Screening Bosnia

Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992-95 War

Stephen Harper

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781623565923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was one of the most brutal conflicts to have erupted since the end of the Second World War. But although the war occurred in 'Europe's backyard' and received significant media coverage in the West, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to cultural representations of the conflict. Stephen Harper analyses how the war has been depicted in global cinema and television over the past quarter of a century. Focusing on the representation of some of the war's major themes, including humanitarian intervention, the roles of NATO and the UN, genocide, rape and ethnic cleansing, Harper explores the role of popular media culture in reflecting, reinforcing -- and sometimes contesting -- nationalist ideologies.

1

The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia

Coming at the end of a century of unprecedented man-made slaughter, the Balkan wars were perhaps the most prominent of a series of intra-state conflicts that broke out in the 1990s. These conflicts produced ‘dramatic images of human suffering that played to the heart and evoked cries for the international community to “do something” to stop the terrible tragedies being played out before a global television audience’ (Taylor 2003: 299). Yet the Western clamour for intervention in these wars was not always underpinned by a robust historical or political understanding of them. The Bosnian war, in particular, constitutes a hugely complex and overdetermined series of events. What follows in this chapter is therefore merely a brief overview of some of the political, social and economic roots of the conflict. I provide it in order to highlight points of controversy about the causes, conduct and conclusion of the war and to set the scene for the ensuing discussion of its cinematic representation.

The political and social processes that led to the outbreak of hostilities in the Balkans in 1991 are complex and do not permit of easy comprehension. They are also hotly contested. Today, within the post-war Balkans, each of the Yugoslav successor states has its own version of Yugoslav history – each dependent, in large part, on the geopolitical affiliations of its national ruling class. Outside the Balkan region, in the Western media, meanwhile, something that might be called the dominant framing of the Bosnian conflict has crystallized. This mainstream account – the one upheld by the academic and mainstream commentators in the West – holds that the Balkan conflicts were wars of aggression waged exclusively by the Serbs in which the United States and the ‘international community’ in general was ‘slow to act’. Over the years since the war, however, a somewhat different story about the Yugoslav wars has been told by historians and theorists including David Gibbs, Diana Johnstone and Peter Gowan. Oscar Wilde famously quipped that the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. The critics mentioned above have attempted, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s (1999: 248) phrase, to ‘brush history against the grain’, exposing the omissions, inventions and inconsistencies that, according to them, characterize the dominant Western narrative of the Bosnian war – or what Edward Herman and David Peterson (2007: 1) have provocatively called the Western news media’s ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’ about what happened during the conflict.

There is insufficient space in this chapter to rehearse, let alone analyse, every event relating to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the country’s decent into armed conflict in the 1990s; yet a reasonably extensive prolegomenon on both the history and the public representation of the Yugoslav wars is indispensable here. Many of the events of the wars are disputed and facts are difficult to ascertain: both during and after the Yugoslav wars, the fabrication, misrepresentation and exaggeration of atrocities seem to have been rife; and, as is argued in the following chapter, the news media often contributed to the confusion. Notwithstanding these complexities, the following chapter constructs a brief history of the war that – while it may not be comprehensive nor resolve every historical uncertainty – at least provides an outline of the war’s political, economic and military determinants in a way that helps to illuminate the issues and themes at stake in its cinematic representation.

The build-up to the Bosnian war

Before the wars of the 1990s, Yugoslavia consisted of the republics of Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro and the three larger republics of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In each of these republics, the populations were mixed: Albanians were dominant in the Kosovo region of Serbia, for example, while Serbs predominated in Croatia’s Krajina region, and there were large numbers of Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. Intermarriage between ethnic groups was common: around 40 per cent of families in the former Yugoslavia were ethnically mixed (Glover 2000: 132) and Bosnia, the most ethnically heterogeneous republic in the federation, had the highest percentage of mixed marriages (Radović 2014: 46).

The disintegration of this multi-ethnic federation was precipitated by internal and external pressures. Until the death of President Tito in 1980, nationalist sentiment in Yugoslavia had generally been held in check by the country’s official ‘communist’ ideology: Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Macedonians, Slovenes, Montenegrins were supposed to enjoy a peaceable coexistence. Yet nationalist and cultural-separatist ideas were in the air for several decades before the wars of the 1990s (Pavković 1997: 62–3). In the relatively liberal atmosphere of the 1960s, for example, Croatian nationalism grew in response to a feeling that Croats were discriminated against in Yugoslavian economic policy, leading to huge protests in the ‘Croat spring’ of 1971 (Myant 1984: 26). The suppression of this liberal upsurge, however, was paradoxically accompanied by an intensification of nationalism that militated against the formation of political coalitions across the republics (Kovač 1988: 115). In the 1981 census, more than 1.2 million Yugoslavs declined to state an ethnic identification (Samary 1995: 28), suggesting a significant level of resistance to ethno-chauvinism and in the pre-war years many Bosnians enjoyed a peaceful, multicultural co-existence (Bringa 1995). Nevertheless, nationalist ideas were ‘increasing in frequency and intensity’ by the middle of the 1980s (Rusinow 1985: 131), particularly among the Albanian majority in the province of Kosovo, whose protests in support of independence from Serbia were bloodily suppressed by the Yugoslav government. By the end of that decade, nationalist ‘dissidents of all persuasions turned into party politicians’, most of whom claimed that ‘their’ nation alone had been failed by the socialist regime (Pavković 1997: 85–98).

Living standards fell by one-quarter over the course of the 1980s (Lydall 1989: 40–71) and the precarious economic position of Yugoslavia helped to fuel both nationalism and discontent with the status quo. In order to deal with a vast national debt following Tito’s death, Yugoslavia had been obliged to undertake an International Monetary Fund ‘shock therapy’ programme that raised the cost of living, reduced the social wage and eliminated jobs, forcing many Yugoslavs to leave the country to find work (Pavković 1997: 77; Parenti 2000: 21; Johnstone 2002: 21; Woodward 2005: 47–57; Gowan 2010: 21). This did not happen without struggle, however, and Yugoslavia in the 1980s was characterized by a series of major strike waves (Myant 1984: 28) and uprisings that intensified throughout the decade and which made austerity extremely difficult to implement. At the close of the 1980s, Yugoslav workers’ demands for political change were also inspired by the collapse of the Communist regimes in other Eastern European countries (Evangelista 2011: 83).

Nevertheless, politicians continued to exploit ethnic differences, pointing to the ‘privileges’ enjoyed by workers in some of the federation’s wealthier regions, in an attempt to suppress expressions of working-class dissent. It has been argued, in fact, that the leaders of Serbia and Croatia, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman, both promoted the idea of ‘ethnic war’ in order to ‘demobilize’ fractious publics, shifting the attentions of the public from the pursuit of internal social and political change to the ideology of nationalism (Gagnon 2004). Certainly, with demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, nationalist and ultranationalist political parties were resurgent across Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia. Slovenian media from the mid-1980s ran a series of television advertisements using the slogan ‘Slovenia My Homeland’, while the Serbian media, increasingly under the influence of the Milošević faction, exploited the propaganda potential created by the expulsion of Serbs from their homes by Albanian nationalists (Wildcat 1996).

In 1990, as a pro-Western mood swept Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall, each of the former Yugoslav republics held multi-party elections –the first in Yugoslavia since the 1930s. While the electorate in most of the republics favoured retaining the federation, in Croatia and Slovenia public opinion was more divided. Facing IMF austerity measures, the governments of these republics did not wish to pay for the ‘poorer’ members of the federation (Phillips 1992a; Johnstone 1998) and pushed for statehood. After the Slovenes walked out of the final Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1990, they immediately ceased contributing their portion of the Fund for Underdeveloped Regions (Wildcat 1996). Moreover, Croatian and Slovenian secession had the support of German and Austrian governments, which gave the two republics confidence in pressing for independence (Pavković 1997: 125; Chandler 2000: 21–22). The United Kingdom even sent arms to Slovenia, while officially opposing its secession (Johnstone 2002: 138).

The Western media generally played a supportive role in this process. In the German press in 1991, Serbs were presented as Oriental ‘militant Bolsheviks’ (Johnstone 1998: 137). In Slovenia itself, meanwhile, news media also ran an anti-Serb campaign, in which Serbs were demonized as pre-modern monsters (Pavković 1997: 135). This coincided with public demonstrations in which pro-independence propaganda was disseminated. It was therefore hardly surprising that, in 1991, Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared independence and their secessions were recognized by the European Community. In response, the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) clashed with Slovene defence forces for ten days in July; but once sanctions were applied to the federal government, the JNA withdrew quickly from Slovenian territory and a ceasefire was negotiated.

The situation in Croatia was considerably more violent and more complex. In a year-long independence campaign in the Croatian media, no dissenting voices were heard as the drive for secession grew (Pavković 1997: 124). Official harassment of national groups began and, following the election of the Croat HDZ party, Tuđman built a military force independent of the JNA, which the Croatian army blockaded and attacked (Pavković 1997: 131). Serbs were removed from influential positions in government, police, management and media and the status of the Serbs as a ‘constitutive nation’ in Croatia was deleted from the Croatian constitution (Pavković 1997: 94; MacDonald 2002: 103; Smith 2007), although dark rumours that there existed secret ‘liquidation squads’ to assassinate Serb officers and kidnap their families remain unconfirmed (Silber and Little 1997: 120). Indeed, the origins of the armed conflict in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia are complex and disputed; but it is clear that the violence cut in several directions. The attempted Serb secession from Croatia was met with force by the Croatian police, some of whom were murdered by Serbs (Glover 2000: 126) and Croat irregulars began to attack Serb businesses. The spiralling violence sparked refugee movements both into and out of the Krajina.

There were intensive propaganda campaigns in both the Croatian and Serbian media as the JNA – disdained by many young Slovenes and Croats since the 1970s (Pavković 1997: 128) and increasingly pro-Serb in character (Gibbs 2009: 120) – moved into action, ostensibly as a neutral force aiming to ‘keep the peace’ between the Croatian police and insurgent Serbs, although huge numbers of Serb men avoided being drafted into the army. There followed a conflict characterized by extreme barbarity on both sides. A huge JNA attack on Vukovar left many dead and the city virtually destroyed, although the Croatian National Guard also committed atrocities (Gibbs 2009: 90): JNA forces entering the town found corpses of people who had been summarily executed for refusing to join the Croatian National Guard or the irregulars (Wildcat 1996). Following its sieges of Vukovar and Dubrovnik, the JNA had taken 30 per cent of Croatia by the end of 1991, although the Croatians had by this time begun to reverse the tide and the war eventually stalled as Croatian forces mustered (Glover 2000: 126). The war inside Croatia effectively ended in December 1991 after the acceptance of the Vance plan by Tuđman and Milošević (Pavković 1997: 142), although the Croatian Army would be involved in fighting alongside the Bosnian Croat HVO (Croatian Defence Council) in Bosnia until 1995.

The war in Bosnia

From 1992, the focus of the Yugoslav wars switched to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where three parties – the Muslim SDA, the Croat HDZ and the Serb SDS – had together won 80 per cent of the votes in the 1990 elections, forcing the Communists from power (the anti- or pan-national parties, lacking any support from powers outside Yugoslavia, together got less than 8 per cent of the votes). Appealing for votes on the basis of ethnic identity, each of the three parties gained a share of the ballot roughly equivalent to the population of the ethnic communities they claimed to represent (Pavković 1997: 114). Their ethno-communalist appeals were directed across the old republican borders, serving to weaken the inter-ethnic bonds that had theretofore characterized Yugoslavian society and which, as late as March 1992, had brought tens of thousands of Bosnians onto the streets chanting ‘We want to live together!’ (Udovički and Štitkovac 2000: 183). While the three parties initially announced their intention to govern Bosnia jointly, this became virtually impossible as pressure from Croatia and Serbia was brought to bear, deepening ethnic divisions (Udovički and Štitkovac 2000: 177). Indeed, once the violence had begun in neighbouring Croatia in 1991, Bosnia began to fall apart, as criminal gangs involved in protection rackets and arms smuggling sought to ally themselves with politicians representing each of the three Bosnian ‘nations’ (Pavković 1997: 115). Indeed, the Bosnian war has been argued to typify armed conflict in the era of ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999), in which conventional confrontations between two clearly defined enemy states increasingly give way to conflicts fuelled by ethnic identity politics in which the distinction between war and crime is blurred.

After a referendum in February 1992, Bosnia, following the path taken by Slovenia and Croatia, declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Some of Bosnia’s Serbs, however, claimed that the referendum violated the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, boycotting the poll. An independent, although internationally unrecognized, Serb republic, later named Republika Srpska, was declared in Bosnia, under the auspices of Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslav rump state. The implementation of the Carrington-Cutileiro plan to cantonize Bosnia might have prevented the outbreak of war, but Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović seems to have been encouraged to reject the plan under US advisement (Gibbs 2009: 108–112).

When a brutal territorial war – involving ‘ethnic cleansing’, murder, rape and the burning of villages – broke out in Bosnia in April 1992, it was the ‘first open armed conflict in post-World War II Europe’ (Zajec 2013: 201). The Serbs opened an Eastern military front and began to push westwards, controlling most of Bosnia within a week. Muslim and Croat forces fought against the Serbs and eventually against each other, leading to three-way fighting among the ethnic groups: while Croat forces sometimes fought against Muslims in the so-called Croat-Bosniak war (which reached a vicious peak in the Bosnian town of Mostar), they elsewhere fought against the Serbs, depending on local strategic interests. Although the JNA officially withdrew from Bosnia in May 1992, most of its ammunition and personnel passed into the control of Republika Srpska (Tucker and Hendrickson 1993). Something of the cynicism of the way the war was conducted is conveyed by the fact that weaponry was sometimes rented or sold by one side – most often the well-armed Serbs – to another, depending on local strategic and financial imperatives (Mueller 2000).

In the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, Serb forces took positions on the high ground surrounding the city, bombarding and shooting at the population below in a siege that lasted for three and a half years and which caused untold suffering to the city’s inhabitants. Yet there is confusion over which ‘side’ was responsibility for many of the attacks in the city. Responsibility for the infamous Breadline Massacre in Sarajevo on 27 May 1992, for example – a mortar attack that killed at least 16 people – is disputed: while the attack was widely attributed to Serbs, UN officials believed it was perpetrated by the city’s Muslim defenders (Doyle 1992). The two attacks on Sarajevo’s Markale market in 1994 and 1995 have similarly disputed authorship (Brock 2005: 23). It is clear, however, that ‘the Bosnian government used civilian suffering strategically’ (Gibbs 2009: 126). The British diplomat and EU co-chairman of the Conference for the Former Yugoslavia David Owen (cited in Parenti 2000: 75) records in his memoir that NATO knew of Muslim ‘friendly fire’ attacks, noting that ‘no seasoned observer in Sarajevo doubts for a moment that Muslim forces have found it in their interest to shell friendly targets’. Muslim forces also prevented Serb civilians from leaving the city in order to use them as ‘human shields’ and shot at Muslim civilians ‘in attempts to blame Serb attackers’ (Parenti 2000: 75). Even Philip Taylor (2003: 302), an academic who attributes responsibility for the Balkan wars almost entirely to Milošević and Serb expansionism, acknowledges that claims of Muslim forces attacking ‘their own’ in order to garner international sympathy ‘proved to be not wholly without foundation’. There is also evidence that Muslim forces in the city sometimes fired first against Serbs to provoke a military response and gain sympathetic media coverage (Goldsworthy 2008; Gibbs 2009: 126).

In Bosnia, as in Croatia, ethnic divisions deepened and the former official ideology of bratstvo i jedinstvo, or ‘brotherhood and unity’ – which had represented an attempt to overcome the long-standing stereotype of the Balkans as a fragmented, primitive and liminal zone (Todorova 1997) – gave way to nationalist hysteria. This chauvinism cut in many directions, confounding any simplistic identification of the warring ‘sides’: some Serbs fought for the Bosnians and vice versa (the influential Bosnian Muslim businessman Fikret Abdić, for example, rebelled against Izetbegović’s government), complicating questions of loyalty and allegiance. With the outbreak of war, as Beverly Allen (1996: 7) notes, ethnic identities became reified and exclusive:

[P]eople learned that their ‘ethnic’ identity could now determine whether they were to live or die. Although many people had felt mainly Croatian, Bosnian-Herzegovinian or Serb-Montenegrin, those who had felt ‘Yugoslav’ now became, many of them reluctantly, ‘Bosnians’, ‘Croats’, ‘Serbs’ or ‘Muslims’.

Dubravka Žarkov (2007) even argues that the Bosnian war was not so much fought between pre-existing ethnic groups, as productive of them. In this sense, the war was characterized by a mode of violence that Arjun Appadurai (1998) has called ‘vivisectionist’; that is, aimed at exposing the identity of the other in circumstances, such as civil wars, in which ethnic affiliations have become unclear or confused.

There was resistance to this rising tide of nationalism in civil society, as is apparent from the many reports of Serbs, Croats and Muslims protecting one another against the ethnic militias and armies ravaging Bosnia. Insofar as they were able to do so, alternative local media also challenged nationalist propaganda. In Croatia, for example, the ironically titled Feral Tribune openly reported on politically controversial topics and was openly critical of Tuđman, including reports of war crimes perpetrated by Croatian soldiers in Bosnia that earned the newspaper’s chief editor conscription in a military training camp. In Serbia, meanwhile, there were critical publications such as Vreme and Borba (Iordanova 2001: 140) and the anti-war Women in Black group, which served as a thorn in the side of the Serbian leadership by drawing attention to Serb atrocities (Žarkov 2007: 87). Nevertheless, mainstream media created a mood of frenzied nationalism across all of the Yugoslav regions, with television becoming a key propaganda organ:

Nationalist governments, rather than allow for the discussion of competing ideas and viewpoints, used the absolute power they wielded over the broadcast media to play and replay images that provoked outrage and anger. They told stories, many of them fabricated, about alleged atrocities committed by the enemy. Impartial information disappeared. Television became the emotional crutch used to justify violence and rally ethnic groups around nationalist leaders. (Hedges 2003: 46)

As a ‘paranoid public sphere’, to borrow Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase, developed in each of the former republics of Yugoslavia, news media collapsed into cynicism and absurdity (Gow et al. 1996). Serbian media issued crude anti-Croat propaganda, often invoking the iconography and political language of Second World War propaganda, such that ‘the media offensive of Milošević’s Serbia in the 1980s resembled very closely the propaganda campaign of Nazi Germany in the 1930s’ (Bennett 1995: 97). But the Croatian news media also broadcast similar material. At one point, in fact, Serbian and Croatian media disseminated the same image of children killed during a siege of a village, each side claiming the children as ‘their’ casualties (Sontag 2003: 9).

As the Yugoslav population became increasingly conscious, and wary, of ethnic difference, historical tensions and anxieties – many of them rooted in memories and experiences of the Second World War – were revived. Misha Glenny (1992), referring to the Serbs’ long-nursed grie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia
• 2. The First Draft of History: (Mis)Reporting the Bosnian War
• 3. Humanitarianism and Its Others: Three ‘Liberal’ 1990s Bosnian War Dramas
• 4. Going in Hard: Masculinism, Militarism and Melodrama in the Bosnian War Action Film
• 5. The Subject of Rape: Phenomenological and Ideological Representations of Sexual Violence in the Bosnian War Film
• 6. From Nationalism to Normalization: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Films about the Bosnian War
• Conclusion: Neither Hollywood Nor Belgrade: Towards an Unpatriotic Cinema of the Bosnian War
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint