For years after the Second World War many hoped that the words concentration camp had been consigned to history, although variants – looking to their original purpose: centres for concentrating civilians forcibly moved or fleeing from zones of unrest – did emerge, for instance, during the Malayan emergency as British forces battling with Communist insurgents moved domestic populations into camps.
But when the existence of camps emerged during the Bosnian civil war a collective chill passed down people’s spines. O’Kane’s report described the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, which was one of the principal cities of Republika Srpska but whose population was partly Bosniak Muslim, as a ‘a city waiting to be cleansed’. The despatch also mentioned camps at Omarska – to which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had been trying to get access, but without success – and Bratunac. She wrote that one camp, Trnopolje, was ‘the best one to be sent to’ because food was provided and villagers could take in supplies. But her report quoted an eyewitness account of trains plying between Trnopolje and elsewhere, comprising largely cattle trucks, but whose cargo was very much human. The eyewitness had spoken of seeing women and children being taken away from the camp in those trains. And in a direct parallel with witness testimonies from the Second World War about concentration camp transport trains, her report described fully laden trucks that were left in blazing sunshine for a whole day while the people locked inside called for water that was not forthcoming. That was just the sort of casually inhuman thing that the Nazis had perpetrated decades before, without giving their human cargo’s needs a second thought. Gutman, interviewed on the US National Public Radio two weeks after his first report was published, spoke about Omarska and another camp at Brčko. He spoke about a former Omarska inmate, an escapee, who had told him that in the camp ‘they would execute people in groups of ten or fifteen. They would shoot them. They would slit their throats…’ With stories like these filtering out the world’s politicians and news consumers alike became greatly concerned to find out more, to have the details checked, to discover whether there could possibly be other camps too, and to see whether anything needed to or could be done about them.
‘I invite foreign journalists to visit…’
As Maggie O’Kane’s story about concentration camps broke Radovan Karadžić happened to be in London to discuss a European Union-sponsored peace plan: one of many that failed to get anywhere. While Karadžić was making preparations for a press conference that he would be holding later in the day, senior editorial staff at Independent Television News (ITN) seized on the report and began discussing what might be done. The company supplied the news programmes for Independent Television (ITV) and Channel 4, doing so by means of completely separate and discrete editorial and news-gathering operations.
In the Channel 4 News morning editorial meeting, foreign editor Sue Inglish raised Maggie O’Kane’s story and it was decided that diplomatic editor Nik Gowing should go to Karadžić’s press conference in London and ask him about the camps.18
Gowing recorded an interview with Karadžić, who had been handed a copy of that morning’s Guardian. Gowing challenged him about the camps. Karadžić replied, ‘There is no ethnic cleansing going on in Bosnia … there is no evidence that people are being forced to leave … civilians get full rights under Geneva Convention.’19 But he then went on, ‘I invite foreign journalists to visit and look for concentration camps.’20 Was that a touch of bravado? Was it calling Gowing’s bluff – a ‘put up or shut up’ sort of reaction? Or was it an ill-thought-out knee-jerk reaction? Events would soon provide an answer.
As soon as the interview was over Gowing quickly called Sue Inglish and told her that Karadžić had just issued an invitation to foreign journalists to go and see for themselves.21 Immediately after she had spoken to him she called Karadžić’s London press representative, John Kennedy, and told him that Karadžić had issued an invitation, that she was accepting and had a team ready to go. She then absorbed herself with making the arrangements, including briefing the Moscow correspondent, Ian Williams, to ready himself for the journey to Belgrade.22
The Guardian also busied itself, although later in the day. Ed Vulliamy tells that after seeing Karadžić’s challenge on Channel 4 News that evening the newspaper’s foreign editor, Paul Webster, called Karadžić straight away, reaching him on his car phone as he travelled to Heathrow, and told him that he would be sending Vulliamy to check out the story. Just afterwards Vulliamy was briefed by Webster and O’Kane, whom he was already scheduled to replace on rotation, while they shared a drink in a pub near The Guardian’s offices.
So over the next days, preparations were made for the departure of two ITN teams, which would be led by very experienced reporters, Penny Marshall (for ITN’s news service to ITV) and Ian Williams (Channel 4 News).They would travel to Bosnia via Belgrade and ultimately Ed Vulliamy would accompany them. When there they hoped to be taken to Omarska and Trnopolje and to be able to see the camps for themselves, to see what conditions were like and how the camps functioned. Failing that they hoped to be able to provide more eyewitness accounts like O’Kane’s and Gutman’s. Shortly after they arrived Roy Gutman’s ‘death camps’ article about Omarska was published.
After spending some frustrating time in Belgrade while officials hastily made arrangements and delivered endless briefings the ITN teams and Vulliamy were flown to Pale in Republika Srpska on 3 August 1992 and from there driven to Banja Luka. At Banja Luka the journalists faced further delays as yet more officials and, this time, military commanders pondered what to do with them.23 It appeared to the reporters to be a delaying tactic, the result of Karadžić’s knee-jerk reaction. Having issued the invitation, which only ITN and The Guardian had taken up, Karadžić’s colleagues then faced up to the task of preparing the camps and their inmates so that they could be shown in a good light. Eventually it was agreed that the journalists would be taken to see some camps, but it was proposed that instead they should see a camp at Manjača, which had already received an ICRC inspection, instead of Omarska. Manjača was known to be ‘a ghastly place’, but they declined the invitation because from what they had already heard Omarska remained ‘a terrible mystery’ and everyone wanted to check it out.24 Ian Williams takes up the story:
We made it very clear that the reason we were there was to visit these camps. We reminded them of the promise that had been made to us by Karadžić. We reminded them of the importance of verifying what sort of camps these were and we told them that. Although it was dangerous we were prepared to take that risk.
Asked about the reaction with which these points were greeted, Williams said,
A number of phone calls was [sic] made. There was much shuffling of feet and eventually, once again, we were loaded back into the green army bus, although I think by then Channel Three [ITN on ITV] had a VW van which they had arranged to have bought in from Belgrade so were travelling separately from us.25
Finally they set out on their journey on 5 August. But on the way they experienced what appeared to be a gun battle by a small bridge. Williams and Vulliamy both speculated later that it may have been faked: an attempt to persuade faint-hearted journalists to ask to turn back without seeing the camps. It just happened there were no faint-hearted journalists in the party.26 It is also possible that it could have been used to create a context in which the journalists might have been injured or even killed, all of which could then have been attributed to hostile forces.27 This was a dirty war, after all.
What they may not have realised because communications from the war zone were difficult was that the day before their trip The Guardian had published another story about the camps. In Geneva on 3 August the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had said publicly that ‘all sides in the Yugoslav conflict were violating human rights conventions in their treatment of civilians from other ethnic groups’. Relief organisations were quoted as saying that the ‘Croat–Muslim alliance as well as the Serbs had set up
what were in effect concentration camps’.28 In response, a US State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, was quoted saying that the US government, while ‘deeply concerned’ about the camps, was not going to make detentions ‘a special issue’. Likewise, a UN spokesman had said that people
think it is just the Serbs but that is not the case. Serb civilians who have fled, or been forced to flee, Croat and Muslim-held areas also give convincing accounts of mistreatment. The fact that the Serbs are better-armed and hold much more territory certainly makes the size of the problem greater where they are in control. The Serb militias are certainly ferocious, but the Croat militias are no angels either.29
What would the journalists discover when they got to see the camps?
Eventually, the party was taken to see Omarska and Trnopolje. At each location the journalists were allowed to spend an hour moving about the camps, filming and talking to camp inmates; while they did so they were in turn filmed by Republika Srpska military cameramen. What the reporters brought out with them would cause a stir. While at Trnopolje Penny Marshall had been handed a roll of film by Dr Idriz Merdžanić, a Muslim inmate, who was acting as a camp doctor. The film, when developed, would show the marks left on several prisoners by beatings.
Of the camp at Omarska, Ian Williams said,
What confronted us was, frankly, an appalling scene. The silence perhaps spoke volumes. No one spoke, terrified sunken eyes, dishevelled filthy prisoners, eating like famished dogs while over them stood well-fed fat Serbian guards with their guns cocked. It was an appalling vision of inhumanity. These people had been starved. They were in a disgraceful state.30
Ed Vulliamy found inmates, or internees, who were ‘horribly thin, raw-boned; some are almost cadaverous, with skin like parchment folded around their arms; their faces are lantern-jawed, and their eyes are haunted by the empty stare of the prisoner who does not know what will happen to him next’.31
When later the party was moved onto Trnopolje, a journey that took them around half an hour, the party found what was described as a civilian-controlled transit camp. The ITN team, driving in their VW minivan, arrived first. Vulliamy wrote that there was
complete confusion – political and physical. The camp is a ramshackle fenced-in compound around a former school. The men stand stripped to the waist, in their thousands, against the wire in the relentless afternoon heat; the women and children seek shade upstairs in the crowded, smelly building. They wait, stare at nothing, sweat – and wonder what will happen next.32
Williams said of that camp, ‘The physical condition of the men penned in was very bad. Many had been brought from another camp that day. Some had come from Omarska, some had come from a camp called Kheratam [sic].33 They were in a very bad physical condition, emaciated, dirty and clearly very, very frightened.’34
As the visits ended the journalists faced a long journey back to Belgrade. They knew that what they had seen was important and they also knew that they were potentially in danger for that very reason. Their particular concern was simple – get the tapes out of the country. They decided to travel first to Belgrade and piled into the ITV News VW minivan: the four-strong Channel 4 News team, the three-strong ITV News team, plus Ed Vulliamy, two fixer/interpreters and the driver, Misha.
Penny Marshall highlighted the problem:
I was very keen to get out of Bosnia safely with all our tapes, because you are often stopped in these circumstances at road blocks and very often they’ll confiscate all your tapes from you, sometimes even take your equipment, which happened to me on a subsequent trip about two weeks later. So we were actually extremely anxious and there’s nobody to my knowledge who had made that journey across that particular area before safely. We were just very anxious to do it.35
Ed Vulliamy shared the concern, remembering that they all tried to occupy themselves with the distraction of remembering how much of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album they could each remember.36
Ian Williams remembered:
I think everybody was pretty stunned. We had seen some pretty harrowing images. We had seen some pretty clear evidence of inhumanity. We were stunned and there was also a sense of ‘Are they going to let us get out of here with these tapes?’ because we knew the material we had was powerful. We knew the material we had was the first evidence, the first-hand evidence of inhumanity in this part of Northern Bosnia and, frankly, at one point, we wondered if we would actually get out of Bosnia with those tapes.37
They reached Belgrade at around midnight – after some hairy moments along the way, including passing between two battle fronts. Shortly after they arrived they were asked to meet Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown in the Belgrade Hyatt hotel. Ashdown had just arrived in Belgrade on a fact-finding visit with his party’s foreign affairs spokesman, Sir Russell Johnston, and wanted to know what they had found out.38 After the meeting they parted company: Vulliamy would be staying in Belgrade to write his report, and the ITN and Channel 4 teams would have some food and snatch a couple of hours of much-needed rest before travelling separately to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, where they were scheduled to edit their stories and send them on to London via satellite link. But before they sorted themselves out Penny Marshall and Ian Williams telephoned their respective editors in London to tell them what they had seen and filmed. Penny Marshall said, ‘We knew we had established something extraordinary was taking place that needed to be reported on, as clear from the rushes [uncut video material], and on the basis of that I rang London and they sent out a team.’39 After making the call she was intent on getting a good night’s sleep ‘to make sure … I had a whole day to do an edit’.40 Ian Williams called Sue Inglish: ‘I told her that we had very powerful pictures, that we had a very strong story which went some way to confirm the rumours, the allegations that had existed about what was happening in North-East Bosnia.’41 The next morning, at the crack of dawn, each team set off for Budapest.
When they reached their destination they met Bill Frost, a video editor who had flown out from London especially to assist Marshall’s team with their story. The Channel 4 News footage would be edited by James Nicholas, who had shot it. Their bosses in London had also organised separate local professional production facilities for them to use, so that they could work with maximum speed and the minimum of disruption. Over the course of the next few hours each worked intensively and independently of the other, shaping their stories and pictures to show what they had found. They did not discuss their stories, share ‘angles’ or details.42 Among other things, there just wasn’t the time for them to discuss their approaches.
Xylophone ribs
London was keen for the reporters to tell their strong stories. Penny Marshall’s first filmed story was scheduled for ITV’s News at 5.45 and she was also to do a live two-way interview about what she had seen. Ian Williams’s report was scheduled to be broadcast around seventy-five minutes later, during the early part of Channel 4 News, and he too would be interviewed live on air; later Penny Marshall’s main report would be broadcast on News at Ten.
Ian Williams takes up the story: ‘We had strong images and in a sense there was a desire to hear less of me and to be able to just allow people to see the visual evidence of what we had found in Omarska and Trnopolje.’43 Marshall’s approach was much the same.
Williams first saw the footage that Marshall was using for her News at 5.45 report as it was being uploaded to the satellite for transmission to London. As the video was playing he saw the image of a skeletal inmate from Trnopolje looking through a fence that was a mix of barbed wire and chicken wire. The man’s name was Fikret Alić, and his ‘xylophone ribs’, as Ed Vulliamy later described them, caught Williams’s eye. He felt it was ‘a very good shot’ and asked to use that footage alongside his own team’s images from Trnopolje for his Channel 4 News story. He had just an hour or so for the footage to be cut into his story, so he and his editor would have to work fast if they were to meet their own uploading deadline.44
When the ITN reports were broadcast, on 6 August 1992, and Vulliamy’s report published the following morning, the reaction was spectacular: the story made the lead in most of the national newspapers; and it was also picked up as a major story worldwide. It also had political repercussions. Within twenty minutes of seeing it in the White House on television, President George H. Bush reacted immediately. He ‘pledged that the United States “will not rest” until international organizations, such as the Red Cross, can inspect camps’,45 but, according to the New York Times, his calls had opened a ‘three-way split at the United Nations over the role of its peacekeeping forces in the region’.46 Two days after the reports made the front pages, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said on BBC Radio 4, ‘I hope that there will be a Security Council resolution in the next few days which will put the emphasis on the escorting, the protection, of humanitarian help.’ But, he continued, ‘it may well involve the use of force’.47 However, neither he, President Bush nor French President François Mitterrand were willing to send forces to stop the conflict, responsibility for which, in their view, was due largely ‘but not exclusively, to Serbian nationalist forces’.48 This reluctance prompted Paddy Ashdown, after returning from his visit to Republika Srpska, to write to Prime Minister John Major expressing his outrage at what he had seen and heard and pressing for speedy action. Ashdown said, ‘I do not think that we have done ourselves any favours by our failures both of will and of action in the Yugoslav conflicts.’49 In Belgrade, ‘moderate but by then redundant Yugoslav President Dobrica Čosić demanded that the camps be closed within thirty days’.50 They were.51 On 18 August, John Major had summoned his Cabinet back from holiday for an emergency meeting about the civil war and shortly afterwards announced that he would be despatching 1,800 troops to Bosnia.52
When Reporters Cross the Line Page 2