Title — Dec 1998

The
Serbian Concentration Camps: A Case of Mistaken
Identity?

by
Paul Moon

During the first half of the 1990s, the world was made to feel outrage at the alleged atrocities being perpetrated by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. A combination of emotive reporting and a myriad of unsubstantiated and often contradictory eyewitness testimonies contributed to the impression that a holocaust was being perpetrated in Bosnia.

However, recent information has surfaced which casts serious doubts over the stories of genocide and concentration camps — stories which were initially trumpeted in the West as proof of the need to bomb the Serbs into submission and acceptance of the Western-imposed peace.

The prima facie evidence of detention facilities was a problematic issue for the international community to grapple with. The visible and reported signs of breaches of international humanitarian law were apparent in several of these camps. Yet, the implication that they were devices in an orchestrated programme of genocide was much less certain.

In fact, on the contrary, many of the camps succeeded in keeping civilian populations alive and away from the ravages of fighting, albeit only to be subjected in some cases to torture, beatings, rape, and death.

The camps themselves were often converted schools, offices, Government buildings, and sports arenas. The evidence of centralised planning for these camps is weak. Indeed, it is possibly because in part because of their ad hoc and independent nature that they were able to become the sites for some of the more barbarous attacks on civilians and prisoners of war.

The
Commission of Experts, charged with investigating war crimes in the former
Yugoslavia, hinted at this anarchic situation, observing that:

The characteristics and patterns of
violation in the camps differ widely
depending on the controlling authority, the
purpose of the camps, and the camp
commander.’

This widely differing pattern of violations suggests that there was no specific command, even at a regional level, for such abuses to be carried out. And even if such an order did exist, the obvious inability of the camp leaders to carry it out would be evidence of a chain of command that had completely broken down.

In its summing up, the Commission of Experts, while repeatedly stressing that the frequency of brutal acts necessarily made such crimes systematic, it also, paradoxically, argued that the defence of following orders was invalid because:

. . .of the loose command and
control structure where unlawful orders could
have been disobeyed without individuals
risking personal harm?

Therefore, if such choices did exist, the command structure must have been close to falling apart. In such an environment, the capacity of a commander to comply with a

The issue of actual evidence for the alleged atrocities carried out in some of the camps remained an outstanding one for the Commission and the international community. There was one incident in particular which brought to the attention of a wider audience the problems of prime facie evidence of atrocities.

The particular incident in question – one which exploded the credibility of many of the reports emanating from the war zone – was of the
‘concentration camp’ being run by Serbs at
Trnopolje. In what was to represent a major turning pint in the West’s attitude to the
Yugoslav conflict, film footage was screened on news networks around the world in August 1992
showing emaciated Bosnian Muslims caged behind barbed wire.

The scenes were peculiarly reminiscent of those filmed at the German concentration camps during the Second World War
— a point that was not lost on the media.
Britain’s Daily Mirror headlined the photo, accompanied by the caption ‘Belsen 92’? These were followed by headlines using the same photo in The Star (‘Belsen 1992), The Daily Mail (‘The
Proof) and The Times (‘Evidence Mounts of
Executions and Beatings in Serbian camps’).

The
Daily Mail was explicit in its linking of the photo with the images of then Nazi are: ‘They are the sort of scenes that flicker in black and white images from 50-year-old films of Nazi concentration camps.'[4] The Independent mirrored its sister papers in emphasising the
Nazi connection: ‘The camera slowly pans up the bony torso of the prisoner. It is the picture of famine, but then we see the barbed wire against his chest and it is the picture of the Holocaust and concentration camps’.[5]

However, an investigation by German journalist Thomas Diechmann revealed that the images filmed by the British ITN camera team were misleading.

Diechmann concluded that there was no barbed wire fence surrounding the
Trnopolje camp (as shown in the pictures); that the camp was, in fact, a collection centre for refugees and not a prison; and that the refugees pictured were in no way surrounded by barbed wire, but that the barbed wire surrounded the news team who were filming from inside a small enclosure next to the camp.

Diechmann’s concluding comments indicated the annoyance he felt at the misleading photojournalism that had whipped up so much anti-Serb feelings in the
West:

I am shocked that over the past four
and a half years, none of the journalists
involved has told the full story about that
barbed wire fence which made such an impact
on world opinion. The photograph has been
taken as proof that Trnopolje was a
Nazi-style concentration camp, but the
journalists knew that it was no such
thing.[6]

Contrary to the impression created by the pictures the reporters released, the individuals at the refugee centre, including Fikret Alic, the prominent person in most of the photos, were free to leave at any time. There starved bodies were more likely to have been the result of malnutrition suffered as a result of walking for days, and in some cases weeks with virtually no food, endeavouring to reach refugee centres such as the one at Trnopolje.

It was through my role as an expert
witness to the War Crimes Tribunal that I
first realised that something was wrong with
the famous pictures from Trnopolje.

As a
journalist with a track record of reporting
on Bosnia, I was asked to present the
Tribunal with a report on German media
coverage of Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb
accused of war crimes. Reviewing press
articles and video tapes which had been shown
on German TV, I became aware of the major
importance of the Trnopolje pictures. The
picture of Fikret Alic behind the barbed
wire…could be seen again and again.

One night, while I was going through the pictures again at home, my wife pointed out an odd little detail. If Fikret Alic and the other Bosnian Muslims were imprisoned inside a barbed wire fence, why was this wire fixed to the poles on the side of the fence where they were standing? As any gardener knows, fences are, as a rule, fixed to the poles from outside, so that the area to be enclosed is fenced-in.

It occurred to me then that perhaps it was not the people in the camp who were fenced-in behind the barbed wire, but the team of British journalists.[7]

The more the stories of death camps were examined, the less seemed to make sense of the reports being spread through the media. First, the Bosnian Serbs themselves had invited reporters to se their refugee centres in operation. It would have been extremely unlikely that such an invitation would have been issued had these centres been the type of concentration camps claimed by some journalists.

Secondly,
Throughout the summer of 1992/3, several news teams, mainly from Britain, were dispatched to
Bosnian in order to find ‘further stories’ of concentration camps. When none were forthcoming, the pressure to support the original story heightened. Penny Marshall, a reporter for ITN and Channel 4, was quoted as saying:

They had sent Ian Williams (a fellow
journalist) and myself loose on an open-ended
brief to find and visit the detention camps,
and with orders to file nothing until we had
come up with the story.[8]

Diechmann was at first just mildly sceptical about the photos he had seen of Trnopolje, but his scepticism increased the more he pieced together other details about the Trnopolje camp:

My suspicions were heightened by a
conversation I had with Professor Mischa
Wladimiroff, Dusko Tadic’s Dutch defence
advocate at the War Crimes Tribunal at The
Hague. The main witness against Tadic, Dragan
Opacic (later exposed as a trained liar), had
told the court about the barbed wire fence
surrounding the camp at Trnopolje and had
even made a drawing of where it was.

But when
Professor Wladimiroff went to Bosnia to
investigate for the defence, it became clear
to him that Opacic had lied in the witness
box; he could find no evidence of a barbed
wire fence surrounding the Trnopolje
camp.[9]

Even the US State Department, which had been consistently hostile to Serb aspirations, mentioned in its 1994 Annual report on Human
Rights that the camps at Batkovici, Kamenica,
Trnopolje, and Doboj, only suffered from
‘…poor living conditions’,[11] whereas the Bosnian Muslim installation at Dretelj was:

. . .perhaps the most notorious
camp. . .the UNHCR found prisoners in
conditions of “appalling brutality and
degradation”, with broken ribs and fingers,
bruises, and heart irregularities. Amnesty
International said prisoners at Dretelj were
so cramped that they could not lie do…..
Summary executions and deaths due to torture
or neglect were attested to… [12]

Inexplicably, the Western media were mute on the existence of this concentration camp throughout the war.

The Trnopolje camp consisted of buildings that had previously been part of a school, community centre, medical centre, and public hall. The outside area had been part of a large sports field that remained unused for that purpose during the war. The only fences that appeared anywhere around the camp were those normally placed around schools. They were approximately a metre high, and did not have any barbed wire on them.

It appears, based on pictures of the buildings adjacent to the
Trnopolje refugee centre that the British news team shot their film from a compound which housed an electricity transformer station, and which had been fenced in a few years earlier to protect it from vandalism and to keep children out. The relative complexity of the construction of the fence suggested that it had not been hastily erected in order to accommodate a sudden influx of refugees.'[13]

Another central aspect about the film of
Trnopolje was that certain sections of the film were not screened. A segment which included a wide angle view showed a large area where refugees were standing that was not fenced in with barbed wire. The film crew were able to walk freely in and out of the compound and there was no indication of a presence of guards of the sort that would normally be expected at a prisoner of war, or concentration camp.

Within two weeks of the film of the Trnopolje camp being aired to the world, Paddy Ashdown, leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party, visited Trnopolje, and gave a substantially different opinion of the camp and its
‘inmates’:

They have gathered here because they have to go somewhere. Their houses have been burnt and their lives threatened. Muslim extremists pressurised the men to join up with the guerrillas, so they have come here for safety.
But on most recent nights the unprotected camp
[author’s italics] has been raided by
Serbian extremists who beat them, rob them of what little they have left and, it is claimed, rape the women. Things are better now.[14]

One of the elements we felt we
should check on was this reference of witness
‘L’ to a barbed wire fence around the camp
site, that reminded us of the Penny Marshall
pictures.

Later when I was back in the area
we found a man who worked as a guard in that
camp, and he was able to provide us with all
kinds of details and names, and from that
point we were able to go deeper and deeper
into the matter. During my October 1996 visit
I very specifically focused on that barbed
wire issue, and then I approached that man
again and he showed me where this fence was.

It became clear to me what actually must have happened. According to this man, Penny
Marshall entered an area which is at the side of the camp where there is a barn and an electricity house. And the area with the barn and the electricity house was surrounded by barbed wire and poles. He told us that the camera crew must have walked into that area and from there filmed the camp. I videotaped the area and his explanation fits with all the images I have seen. . . .

I have no indication that at the Trnopolje site things were taken away in order to hide things….

I think what has happened is that while being there, Penny Marshall and her crew were looking for the best picture, as every TV crew and journalist crew would do. And later on I think that she may have realised that it was a very suggestive, a very strong image, a very direct resemblance to the camps of the
Second World War. Then she did not feel the necessity to explain more about these pictures. It is for her to explain why she did not. I have no idea.

But as a matter of fact, I can say that in some ways, it was good that she made these pictures, because it helped us out. If ‘L’ had not collapsed and confessed that he had lied, we could have used the videotape as evidence against him.[15]

The issue of media involvement, and the capacity of just a few reporters to alter world opinion was another striking feature of the Serb concentration camp stories. The pictures of suffering and death, accompanied by stories of almost unthinkable brutality were juxtaposed against images of the political leaders in the war, particularly Karadzic and Mladic, who were found guilty by association of the crimes that were being reported.

The media war was fought around the world in order to achieve maximum effect on the public opinion of the West.

In America, the public relations firm Rudder and Finn devised media policies to assist
Croatia and the Muslim Government in Bosnia in achieving a more favourable representation in the eyes of the United States:

We were working eighteen months with
some breaks, for Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
and the paramilitary opposition in Kosovo. We
won because we were aiming at the Jewish
public opinion. The press immediately changed
its vocabulary and started using terms with
strong emotional impact, such as the ethnic
cleansing and concentration camps which
started to resemble Nazi Germany and the gas
chambers [sic] at Auschwitz. The
emotional charge was so strong that no-one
could resist it.

It is not our job to check
the information, but

The fact that certain parties hostile to the aspirations of the Bosnian Serbs seized the initiative in the media war from a very early stage led to a tendency to partial reporting, a distortion of the nature and rationale for the conflict, and the vilification of certain individuals whose preparation for the media onslaught was insufficient.