Bosnian Camps: A Barbed Tale

Beginning of article

On August 5, 1992, Penny Marshall and cameraman Jeremy Irvin of ITN, Ian Williams of Britain's Channel 4 and Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian talked their way into Bosnian Serbain concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje. What they filmed and wrote created an international firestorm. Earlier that week, Newsday's Roy Gutman had reported the existence of the Omarska camp but had not been allowed into it. In Omarska, the journalists were soon hustled out by the camp's authorities after catching only a glimpse of a group of skeletal figures in a canteen. In Trnopolje, however, they were eyewitnesses to the workings of what appeared to be a gentler camp in full operation. The visit produced what would become perhaps the single representational image of the cruelty of Serbain "ethnic cleansing"--and emaciated prisoner named Fikret Alic reaching through barbed wire to shake hands. As Vulliamy later wrote, "With his rib-cage behind the barbed wire of Trnopolje, Fikret Alic had become the symbolic figure of the war, on every magazine cover and television screen in the world."

The journalists were careful to report what they saw and note what they had not seen as well. While they did describe harsh conditions and forcible detention, they dud not compare Trnopolje to a Nazi death camp. They did not even us the words "concentration camp." Vulliamy quoted Muslim refugees who said that they had not been the victims of force themselves. Marshall's reports showed the Serbian guards feeding Muslim prisoners and a small Muslim child who had come to the camp voluntarily. These descriptions were exaggerated in subsequent stories by other newspapers, based on the original reporting. (One British tabloid headlined the famous photo "Belsen '92.") Vulliamy later wrote that during the course of the fifty-four TV and radio interviews he gave immediately following his Guardian article," to my annoyance, I was obliged to spend more time emphasizing that Omarska was not Belsen or Auschwitz than detailing the abomination of what we had found." Still, the reporters …