The Balkan Image War by Mark Durden

What is so striking and disturbing about recent British press coverage of NATO's war with Yugoslavia, is the way in which the faces of innocent children are used as a sentimentalising media focus to encourage support for the continued bombardment of Serbia by the most powerful countries in the world, militarily, politically and economically.

There is nothing new in the use of pathos and sentiment in representations of war. John Taylor has written about the way the family album was drawn into the news when 'ordinary family mementos were changed into the relics of sacrifice.' He draws attention to the publication, in the Daily Sketch on 13 September 1915, of family snapshots picked up from the battlefield during the First World War, photos of loved ones, of women, children and babies. Using such private mementos as poignant public memorials, enabled the press to address the losses of war without graphic representations of death. Such snapshots fashioned 'a new precept of normality: the family used to patriotic purpose.'

Similarly, Don McCullin drew upon the pathos of a snashot photo portrait in his well-known war photograph of a dead North Vietnamese soldier from 1968. Potentially transgressive sympathies were elicited from such a photograph as a result. There the detail of a snapshot portrait of a woman's face, among the dead soldier's personal effects, served to humanise and individualise the enemy.

The anti-war rhetoric of McCullin's photo is in market contrast with the pro-war sentiment so abundant in current newspaper coverage of the Balkan war. Images of families are now used to confirm and bolster NATO's continued bombardment of military and civilian targets in Yugoslavia. Typical of this is The Sun's use, on 3 April, of a full cover page to a portrait of wide-eyed refugee children, together with a plea, in Serbo-Croat, to Slobodan Milosevic: 'Don't let them die'. Such sentimentalising child imagery continues with coverage of the arrival of the first few hundred Kosovan-Albanians in England: another cover image by The Sun on Monday, 26 April, showing a little refugee girl smiling and waving as she arrived in Britain the previous day.

The faces of Kosovan-Albanian children offer a very different media image of war to the much-discussed image-sequences of the Gulf War which were transmitted from the noses of 'smart bombs' descending on their targets. Coverage of this war partially attempted to erase memories of Vietnam, stressing US superiority through high-tech weaponry. If such an abstract media representation of war anaesthetised us to the full horrors of the massacres of Iraqi conscripts in Kuwait and innocent civilians in Iraq, media coverage of the war in Europe is much more emotively charged. Only the emotionalism and pathos elicited by all the close-up portraits of refugees fleeing Kosovo, is caught up in the Government's pronouncedly hawkish and pro-war rhetoric.

Many in the media have made analogies between the present conflict and the Second World War. For all the confusions and uncertainties which mark its media coverage – as Barbie Zelizer has pointed out, captions would even describe military personnel as Serbs, despite the fact the insignia on their uniforms identified them as Croats – the Holocaust has become the constant reference point for the representations of atrocities in the Balkans.

As NATO continues its ferocious military bombardment of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic is demonised as Hitler (as Saddam Hussein was during the Gulf War) and his 'ethnic cleansing' of Kosovan-Albanians is compared with the Nazi's extermination of the Jews. A front page of The Mirror on 1 April not only evoked the war against Hitler, but drew upon Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, to drive home its point even further. Echoing the film, the front page coloured a section of a black-and-white picture to make a little girl stand out, alludes to Spielberg's use of colour to single out, from the black-and-white surroundings, a little girl in a red coat. Colour comes at a particularly significant moment in the film. Schindler is watching the destruction of a ghetto from a hillside and comes to realise the horror of the scene in which he has so far participated. As Mieke Bal has pointed out, the director uses the little girl in red to show us the point of view of Schindler – to show us what he is seeing. The little girl alerts us to the fact that Schindler now sees those in the ghetto as 'individuals instead of the devastating, de-humanising bureaucracy of numbers.'

Succeeding pages in The Mirror went on to use archival photos from 1942 to 'show' the parallels between the past and present, between the brutality of the Nazis and that of the Serbs, the plight of the Jews and that of the Albanian refugees. Invoking the war against Hitler through the use of historical photos and borrowings from Hollywood, further confuses and distracts from the full complexity of this conflict. References to the Holocaust, genocide and ethnic cleansing are used to justify, morally, the present military action. But such use of the past is problematic, both diminishing the resonance of the representations of atrocities of the Second World War, and confusing the historical reality underlying the events of the present with the past.

While the media representation of the Gulf War was notable for the absence of bodies, bodiees proliferate in the present war coverage. However, media focus on the plight of Albanian refugees fails to give the full story. As in the Gulf War, the horrors of a Western military devastation of another nation have been under-represented.

In more recent coverage, NATO's atrocities are no longer hidden behind the poignant faces of Kosovan refugees. On Thursday, 15 April most newspapers ran graphic colour images showing the carnage which followed the accidental bombing, by NATO, of an Albanian refugee convoy. And where the body horror was not shown, in an interesting reversal of the earlier use of sentimental portraits in the British press, it was the very faces of Kosovan children which stood to trouble the conscience of those supporting the war: the bloodied and bandaged faces of two sisters orphaned by NATO bombs which ran on the cover of The Express on Friday, 16 April. As visual testimony to NATO's brutalities accumulates, Vietnam (where atrocities and blunders were committed by US troops) becomes a more appropriate historical reference point than the Second World War.

Today, as I write, Sunday, 2 May, The Independent on Sunday runs a shockingly explicit colour photograph on its front-page showing the bloody rag of a human body, one of 40 civilians allegedly killed when a NATO missile hit a bus in Kosovo. To say such images play into the hands of pro-Serb propaganda misses the point. It is only through necessary exposure to these images that we begin to get a fuller representation of the brutalities being committed by both sides – in the present war in Europe.

Mark Durden

First published in Creative Camera, June/July 1999, pp. 36 - 39, this text Mark Durden presented at the opening of the OSMOSIS photo exhibition in conjunction with the EU CIED conference held in Leipzig, June 1999.

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The Balkan Image War by Mark Durden