Among the many brave correspondents who covered the war in the former Yugoslavia, the reporting of Ed Vulliamy and Maggie O'Kane has received numerous praise and awards. Both gravitated relentlessly to the places where the action was taking place and wrote vivid accounts. What made their reporting controversial, however, was their decision not to remain neutral. For many journalists, including some of their colleagues at the Guardian, it was crucial to maintain the distinction between a witness, a "neutral" observer, and one who was actively involved in the conflict. Some felt that they had crossed a line they should not have crossed.
The war, a series of ethnic conflicts that began in 1991 and lasted for almost a decade, left an estimated 140.000 dead and as many as four million displaced. As they reported, Vulliamy and O'Kane became increasingly biased, particularly in favor of the Bosnian Muslims. For O'Kane, "There really wasn't a balance of blame in this." Vulliamy, too, saw the Bosnian Muslims, more than any other side, as the "victim people" of the war, and his reporting became increasingly an impassioned indictment of their oppressors.
One critic from The Guardian, disagreeing with the approach of Woollamy and O'Kane, said that it turned the journalist into an "indignant participant". Another of their colleagues, also a respected foreign correspondent, spoke of the emergence of the "Maggie O'Kane school of reporting": "I think she epitomizes that type of journalism. It's a kind of print version of television reporting, where the article starts with a close-up of some scene of suffering and then expands to a wider context. But it has to start with a crying baby, a starving child, a weeping widow - that type of reporting was very different from the approach of Ian Black, Martin Woollacott, Jonathan Steele, Richard Gott, which was much more thoughtful and analytical."
On one occasion, after a political story was moved to make room for another disturbing report from Bosnia, Richard Gott, then one of the paper's editors, called it "political pornography" in a lively morning panel discussion.
In fact, both styles, graphic reporting and contextual commentary, successfully coexisted in the Guardian’s coverage of the war. The Guardian’s European correspondent, Ian Traynor, and his mentor Martin Woolcott provided particularly insightful analysis. The best reporting combined all these elements, conveying context through powerful, direct reporting, as, for example, in Julian Borger’s coverage of the horrific fall of the “protected” enclave of Srebrenica, as was later the case in Jonathan Steele’s reporting from Kosovo.
After crossing the line of neutrality, Ed Vulliamy, in a controversial move, became the first journalist to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In doing so, he said, he acted on his conscience, despite repeated advice not to do so. “Some of my most respected colleagues strongly advised me not to testify,” he said. He later testified in six more trials, including the trial of Radovan Karadžić. The war changed his life. “I was a serious pacifist who believed that all war was wrong; now I believe that sometimes war is necessary to end things that are worse than war itself.”
Maggie O'Kane did everything she could to provide investigators with contacts of survivors and witnesses, but she refused to testify before the court in The Hague. "I think it makes our job (as journalists) more dangerous and difficult. We would be seen as a threat and enemy combatants," she explained.
The first reports of O'Kane came from Croatia, mainly from Dubrovnik, which was under naval blockade. She was smuggled into the city by a sympathetic Croatian crew member, hiding her in the bunks of a ship carrying European Community observers.
After crossing the line of neutrality, Ed Vulliamy, in a controversial move, became the first journalist to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In doing so, he said, he acted on his conscience, despite numerous advice not to do so.
Her reports were notable for giving a voice to ordinary people. This was especially true for the citizens of Sarajevo, which had been under siege for many years. She reported regularly from the city during all four years of the siege. She first visited in the spring of 1992, traveling part of the way in a Red Cross convoy that came under artillery fire, killing several people. She then left Sarajevo in a somber column of vehicles carrying the coffin containing the body of Jordi Pujol, a young Spanish photographer who had been killed in the city by a mortar shell, his body becoming their pass through the checkpoints.
Like Vulliamy, O’Kane had made documentaries for television before she began reporting for the Guardian, and it was perhaps this visual sensibility that gave her writing a graphic, intimate, almost intimate tone. O’Kane wrote that being in Sarajevo, under constant attack from Serbian militias firing from the surrounding hills, was like being in a doll’s house with a giant lifting the roof off. Two months later she was reporting from another siege, this time from the topographical vantage point of the Serbian forces commanding the mortar positions around Gorazde. Her report began with the line: “Commander Slavo Gub stands on the mountaintop, unscrewing the legs of a green tripod to mount a telescopic sight. The streets of Gorazde are bouncing up the mountain.” It was this line that gave her report an immediate and startling reality for Peter Murtagh, who was on duty that evening in the foreign news office in Farrington Road. He was so impressed by the picture that he went to the editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, and said, "You have to read this."
Preston opened the text on the screen and said: “This young woman has just gotten herself a job by writing.” O'Kane went on to report for the Guardian for more than 20 years, the first ten of which she spent in a series of war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya.
While O'Kane was in Dubrovnik, she was joined by Vulijami, who had come directly from Vukovar, the besieged Croatian city. The siege, which lasted four months, ended about three weeks later. This was immediately followed by a massacre of more than 200 people, who were shot and buried in a mass grave by Serbian militia.
O’Kane and Woolley shared a strong, fierce commitment to truth and to calling out the powerful. As soon as O’Kane arrived in the relative safety of Split after her first visit to Sarajevo, she wrote an open letter to the British prime minister, which was published in a commentary under the headline: “Save Sarajevo, Mr. Major.” It was a merciless account of the agony inflicted on the multiethnic population of the Bosnian capital by the militias under the control of Radovan Karadzic. “I have interviewed Mr. Karadzic several times,” she wrote, “and it seems to me that he has become crazier and crazier each time.”
From his base in Rome, Vugliami was tasked with monitoring the situation in Yugoslavia. While he was in Dubrovnik, a fleet of 30 smaller ships, led by a ferry carrying medical aid and food, was breaking through the blockade. The fleet included the Croatian president of Yugoslavia, Stipe Mesić, who had organized the convoy.
By then, Vulliami had already spent more than a month in Yugoslavia and was due for a short break. He also had a ticket for the important Napoli-Milan football match, his “pass to sanity,” as he called it, and he was eager to leave. “I figured what goes in must go out, so I boarded the ferry with Mesić, planning to arrive in Ancona in time to get to Naples for the match.”
On 29 July 1992, The Guardian published Maggie O'Kane's most shocking report to date. The headline read: "A Muslim nightmare under the long, hot Yugoslav sun." The language she used was unequivocal. Speaking of the Prijedor area, she wrote: "At least 14.000 Muslims are held in four concentration camps in this part of Bosnia, in the upper corner of Bosnia that the Serbs claim for their new Serbian Republic of Bosnia."
O'Kane arrived in Banja Luka by bus from Belgrade. When she checked into the hotel, she discovered she was the only guest.
At about four in the morning, someone knocked on the door. “It was a Red Cross worker, a young Serb, who said, ‘You have to understand what’s going on here.’ He was the one who warned me.” He took her to a house where boys under 16 and men over 60 were staying, who had been released from the camp. Among those she interviewed was a family she said had been detained in what she called the “Trnopolje concentration camp.” One of the other camps she mentioned was Omarska. O’Kane quoted a witness as saying: “They’ve been sitting there for two months, no shelter, no water to wash, no place to lie down.”
The main horror conveyed by this report was the fate of women and children crammed into a train of cattle cars. She spoke to the witness again. “They came from the Trnopolje camp. The women were crying and the children were screaming. They were screaming: ‘Water!’ It was a hot day, and the cars were standing in the open.” They were being transferred to Zenica, as part of an ethnic cleansing operation. When the train arrived in that Bosnian town, 110 miles from Trnopolje, five days later, eleven were already dead.
The article was immediately responded to by Radovan Karadžić, who was in London for negotiations that day. In a letter to the editor, he wrote: “Your front-page article is sensationalist and cannot be ignored. It is completely incorrect to suggest that the Bosnian Serbs organized concentration camps or that we are holding civilians as prisoners… I have offered the British journalists a list of places they believe to be camps. I will ensure that they visit them.”
Paul Webster, editor of the foreign affairs section of The Guardian, called Karadzic and told him that he wanted to accept his invitation and send a journalist immediately.
One of the most controversial events of the war was about to unfold. After a five-day delay, journalists were granted limited access to the Omarska and Trnopolje camps. “I was initially hesitant to call them ‘concentration camps,’ because of the many unique features of the Holocaust and its scale,” wrote Vulijami. “Yet, on reflection, they were precisely concentration camps.”
In Trnopolje, a starving Fikret Alić was filmed and photographed looking through barbed wire - a scene that soon became perhaps the most recognizable image of the Yugoslav war.
The United Nations' procrastination and the inability of NATO members to agree on joint action allowed the horrors to continue. The "safe zones" finally established by the UN in the spring of 1993, first around Srebrenica, proved to be anything but safe.
The report, written by Haris Nezirović, a 26-year-old journalist for “Slobodna Bosna,” described how 35.000 people in Srebrenica were living in basements, car wrecks, destroyed houses, and destroyed streets, while rivers of refugees were arriving from surrounding villages, fleeing the fighting.
By April 1993, Srebrenica had been under siege for a full year. A message from an amateur radio operator, published on the front page of the Guardian, conveyed the desperation of the population: “Please do something, anything you can. In the name of God, do something.” A UN resolution of 6 May formally confirmed the declaration of Srebrenica as a “safe zone,” but by then Serbian forces had already entered the town.
The Guardian’s editorial comment of August 14 was unequivocal: “It should be made clear where this paper stands. We would send thousands more soldiers in blue UN berets to Bosnia; and we would allow them not only to defend themselves, but also to make those protected zones truly safe and Sarajevo a truly protected city. Because we know what is happening and we see no possibility of deviation.”
The siege of Sarajevo continued. On 5 February 1994, a mortar shell hit the busy Markale market in the centre of Sarajevo, killing 68 people. Two days later, NATO declared a no-fly zone around Sarajevo, and US President Bill Clinton reinforced this with the emphatic words: “NATO is now ready for action.” In a front-page commentary, Martin Woolcott noted: “For the first time in the dark history of the Bosnian conflict, the West has convincingly threatened the use of force – and the effects are already working wonders: a ceasefire in Sarajevo was achieved within hours.”
The peace, however, did not last long. The response of Bosnian Serb forces to the declaration of a no-go zone around Sarajevo was to break into the “safe zone” of Goražde. This finally provoked the first NATO military intervention of the war: on April 10, 1994, two American F-16 aircraft dropped bombs on Serbian positions, and the attack was repeated the next day. In retaliation, the Serbs intensified their shelling of Goražde, capturing 150 UN personnel, killing two SAS soldiers, and shooting down a British plane.
The random bombing of Sarajevo continued, while the situation in other so-called safe zones further deteriorated.
In May 1995, Julian Borger reported from Sarajevo during a week during which the city suffered its worst bombing in 18 months. “The UN has abandoned any pretense of protecting the six Bosnian ‘safe zones’ it declared in 1993,” he wrote. Borger spoke to a vendor washing blood from the sidewalk. “Fuck the UN,” was all he said.
It seemed that nothing could have prevented the fate of Srebrenica. In July 1995, when Srebrenica fell, 350 Dutch UN peacekeepers, tasked with the impossible task of protecting the area, were forced to surrender after promised air strikes failed to materialize. Srebrenica finally fell on July 13. Evidence of the massacre quickly accumulated, through the testimonies of refugees and Dutch personnel who had been forced to abandon UN positions. In an article written for the Observer by John Sweeney and Charlotte Eager, a Dutch captain was quoted as saying: “Muslim men were separated from their families and taken to a white building. I heard gunshots coming from inside the building.”
The full extent of the horrors at Srebrenica was revealed in the weeks and months that followed. In early August, Mark Tran, a correspondent in New York, reported that the US had presented the Security Council with “compelling evidence”, including footage of mass graves, that up to 2.400 Bosniak men had been massacred after the fall of Srebrenica. The UN report, which was immediately leaked to the Guardian, along with testimony from Red Cross officials, made it clear that the real number of victims was likely much higher.
Towards the end of July, the Croatian army launched an offensive against the Serbian enclave of Krajina in Croatia, triggering an initial exodus of 20.000 refugees, a number that eventually grew tenfold. In The Guardian of 5 August, Julian Borger’s report from Zagreb was front-page news under the headline: “Croats move to all-out war.” Jan Treynor, in a profile of Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, wrote that he was “a president who went from communist fanatic to nationalist lunatic.”
The full extent of the disaster that befell the Serbs of Krajina was shown in the cover photo of the Guardian on August 9: a column of cars, trucks, men, women and children that reached the border with Serbia, and was 64 kilometers long.
Towards the end of the month, on Monday, August 28, a shell fell on the entrance to Sarajevo’s main covered market, killing 43 people. Vulijami wrote the lead story from Zagreb, suggesting that the bombing was intended to slow down U.S.-led peace talks. The Guardian published the harrowing testimony of AP reporter Srećko Latal from Sarajevo: “Journalists joined taxi drivers and market vendors in loading bodies into the backs of vehicles to be transported to the hospital. Some were falling apart as survivors lifted them up.”
NATO began bombing targets around Sarajevo at 2 a.m. local time on Wednesday. The following day’s front page headline read: “The Decisive Moment.” A joint report by Ed Vulliamy, Ian Black, and John Palmer included a dramatic photograph of thick smoke rising from an ammunition depot in Pale, which the Bosnian Serbs had declared their headquarters. The editorial described the bombing as a “great risk.”
Letters from readers published on Friday, September 1, showed a diverse range of opinions on the bombing and the Guardian’s response. The first letter was signed by MPs Tony Benn, Tam Dayle and others, who, while fully condemning the massacre in the market, also condemned the NATO intervention: “The international community loses all moral authority when it joins in the numerous crimes that have already been committed.”
Amid the lack of progress in withdrawing heavy weapons from the Sarajevo area, NATO launched a new offensive on Serbian positions on September 5th - the largest military operation in its history.
At the same time, the chief American negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Belgrade for talks with Slobodan Milošević. In a commentary, Jonathan Steele described the American policy as “bomb and negotiate, or Vietnam all over again.” He emphasized that the “Americanization” of war was not necessarily bad, but warned that “there is always something inherently cowardly and brutal about the choice of bombs.”
Jan Treynor in Zagreb and David Ferhal, the Guardian’s military correspondent, reported on 11 September that Tomahawk missiles had been launched for the first time from the USS Normandy in the Adriatic. The main targets were Serbian air defence systems around Banja Luka, in response to Serbia’s continued refusal to respect the no-fly zone around Sarajevo. A few days later, NATO agreed to suspend air strikes for 72 hours, based on promises that the rebel Bosnian Serb forces would finally lift the siege of Sarajevo.
One of the last towns to be recaptured by Bosnian Muslim forces was Donji Vakuf. Its liberation, Traynor reported, was a huge morale boost for the army, made up mostly of refugees, that fought for it.
The war was entering its final stages. In November, representatives of the main warring parties met near Dayton, Ohio, for talks that the Guardian described on its front page as “Bosnian search for Pax Americana.”
The Guardian called the Dayton Agreement the greatest foreign policy triumph, and the greatest political risk, of the Clinton presidency in a front-page report.
The Dayton Agreement, through the way it divided the territory, acted as a tacit recognition of the ethnic cleansing that had preceded it during four bloody years, presented as a necessary compromise for the sake of peace. The ideal of multiethnicity was abandoned, and the former Yugoslavia faced a future drawn along ethnic, or more precisely religious, lines: between the Orthodox Republika Srpska, the predominantly Muslim Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Catholic Croatia. The agreement confirmed that Kosovo, with its Albanian Muslim majority, was part of Serbia. Eyes were then turned to Kosovo as the next possible flashpoint.
Edited by. NB
Bonus video:
