http://www.balkaninsight.

com/en/article/capturing-the-image-of-ethnic-cleansing-in-bosnia-01-19-
2017

Capturing the Image of Ethnic Cleansing in

Bosnia
Photojournalist Ron Havivs shocking image of a Serbian paramilitary kicking a womans
corpse during the Bosnian war is one of the subjects of a forthcoming documentary about his
most significant pictures.

Igor Spaic BIRN Sarajevo

A Serbian paramilitary kicks the dead body of a woman in Bosnia in 1992. Photo: Ron Haviv/VII.

Ron Havivs 1992 picture of a Serbian paramilitary fighter kicking the lifeless body of a
middle-aged woman who his comrades had killed just moments earlier may not have changed
the course of the Bosnian war like Nick Uts famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl
running away after a napalm attack in her village.

But to those who at that point had still not fully understood the term ethnic cleansing -
which reporters were using to describe what was going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina - the
shocking photograph quickly explained how dirty the cleansing really was.
 Another photo that Haviv shot in Panama in 1989 captures newly-elected Vice-President
Guillermo Ford fending off an attack by a paramilitary supporter of the dictatorial regime of
Manuel Noriega.

The bloody shirt in the photo, the defensive pose and the soldier standing in the background,
doing nothing to stop the attacker, inspired a revolution.

Panamanian Vice-President Guillermo Ford being attacked in 1989. Photo: Ron Haviv/VII.

Now the award-winning photographer and his co-director, photojournalism professor Lauren
Walsh, have decided to explore how and why these particular two of the thousands of pictures
that Haviv has produced took on their own lives.

For their documentary, entitled Biography of a Photo, they travelled to Bosnia and Panama
to interview people about what the two images meant for their societies.

Do the photos still have meaning and if so, what is it? Haviv explained in an interview with
BIRN.

There are a lot of correlations between the photo in Bosnia and the one in Panama. Although
the photos are very different, the Panama one stands for the fight for democracy and
obviously the photo here [in Bosnia] is a photo of a war crime, which in my opinion had no
impact whatsoever when it was taken, Haviv said.

Although the image prompted an international uproar at the time, it did nothing to change the
course of the conflict. However, it did turn Haviv into a potential victim.
Taken from the small space between the front and back end of a truck in a street in the eastern
Bosnian town of Bijeljina, the photo portrays a senseless act that defines the mindset of those
who committed war crimes during the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.

Haviv was watching when the infamous Serbian nationalist Tigers unit, led by notorious
Zeljko Raznjatovic, alias Arkan, arrived in Bijeljina. He took pictures when they took a
Bosniak man and a woman out of their house, killed the man, and then the women. He took
pictures when they brought out the sister of the women and shot her too, but somehow the
perpetrators were not in any of the frames.

I realised I had nothing to prove what happened, so I wanted to get a photo of the Tigers in
the same frame as the bodies, Haviv recalls.

Minutes later, a couple of fighters came around the corner and Haviv lifted his camera to
capture them next to the bodies when another member of the paramilitary unit just walked
into his frame and, for no reason, kicked the dead womans body.

The sound of Havivs camera made the soldiers turn around and see him but he just gave them
a big smile.

Arkan demanded the film and promised to return it to Haviv after he had taken a look at the
images. If he liked them, Haviv would get back the film.

But what Arkan did not know is that Haviv had previously hidden the roll with the image in
the car, and had loaded a new roll and started taking more pictures.

And then we had this ridiculous conversation about film labs in Belgrade, where Im saying
the labs there are very bad, let me process the film, Ill bring you the pictures and you can tell
me what I can use, says Haviv.

We argue for 15 minutes about film processing. So at this point I know my film is gone, but I
want him to see Im fighting really hard for this camera, and he doesnt think there are any
other pictures, he adds.

Eventually Arkan took the film from Havivs camera, but the photographer drove back to
Belgrade and filed the image from the hidden roll.

When the images were published, they produced nothing more than outrage and Arkans
anger, including an alleged statement that he was looking forward to drinking Havivs blood.
Ron Haviv.

For the next eight years, Haviv tried to keep out of Arkans way while still covering the
Balkan conflicts.

Other photographers were arrested because they looked like me, and I narrowly missed him,
mostly in Kosovo, he said.

It took time for the photo from Bosnia to become an image of some significance. The turning
point may have been its display in the courtrooms of the United Nations war crimes tribunal
in The Hague by prosecutors who were trying to describe ethnic cleansing to the judges.

The photo then became one of the symbols of the Balkan conflicts, but was particularly
significant for Bosniaks, who it reminds of the suffering they endured.
It also had other unintended consequences - a few years ago it was used as propaganda
material in the war in Ukraine.

A very famous Russian blogger had taken the Bosnia photograph from Bijeljina and had
changed the caption. He wrote that the soldiers were not in fact Serbs, but were Ukrainian
soldiers, and that the victims were not Bosnian Muslims, but were in fact ethnic Russians
living in Ukraine, says Haviv.

The blogger had a large following, and the photo went viral all over Russia. Haviv wrote a
public statement explaining that the photo was from Bosnia not Ukraine, but he says the
blogger had a much larger audience than him.

Eventually the blogger retracted it, but his retraction produced little reaction, and the photo
was then displayed again with the same caption months later during a photographic exhibition
in Moscow, says Haviv.

I felt an amazing amount of disrespect for the victims in that photograph - for their sacrifice
and their loss to be misused in that way. I felt also a punch in the idea of what journalism, in
this case photojournalism, is supposed to be and how easily its becoming to knock that
down, he adds.

Haviv believes that what happened to his photograph is a small indication of the dangers that
journalism and photojournalism are facing.

This phenomenon has always been going on throughout photography, images being misused
with captions being changed, different sides using photographs for different reasons, he
explains.

But I think never before has it reached a point where it is now so dangerous, because the
ability for imagery to spread so wide so quickly. And then even when there are corrections,
its never able to correct the first instance, he says.

Haviv and Walsh hope to have their film ready for the 2018 Sarajevo Film Festival.

Talk about it!

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/arkan-s-paramilitaries-tigers-who-escaped-justice

Arkans Paramilitaries: Tigers Who

Escaped Justice
Paramilitaries led by notorious Serbian warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, fought their
way through Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo so why were none of them jailed for his units
crimes?

Denis Dzidic, Marija Ristic, Milka Domanovic, Petrit Collaku, Sven Milekic BIRN Bijeljina,
Belgrade, Djakovica/Gjakova, Zagreb

Arkans Tigers in action in Bijeljina. Photo: Ron Haviv/VII.

Jusuf Trbic remembers the first time he saw Arkan, sitting in an army truck loaded with
weapons in Bijeljina in eastern Bosnia. It was around 4pm on April 2, 1992, after Serb forces
had taken over the town. Trbic recognised Zeljko Raznatovics face from television reports;
he was already known as a man to be feared.

Trbic had just been captured by Arkans Serbian Volunteer Guard, the Tigers. Over the next
few hours, through the night until dawn, he was beaten and tortured, sometimes in the
presence of Arkan himself. They knew what they were doing, Trbic told BIRN. I didnt
have a millimetre of white skin; all of it was black and blue.
He was ultimately released because Arkan had seized him for a reason he was a local
journalist, and the paramilitary boss wanted him to broadcast an appeal to Bosniaks on Radio
Bijeljina to give up their weapons, he said. Others were not so fortunate.

A woman from Bijeljina, who asked to remain anonymous, said she was 19 years old when
Arkans men knocked on her familys door one night in April 1992. They were masked, so
we could only see their eyes, she recalled.

The paramilitaries ransacked the familys possessions, took money and gold. One fighter
kicked her in the spine and she fainted. When she woke up, she and her sister-in-law were
naked and bloodied. The next day, Arkan arrived and raped her, she alleged.

Arkan came for the first time after that night. He came, grabbed me by the hair and took me
away. He took me to an apartment and he abused me there. He brought me back half-dead,
and then [did it] again the next day, she said in an interview with BIRN.

Then other soldiers come and abused me in front of my children, my mother-in-law and
everybody else, she continued. I begged them to kill me so that I wouldnt suffer any
longer. They just laughed cynically again and told me that they would not gain anything if
they killed me, because I was going to kill myself.

Although her testimony has never been tested in court, she has since been officially
recognised as a war rape victim by the Bosnian state and compensated for what she suffered.

He took me to an apartment and he abused me there. He brought me back

half-dead, and then [did it] again the next day.
Victim who alleges she was raped by Arkan in Bijeljina in 1992

Verdicts at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have established
that at least 48 people were killed in Bijeljina by Serb paramilitaries in the first two days of
April 1992. But none of Arkans men have ever been jailed for murder, rape or looting or
for any of the other crimes they are accused of committing during the wars in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Arkan had been indicted for war crimes by the UN-backed court in The Hague by the time he
was shot dead at Belgrades Intercontinental Hotel in January 2000, but his murder ensured
that he would never go on trial.

Since then, only one of his fighters has ever been convicted of committing a war crime while
serving with the Tigers Boban Arsic, found guilty by a Croatian court of killing a married
couple in a small village in 1992 and even he was convicted in absentia because his
whereabouts were unknown.

Some Tigers have since been jailed for other crimes during and after the Balkan wars, such as
the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, but never for anything
they did while fighting for Arkan.

Balkans expert Christian Axboe Nielsen, associate professor at the University of Aarhus,
points out that the Hague Tribunal was set up to prosecute high-level suspects, not ordinary
 fighters: The assumption and expectation was that the war crimes courts in the [individual
countries of the] former Yugoslavia would eventually start to prosecute the rank-and-file of
Arkans unit.

But this did not happen. In Serbia, Nielsen explained, investigations also studiously avoided
following the chain-of-command, never targeting the senior officials who made it possible
for the paramilitary units to exist.

There is simply little or no political will - and little public appetite - for this in Serbia even
today, he said.

A career in crime

Zeljko Raznatovic was born in the small Slovenian town of Brezice on April 17, 1952, and he
was well-known to the police in many countries around Europe by the time the Yugoslav
conflict began.

He was first arrested in Belgrade in 1966 for stealing a womans purse and spent a year in
juvenile detention, before moving to western Europe in the 1970s and embarking upon a
decade-long crime spree.

Between 1973 and 1983, he ran up a string of convictions and arrest warrants for bank heists,
robberies and attempted murder in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria,
Switzerland and Italy. He managed to escape from most of the prisons in which he was held.

After he returned to Serbia, he became the leader of the hardcore Red Star Belgrade football
fans, the Delije, who would provide him with some of his future Tigers. Journalist Filip
Svarm, who has studied Arkan closely, told BIRN that the state security service at the Serbian
interior ministry tasked him with setting up the unit in autumn 1990 to carry out black
operations in Croatia.

Those state security officers told Arkan precisely what they expected of him, Svarm
explained. In return, Arkan was given different benefits for the favours he did for state
security. Those benefits were mainly of an economic nature.

Protection from prosecution for his more orthodox criminal activities was another incentive
for the newly-anointed militia leader, who would go on to run lucrative smuggling operations
in Serb-held territory in Croatia during wartime: By providing various services for state
security, Arkan exempted himself from the law, said Svarm.

Although Arkan was arrested in October 1990, before the war in Croatia, and sentenced to
five years in jail for plotting a terror attack after police found weapons in his car, he never
went to jail for it. Svarm said he believes a widely-circulated rumour that the Serbian and
Croatian interior ministries made a deal to secure Raznatovics freedom: That says it all
about how important Arkan was for Serbian state security, that the highest officials were
engaged in order to get him out of prison.

By providing various services for state security, Arkan exempted himself from the
law.
 Zeljko Raznatovic poses with his Tigers. Photo: Ron Haviv/VII.
Filip Svarm, Serbian journalist

The Serbian Volunteer Guard was a relatively small force made up of Delije football ultras,
criminals and ordinary volunteers who admired Arkan and believed in his cause, such as
Borislav Pelevic, who became his closest associate and later ran his nationalist Party of
Serbian Unity.

There were always around 500 men, some were coming and some were leaving. It is my own
estimate that around 10,000 men were part of the guard at some point in those several years,
said Pelevic, who is now the president of the European Kickboxing Association.
He also denied the allegation that the paramilitaries were funded by Serbian state security.
Arkan was very rich, he told BIRN, and wealthy expatriate Serbs also acted as sponsors.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/why-arkan-s-exploits-aren-t-news-in-serbia
The Tigers were mainly deployed to support the Yugoslav Peoples Army as they did during
the siege of the Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991 but their image as brutal, disciplined
Comment
killers also17 Dec
had 14
a chilling impact on Belgrades enemies. According to Pelevic: When people
heard that Arkans Tigers were coming, Ustase [Croatian nationalists] and Muslims usually
fled.
Why Arkans Exploits Arent News in
A sanctuary for Tigers
Serbia
It came as no surprise that the glamorous birthday party of paramilitary chief Zeljko
Raznatovics son got more coverage than BIRNs report on the wartime brutality of his
Tigers.

Milka Domanovic
BIRN
Belgrade
A BIRN investigation published last week
detailed how notorious Serbian
paramilitary boss Arkans fighters
managed to avoid jail time for the war
crimes they are alleged to have committed
in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. But no
media in Serbia followed up the story -
why?

Was it because it is not news that there are

still no convictions for crimes committed
two decades ago? Or because this was not
a story about war crimes against Serbs? Or
perhaps because it was not one of those Arkan mural at the FK Obilic football stadium in
days in the year when we commemorate Belgrade.
the victims of some crime only to forget
about it again the next morning? Photo: Milka Domanovic.
Or was it just bad timing to publish an investigation about some of the worst atrocities of the
1990s wars during the week in which Arkans youngest son Veljko celebrated his 18th
birthday?

Serbian media provided detailed coverage of young Veljkos birthday party at Belgrades
Hyatt hotel, attended by the countrys jet set and its top politicians, with no word mentioned
about the war crimes allegations which are older than the teenage Raznatovic.

Journalists were quick to deliver information about the most expensive or unusual gifts that
Veljko received from one of his 400 guests. His mother, turbo-folk star Ceca Raznatovic,
fulfilled her late husbands wish and gave Arkans golden Rolex watch to his son, we learned,
amongst other exclusive details from the celebration that Serbian media rushed to
investigate.
All the invitees, including foreign minister Ivica Dacic and energy minister Aleksandar Antic,
European Kickboxing Association president Borislav Pelevic and Arkans former political
ally Dragan Markovic Palma, had to go through metal detector at the hotel entrance before
entering the party.

It was all organised by Ceca, the folk diva who paid a 1.5 million euro fine to avoid jail in
2011 after she pleaded guilty to charges of misappropriating funds from football player
transfers at the FK Obilic club which Arkan once owned and to illegal possession of firearms.

Foreign minister Dacic, an old friend of Ceca and a regular guest at her parties, even grabbed
the microphone to serenade the revellers. And while in some other countries, there might be
public criticism of government officials who went to such an event, the Serbian tabloid
readership was desperate to see who had joined the Raznatovic party.

The BIRN story, Arkans Paramilitaries: Tigers Who Escaped Justice was widely
republished in media elsewhere the region - by one of Bosnia's largest daily newspapers,
Dnevni Avaz, by Croatian daily Slobodna Dalmacija, as well as by media in Kosovo,
Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania.

Arkans Tigers were not recruited from Macedonia, nor did they fight in Macedonia. They
mostly came from Serbia and fought their way through Bosnia and Croatia. Even though his
Serbian Volunteer Guard was disbanded in 1996, some of its members also fought in the
Kosovo war.

But Macedonian media seemed most eager to give their readers the story of bloodstained path
followed by the Serbian paramilitaries during the 1990s wars; it was republished in some of
the most prominent internet portals in the country such as NovaTV, Lokalno.mk, Libertas and
Prizma.

The investigation was also republished by Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Turk, as well as
by Deutsche Welle on its Croatian and Bosnian websites.

But in Arkans home country, the country that provided him with funds for his wartime
exploits and used him for propaganda purposes while he was still alive, there was nothing.

This is not about Serbian journalists ignoring a BIRN story. It is much more important than
that. It shows that the countrys media has no interest in facing up to what happened in the
recent past.

The whole world saw American photojournalist Ron Havivs photograph of one of Arkans
men kicking the corpse of a Bosniak victim in the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina. But none
of the Tigers has ever been convicted of the crimes committed there, although verdicts at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have established that at least 48
people were killed by Serb paramilitaries in April 1992.

Arkan was indicted by the UN-backed court for war crimes in Sanski Most, but never lived to
hear a verdict because he was killed in Belgrade in 2000. Indeed only one of his fighters has
ever been convicted of a war crime while serving with the Tigers - killing a married couple in
Croatia in 1992 - and he was convicted in absentia.
No trials, no judgments, no compensation for victims. Does that mean that there were no
crimes, after all?

That is the key argument for those who appear to believe that Arkan and his unit were
innocent patriots. As Borislav Pelevic, once Arkans closest associate, has asked: It is 20
years since the war, how is it possible that no one [of Arkans men] was indicted by the
Hague Tribunal or the Serbian war crimes prosecution?

Yes, 20 years afterwards, the crimes should have been investigated, the perpetrators brought
to justice and the victims compensated. But this hasnt happened.

That is the reason why asking questions about what happened and why should still be more
important than titillating tales about a well-connected boys 18th birthday party.

Milka Domanovic is one of the authors of Arkans Paramilitaries: Tigers Who Escaped
Justice.