June 10, 2000 International Tribunal for U.S./NATO warcrimes in Yugoslavia

MEDIA PROPAGANDA AND THE PHOTO THAT FOOLED THE WORLD

by Jared Israel

Jared Israel maintains a web site titled The Emperor’s New Clothes that debunks government and media lies about the war against Yugoslavia. He produced a film called Judgement! showing how corporate media distorted a photograph of refugees to produce false evidence of Serbian atrocities and demonize the Serbs. At the tribunal, he showed a segment of that video; below, we reproduce part of a description of what the video shows in detail.

In 1992, ITN, the British news station, sent a film team to Bosnia. It was led by Penny Marshall.

The ITN people came back with what was supposedly film of a Serbian concentration camp. A "death camp," if you will.

Or will you? A "death camp?" What is wrong with this story?

First off, how did Marshall and an entire film crew manage to get into a Serbian "death camp" and shoot a film? Didn’t somebody have to transport them and their mountain of equipment? Didn’t somebody have to show them around? Feed them? Didn’t the crew need time to set up their cameras and other equipment? How did they do this without getting caught? Did they parachute from the sky? Didn’t they need the cooperation of the administration of the so-called death camp?

They did.

But why would the authorities want to help? Didn't they know the West was hostile to the Yugoslav-loyalist Serbs? Weren't the loyalists attacked every day in the British press? Wasn't the Islamist secessionist leader, Izetbegovic, treated as a hero? Knowing that ITN was probably pro-secessionist, why would the authorities let an ITN crew film a "death camp?"

Could it be that the place ITN filmed was not a death camp? That the authorities let Penny Marshall and her film crew in precisely because they had nothing to hide?

The ITN crew (and the Yugoslav crew) moved on to the refugee center at Trnopolje. After filming refugees who were wandering around freely, Marshall took her crew into a small area partially enclosed by a fence. The fence, mainly chicken wire with a few strands of barbed wire, was falling apart. It had been erected before the war to secure a storage shed, some wheelbarrows and other equipment. The only people inside the enclosure were the ITN and RTS crews. A group of refugees gathered outside. They were curious to find all these movie people crammed into an awkward space, filming through a fence.

As you will see when you watch Judgment! Marshall's crew and the RTS people had already shot interviews with refugees and others. Why didn’t Marshall use this film?

The obvious answer: she wanted a fence. She wanted to film through barbed wire. When you film refugees wandering freely in a refugee center it’s hard to create pictures that look like a death camp. But when you film through barbed wire it’s easy as pie.

Is there any other explanation for why an experienced film worker would squeeze her crew into an inhospitable litter of wheelbarrows and overgrown weeds? Why she would pick a spot where she had to talk to the refugees through a barrier?

Marshall tried to find someone who spoke English. She settled on a refugee named Mekmed. She asked him, Do they treat you badly? "No," said the man, "very kind, very kind." Marshall was clearly impatient. She pressed the man to criticize the loyalist officials. The man insisted: "everything is good; I think it is very safe but just too hot. Very hot."

Marshall asked Mekmed about another refugee, a man in a black tee shirt. That man is very thin, she said. Mekmed shrugged as one does when forced to explain the obvious. "Yes," he said, and shrugged. "I think all people is not the same."

Apparently someone in the crowd translated Marshall’s question about the thin man, for soon afterwards someone pushed a very thin man forward, as if to say, "You want thin? We'll give you thin!" As the man, Fikret Allich, stumbled toward Marshall, he laughed, then reached over the fence to shake her hand.

Allich had suffered from a childhood disease, probably TB, that produced a scurvy-like effect. He was stripped to the waist from the heat. In Judgnment! we see that his ribs were deformed. The appearance is shocking.

EDITING TO MAKE A STATEMENT

Marshall never aired the conversation with Mekmed. Why not? Was it because he refused to bash the loyalist authorities?

Instead, ITN produced film clips and stills that gave a totally false impression. These pictures made it appear that Fikret Allich and the other refugees were the ones behind barbed wire.

Everyone saw these pictures and because human beings tend to believe what they see, millions of people were fooled. They thought they had seen proof that the Serbs were the new Nazis.

back to schedule and presentations