 of the war crimes. OK, now we're starting. So I start again. So good afternoon, everyone. This is Maria Varaki, Dr. Maria Varaki, lecturer in the National Law. And together with Professor James Gao and Professor Rachel Kerr, it's our pleasure to welcome you to the first webinar of the War Crimes Races Group series for this academic year. This year, the War Crimes Races Group will run throughout both terms. Having said that, we're very happy to initiate this year's series with the presentation of a very, very excellent and interesting book of the Siege of Sarajevo with two prominent academics and experts on this field. And with this very short welcome, I would like to give the floor to Professor Kerr to initiate the webinar. Thank you all. I look forward to see you to the rest of the series. Thank you very much, Maria. And welcome, everybody, to this webinar. Good afternoon, everybody. As Maria said, we are really delighted to be kicking off the series with a presentation from Paul Lowe and Kenneth Morrison on their new book on the Siege of Sarajevo, Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo. So we have an hour. The presentation will be about 30 minutes. Each of Paul and Kenneth will speak for about 50 minutes each. And then we'll open up and have some time for questions and answers and discussion. So we'll take questions in the Q&A box. So if you have a question, feel free to pop it in there while the presentations are going on and we'll come to them at the end of all of that and take them and answer them. So pop your questions in there. So before we start, just by way of brief introduction, you can see a bit about the book and also a link for a discount if you'd like to order a copy on the web listing for this event and also a bit more information about Paul and Kenneth, so I don't spend too much time introducing them. But just to say, Professor Kenneth Morrison is Professor of Modern South Eastern European History at DeWantford University and Dr. Paul Lowe is reader in documentary photography at University of the Arts London. And I for one, and I'm sure all of us really look forward to hearing more about this amazing book Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo. So over to you, Kenneth. I think you are going to be starting if you want to load up your slides. Thank you. Okay, that's there, great, over to you. I'll begin again. We're going to spend about 15 minutes each talking about reporting the Siege of Sarajevo, which we published with Bloomsbury in January this year. It's a project that Paul and I worked on for over three years. And it was quite a serious endeavour, writing that a kind of history of how the siege was reported. Our focus is primarily on foreign correspondence as opposed to local media. But of course, we do discuss those locals that worked very closely with foreign correspondence in Sarajevo. And one of those fascinating things about this period is the construction of the journalistic infrastructure that was needed to report from a city under siege. So much of the first half of the book focuses on the creation of that journalistic infrastructure. So the book, it was in, how do I move this on? The next slide, there we go, apologies. So this is the first detailed study of the work of foreign correspondence in Sarajevo. Of course, there have been many books written about the siege of Sarajevo, but none have had this particular focus. The aim of the book is really to kind of analyse how journalists function within a besieged city. And of course, doing so required, well, it was a real technological endeavour to make this whole infrastructure function. So throughout the book, we focus on the creation of this journalistic infrastructure. We deal with the changing technology, because of course, the siege of Sarajevo also happened at a time in which you had the introduction of digital technology. So the way that journalists changed fundamentally transformed between, let's say 1992, when the very early stages of the siege, the only way that journalists could get stories out was using, if they had satellite phones, if you did at that time, and some were using existing telephone lines at which there were very few in the city. But one of the other changes that took place, certainly during 1992 and 1993, was what Paul and I described as the armourisation of reporting. And at the end of 1992, most big agencies were using armour cars in Sarajevo, all journalists, or most journalists, were wearing flat jackets, helmets and so forth. And of course, that brought its own particular problem in terms of reporting daily events. Now, for us to do this, of course, we worked with the available primary and secondary sources, but we were required really to interview participants. And for this book, we interviewed around about 100 journalists, stringers, translators, satellite engineers, drivers, mechanics and so forth, people that were involved in the whole building of the infrastructure that made it possible to broadcast eventually live from Sarajevo. So I want to talk a little bit about that infrastructure first and the creation of it. Here you can see a picture, actually one of Paul's pictures of the Holiday Inn hotel, which is, of course, the famous journalist's hotel in Sarajevo. Even by the standards of war hotels, this one was particularly interesting. Most war hotels that we think of, for example, the Caravelle in Saigon or the Commodore in Beirut, none of these hotels were directly on a front line. The Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, of course, was only 500 metres away from an active front line and was within Siege Line. So it was a particularly hazardous place to stay. What it did have is it had an underground car park. It had electricity, it had its own generators, so it could provide for journalists who were staying in Sarajevo and covering the siege of Sarajevo from there. Not all journalists stayed in the Holiday Inn, some stayed in private accommodation. Associated Press were based in the Belvedere hotel, which was near the Koshival Hospital. But the vast majority of those foreign correspondents working in Sarajevo stayed in the Holiday Inn hotel. This is a black and white photograph, so, of course, you don't see this wonderful, lurid yellow-brown and grey colour of the Holiday Inn, but it is a somewhat unusual building from an architectural perspective. Now, the Holiday Inn didn't reopen until late June. I think the precise date is the 25th of June 1992. Originally, when journalists arrived in Sarajevo after the events of the 6th of April, which, of course, shots were fired by Radovan Karadzic's henchmen into the crowd of peace demonstrators from the 5th floor, in fact, of this hotel, most journalists that arrived in Sarajevo at that time were based in Belgrade, and they would simply come from Belgrade down to Sarajevo, report on events, maybe for two or three days, and go back to Belgrade. However, in mid-April 1992, the foreign correspondents began to base themselves in the city, and they based themselves primarily in a hotel on the outskirts of Sarajevo in Ilija, called the Hotel Bosna, and it was there for the next month that they reported on the early developments of the siege of Sarajevo. But on the 15th of May 1992, as there was more fighting around the area of the so-called Ilija Hotel complex, there was a massive actuation of journalists. Many of them left on the 15th of May, went down to Split in Croatia. A very small number stayed behind, including John Burns, the New York Times, for example, but the vast majority left during that period. And actually, between about the 15th of May and about mid-June, there were a very, very small number of foreign correspondents based in Sarajevo. At that time, Skye got something of a scoop because Skye News were based in Pali, which of course was outside Sarajevo and was the wartime headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs. They managed to get into Sarajevo through Mokovica and some of the most visceral images of the shelling of Sarajevo, particularly of the parliament building across the road from the Holiday Inn, were taken from the top floor of the Vojna Bolnitsa, or the military hospital. Skye News had been permitted to use that to film and they used that position for several days to film the shelling of Sarajevo at the end of May, beginning of June, 1992. However, in June, 1992, foreign correspondents began to come back to Sarajevo and they came back in greater numbers after the city's hotel was reopened on the 29th of June, 1992. Here you can see inside the Holiday Inn, this is Chris Helbrin of the BBC and you can see the large satellite umbrella, satellite phone umbrella, hanging out the window of the Holiday Inn. The Holiday Inn was particularly useful for radio... I'll turn the volume down for now, you can turn it here, but also when you get to the other end, switch the network back. I think we've got a tiny bit of time. Can you go and mute? We've got you, thank you. So yes, radio journalists could use relatively easily. They had a communications infrastructure within the Holiday Inn itself. If you wanted, of course, to send images, television images, you would have to use the TV station building, which was another part of that journalistic infrastructure. The Holiday Inn was also something of a kind of social and communications hub for foreign correspondents and here you see Jonathan Landay, Chris Helbrin, John Byrne standing there, Pulitzer Prize winner who reported on the Siege of Sarajevo in the Borden, Bosnia for the New York Times. So the Holiday Inn became a kind of central, very important kind of part of that infrastructure because it's where most journalists resided. Here you see the Sarajevo TV station on the left-hand side, built originally in the 1960s, extended in the 1970s and again just before the Winter Olympic Games of 1984. It was one of the most robust buildings in the city, certainly, but it was one that was also targeted on a number of occasions. On the 28th of June, 1995, it was actually hit by a modified air bomb killing one member of staff and then engineering said all other foreign correspondents who were based in the TV building. But the TV building became the important part of the infrastructure because it wanted to send images out of the city, filmed images, visual images. They had to do so from the, you could send photographs using a satellite phone, but you could not send footage. One other interesting thing that developed as a consequence of foreign correspondence operating in a very dangerous environment was the creation of the Sarajevo Agency Pool. So in the summer of 1992, on the suggestion of Martin Bell or the BBC, that essentially camera crews shouldn't all go out into the city to attempt to garner footage. They should basically send one or two camera crews out and those camera crews would then come back and the footage would be pooled. So they would essentially share footage between themselves. Now that was quite an interesting development, particularly in a context whereby journalists and camera men tend to be very competitive. Therefore, the creation of the Sarajevo Agency Pool not unique was something somewhat unusual, but the Sarajevo Agency Pool also had, as well as many other agencies, had a space, the television station from which they could broadcast their images. Now key to this was the European Broadcasting Union because without the European Broadcasting Union, Sarajevo didn't have a satellite uplink. European Broadcasting Union first established a satellite uplink at the Hotel Bosna, but when they were evacuated from there on the 15th of May, 1992, there was no satellite uplink in Sarajevo. There was one in Palais, but not in Sarajevo. So what happened was in mid-June, 1992, the European Broadcasting Union sent in a special operations team led by Miriam Schmouse, who created a satellite uplink in the TV station, which was then used by the Sarajevo Agency Pool and all of the other agencies operating in Sarajevo. So the EBU's equipment was absolutely key to making the whole thing function. And of course, that was one of the really interesting things about writing this book that we already knew quite a lot about how the BBC functioned or CNN functioned within Sarajevo, but less so about how the European Broadcasting Union functioned. And we managed to interview track down almost everyone who was involved from the EBU during this time. The other building that was very important was the PTT building, which of course was the headquarters for the UN in Sarajevo. And here you see the UN team or staff being grilled by journalists during the so-called nine o'clock follies. The nine o'clock follies took place in the PTT building more or less every morning, which journalists would turn up to be given the UN's perspective on events, not just unprofor, but various UN agencies would give briefings there. The term nine o'clock follies is really borrowed from the Vietnam War. Famously, the Rex Hotel in Saigon, the US military, used to give the body count that were dubbed by journalists as the five o'clock follies. Well, Sarajevo had its own version of the so-called nine o'clock follies that took place at the PTT building. Here you see again another image of journalists at the PTT building asking questions of whether the UNHCR or unprofor. Now, a part of that infrastructure, of course, journalists had to be able to move around the city with relative ease. One quite interesting thing about Sarajevo is at the beginning you could get in and out relatively easily, but at the beginning it was getting in and out by road because the airport was until the 29th of June 1992 closed. After 29th of June, you could get into the city on flights from Split or Ancona to Sarajevo Airport and then hopefully get transport from Sarajevo Airport to at least the PTT building. So at the beginning of the siege, journalists were really driving around in soft-skinned cars and you can see this old BBC Carlton which was Martin Bell's crew. The cameraman there you see is Nigel Bateson who was one of the BBC cameraman who was working in Sarajevo, both with Martin Bell and John Simpson. I think Eddie Stevens is the sound man there. But you can see they were extremely exposed. There was no protection. And in a city which they were often subject to sniper fire, journalists needed equipment and needed cars, armored cars that would allow them to traverse the city more easily and with the level of protection that they required. But the trigger for this review was the killing of the ABC producer, David Kaplan just outside the airport. In fact, not very far from where this photograph was taken. That happened in August 1992, just a few weeks before that, the CNN camera woman Margaret Malt had been seriously injured. Again, quite near the airport outside the Oslo Virginia building. So by the autumn, winter of 1992, the use of armored cars and flat jackets and so forth is becoming much more commonplace. Now you can see that both Nigel Bateson and Eddie Stevens are wearing flat jackets but these don't amount to much more than stave vests essentially. So what we begin to see is agencies investing quite large sums of money in buying armored cars and flat jackets and helmets and so forth for their correspondence. And this is one of the BBC's vans or trucks that they had bought, Land Rovers. These had been previously used in Northern Ireland. They were bought from the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They were then refitted by a mechanic called, well, in fact, he wasn't just a mechanic, he was in charge of the BBC fleet, Alan Heyman. And then these were either built in situ. They were taken in different parts and then constructed in Sarajevo or they were shipped in to, well, taken to Split and then driven from Split into the city. Not all of these armored cars were completely armored. Some just had armored cabs. So basically where the driver and the passenger are sitting would be armored but other parts of the vehicle would not. But in any event, this became much more commonplace by the end of 1992. And it's an interesting period, of course, because this is leading us on to where we got a decade later in Iraq, where journalists are not only driving around in armored cars, but sometimes have their own security detail and so forth. I think it was James Mates of ITN that had his own security detail when travelling to Tikrit just after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And he was much criticised for, you know, why would a journalist be travelling around with a security detail and was that actually, you know, that's deeply problematic when the journalist can no longer be, in a sense, objective, either because they're embedded or either because they're travelling with a security detail. So this was in Sarajevo, this was the beginning of the process of armourisation that became much more commonplace throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But I'll pass on to Paul now because Paul's going to discuss technology and a little bit about ethics and the ethical challenges that journalists faced while operating in Sarajevo. Sorry, I just need to get to the right slide. OK, great. So can you see the screen pop? It's not, you don't see my presenter notes, are you? Great, OK. So, yes, so thanks, thanks, like Kenneth. Yeah, so the book has this sort of two halves, as Kenneth said, the first half is a kind of narrative of the process of how journalists started off with very little organisation, very little infrastructure and built up over that period of the siege into quite a sophisticated and complex operation. The second half of the book is a little bit more analytical in the sense that we take particular themes that emerge from our research and look at them. And the first thing we looked at really was the sort of daily reporting life. How did journalists cover the story on a day-to-day basis? And as Kenneth said, you know, the majority of journalists covering this were relatively young. I mean, I was one of them. I was a photographer in my late 20s. And it was a war that was broadly covered a lot by what we would call the time stringers or super stringers who were freelancers who had a kind of semi-contract basis with, let's say, a newspaper or a radio company. Obviously, we had staff reporters were there as well. But a lot of the war was covered by stringers and super stringers. And it was a generation that had sort of been drawn to Eastern Europe, often just after that, the Romanian Revolution and before the Berlin Wall. And they'd sort of established themselves in place like Budapest and Bucharest and so on. So they had some familiarity with the area. And then obviously when the conflict in former Yugoslavia broke out, it was a much bigger, much more complex and much more violent story than they'd been used to covering. So we were literally learning on the job in many ways. It was very much sort of that sense of trying to find out what's going on. The hotel, the holiday inn had this kind of focal point, really. Not everybody stayed there, but everybody went there. And it was a space where journalists could talk with NGOs, with various strange black market dealers, with all of sort. It was a kind of focal point, really. And you would start the day and end the day there, trying to find out what was happening and getting reports from your colleagues. So this is David Reef talking with a colleague in the lobby of the hotel. And it was a very peculiar place because the hotel is like this kind of castle or sort of fortress, if you like, in the center of the city, overlooking both sides, the sort of side out towards New Sarajevo and the airport, and then the side towards the old town. And it's also very much on the front line. It was literally meters away from the front line in Gorbovice. So it was a very, very vulnerable and very dangerous place, but also it's kind of in a strange way protected. The Serbs did shoot at it occasionally, but it was sort of an easy truce around it. But it was a very much a place where people defined the terms that we're so familiar to us now, terms like ethnic cleansing. I remember sitting in the lobby here with Roy Gutman and I think Alan Little and they were trying to decide, could we call what was happening in Priador and Eastern Bosnia and Western Bosnia when the camps were just being discovered in August 1999? Could we call it genocide? Did it meet the requirements to be called a genocidal act? So this is a really interesting kind of moment where a lot of vocabulary that we're so familiar with today was being established. The period is also, we argue, very, very important in the sort of history of journalism in the sense that that decade of the 1990s does mark this transition in lots of different ways from one type of journalism kind of into another one. Sean McGuire who was working for Reuters and went on to be the head of Reuters News in Europe said, it wasn't so much this was the first of a new war, it was almost the last of the old wars where there was still a sense of some sort of frontline, it was still predominantly two government-level institutions fighting each other, whereas the sort of conflicts that we're seeing now are much more the kind of new war style with all sorts of different armed groups who are not necessarily at state level. And it was also, as Kenneth said, it was a technological shift from analog into digital. It also marked in a way a kind of shift in terms of the business of journalism from the idea of journalism, predominantly as a kind of public service activity into something that's much more dominated by advertising and revenue streams and business. So journalism sort of shifting into a business if you like. So this is Charlotte Eger and Michael Montgomery in the hotel dining room. And it was a very strange atmosphere, you can imagine there even at the height of the siege, the waiters were still dressed up in bow ties and dinner jackets serving as rather thin soup and food and so on. So it was this kind of strange haven where you could still operate. And as Kenneth said, it had electricity at times, not always people had generators. So they could file stories. So Charlotte Eger was a great interview. She's very, very typical of this group of journalists who came out here as stringers. She started out working for the Daily Mail and then ended up working for contract for the Observer. And so she was working for a weekly newspaper which meant the rhythm of her life. She described it brilliantly as saying she'd just graduated from Oxford in I think English literature. And she said it was like kind of going back to university and your writing schedule was very much like writing essays. You kind of had a week to write your essay or your story. You had four or five days to do your reading or your research in the field. You had to write it for the deadline to get it into your supervisor or in this case, your editor. And then you'd have Sunday off and then you start the whole process over again. And this is sort of fantastic way of understanding how the rhythm of the week worked for some of these reporters. And Charlotte was also very typical of what happened to a lot of journalists then. They became incredibly attached to the story. It really did capture the imagination and in some ways the emotions of other journalists because although we were living in the hotel, we still were out on the streets a lot. We were with families, we were staying with families. There was a very strong connection emotionally, I think, and psychologically with the citizens of the seas. This extraordinary situation where you had this very modern European city very much kind of in the same space as it were as the rest of Europe and Britain and so on. Taking back to the middle ages, this kind of middle ages siege with no real electricity cut off, constant bombardment. And it was like this giant psychological experiment of how would people like us respond to that? How would an educated suburban or urban civic value sort of be expressed in a situation like that? And that was endlessly fascinating, I think, for journalists and for their audiences. And so Charlotte was typical of several reporters who followed individual families for years, literally through the whole life of the siege and reporting on the cultural life of the siege as well, the exhibitions and concerts that were put on, the sense of the city resisting the aggression through not just fighting on the front lines, but also through defending the values of what it means to be a citizen of a city. As Kenneth said, technology shifted a lot in this period. So at the beginning with photography, we were shooting film, developing our film in hotel bathrooms, scanning it with some of the very first scanners and the Hasselblad film scanner scanned a 300 kilobyte file, not megabytes, but kilobytes, which took 45 minutes to transmit over a satellite phone. And by the end of this period, they were shooting digital cameras that would transmit it almost instantaneously. And this is an example of the Tandy. It was a little laptop that ran on batteries, which meant it could be used even when there's no electricity, little AA batteries. And this is a reporter sitting in one of the, I think in the Reuters office in the Holiday Inn getting ready to file his story. At the beginning of the conflict, they were still filing manually by literally reading the story out word by word to a sub-editor, which could take an hour to transmit a story. By the end, they were using satelixes and other digital transmission devices that would allow the story to be uploaded in minutes. One of the very interesting sort of things that emerged as well is this was the period where CNN was establishing itself as the 24-hour rolling news. And this became the sort of dominant model for a lot of television reporting. And this idea of the tyranny of the two way. And the two way is when you go live to the reporter on the scene to his editor in London or New York or wherever it might be. And this actually gave a lot of drama and immediacy to the reporting, but it was also very problematic because it meant that a lot of the time the reporter was tied to the hour or half hour news bulletins. And it meant they couldn't actually get out and report on the story. So Martin Dawes of the BBC, for example, gave us a great interview where he talked about during one of the NATO airstrikes in, I think, 1994. He was basically unable to leave the hotel because BBC World Service, BBC News, BBC Television, BBC Radio were constantly going to him for the latest update. And it was almost, it was incredibly frustrating because he actually wasn't able to give them an update because he wasn't able to go out and report and find out what was actually happening. He was only able to sort of, you know, give them what he could see literally out of the hotel window. So there was a flip side to this technology, to this advances, this kind of live news, the ability to broadcast live from the field in a way was counterproductive in terms of actual journalism. As Kenneth said, we did think a lot about the ethics of reporting and Sarajevo and the siege in general threw up a lot of really difficult problems. The sort of idea of journalism that if you tell the story honestly and truthfully and present the facts to an audience that they will then do something about it was really challenged I think by the siege of Sarajevo and more broadly by the conflict in Bosnia because, you know, there was evidence, very clear primer-facing evidence of war crimes and atrocities being carried out very, very early in April 1992, never mind August and so on. And nothing was done. So there was a real disconnect between the narratives that were coming from the journalists on the ground who were predominantly saying, you know, we can clearly see there is one major aggressor attacking relatively undefended civilians. The arms embargo is not doing any good at all to prevent that. You know, we can see atrocities being carried out. We can see war crimes. We can see very difficult situations being happening on the ground. Something should be done. This is a primer-facing case for intervention. The narrative that was coming from the embassies and the political elites in France, Britain and America particularly was, oh no, this is all ancient ethnic hatreds. They're all the same as each other. They're all as bad as each other. If we intervene, it'll be another Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we know that obviously that story, you know, went on for the period of three years. So it was a real challenge for many journalists to the sort of fundamental tenets of why you do journalism and how you do journalism. And this led, you know, Martin Bell in particular, famously to come up with this idea of the journalism of attachment, which is also supported in many ways by people like Alan Little and Christian Amopore who argued that in the face of war crimes, trying to give both sides equal credence and equal coverage is unethical. It is absolutely beyond the pale really. So they were defending a journalist's right to take sides effectively and to call out genocide, atrocity and war crimes when they see it. And my computer's just got a little bit nuts. So I'm not sure I can actually see if it's frozen somehow. So apologies for that. I was going to try and bring one to the next slide, but my computer's got a bit crazy. Wait a minute. Let me just try. Ah, there we go. Okay, I've got it now. So a warning, a random warning popped up. And obviously this also took a pretty difficult toll on the journalists themselves. I'm going to flip through these pictures quite quickly because they're quite disturbing. But, you know, having to report, particularly for the photographers, I think, because they are right in the heart of things, right in the middle of everything. And we got some very powerful interviews from Chris Morris, who was the photographer there in the morgue and from Enrique Marti, who took that picture of the killing of a young boy called Nermindovic, who was killed by a Serbian sniper right in front of the Zamycki Museum in the heart of the city in front of the Holiday Inn. You know, they were very honest, brutally honest really, about how it affected them personally, emotionally and in some ways, you know, for the rest of their lives, suffering from some of the trauma of that, but also their frustrations at how they were producing these very powerful images of atrocities, of killings, of the daily violence. And it wasn't having any impact through their readerships on government policy back in the States and back in Europe and back in the UK. So I think I'm going to end there. I've got some, I'm going to keep on rolling through some photographs while we do the Q&A. These are some of the work that I did in the city, but I think we can move to some questions if you want, and I'll keep the slideshow sort of ticking over as we're doing that. Thank you very much, Paul. It'd be great to go to the questions. Actually, one of the questions I had for you was whether all of these photos are ones that you'd taken, are they all your photos in the book or? Yeah, so most of the ones you've seen now, there's one or two by Kevin Weaver and the color one at the end there is of Nermind is by Enric Marty, but the rest of them are mine. Yes, that's right, yeah. And then this is a series now. I did a sort of landscape project during the siege because I was really fascinated by the fabric of the city and the texture of it. So I did a series of panoramic and square format pictures of the sort of landscapes of war, which is what I'm showing you at the moment. I'll just kind of go through those as we go through the Q&A. Great, thank you. Thank you both. That was absolutely fascinating. And I've got tons of questions I think I could ask you about. I'll try not to, but I just want to pick up on a couple of things as we go to the Q&A. We've got one question in there already, which I will come to, but do put other questions in there. But one thing I was really struck by is the sense that you both said that many of the people reporting, many of the journalists reporting on the siege were fairly young and inexperienced. And I wonder what impact that had on reporting and whether it's the same people stayed throughout it. And then sort of linking into your last point, Paul, on attachment, you know, it's quite striking how we know some people, obviously yourself, still being involved very much in the region and involved heavily now on the kind of peace building, reconciliation side, Roy Gutman as well. I wondered how many others there in this sense of attachment is not only during the reporting in this sense, but there's sort of longevity of that and how it makes them all. Yeah, I mean, I think the first question, yes. I mean, there was definitely a side of a core. There was a sort of a central group of people that covered the story continuously. I mean, they weren't there every day, but like myself, they would go in, come out. So the BBC, for example, had a rotation system in Reuters. So the main agencies had a rotor system where journalists would typically go in for a month at a time, and then they would be rotated out to rest and recuperate, and then they would go back in again, maybe two or three months later. Although having said that, very often, it wasn't like you were going on holiday. You would go from, I went from, you know, Sarajevo to Somalia to Grozny back to Sarajevo again at times. So there was a sense of sort of people coming and going, but, and there were people that just came for one day. There were kind of dateline journalists who would arrive at the airport and file their copy and then fly out again without having even seen the city, but they would get that dateline of Sarajevo under siege. But by and large, it was a story that was covered by a fairly tight-knit, fairly small group of people. So people like Alan Littlekirt, Shorq, Martin Dawes, and, you know, Sean McGuire, Charlotte Eager, and obviously, you know, John Burns from the New York Times. And they were people that either stayed there, extended them, and John Burns kind of moved to Sarajevo effectively for that period and was there for months at a time. So, and it really did capture the imagination and the hearts, I think, of many of the journalistic community. And I think that's definitely evidenced by the fact that we had a reunion in 2012 of journalists who'd been covering the conflict. And a lot of people were quite nervous about coming back. They felt maybe a bit uncomfortable about that, would the city really want to hear again and be kind of reminded as it were of that past? But something I think like 300 journalists came in the end because there was an invitation from the city. And the response was very powerful from the public. People were really sort of saying, yeah, yes, it was really important that you came. You did, despite everything you did do, a very good job because it could have been even worse if it hadn't been reported on. And a lot of us at the time were saying, well, you know, there hasn't been a reunion in Kigali or even in Kabul. It's not the kind of place that you would have that reunion from. And we're now talking about doing another reunion for the 10 years on from that, for the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the siege in 1992. So definitely it's a place that's remained close to the hearts of lots of the reporters that covered the story. Absolutely. I wonder if I can just turn to Professor James Gow quickly. James, of course, co-convener of the crimes research group and has also been sort of involved in following this from the beginning as well and giving testimony at the ICTY. James, did you want to ask a question, make some comments? You're muted. I'll travel with these things and all the stupid people. Mary, thanks very much for all of that. First thing I want to say is that I hope we get an answer to Gabriella Kieffi-Skyte's question I've just seen in the chat at the end. I had a few kind of thoughts and observations and I would like to have seen the book. I'm very much looking forward to see it. And it would be a different discussion, I think, in that light. So with that caveat, I had a kind of few observations. One is about the change. And I think the change that came through that Hugo period in the early 1990s was a kind of democratization. There were some of the technological changes coming. There were changes in the professional structures and working, but in part, they kind of were part of this democratization. And one of the things about Bosnia in particular, the whole of the Hugo lands, was that they were quite accessible. So lots of young people with cameras, video cameras, you know, it's the age of the portable. And that's kind of a big benefit of that in the long term is the richness of material that's been left behind. And of course, from the locals, we should never forget the locals in all this, both journalists and ordinary people capturing stuff. So when it comes to some of the great documentaries, Death of Yugoslavia and Balcony and Flamen, both of which I had in spring to mind, the material available is almost like any other thing. People often talk about Vietnam as the television war. It wasn't. It was a war on which there was lots of film that came, bits of film that came a week later. Yeah, this was rich dense environment. And I think it was a kind of democratization and that has changed. Paul mentioned the changes in technology, but those really, yeah, kind of, it was the small foothills of the changes we have now with people with their devices, everything, everywhere. Second observation was when Paul spoke about the tyranny of the two way. And I'm really glad that it's raised as a point because there were many times I'm aware of and not just in Bosnia and Hugo lands, but Iraq as well, observed situations where the expectations that the editors, the producers have and that they believe that their audiences have, I mean, you've got to have somebody standing there in this place because that gives it authenticity. But in fact, the people speaking to camera are being fed and told what to say down the line by the editors because the people on the ground don't actually know what's happening. And it's, and I think drawing attention to that is such an important aspect and interesting element of the things going on. Third, I think, you know, when you spoke about, I think this was Paul, not Ken, but I'm not sure which one of you said this about, yeah, journalists' right to take sides, referencing Martin Bell, and is it right to take sides or is it right to be objective? And this is very much striking at the BBC and a bizarre idea of objective that means a bit of this and a bit of that is actually rather than an independent evaluation of the evidence. And last couple of things, the point on ethics, yeah, I was struck that Paul skipped over a couple of the difficult images, consciously saying so, and maybe that's probably quite rightly, but there's a whole discussion to be had about those kinds of issues. It's difficult to say, talk about this because I recently read an essay that's been considered for a prize about images of victims of the Holocaust and the ethics of reproducing those images and showing them when there's no permission from the users and in an age of GDPR that becomes even more sensitive. But I wonder if there's any thought on that kind of the use of these images, pros and cons. And finally, of course, your book's about Sarajevo, that's your experience and it's a big attention. But to what extent do you think the journalistic attention to Sarajevo was a distraction from everything else going on everywhere else? Because it was there, the journalists were there, and in a way it was a story that kept itself going and meant that a lot of the time other things went unnoticed. Anyway, thanks very much. It was great, really entertaining, but do somebody make sure to answer Gabrielle Kefis-Kaitis' question? Yeah, that's gone, sorry. I can just add that in. Thank you very much, James. Maybe if I just, there are a few questions and really brilliant, interesting questions. I really hope we get to all of them. But shall I just read out Gabrielle's and then I'll go back to you, Kenneth and Paul, and then we'll take some more after that. So Gabrielle says, thank you for the wonderful presentation of the book. Considering the extent of reporters' exposure to possible atrocity crimes, to what extent do you think reporters have a responsibility to provide evidence to courts? And how do you feel about such a prospect? I don't know if that's something you covered in the interviews as well. It is. Can I just pick up on this poll first and then you can come in? Of course, of course. I mean, there was a divide among journalists who reported from Bosnia, not just from Sarajevo, whether they should in fact give evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. So a number did. Martin Bell did. Jeremy Bowen did. Ed Valiami did. The guy who worked for Sky News, Van Linden, he also gave evidence. But there were those that believed that they shouldn't, that it wasn't the job of the journalists to bear witness to reports, but not to give evidence in a court case over which they had very little control. And for some, they saw the ICTY potentially as politicised or being used as a kind of political instrument. So it was really interesting that divide that opened up between the press corps within Sarajevo regarding this. Paul can probably talk in a little bit more detail about that, but there was a divide. It wasn't by any means consensus on that issue. Yeah, absolutely. And it was definitely something that was actively debated and people argued with each other about whether they should or not. I think in the end, it was down to individuals conscious about whether they... I mean, it's interesting the whole thing because the flip side of that argument is would you give evidence in a police trial against the sort of left-wing protester? And so for example, at the moment, the NUJ in Britain would defend the rights of photographers not to give their film to the police if it was a public order incident, for example. So there's some very interesting kind of nuances in these kinds of situations. From the point of view of broadening it out a little bit from just from the stage of Sarajevo, the interesting thing about the way that photography was used predominantly in the war crimes tribunals is most of the time it wasn't used for the way that you might think it would be sort of initially, you might think that a photograph showing an individual carrying out some form of an act of war crime would be prosecuted that specific individual. But that's not how images were generally used by the ICTY. They were used more as corroborative evidence to establish command responsibility for senior leaders. And as part of that kind of general sense of this is going on in multiple locations and here's evidence that it was happening in these different locations. So low level competence, carrying out acts of violence and executions were not being prosecuted themselves but those images of them doing those things were being used to prosecute their commanders and so on. And that sort of more or less stayed the same to the present day. In terms of some of James's other questions, yes. I mean, the tyranny of the two way, absolutely correct. I mean, I remember standing on the roof of the TV station at one o'clock in the morning photographing Christian Aminpour who was during the NATO airstrikes who was going live to Atlanta. And they were saying, what can you see? And clearly she couldn't see anything because it was dark and nothing was literally nothing was happening. And it was, it did become almost absurd. As you said, James, in one area is coming their editor or their political editor from one end and then the other ear they're trying to actually find out what's going on. So it is deeply problematic. I think I would say that from, I think that again as Sean said that this was in a sense one of the last wars of the old type because it's just before social media and the camera phone and the sort of mass citizen journalism and the mass amount of information. It's just before that happens. So I think you're in Iraq and to an extent even Afghanistan and some of these other conflict zones we're seeing today, so much more media is being produced by, by combatants themselves for example, by civilians, by journalists, by local journalists and so on. So I think in a way, Sarajevo in particular marks the kind of high water of that classic old school journalism approach. And before we kind of get this whole new landscape of different types of media outlets coming through. Couple of other things that you mentioned. Yes, I think absolutely right. I think the way you formulated it, I think it was, a lot of the Jones was saying, yes, to be objective against war crimes doesn't mean giving both sides equal credence. It means looking at the facts, surveying them, seeing, coming to an opinion or just to find opinion on who is carrying out, who is the aggressive, who is the victim and saying that that's the case rather than trying to give both sides equal credence in that. So I think one thing I did, I forgot to mention earlier on which James reminded me of. I think one of the things that we do uniquely in this book as well is we don't just, we didn't just interview and talk to the kind of superstars, the Alan Littleism and the James, sorry, the John Burns. We talked to producers, to fixers. Obviously the local fixers were very, very important in this. In fact, without them, none of this would have happened and the whole kind of the role of the fixer in all of these different international media situations is supremely important and must really not be forgotten. And so that whole kind of, as Kenneth said, the whole sort of ecosystem or ecology of how news is produced is something I think that we opened up quite effectively in this book in a way that in a sense, that's one of the bigger sort of themes that we draw out from this case study specifically of Sarajevo is how you see the TV reporter on the screen, what you don't see is the whole network of other people and other things that are happening to allow that image, that 30 second report to actually get onto your television. There's a whole kind of set of things that go on around that with producers and editors and so on and so forth. We went into quite a lot of detail about some of the microcosms of how that actually happens and so on. I wonder, should I pick up on the gist very quickly, the question about armourisation and your journalists arming up. It's Richard's question, really interesting. I mean, we interviewed, of course, lots of journalists but also lots of producers. So producers based at BBC or CNN, they saw it as their obligation to protect their people on the ground. So actually within a relatively short space of time within two or three months, journalists had armored cars. They were provided with armored cars. We have an interesting story about the business around armored cars in just a moment, which Paul will convey. But many journalists did resist it because they felt that it created a barrier between the ordinary citizens of Sarajevo and they were reporting about that experience. Could you read the interview, someone in the street who was not wearing a helmet and a flat jacket, could you read the approach, some in a helmet and a flat jacket and interview them? It obviously created this kind of barrier. Many of the local staff refused to wear flat jackets or helmets or even drive around in armored cars because it was their city and they were reporting the experiences of their peers, their friends. So they didn't want to be, you know, wearing flat jackets and helmets and so forth. And there's no doubt that it had something of an impact. By 1994, you can read some critiques of the journalists in Oslo, Virginia or Vremie in which, you know, local Sarajevans are being interviewed saying, you know, we don't meet these people. We just see them driving around in armored cars and they go in and out of the holiday in and, you know, there's no dialogue between them and the ordinary citizens. Now, of course, journalists would rightly say that, you know, ordinary citizens of Sarajevo maybe didn't need to be out on the street all the time reporting. Journalists did. And because they were doing that job and it was a very dangerous job in the context of the besieged city, then they needed to protect themselves. But there's no question that it created a psychological barrier of sorts. But vis-à-vis armored cars, there was something of a trade that emerged in armored cars. Paul, there's a great story. So just tell this one. Yeah, so we found a fantastic story from Gary Knight who was a very good photographer but who was also a very, very entrepreneurial character. And quite early in, I think in 1993, he realized that there was a sort of gap in the market for providing armored cars to clients effectively. So he decided to, along with another photographer friend of his to invest in an armored car and then to try to rent it to American TV companies. So he went back to the UK and he found out the company that makes these Kevlar armored cars in the Midlands somewhere. And he went for an interview with the manager and said, I'd like to buy an armored car, please. And the gentleman was like, well, absolutely, we've got one here, it's ready to go. It's 60 grand, do you have the cash? And he was like, well, I've remortgaged my girlfriend's flat and I've raised the finances. I said, okay, can we see your arms dealer license, please? He's like, oh, I don't have one of those, do I need one? And so because it's a weapon effectively, it's a militarized vehicle. So in order to be able to buy one, you actually have to be a licensed arms exporter. So Gary went off and managed to get the paperwork and succeeded in buying this armored car and immediately signed a contract to ABC television to rent it for I think a whole year at a couple of grand a day or whatever it was. And on the back of that created a very successful sort of sideline business where by the end of it, you had about five or six armored cars and half a dozen soft-skinned range rovers and land rovers driving in and out of Bosnia sort of up and down the road from Split. So he was probably the only journalist ever to actually have, well, maybe that's not true, but certainly the only one in Bosnia to have a legal status as an arms dealer. So that was a pretty good story that came out from the, from the, the other armored car story was Chris Morris, who was the time photographer who had himself a bespoke F-150 armored truck, American, big sort of the classic American pickup truck built with an armored cab and had that flown out. And that was the kind of fanciest, most plush sort of VA powered armored truck in the area. Everyone was very jealous of Chris's beast. I might just comment on the show. I feel like there's another book to be written about the intersection between journalism and arms dealers now or maybe a script to be written. I wonder if we've only got a couple of minutes left. I just want to tie in, there's a couple of questions about the relationships between the journalists and other agencies, other people. Yeah, I was gonna, that was what I was gonna come to. Yeah, Marky Zilkuk says, you've mentioned your interactions with the UN and humanitarian agencies. Did you have interactions with military political representatives of the warring sides and how would you characterize those interactions? And then similarly, in a slightly different vein, but related, Michelle Hughes asks, if you can comment on the relationship between the reporting effort and the Western military commanders on them. Yeah, and I'll tie that back into James's point as well about the way that Sarajevo sort of dominated the news agenda. To a lesser extent, Vitez did as well in central Bosnia when that conflict broke out largely because there were British forces deployed there and it became a kind of hub for the British reporters to cover that. So yes, I mean, you could argue in one sense that the kind of overriding media focus on Sarajevo took away from what was happening in other parts of particularly in what was then Republican Serbscare. Having said that, it was much more difficult to work on the Republican Serbscare side. Journalists were escorted around. Usually they were sort of taken care of you. It was harder to get to access to things. So there was a sense in which it was much more difficult to operate on that side of the story. And it was a lot easier to operate on the Federation side. And especially when Vitez sort of opened up the British Army, obviously, it was before the concept of embedding. So in a sense, it was probably the last conflict where we were allowed to travel with British Army units without having to go through all the kind of complicated paperwork and signing off your life. Because in my mind, I remember riding around the back of Saracen and Scorpion Army personnel carriers and armored cars and so on with British troops without any kind of great, great fanfare and just being allowed to do whatever you wanted effectively. In terms of access to commanders and so on, yes. I mean, I would argue that the Journalistic Court gave the UN, NGO leadership and the military leadership a pretty hard time. In a lot of those nine o'clock folly press conferences, people like Alan Little and Kurt Short particularly did press the UN forces very, very hard on, what were you doing? Why were you not responding? Why are you allowing these things to happen? Why were you not calling for airstrikes and so on? So I think there was definitely a sense of the Journalistic Court pushing back, not simply sort of neutral reporting and just being kind of fed the news as it were from these military and these other political sources, but actually actively questioning them and actively pushing them and trying to sort of move the agenda forward really in discussions with them. And then in terms of the, you were saying about political leadership. Yes, I mean, obviously, the Federation political leadership, the beginnings saw journalism and journalists and access to Western journalists as being the way to get their message across. And I think perhaps naively assumed as many journalists perhaps did that if you made it clear what was going on and how, for example, the arms embargo was massively impacting on the Federation side, on the Bosnian side, compared to the replica Serbska side in terms of their ability to fight back that something would be done, but obviously it wasn't. So there was a naivety, I think at the beginning on all sides in that sort of political space about what journalism could achieve and what it couldn't achieve. And so yes, I think there was definitely a lot of contact between journalists and the various political players, but on both sides, you know, we would go up to press conferences in Parley, with Karaditch and his daughters and so on, as well as we would go to talk with Izhevaevich and Ganesh and so on. So there was a lot of interaction between the journalists and all those other sort of actors as it were in the conflict, definitely. If I can just add to that, Bob, the relationship between the foreign journalists and the UN was an interesting one because, you know, normally at UN briefings, well, the tone could be quite hostile at times. And although I think many of the foreign correspondents acknowledge that, you know, these people were on the ground doing a very difficult, sometimes impossible job, that there was a tension in these meetings at the nine o'clock follies in the PTT building. What is interesting though is that the pressure of the journalist applied on the UN led to a situation whereby they were permitted to use UN vehicles to get to the airport, for example. There was an organization established called the Sarajevo International Journalist Association, which arranged for local staff working for foreign correspondents to be given transport to the airport and then permission to get on UN aid flights in and out of the city. So that relation was quite a complex one, actually, between UNPRO4 and between the international journalists. Are we finished now? Thank you very much. Yeah, I think we are. We've got one minute. So if you wanted to make a last comment. Maria wants to ask a question quickly. Moira, did you want to ask you a question? Yeah, but I think we've run out of time. I think we've run out of time, which is really sad because we've got a couple of other questions. And I think there's a really interesting question from Adna about decentralization and images. So I'm going to use that instead to plug a next event. So we've got two events coming up. One is the next series in the War crime seminar series was on the 9th of November, and that's a talk on the evolving international law of peace by Cecilia Bayet. And then we have Paul back on the 10th of November on a panel on art and war and why does art and visual images matter in war? And I think perhaps we can pick up, pick up in that panel discussion this issue around what images are doing for us and sensitization, desensitization to them would be great. So I would employ you all to join us for that. It's part of the War Studies at 60 seminar series on the 10th of November. So you can find the link to join up on the War Studies site. But I will stop there and just say, thank you so much to Kenneth and Paul for coming and talking to us about this book. It's absolutely fascinating. I'd say I think we could go on for hours. It's such an interesting topic and your reflections are so, so interesting on it. And then, you know, we've talked a lot about Sarajevo, but you can just imagine opening up the conversation to think about the links to other conflicts and the development of war reporting and all of those things. So I think we're gonna have to get you both back again to talk about that at some stage. But thank you both very, very much. And thanks everybody for joining and for your questions and thank you James too for your comments. So with that, I will say goodbye and end the webinar. Thank you very much everybody. Thank you, thank you for your attention. Thanks. Thank you very much.