UNTV project
I managed to finish my first Masters essay and hand it in - on time. It has been a very long time since I tried my hand at academic writing and it was a bit of a struggle to get started!
I am now moving on to Phase 2, which is a piece about UNTV - the United Nations TV unit that I worked for as a documentary cameraman in 1994-5. I am hoping to look at documentary film can be used in international development in conflict resolution, to see if can be successful and I have chosen to use UNTV as my guinea pig.
Based in Zagreb, UNTV produced hours of documentary film for the local broadcast TV networks across the former Yugoslavia and also supplied material to the international networks. The archive, which now sits in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London, has been used in documentaries (notably in Death of Yugoslavia by Brooke Lapping for the BBC) and some of the work been presented as evidence in the Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The archive is all sitting in London at the Imperial War Museum and I have permission to go and view some of the material sometime in the next coupe of months - hopefully before I have to hand the next weighty draft in!
As a cameraman, based in Zagreb, UNTV was an amazing experience. Unlike so many of our colleagues in the international press corps (especially the freelancers and stringers that would regularly pass through town) UNTV had amazing access to areas that were often off limits to other journalists and we had lots of back up to (something which I think is still missing for many journalists covering stories in warzones and other dangerous places). As cameraman coming from London, covering a war and the resulting humanitarian crisis was whole new experience. In London, I had existed on a diet of news, documentary and corporate work - the pinnacle of my career to that point was shooting an interview with Kermit the Frog for the World Entertainment News Network. (Remember them? No I don't think anyone does...)
My first proper assignment in November 1994 was a trip out to Vukovar to do a story about the Hungarian minority that lived in the Baranja, in Eastern Croatia, one of the areas of Croatia that was controlled by the Serbs. Cruising down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity (as the Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrad-Skopje highway was known), producer Denise Seneviratne and I polished off about 3 packets of cigarettes between us. I gave up smoking after that trip - convinced that there was no point killing myself - there were people roaming about with guns that would probably gladly do that job for me.
At the time I knew very little about UNTV, why it was set up, what it was hoping to achieve and less still about whether the films we were making were having any impact. I recently exchanged e-mails on this subject with with my former colleague Rob Mackey (still committing journalism in New York for the NY Times and the Guardian among others - right Rob?) and he recalled:
"I remember being in Sarajevo and hearing the theme music [for the UNTV programme] playing as people watched it one night, and even spoke to people there who had seen one of the video letters I did - which was about a young Croatian Serb woman living in the Krajina who missed her Croat friends. What was sort of remarkable about that was the people who told me they'd seen it on TV were Bosnian Muslims, living under siege in Sarajevo, surrounded by Serb forces, and yet they said they felt sorry for that young woman, who was not only a Serb living in the Krajina, but even worked as a police officer at a checkpoint between the Krajina and Croatia."
There have to be more stories like this out there. Don't there? Please help me find them.
Devon, UK. March 2012