Uphill Struggle

01-07-2012

A lot has been written about the importance of the local media in across the region in whipping up support for the war in the former Yugoslavia[1]. UNTV’s mandate was to combat this hate media by producing stories that would try and draw communities together. But, as Roy Head points out in his interview for this project:

“We did not have the horse power of three channels of Tudjman television and three channels of Milosevic television. They really out gunned us. In Cambodia we had a whole radio station and were simply more powerful than any other radio station there and we did not have anything like that ability in the former Yugoslavia.”[2]

In this context, producing one main programme package each week, it was hard for many of us at UNTV to really believe that we were making a difference in making the films that we did, indeed there were stories at the time about many aspects of the UNPROFOR mission being more of a hindrance than a help. According to Misha Glenny [3], the Bosnian government accused the international authorities (including agencies such as UNHCR and ICRC) of aiding and abetting the ethnic cleansing and there were numerous stories flying about at the time of unscrupulous UN battalions profiteering by selling their kit, fuel and vehicles to various combatants. Indeed, many of the victims of the Srebrenica massacres where rounded up by Bosnian Serb soldiers posing as UN troops in stolen UN helmets and vehicles[4] – a fact which UNTV itself confirmed in Leigh Foster’s film After Srebrenica: Tuzla [5]. In this environment, it might be assumed that finding a positive personal motivation to be part of the UNPROFOR project may have been hard, but in researching UNTV for this project, it’s clear that some former UNTV staff truly believed that they were there to make a difference and that the body of work that they were involved in producing was significant – this was certainly true as far as I was concerned. I was discussing this same point with my colleague and former UNTV cameraman Mark Turner. In an e-mail to me recently Mark wrote:

“I have always thought that of all the stuff I've ever been involved with in this business the only thing with any true, lasting relevance was the UNTV stuff…To get the access we had was unique. Although it's use at the time was very limited as an archive, I can't imagine it's ever been done elsewhere. To have access without the usual press restrictions and to not have the pressure of daily deadlines like other media meant that a depth of content could be achieved...If one of the witness statements or some footage of a massacre site I shot is used in evidence then I will have done something worthwhile in this life.”[6]

With these thoughts in mind, perhaps the most interesting comments about the significance of the UNTV project were made to me by Kay Gladstone, the head curator of the film unit at the Imperial War Museum (IWM), where the archive now resides. While I was at the IWM reviewing some material for this project, Kay was particularly complimentary about the work, saying that it was in the grand tradition of Grierson and all those other documentary filmmakers who had a specific social purpose.

“The collection also has a special value for the IWM as out first (and probably last) recording of a conflict where the voices of the participants are heard raw. Our official unedited collections from the Second World War are mute records…the record was entirely visual. Only very occasionally, as in the case of Belsen, did a cameraman try to make up for this silence by writing emotionally in his dope sheet if his reactions to the scenes he was focusing on.”[7]

Although, UNTV effectively failed to achieve its goals, as Roy Head suggests in his interview, when he says:

“We know [the UNTV project] didn’t work as NATO and the Dayton Agreements solved the problem and we didn’t get peace breaking out as a result of our programmes.”

Gladstone’s comments offer some perspective and perhaps suggest that ultimately UNTV did achieve some lasting relevance. Had UNTV's goals not been so lofty, perhaps it may have been seen to achived more than it did.

 


[1] Thompson, M. (1994) Forging war: the media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina. London: Article 19.

[2]  Interview with Roy Head, former Series Editor of UNTV (2012) Film. Johnstone, A. (Director), Wild Dog Limited: http://masters.wilddogworld.com/blog/blog.php?d=8

[3] Glenny, M. (1996) The Fall of Yugoslavia. London: Penguin.

[4] Shawcross, W. (2001) Deliver Us from Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

[6] Turner, M. (2012) Conversations about UNTV. Personal E-mail conversation with Andrew Johnstone. June 1 2012

[7] Gladstone, K. (2012) Discussions about UNTV. Personal communication with Andrew Johnstone. June 18 2012

 

 

Roy Head Interview

17-06-2012

I went up to London at the end of May to interview Roy Head, to try and get more of an insight into the mechanics and rationale behind the UNTV Project.

Inevitably there was not enough time to have as long a discussion as I might have liked, but many thanks to Roy for taking the time to see me for this project.

Roy in now running his own organisation, Development Media International (DMI) that uses media to deliver health messages to people in developing countries. DMI do crucial work in some very demanding circumstances, tackling Aids, Malaria and other public health issues. In the interview, Roy traces a direct line from his work at UNTV and before that at UNTAC in Cambodia on to what DMI are trying to do now.

 

A conversation with Roy Head, former Series Producer at UNTV. from Andy Johnstone on Vimeo.

UNTV and the "media space"

16-05-2012

I seem to be have been reading myself into a corner over the last few weeks, hoping that there will be a secret button opening a magic door, offering me a way out.

The issue that has been puzzling me, and one to which I referred to in my previous blog post Looking for Clues, is why the UN, normally so heavy on bureaucracy, rules and regulations appears to have such a laissez-faire approach to its media strategy in field missions. Clearly each political situation into which a UN mission is deployed is different and mandates vary, yet the need to control (or at least to stand its ground) in the media space appears to be a consistent theme in most UN missions, if only to pursued the local population that the UN’s project is valid. So why has the UN’s media strategy for each mission not been more consistent, based on strict protocols dished out from New York? And why instead, as Shira Lowenberg[1]  points out, was media strategy in Kosovo, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia (among others) so freely delegated to the field mission staff to design and implement? 

The net result of this strategy has clearly been varying levels of success in what Thompson and Price describe as “controlling the media space”. According to John Martson (Martson, 2002), the UN’s foray in to the media in Cambodia with UNTAC Radio was relatively successful. Martson says that:

“By the time of the elections UNTAC’s use of radio came together in a way that captured the imagination of the public, and it became astoundingly popular...and accounts of the period often describe Radio UNTAC as playing a key role in convincing the Cambodian population of the secrecy of the ballot.”[2]

However, by contrast Thompson and De Luce are highly critical of the UN’s media efforts in the former Yugoslavia, saying that:

“By not Contesting the propaganda battle, or by doing so faint-heartedly, the United Nations in effect pandered to the regime-controlled media, handing them easy victories for public opinion.” [3]

Having personally shot hundreds of hours of documentary film for UNTV, I confess that reading subsequently that these efforts may have been ‘half hearted’ is a little hard to swallow. However, despite the fact that during the UNPROFOR mission we were constantly on the road filming stories, I can’t honestly say that many of us working for the UNPROFOR media unit (including the press and radio teams) did not sit and wonder at times if anyone was actually watching, listening or reading what we produced. I recently contacted Ismet Arnautalic from Saga Films to discuss the issue, hoping for a local perspective on the UNTV programming. Saga had produced Sarajevo: A Street under Seige, a powerful daily documentary series about life in Sarajevo during the war and I hoped that Ismet might recall the UNTV programming (projects that Saga often helped facilitate, even if only by offering us a coffee stop and bolt hole when we were filming in Sarajevo). Sadly Ismet could not help and I was left wondering where to turn to next.

There seems to be a widely held view that assessing the impact of any international development media programme is very difficult, especially in situations where infrastructure is lacking (or in the case of Bosnia smashed beyond recognition). As a general rule, any monitoring and evaluation needs to be built into a project from the start, so that there is a realistic chance of a successful assessment. Part of the issue with assessing the impact of UNTV, is that UNPROFOR appears to have organised no monitoring and evaluation for its media programme in the former Yugoslavia, so there is no formal record of the extent to which its programmes reached their target audience and delivered key messages. With anecdotal evidence thinner on the ground that I had hoped (and let’s face it this blog was supposed to try to galvanise some reaction/feedback to resolve that issue) and such a short lead in time to my next MA assignment (due in June 2012) assessing UNTV’s audience impact is virtually impossible at this stage. Indeed the lack of such data supports Thompson and De Luce’s assertions that UNPROFOR’s media outputs were a damp squib.

As such, I am drawn back to trying to figure out why the UN’s media strategy was so haphazard and was not better planned. In terms of UN intervention, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia were different animals. In Cambodia, the UN was, according to Martson “mandated control over the field of information”, thanks to the Paris Peace Accords of 1991. By contrast, as Susan Manuel (then at United Nations Department of Public Information) points out in a piece for UNESCO:

“Unlike in Cambodia where the UN had a mandate to control information (and where the State granted permission for a UN station), Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were fully sovereign countries with scant interest in authorizing frequencies for a UN radio station.”[4]

In November 1991, at a meeting in Geneva, the Serbs and Croats both agreed to the UN’s deployment and mediation in the escalating conflict. Given this agreement and the growing nationalist rhetoric in the local media [5], why the UN did not at least attempt to intervene in the media space to prevent an escalation in hostilities, especially given the fact that barely one month prior to this meeting the Paris Peace Agreements for Cambodia had mandated “control of the field of information” to the UN? After 10 years of negotiation and planning to reach agreements for peace in Cambodia, the UN was clearly aware of the significant role that media plays in both conflict prevention and conflict resolution and yet when the UNPROFOR mission was established in February 1992, its mandate made no mention of the media was made. Manuel’s argument that neither Serbia nor Croatia were interested in authorising frequencies for UN Radio or allowing the broadcast of UN programming on local networks may be true, but economic sanctions against Belgrade and Croatia’s desperation to regain sovereignty over those areas of Croatia that had been over taken by Croatian Serb irregulars had given the UN leverage. This leverage, combined with mounting international pressure forced the Serbs and the Croats to  agree to allow the UN to establish and control access to the United Nations Protected Areas (UNPAs - Eastern Slavonia, Western Slavonia and Krajina), and to the UN supervising the withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army from those areas and the supervision of local authorities and the police. Both the Serbian and Croatian authorities were, in principle, open to relinquishing authority to the UN, so why was controlling or at least monitoring the local media not included from the outset? (Lowenberg, 2006)

But according to Thompson and De Luce, the UN was not the only player to misread the media game in the former Yugoslavia. When it came to setting out the provision for the Dayton Peace Agreement [DPA] in 1995, the USA, leading the project, also overlooked the media.

“The DPA contained next to no provisions about the media. Its drafters essentially chose to ignore the problem, hoping it could be addressed along the way, or at least prevented from blocking implementation.” [6]

The net result for UNTV was, irrespective of the quality of the outputs, that the unit faced an up hill struggle trying to get its content screened on local TV and this surely limited it capacity to deliver the change that the programming was planned for.

 


[1] Lowenberg, S. (2006) United Nations Media Strategy: Recommendations for Improvement in Peacekeeping Operations. UN Policy, Evaluation and Training Division: New York. Accessed: 5 May 2012

[2] Martson, J. (2002) Neutrality and the negotiation of an Information Order in Cambodia. In: Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space. (Eds. Price, M.E. & Thompson, M.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 177-200.

[3] De Luce, D. & Thompson, M. (2002) Escalating to success? The media intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space. (Eds. Price, M.E. & Thompson, M.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 201-235.

[4] Manuel, Susan (2004) UN Media and Post Conflict Peace-Keeping UN Policy, Evaluation and Training Division. http://portal.unesco.org [Accessed 5 May 2012]

[5] Thompson, M. (1994) Forging war: the media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina. London: Article 19.

[6] De Luce, D. & Thompson, M. (2002) Escalating to success? The media intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space. (Eds. Price, M.E. & Thompson, M.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 201-235.

 

 

Looking for clues...

24-03-2012

I joined UNTV in November 1994, but the UNPROFOR media unit had been running for some time before this. As part of this project, I have been trying to look at when and why the unit was established. One of the issues is that there is very little literature about UNTV or the UNPROFOR media unit itself. Thus far I have found the unit referenced only twice in academic papers or books, so much of the information I am gathering here is fresh and I am still looking for clues, so I appreciate the time that everyone has taken to write to me and/or post their comments. Here’s some of the background I have so far…

In 1992-3, the UN mission in Cambodia, UNTAC, had established a radio station with mandate from the UN Security Council to develop a 'neutral political environment' for the scheduled 1993 elections, after the country had suffered years of civil war and the traumas of the Khmer Rouge. According to John Martson[1] UNTAC Radio was incredibly successful and widely listened to by Cambodians leading up to the elections and this success would appear to be part of the inspiration for the way that the large UNPROFOR media unit (that included UNTV) developed in the former Yugoslavia. However, in 1993 UNTV in Zagreb was running concurrently with the UNTAC media project and the two were, as far as I can tell not connected. The UNPROFOR UNTV unit was also nothing to do with UNTV in New York. [I need to look at the reasons for this in more detail, but just to be clear, I am referring to UNPROFOR’s UNTV unit in this blog.]

From the outset, UNTV for a was fulfilling a more traditional PR role, focusing initially on producing what were, according to Will Stebbins, UNTV Series Editor in 1993, very functional and procedural films. In an e-mail to me earlier this month Stebbins says:

“When I arrived at UNPROFOR there was no clearly articulated institutional mission for any of the information arms. The guy before took a sort of archivists approach, shooting reams of video and then assembling into long items focused on logistics etc. He was almost purely focused on the institution, with the war itself just background.”

Marc McEvoy, former editor at UNPROFOR News credits Will Stebbins as the architect of the UNTV’s project to use the media to engage more directly with local audiences by producing content for the local networks. Stebbins himself confirms that there was no coherent game plan for UNTV set down by the UN’s media bosses.

“I was fortunate that Cedric Thornberry, who was head of civil affairs and the chief civilian at the time, liked the work I did, so I had free rein. It was basically what a dewy-eyed 27 year-old thought UNTV should be doing...we focused on promoting the institution, but one that trying to build bridges between the enemy communities - as well as showing the damage inflicted by the war on all. We started off doing individual items which we would try and place on established show - like 'Slikom na Sliku' a sort of international press review show [on Croatian TV] that would often carry the stories. We then started trying to do a packaged news bulletin with links etc.”

Stebbins fresh approach to UN television production, reflected the fresh approach that UNTAC Radio was making in Cambodia at the same time, using the media and a vehicle to promote the peace and political reengagement that the missions were trying to achieve. Was this a coincidence or a smart new UN media strategy? Stebbins account of a ‘free rein’ suggests that the two media projects developed independently of each other. However, when in 1994 former UNTAC Radio producer Roy Head and Michael Williams (now Baron Williams of Baglan in the UK House of Lords), formerly Director of Human Rights at UNTAC became UNTV Series Editor and Director of Information at UNPROFOR respectively, it was no surprise that Stebbins’ approach in 1993 became the blueprint for UNTV’s production and delivery from then on.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge had outlined a specific media policy to educate the public using film, radio and print to “continue the struggle to abolish, uproot, and disperse the cultural, literary, and artistic remnants of the imperialists, colonialists, and all of the other oppressor classes.”[2] UNTAC Radio was developed in response to this, as part of the UN’s effort to build the democratic process in Cambodia and entrench a fragile peace and clearly from 1993/4 onwards, the UN believed that an effective UNPROFOR media unit, including UNTV would be able to replicate the success of UNTAC Radio in the new Balkan context. However, whereas the UNTAC Radio project in Cambodia was established in an otherwise weak media landscape devastated by the civil wars, prior to the start of the war in the Balkans in 1991/2, the media in Yugoslavia was highly sophisticated and would prove to be a much tougher nut for the UN to crack. Yugoslavia had developed a highly respected film industry, the country had been regularly used as the set for many western films (including From Russia with Love – a personal favourite) and there was a network of national and regional radio and TV stations, as well as hundreds of newspapers and magazines and a tradition of press freedom unlike any other former Communist country[3].

According to Mark Thompson, the media was an immensely powerful force in Forging War[4]. Used by Serbian and Croatian (and according to Thompson to a lesser extent by the Bosnian) political leaders in particular to stir the pot, the media was an easy means to access people to develop ethic tensions. While Pol Pot’s plans to educate his audience in Cambodia involved rigging speakers in villages across the country and showing propaganda films, Yugoslavia’s political leaders could speak directly to people in their own homes via TV and radio. The Yugoslav audience was highly educated, enjoyed a decent standard of living and crucially had unfettered access to the media outlets. Misha Glenny recalls trying to obtain an interview with Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic in early 1991. When Glenny finally meets Babic, we get a snapshot of Yugoslavia as it was just before the war:

“Babic is sitting in a front room, perhaps it is his own, but nobody tells me. He is watching television. We are in a flat which would not look out of place in any moderately prosperous suburban estate in Western Europe.”[5]

By 1993, according to Thompson, the local media in the former Yugoslavia had slid, almost without exception, into the mire of nationalist propaganda, with much of the content full of what ex-BBC correspondent Martin Bell called “soldiervision”[6]. Those journalists that tried to buck the jingoistic trend were, according to Thompson, dealt with in various similar ways by the Croatian and Serbian authorities and their supporters: pensioned off, sent ‘on leave’, dragged through the courts and in many cases beaten up.

However at the outset, despite the nationalist agenda on all sides, persuading the local networks to take UNTV’s output was not as tough a sell as may have been envisaged as Will Stebbins recalls:

“At this stage [1993], there was still the official neutrality - no one was threatening the Serbs with air strikes - everyone was just an equal party to the conflict and negotiations etc. Both Croatian Serbs and the 'Yugoslavs' often did their best to show they were the responsible party, and I think this is why we managed to get Yugoslav National TV to air us (even though we had to sit through hours of history lectures from the odd lady who ran the place whenever we went negotiate...).”

From the outset, the UN was lambasted in the international press for its handling of the conflict and for its failure to secure any kind of peace. It was only when America became fully engaged in 1994/5, bringing NATO with it that UNPROFOR grew any real teeth, but by then there was no longer any peace to keep, the project was now focused on stopping a bloodbath. With the UN failing to keep the peace from the start, it is easy to understand why the bosses saw the need for solid PR as described by Will Stebbins above.  From my e-mail conversations with Stebbins and because it appears that UNTV was not directly connected to the UNTV unit in New York, it seems that the Zagreb based UNTV project developed very much in isolation, drawing some inspiration from the success of UNTAC Radio in Cambodia. Based on Thompson’s Forging War, I can fully see the perceived need for the UN to try provide media content with some sort of balanced editorial line to counter the nationalist content that was dominating the local networks and press during the war, but was here more to it that this? The international press had, for the most part and not with out much justification, come down on the Bosnian side and I wonder to what extent UNTV was also trying to provide balance here by reminding people that there were victims on all sides of the conflict? And what of the scale of the project’s ambition? The unit produced little more than one programme a week as I recall and, without a satellite channel or airwaves of its own in the pre-internet TV age, UNTV’s distribution relied on the good will of programme editors at the local news networks, most of whom had their strings pulled by the political bosses. Mad ambition?

 


[1] Monroe, E.P., & Thompson, M (eds) (2002) Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space Edinburgh: EUP

[2] Chigas, G & Mosyakov, D (2010) Literacy and Education under the Khmer Rouge [WWW] Yale University, Cambodian Genocide Programme. Available from: http://www.yale.edu/cgp/literacyandeducation.html#_ftn8

[3] Thompson, Mark (1994) Forging war : the media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina London: Article 19

[4]  Thompson, Mark (1994) Forging war : the media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina London: Article 19

[5] Glenny, Misha (1996) The fall of Yugoslavia (3rd Edition) London: Penguin

[6] Bell, M. (1996) In Harm's Way: Reflections of a war zone thug. London: Penguin.

 

 

Joining the Dots...

08-03-2012

Last night, in order to generate some more interest in this blog project, I posted a few old pictures from UNTV assignment trips to my Facebook page.

One of the pictures (see here) is of me and a young Croatian Serb police woman at a border crossing point between the Serb held Krajina and Croatia.  Rob Mackey, blogger extraordinary for the New York Times, then quickly reminded me that this was the girl who's Video Letter he had talked about to my in first blog post that had aroused so much sympathy from viewers in Sarajevo. Something should have clicked as I did not tend to go round hugging checkpoint police officers too often. Needless to say Snjezana was very different to most of the checkpoint guards we came across - most were large blokes with guns on a power trip, very often drunk and always on the scrounge for cigarettes.

Rob has promised to upload Snjezana's Video Letter to YouTube, so I'll add that in here soon I hope. Furtther down the line, with a little hunting around, it would be interesting to try to follow up on some of these stories. It would be really interesting to find out what happened to Snjezana, but I suspect the worst. As a Serbian checkpoint guard, she would most likely only have survived the Croatian advance Operation Storm in August 1995 if she had been off duty and at home out of uniform. Following my post about the Burning Village former UNPROFOR news editor Marc McEvoy described the scene to me in an e-mail this week (March 2012), saying:

"Pity you weren't with Staton [Winter], Henry [Peirse] and I...with your TV camera when we drove to Sector West two days after the Croats launched their August 95 offensive. That drive down towards the river through the tanks and troops and burning villages and dead burnt bodies by the side of the road (and horses) was surreal. The road was covered with thousands of empty bullet shells shining like gold pennies. We were stopped by a company of HV [Croatian Army] who were resting after a fight. I guy who looked like Frankenstein wearing a Serb cap (a trophy) and eating tinned food from the end of a giant knife came over and asked what the fuck we were doing. I think we said, 'We're leaving, sir!'"

And so just as the Croats had been forced out of the Krajina at the start of the war in 1991, it was now the Serbs turn to flee a Croatian advance. Thousands left. I hope for her sake that Snjezana made it too.

**

For more information about this Video Letter see the Imperial War Museum catalougue (no video available yet).

 


Why this Blog?

I have set up this little blog as a means of gathering information and data for my Masters project. I will use the blog to collate some of the material that I find and post links to interesting content.

I am also planning to add some film reviews to the blog in due course.

Rules

If you have something constructive to add to the debate, please join in.

I will be moderating all the comments on this blog and my editors pen will be ruthless with any unsolicited and inappropriate nonsense!

Twitter Updates


All Photographs © Andy Johnstone/Panos Pictures 2000-2012