Here's a roadside stall in Northern Uganda where the owner claimed he could charge pretty much any handset, all thanks to the solar panel he had rigged to his roof. All this in an community where access to running water is scarce and sanitation is far from guaranteed. But with this sort of resourcefulness, it really could be 2013 in many developing communities much sooner than you think.

ICT's are transforming lives in rural Africa and this is set to increase. Broadband internet is already widely available in many communities, but mobile broadband is where everything seems to be heading. Of course all the major players know this and this is why they are scrambling of a piece of the African pie. Orange, Vodafone and others are all heavily represented in Africa...it is just a matter of time.
 

I also took the chance to discuss his work at Development Media International (DMI) and the relative merits of different media for delivering development messages to developing communities.

DMI produce media campaigns (Radio and TV) that focus on key health issues  such as infant mortality, hygiene and maternal health - issues that have key impacts on societies, but which are often sidelined in the news media by the big ticket items like HiV and Malaria. DMI's focus is on producing behavioural change in communities, rather than relief aid.

Worth a watch, interesting points.

Adopting and adapting new technology has been a feature of documentary filmmaking from the outset. This essay examines the relationship between the documentary film maker and technology, arguing that technology has always had a critical role in not only shaping the way in which documentary film has been made in the past, but that technology continues to shape approaches and methodologies in film and television today. However, whereas in the past the major beneficiaries of these technological advances have been professional documentary filmmakers, the most notable beneficiaries of the recent technological advancements have been amateur filmmakers, including users in developing societies. This essay looks at the links between technology and documentary film and examines how new technology is driving changes in both production and distribution, with particular reference to engaging audiences in developing countries.

The essay seems to have been well received, gaining another distinction. You can down load and read the essay here. It remains unchanged from the file that was submitted for assessment. 

There are lots of instances of mobile phone networks being used as two ways data streams for rural communities, for example, to aid farmers to get more information on market prices and also on farming techniques. There's a good little film by IFAD about a project in Tanzania here. However, from what I have read and seen, the big issue for rural communities is still bandwidth and expense.

The Grameen Foundation also runs projects in Uganda to educate farmers by mobile phone, using a network of Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) as human information hubs (see this piece in the Observer). According to the Grameen foundation website, they are rolling out a project to deliver agricultural lessons to farmers via mobile phones, but I ma told by Grameen that the network is still not up and running and that the main reason for this is bandwidth.

As part of my studies and for research into some new film projects for Wild Dog, I commissioned my friend and colleague, Ugandan journalist William Odinga to write a short piece about the way film and TV is watched in Uganda and to look whether people are yet using mobile phones as a viewing platform. Despite the fact that broadband is now available in Kampala, local network provider MTN is offering 3g mobile broadband in "80% of the country" (and I am relaibly told that fast mobile broadband is a reality in Kampala), William reports that most people still only really have access to the internet at work in the office. While computers in the Global North are now very affordable, a machine that may cost as little as £300 on the high-street in the UK is still a big ticket item for families in a country when the average wage is still only $460 per year. William's piece is available to read here.

All these issues not withstanding, mobile phone technology is an ideal platform for developing communities. It is relatively cheap to install and as Gelvin has argued, it is harder for governments to close these networks down, should they choose to do so, because government officials also rely on the networks as a communication tool.

Wave of the future?

The radio programme document's Fraser's trip to New York to find out more about why poverty is rarely these days on the media agenda. The blunt answer it seems is that poverty is not as entertaining as films like Man eating super croc, one of the films made by Michael Hoff of Hoff Productions whom Fraser interviews. Having done some recent reading around this subject area, it will be interesting to sift through the Why Poverty? films and look at exactly what the films are advocating in terms of solutions. There is now a growing argument amongst some academics that aid is not the solution to the problems faced by the developing world (see Collier, Moyo and Dowden for comments on this), yet there is still much that the developed world can do and is responsible for in tackling the issue. Using this documentary series across 50 broadcasters to raise awareness in 500 million people can only be a good thing.

To listen to Fraser's documentary, follow this link.

While researching this idea, it occurred to me that of course documentary has in fact always had a long association with cutting edge technology. Since the very early days of film production in the late 1800s, documentary filmmakers have seized upon the latest incarnation of the film or video camera to tell stories, educate and create their content. But up until this point it was film technology itself that was the technological wonder, capturing action and recording events like never before. Film cameras, miraculous though they were, were big and bulky 35mm machines, and although Eastman Kodak introduced a 16mm film stock in 1923, it was not until 1960, that a real revolution in filmmaking technology liberated and empowered the documentary filmmaker. The technology combined a portable, silent 16mm film camera and the Nagra crystal sync audio recorder, allowing filmmakers to record location sound that synced with the film pictures easily, techniques pioneered by filmmakers like Richard Leacock and Jean Rouch.

This story has itself been captured on film in a BBC film by Mandy Chang The Camera that Changed the World. The film is available to watch via Live Leaks and is very well worth watching for anyone interested in the history of documentary.

Part two is here and part three here.

Enjoy!

This is a film that I shot for director Mary Currie in Gornji Vakuf. The town, in western Bosnia, once shared by all communities was divided along ethnic lines by the fighting. In this film both sections of the community reflect on these divisions and lament the breakdown of their communitiy.

As a piece, the film is a classic UNTV project, notably because both sides were given the chance to speak and despite the underlying bitterness, the film contained messages of hope. Without the pressures of a news deadline and with access to all sides of the conflict, UNTV had time to make well crafted, thoughtful films and this film is a good example of these high production values. However, as I have noted in my essay, this approach was to change as the conflict developed in 1995 and UNTV found itself reporting on live events, such as the arrival of refugees from Srebrenica and the Croatian Army's Operation Storm.

UNTV586A GorniVakuf315 from Andy Johnstone on Vimeo.

Special thanks again to the Imperial War Muesum for permission to include these films on this blog.

My essay has now been submitted and assessed by my tutors - I was awarded 72% for the piece, so I am naturallly pretty chipper about the result. If you are interested in having a read, then please download the essay by clicking on the PDF icon link at the bottom of this post.

Because UNTV has receive so little scholarly attention ("still hasn't" I hear some of you wags chortling), I am hoping to submit a version of the essay to some academic journal or other at some point. If this happens I will make some minor revisions as suggested by my tutor Dr Claire Monk at De Montfort University, but for now this version is the full "warts and all" piece submitted for the assessment.

Time now to move on to my next subject area. I am hoping to look more closely at how technology and social media have advanced to the point where audiences and people appear to be able to set the agenda in development. Nearly every BBC report from the current situation in Syria is peppered with footage submitted via mobile phone, with the reporter hastily adding that the broadcaster 'cannot independently verify the authenticity of this material' - but the material still gets screened. How can more formal producers of documentary film complete with that? Or is documentary just a vital component of these changes, a component which is being adapted to fit a new medium? How are or how could these approaches be adapted to drive change in other areas of international development such as health or water and sanitation?

“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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

We were sent to cover the unfolding humanitarian story in Knin, which had, since 1991, been the headquarters for the Serbs that took over the Krajina area of Croatia. Driving round the outlying areas of the town we saw plumes of smoke coming from the hillside and went to investigate. What we found were scores of burning houses in one village where the remaining Serb population had been terrorised and some of the old men had been executed. It was grim stuff.

I remember shooting the story as carefully as I could, trying to pick up details as a witness in what was clearly the scene of a war crime, all the time worried about the Croatian forces returning to find us filming. I also had my stills camera with me and when I had finished shooting all the film sequences and interviews, I raced back into the houses with Richard (himself ex-military and probably a much better at gauging the situation than I was) shouting in my ears to 'bloody well hurry up!" I wanted to shoot some stills, again as evidence or something. Anyway, in all the excitement and panic, I made a hash of it and the pictures never came out properly. I learned a lesson as a photojournalist that day.

As soon as we had finished we raced back to Zagreb where the story was cut in a flash and fed or handed to the international networks. Suddenly UNTV was making news and the next day Roy Head our Series Editor was keen for us to go back out to the field to find more evidence and gather more stories about the aftermath of the Croatian offensive.

The film made the network news and it was used in has been used in the BBC documentary Death of Yugoslavia by Brooke Lapping. The film was also presented as evidence in the Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The film is pretty grim, so be warned. I will try to post the film in its entirety at a later date.

UNTV Burning Village 1995 from Andy Johnstone on Vimeo.

In 1990/1, the BBC started a series called Video Diaries in which a member of the public was given a camcorder, some basic training (video cameras were pretty new to most people then – now everyone’s a ‘citizen journalist’, but that’s for another post) and production support and told to go off and make a show about their life. The BBC project morphed into the BBC’s Video Nation project and there is information about that here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/contribute/tips/

Now I am going to go out on a limb here, but I suspect this BBC series was the inspiration behind the Video Letters series that UNTV produced during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The concept was fairly simple, two people separated by the conflict would speak to each other through the new fangled gizmo of telly and this would help remind people of the communities that the war was tearing apart. One of the best examples of the Video Letters series by directors Rob Mackey and Denise Seneviratne can be seen here:

I shot several of these Video Letters, including one for UNTV producer Richard Bramford who came to the unit after he left the British Army. Richard had worked as an UN Military Observer in Pale, where he had made a Video Diary for the BBC, neatly completing the circle.

During my reading for this Masters project, I have subsequently found out that there was another series of Video Letters made after the war in 2004 by Dutch filmmakers Eric van den Broek and Katarina Rejger which you can find out more about in this piece in the New York Times. As part of this project, subjects made diaries from all over the former Yugoslavia and the films were screened on a bus as well as on local TV. The series was then edited and presented at the Human Rights Watch film festival in 2006. I am going to try and contact the filmmakers to see if they drew inspiration for their project from the UNTV series.

And the Video Diaries concept lives on, I also recently stumbled across an organisation called Global Video Letters that purports to do much the same thing as the original UNTV series did during the war in the former Yugoslavia in developing communities around the globe.

What all this shows is just how powerful filmmakers and activists believe participatory film and video can be. Measuring effectiveness and impact is another thing all together and something which organisations that use the media for development work still struggle to achieve. So, it would be nice to find out if anyone from Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia ever saw one of the UNTV Video Letters and what their reactions to them were...

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