In June 1991 while working as a reporter in Rome, Ed Vulliamy received a phone call from his editor at the Guardian asking him to the travel to the neighbouring Balkan states to check out something strange that was happening in the region. Vulliamy spent the next few years immersed in the Bosnian War, the worst carnage to blight European soil since the Third Reich. In August 1992, Vulliamy revealed to the world the horrific concentration camps that were in operation in Omarska and Trnopolje in Bosnia.
Vulliamy’s latest book The War is Dead, Long Live The War is a tribute to some of the survivors, who are now scattered across various cities around the world in exile. As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the war’s outbreak, Vulliamy argues that there has been no reckoning or redemption in the region, where hatred still thrives.
He spoke to The Spectator about why he decided to testify against the accused war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, in The Hague, why the British government appeased Serbian generals, who were later tried for genocide, and how the violence he has witnessed as a war reporter has changed his view on humanity.
Why do you think the British government were so willing to appease people like Radovan Karadžiæ and Slobodan Miloševiæ during the Bosnian War?
There is the sort of grotesque obsession with stability in British diplomacy circles, and if you have stability going on in a playground, well you back the bully. There was a notion of neutrality which echoed that of Switzerland during The Third Reich. There is also this idea that people prefer talking to a general in a uniform, than to some guy signing singularly for bullets on a front line in a bombarded town. I don’t know why it was seen as acceptable for the former Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, to go and cut deals with Milosevic — who everybody knew was a mass murderer — just before he was indicted for genocide.
What made you testify against war criminals at The Hague, and did many of your colleagues see this as betraying the code of objectivity in journalism?
I think they are confusing objectivity with neutrality. Objectivity is the sacred cow, 2+2 does not equal 5 in journalism. But neutrality is something else, I’m not neutral. I think neutrality is complicity in this situation. As reporters, we came upon concentration camps, mass rape, and armed men shelling the shit out of women and children who were hiding in cellars. And none of this made any difference to the diplomatic agenda, so I suppose when the chance came at least to do something, instead of banging my head against a brick wall, I took a chance to do that.
How did testifying differ from reporting in the war?
A lot of this is aftershock really. During the carnage itself you don’t really have time to reflect. I didn’t know about the details of what was happening in Omarska until 1996, when the trials started at The Hague. People who have been serially raped in camps every night — quite rightly — don’t tell journalists details, nor should they, but they do tell courts of law, and there was something about the charge of detail, truth, and the kind of self exposition of what was going on in the court in the late 1990s that fazed me. When a war criminal is actually opposite you, and his lawyer is lying about these matters, well you get angry and depressed.
How did it feel to be interviewed by Radovan Karadzic in The Hague, who was on trial himself for war crimes?
It was a surreal meeting. This was the man who was the apex of the machine, who I met in Bosnia in 1992. Here I was all those years later in a cramped little room that was once an insurance
building — which is now an international war crimes tribunal — and up goes this little white curtain, and there was Radovan Karadzic, squeezed up against the other side. It
doesn’t get much more bizarre than that.
In the book you discuss how Professor Noam Chomsky said that some of your reports on the Srebrenica massacre were fabrications, have you ever challenged Mr Chomsky on this
matter?
I invite Noam Chomsky, or any of his friends who once worked at Living Marxism (who went bankrupt in 2000 when ITN sued them for publishing an article which claimed that ITN deliberately misrepresented that haunting picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated Bosnian Muslim at Trnopolje camp in 1992) to actually publish where I legally fabricated these reports about the camps, and to actually detail what it was I fabricated, because I will sue them myself. I think I’m going to ask Mr Chomsky to write a piece in a British publication, detailing what I did fabricate, because it is a lie, and I would love to see him defend it.
Why do you think so many others on the Left, in Britain, and America, argued that genocide did not take place at Srebrenica?
Well these were people who supported Karadzic and Milosevic and didn’t have the guts to say so. But this is not a media debate: it’s a matter for the High Court. This is one race of people trying to wipe out another. What doesn’t seem to occur to these rotten apples of the British and American intelligentsia is the searing affect this has on the survivors and the bereaved. They are the subject of my book really, but these so called intellectuals can’t see them. They would rather sit behind their bloody computer screens, than meet the people who have to go and wash toilets to rebuild their lives.
Has the extreme violence you witnessed in the war changed your view on humanity?
Yes. I saw kids ripped apart by shrapnel, I saw the aftermath of a massacre in Sarajevo and I went to the morgue in Sarajevo. Bosnia, for me, was the beginning of finally accepting that there isn’t a better world coming. The bullies of history do actually triumph. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor: rubbish, they’re fu**ed. Blessed are the powerful and the rich, for they get everything they want. I think teleology is a lie, and I think progress is an evolutionary absurd notion.
Where do you see the future of the Balkan region heading, politically, socially, and economically over the next few years?
It will go to hell in a bucket and turn into a swamp of post conflict, post industrial, late capitalist ghastliness, which is today exasperated by ethnic hatred, dysfunction, corruption and mafia.
I think it will be more of a quagmire than another war. But Bosnia — which is a beautiful country of rivers and mountains — will be dysfunctional. The Serbs will defacto become part of
Serbia, to whatever the map says, the same will happen to the Croats. But the Bosniak population — whom most of the violence was perpetrated against — they will be left as lost people,
not only in exile, but in their own country as well.
You discuss how the Bosnian people have been denied the opportunity to bury their dead, is it impossible to see all sides living peacefully until this happens?
There are two things that human beings do: we bury our dead, and we build monuments to our dead. And those two things have been catastrophically denied to the survivors, and the bereaved, of this particular slaughter. It hasn’t been given back to them, in the way that the Holocaust was given back to the Jews. And just to be clear, I make no analogy between the two, there are echoes of the Holocaust in this war. So I don’t even see how you can begin to talk about reconciliation. If my brother or husband died in a concentration camp twenty years ago and they still have not found the bones, I couldn’t move on. Human beings are not wired to move on in these circumstances.
The War is Dead, Long Live the War by Ed Vulliamy is published by Bodley Head on 19 April
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