[ALBSA-Info] {QIKSH «ALBEUROPA»} PRESS: A Pictorial Guide to Hell: Stark Images Trace the Balkans' Descent (New York Times, January 24, 2001)

[Wolfgang Plarre]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/arts/24HAVI.html?pagewanted=all
January 24, 2001 

A Pictorial Guide to Hell: Stark Images Trace the Balkans' Descent

By JOHN KIFNER

The image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb
militiaman casually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells
you everything you need to know.
    Ron Haviv was 27 when he took that photograph in the early spring of
1992, and even today the words come tumbling out, every detail etched in
his memory, when he talks about it. The picture is one of the most
gripping in his new book, "Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal" (TV
Books/Umbrage Editions), a collection of searing photographs. Some of
the photos are on view through Feb. 8 at the Saba Gallery (116 East 16th
Street, Manhattan) and will go on permanent exhibition at the war museum
in Sarajevo.
    The previous year in Vukovar, Serbs had killed a Croatian woman in
front of Mr. Haviv and prevented him from taking the picture. He had
vowed it would not happen again.
    This time it was the town of Bijeljina, at the very beginning of the
Bosnian phase of a war that tore the former Yugoslavia apart. Tensions
were high as reports and rumors spread of Serbian plans for what would
eventually be termed "ethnic cleansing." Zeljko Raznatovic, the gangster
turned paramilitary leader known as Arkan, stormed into the largely
Muslim town with his Tigers militia, and the carnage began.
    "They were going house to house, looking for fighters and things to
take," Mr. Haviv remembered. "Inside a mosque, they had taken down the
Islamic flag and were holding it like a trophy. They had a guy, they
said he was a fundamentalist from Kosovo. He was begging for his life.
    "There was shouting outside. They had taken the town butcher and his
wife, and they were screaming. They shot him, and he was lying there.
    "The soldiers were shouting in Serbian, `No pictures, no pictures.'
    "I felt like I had to photograph it. There was a truck that had
crashed nearby. I got between the cab and the body and turned my back so
the soldiers couldn't see me. They shot the woman, then they brought out
her sister and shot her.
    "I was trying to think as clearly as possible. It was incredibly
important for evidence to try to get the soldiers with the bodies in the
same picture. I framed it, I was probably about 30 feet away.
    "There were the two soldiers. Another came from my left, he had a
cigarette in one hand and sunglasses on top of his head. When he kicked
her, it was like the ultimate disrespect for everything."
    He had the pictures, but he still needed clearance from Arkan to
leave. As Mr. Haviv waited for the warlord, he frantically stripped his
cameras, hid the rolls of film and reloaded.
    "I heard this crash," he said. "The Kosovar came flying out of a
third-floor window and landed at my feet. I started photographing him."
    A few minutes later, Arkan arrived. "I need your film," he said.
    At first Arkan said he would have the film processed and give back
the pictures he approved of, Mr. Haviv said. But he immediately began a
long, complicated argument about the poor quality of film processing in
Belgrade, which so distracted Arkan that he wound up taking the two
rolls of film in the cameras and not bothering to search for more. When
the pictures were published abroad, Mr. Haviv was put on a Serbian death
list and was once held and beaten for three days.
    Mr. Haviv had been, at this point, a major international
photographer for about three years. He had studied journalism at New
York University, graduating in 1987, but only took up photography as a
hobby in his senior year. 
    He started out as an assistant to a fashion photographer, then broke
in as a street photographer - working free at first - for the New York
City Tribune, the defunct Unification Church newspaper, then Agence
France-Presse. 
    Chris Morris, a swashbuckling war photgrapher, took the young man
under his wing, helping him get to Panama for his first big glimpse of
history in 1989. He scored a rare trifecta - the covers of Time,
Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report - with his shot of a vice
presidential candidate being beaten by paramilitary thugs.
    He knew little about the Balkans when he set out for Slovenia, where
a brief war was brewing in 1991. A decade later, he is wiser and sadder.
    "I was very happy when the pictures were published," he said. "It
was a week before the first shots were fired in Sarajevo. There were
lots of reports from journalists, diplomats, spies, everybody, that
Bosnia was going to be very bad. I thought these pictures would provide
a final push, so the world would stop this. But obviously nothing
happened. It was really incredibly disappointing.
    "I went from this very idealistic view of the power of photography
to feeling it was just really frustrating. We all wound up feeling that
way all through Bosnia - photographers, journalists, television people.
Nobody was really listening. There were just halfhearted efforts to
solve the situation. Then Kosovo, and once again the waffling that led
to so many deaths. And the victims become aggressors, and the aggressors
become victims, and it goes around and around."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company


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