Washing the dust from our souls: the war on culture

Re-watching the footage of Dubrovnik’s Old Town crumbling under a barrage of Yugoslav artillery fire in 1991, it seems strangely barbaric.  During the 1980s, Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, incorporating the turquoise Adriatic, romantic islands and endless sunshine, was a popular holiday destination for tourists from across Europe.  The historic and picturesque towns of Split and Dubrovnik, whose walled city stretching into the sea was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979, were eerily familiar to the public watching the war unfold on their television screens.  Tragically for the thousands who had lost their lives earlier in the Croatian War of Independence, it was this act of cultural barbarity that drew the strongest censure from other nations around the world.

In the war that followed in neighbouring Bosnia, the shelling of Mostar’s famous Stari Most attracted similar criticism.  Hundreds of Mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches were destroyed during the course of the Bosnian War, in an effort to obliterate the religions and cultures of the warring parties.

There is much sentiment invested in historic sites; the fact that they have stood for so long and witnessed many lives pass through them and around them makes their destruction entirely symbolic, serving no strategic military purpose.  In the case of Mostar’s Stari Most, there were several more modern road bridges over the river that were left untouched.

In the last two weeks, news has filtered through of the destruction of the ruins of Palmyra in Syria.  The site contains the ruins of a city once considered one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world.  The labyrinth of buildings and monuments, demonstrating a broad range of architectural styles, drew over 150,000 visitors a year before the Syrian conflict began.  The former chief archaeologist at the site, Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded by Islamic State (IS) militants in August for refusing to cooperate in assisting them to find hidden treasures at Palmyra.  He was willing to die to protect Syria’s cultural heritage.

IS know exactly what message they are sending when they blow up sites like Palmyra.  They have similarly rampaged through the heritage sites of Iraq.  Many Shiite mosques, tombs and shrines have been looted and destroyed, as well as numerous ancient and medieval sites and artefacts, including the ancient cities of Nimrud and Hatra, parts of the wall of Nineveh, the ruins of Bash Tapia Castle and artefacts from the Mosul Museum.  Such is the alarm at the work of IS that UNESCO Directo-General Irina Bokova launched the Unite4Heritage campaign in March this year.  Her aim was to create a global movement “to protect and safeguard heritage in areas where it is threatened by extremists.”

The destruction of cultural heritage is classified as a war crime and IS actions have been condemned by the UN General Assembly and Security Council.  The demolition of cultural icons and buildings in war is considered such a grave crime because the deliberate targeting of history, along with other symbolic acts such as book burning and the damaging of art, represents the destruction of ideas and identity – the things that make us human; the things that embody our freedom of speech and freedom of expression.  This is what makes them such effective weapons of war.

Although the history itself will be lost forever, the rebuilding of these sites when wars are over can be equally powerful symbols of reconciliation.  In 2004, the Stari Most was rebuilt, having been painstakingly restored using original methods.  It now attracts as many visitors as ever.  Last year, Bosnia’s National Library in Sarajevo, destroyed during the siege of 1992-5, was reopened, to much celebration.

So why, when Bosnians are celebrating the reopening of their library as a symbol of their resilience and rehabilitation, are our local authorities closing ours?  Why, if our cultural heritage is so sacred, is it the first thing to go when budget cuts are required?  Why is our government cutting funding to the arts, museums and higher education?  Why is there talk of dismantling one of the icons of our cultural heritage, the BBC?  Why are the arts taking such a backseat in education?  It is commonly accepted that ages of cultural enlightenment coincide with eras of political advancement.  The Ancient Greeks had Plato and Aristotle; the Elizabethans had Shakespeare; and the Industrial Revolution, the greatest period of political advancement in history, boasted the broadest and most influential range of political philosophers, artists and writers that the world has ever seen.

It can only be hoped that this Conservative government will wake up to the damage it is inflicting to our own cultural heritage before it is too late.  They will ultimately find that, like packing an ancient temple full of dynamite, repressing the arts is entirely futile.  IS can rampage across the Middle East, demolishing historic temples and archaeological sites, but out of their ruins, we have to believe, will rise new monuments that will stand for thousands more years because ideas and identity can never truly be destroyed.  Human nature - or so I like to think - is tougher than that.

History's Most Dangerous Safe Area

There are certain place names that have become synonymous with the appalling events that occurred there: Auschwitz, Amritsar – Srebrenica.  On 7 July 1995 – twenty years ago this week – the Bosnian Serb Army overran the town of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia and proceeded over the following days to massacre over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.  The town and its surrounding areas had been declared a United Nations Safe Area back in April 1993.  It was anything but.

The trapped and half-starved population were protected by a small Dutch UN battalion armed only with light weapons and a few APCs.  When the first shells landed within the Srebrenica Safe Area on 6 July 1995, nobody was surprised. For the past two years the Bosnian Serb forces had kept the enclave encircled, shelling and sniping sporadically at the civilian population and the Dutchbat troops, waiting for the international community to tire of their effort to keep the enclaves on life support. The Serbs had been waiting for their moment, and everyone knew it. The fall of Srebrenica had been almost inevitable from the moment it was first declared a Safe Area.

Recovered bodies awaiting re-burial in 2010

The events are as controversial today as they were then.  A UK-sponsored attempt to pass a UN Security Council resolution officially defining the massacre as genocide has caused outcry amongst Bosnian Serbs.  Srebrenica is now situated in the state-within-a-state of Republika Srpska and despite being the only town in the region with a Bosniak mayor, barely masks still-simmering ethnic tensions.  Some Bosnian Serbs are angry that their own war dead are not commemorated in the same way; others deny that the massacre even took place.  7,132 bodies have been recovered from mass graves and reburied; over a thousand are still missing, causing unendurable agony for their surviving relatives.  Despite a court ruling absolving the Dutch troops of any blame for the massacre, many still hold them to account for allowing the Bosnian Serb forces to take the Safe Area and for failing to protect the Bosniak population.

So why, exactly, did a supposed Safe Area end up as the scene of the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War?

Simply put, the Safe Areas should never have been created in the first place. When the Serbs had the town surrounded in March 1993 they offered to let the Muslims go to the relatively safe, government held city of Tuzla and General Phillipe Morillon, Commander of the UN Forces in Bosnia at that time, began to make plans for such an evacuation. However, both the Bosnian government and UN Security Council refused. The Bosnian government objected to the planned evacuation because it believed Srebrenica could later be exchanged for Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo. The international community, on the other hand, opposed the scheme because the Vance-Owen Peace Plan placed Srebrenica in a Muslim canton, and to allow the Serbs to take the town would be, as they saw it, to acquiesce to ethnic cleansing. The outrage of an anti-Serb press shamed the Security Council into passing an essentially meaningless resolution – Resolution 836 - which did little to make Srebrenica a safe area because the member states lacked the political will to follow through on the sentiments invested in the Safe Area resolutions.

The Security Council required peacekeepers to play a war-fighting role, whilst failing to provide them with the weaponry or manpower to do so. They assigned UNPROFOR a mandate which, even if only symbolically, aligned them with the Bosnian Muslims, but expected them to continue to rely on Bosnian Serb consent to deliver humanitarian aid. Not only did the Safe Area resolutions conflict with previous resolutions, they also contradicted themselves, leading to widely different interpretations.  Resolution 836 did not clearly state when air support could be called in, and the use of the word ‘deter’ instead of ‘defend’ left the Safe Areas semantically unprotected. Both the UNPROFOR command and the Dutchbat soldiers within the Srebrenica enclave were left confused as to what they were expected to do.

Once the Safe Areas were created, however, it was only a matter of time before the

Serbs decided to attack. Srebrenica was not betrayed by any formal agreement, but merely by a failure to make any real effort to stop the Serb offensive.  Despite a number of deals to sacrifice Srebrenica being considered by the Bosnian government, there is no evidence that any took place.  There is also no concrete evidence of a deal over the use of air power that UNPROFOR Commander Lieutenant-General Bernard Janvier was rumoured to have made with Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić.

Srebrenica fell because of a lack of will to fight for it on the part of the Bosnian government and the ARBiH, and because UNPROFOR had neither the manpower nor the mandate to defend it. It is possible that earlier use of Close Air Support could have saved the enclave (bungled complications with faxes lead to farcical delays in the arrival of UN planes), but ultimately the UN did not want to provoke the Serbs for fear of reprisals against Dutch hostages taken earlier by Bosnian Serb forces.  Taking UN hostages had been a tactic favoured by the BSA throughout the war, used to humiliate the international community as well as a bargaining chip against greater military reprisals.

Srebrenica was one of three eastern Bosnian towns declared UN Safe Areas.  After Srebrenica fell, the towns of Goražde and Žepa suffered the same fate shortly after.  The problem of the eastern enclaves – pockets of Bosnian Muslims amongst Serb-held territory - had been plaguing peace negotiations for months.  Their fall simplified the political map and made a territorial settlement possible.  If the horrendous massacre had not followed, the fall of Srebrenica would probably have been viewed as an ill-advised mandate leading to a military disaster, and not the terrible catastrophe it ultimately became.  Tragically for Srebrenica and its inhabitants, it was politically expedient to allow the Safe Area to fall.

Refugees from Srebrenica arrive in Tuzla in 1995

Could those Dutch soldiers have ever imagined what would happen next?  There is no doubt, from their testimonies and records, that many of them have been psychologically scarred by it.  As the Bosnian Serb forces closed in on the town, the population fled to nearby Potočari, where the UN battalion had its headquarters.  They were denied entry to the UN compound.  Instead they were handed over to Ratko Mladić and his troops, who promised them safe passage to government-held territory.  Subsequently, the men – including the very elderly and adolescent boys – were separated from the women and children.  Many men and boys attempted to flee to safety through the mountains, but they were malnourished from two years of siege and safe territory was many miles away.  Few made it.  Those who did not were rounded up along with the others and shot, and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.

The Srebrenica Memoial Centre at Potočari, opened in 2003

There is little wonder that the horrific events of those days in July still stir passions in a country that remains divided by memories of a war that irreparably destroyed communities.  It is unclear whether the relatives of the victims will ever find closure, even if all the missing bodies are found and Mladić, currently awaiting trial in The Hague, is finally convicted for the crime.  Any such closure, however, is unlikely to be reached until there is acceptance on all sides that the massacre did happen, that it was awful, and that reconciliation is possible.  Twenty years on, there is a new generation of Bosnians coming of age who were born after the war ended.  They are the country’s best chance of fighting the tired propaganda, shaking off the divisions of the past and looking towards a more hopeful future.

Paying for the Past: Reparations and Rehabilitation

On 2 June 2007, Tony Blair offered an apology for the role of the British government in the Irish Potato Famine 150 years earlier.  To some it seemed strange that Blair should be holding himself and his government accountable for the actions of long-dead politicians wholly unconnected with him.  If I bump into someone in the street, it is only right that I should apologise to them.  But no one would expect me to apologise to them on behalf of someone I’d never met who happened to bump into them the previous week.

The question of how states should address past wrongs is a thorny one.  Issuing a formal apology is a popular recourse, but the empty symbolism does little to alleviate the suffering of victims.  Financial compensation is another option, but it can become costly and open too many long-buried cans of worms.  Who should be paid and is it possible to place a monetary value on their suffering?  How far should we delve back into history when requesting reparations?  Should the French start paying us for the trauma inflicted by William the Conqueror?  And should governments be paying at all?  Should not the individuals responsible be held to account for their actions?

Individual culpability has been the approach favoured in the case of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.  Serbia's membership of the European Union has even been conditioned on the arrest of war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  The arrest of Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić in May 2011, followed by that of Croatian Serb fugitive Goran Hadžić in July of the same year, the last indictees still at large, removed the final barriers to Serbia’s EU accession and their membership is expected in the near future.  But these arrests of high profile war criminals such as Mladić and Radovan Karadžić have done little to bring closure to Bosnia.  Nor have the arrests and sentences by the ICTY of many other Bosnian military commanders.

Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić at his trial in 

The Hague. A verdict is expected in October 2015.

The ICTY is the largest and lengthiest attempt to bring individuals involved in war to justice, far surpassing the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, but it has been plagued by controversy since its establishment in 1993.  Long trials, endless bureaucracy and allegations of bias from all sides mean that the judgements, when they are reached, are viewed with suspicion, and the Tribunal has done little to heal the deep wounds of the Yugoslav successor states.  Many are still smarting from the death of Slobodan Milošević, Serbian President during the 1990s, in his cell in The Hague in 2006, before a verdict could be reached.  The ICTY acquitted Bosniak military leader Naser Orić of war crimes in 2008, only for him to be re-arrested earlier this month by Swiss forces on a warrant issued by the Serbian Justice Department, timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre by Serb forces and signalling that any sort of resolution to the tensions in Bosnia is a long way off.

In a country similarly troubled by historic divisions and simmering tensions, there have been calls for an amnesty on criminal prosecutions.  In 2013, Northern Ireland’s Attorney General, John Larkin, proposed that there should be no more prosecutions for Troubles-related murders, stating that “the prospects of conviction diminish, perhaps exponentially, with each passing year” and therefore “the time has come to think about putting a line, set at Good Friday 1998, with respect to prosecutions, inquests and other inquiries.”  He denied it was amnesty, since the crimes would still be considered crimes, but that no criminal proceedings could take place with respect to them, yet his views were still contentious.  Those opposed protested that victims are entitled to justice regardless of the passing of time.  This may be true, but will long, drawn-out criminal proceedings and digging through the ghosts of the past really bring justice, or any sense of peace to Northern Ireland?  Perhaps there is a time to draw a line under the past and start anew.

Or perhaps money cures all ill.  The British government set a strange precedent back in June 2013 when it paid out £20 million to Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s, with William Hague telling the House of Commons: “The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.”  Despite paying out around £3000 to each living victim, Hague stated firmly that “Britain still did not accept that it was legally liable for the actions of what was a colonial administration in government.”  Instead, and interestingly, he conferred the legal liability onto the Kenyan Republic, who inherited it from the colonial administration upon independence in 1963.  All of which seems like an easy get-out clause – has Britain gifted all responsibility for its oppression of native populations during the Age of Empire to the successor states?  How convenient.  Soon the Indian government will be able to pay themselves back for their suffering under British rule.  But all this masks the question of whether we, the British tax payers, should be held responsible and made to pay for events which happened before many of us were born and in which we played no part?

It’s a question that often rears it head in the USA with regards to the issue of slavery reparations.  The economic status of many African Americans and the telling statistic that white Americans earn on average 22% more than them, is said to be a lingering financial impact of slavery and is used to support the argument that descendants of slaves deserve financial compensation from the US government.  It wasn’t until July 2008 that the US House of Representatives even bothered to apologise for the travesty of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  It was nearly a year before the Senate passed a similar resolution, in June 2009, apologising for the “fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery.”  However, the resolution offered little more than hollow platitudes since it also explicitly stated that the the apology could not be used as a basis for restitution claims.  Opponents of reparations argue that the historic wrong of slavery is beyond repair since the actual slaves are now dead.  Others argue that the sheer number of African Americans, which at 42 million represents 14% of the US population, makes paying reparations unfeasible, and the money could be more usefully spent on funding state welfare.  And others are worried about setting an expensive precedent.  Native American peoples also have a strong case for reparations, as do many other minority groups.

In Australia, the government has had similar concerns in relation to its Aboriginal population.  In February 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, apologised “for the past wrongs caused by successive governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population.” His apology particularly singled out the ‘Stolen Generation’; the thousands of children forcibly removed from their families.  However, the refusal to accompany the apology with compensation angered many Aboriginal leaders.  The 460,000 Aborigines living in Australia make up 2% of the population, but they experience far higher rates of infant mortality, drug abuse, alcoholism and unemployment than the rest of the population.  As with the African American population, this is a financial and social hangover from previous discriminatory policies, for which many feel they deserve financial reimbursement.

When it comes to rehabilitation and reparations, there is no better case study than Germany.  Both East and West Germany were forced to pay reparations to Israel and the World Jewish Congress for property confiscated under the Nuremberg Laws, for forced labour and for persecution (though no compensation was paid to the relatives of those Jews killed during the Holocaust).  Yugoslavia was paid $8 million for forced human experimentation and given $36 billion in industrial equipment, and Poland received DM1.3 million in 1975 as recompense for Nazi oppression and atrocities.

German reparations to the Soviet Union, on the other hand, were paid in the form of forced labour, which returns us to the matter of whether it should be individuals or states that are held accountable for atrocities.  The Nuremberg Trials brought individuals within the Nazi high command to justice, but lingering hostility existed towards the majority of the German population who had colluded with and served the Nazi regime.  Germans have had to work hard to distance themselves from Nazi connotations.  Even now, 70 years after the end of the war, Germany is making an effort to hold the Nazis to account for their actions, as demonstrated by the ongoing trial of former Auschwitz prison guard Oskar Groening.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during recent

talks in Brussels

In terms of its international reputation, Germany has made a miraculous recovery.  It has paid its debts and gone from an internationally administered, fractured state to a European economic powerhouse in just two and half decades.  Taking the lead in the Eurozone crisis and offering a strong, stable economy in the heart of Europe, it is fair to say that Germany has been fully rehabilitated, making a strong case for the payment of reparations and a commitment to bring individual war criminals to justice.

When it comes to reparations, the debate will undoubtedly rage on.  There is unlikely to be any consensus reached on how, if and when governments, or individuals, should pay for past crimes committed under a political guise.  There will be further symbolic apologies.  It’s an easy option for a government to issue a formal apology to placate campaigners.  But perhaps the best way a government can make amends is by plugging money into programmes designed the assist victims and their descendants, the indirect victims of past wrongs, in order to tip the balance a little more in their direction.  They can work to bring individuals to justice where possible and to ensure that legislation is passed abolishing discrimination against those victims.  But, most importantly, governments should pay for the past by learning its lessons and refusing to make the same mistakes again.

Mapping the Past: A Brief History of Cartography

We were walking through the New Forest when we came across a sign warning of unexploded ordnance.  “Is that why the Ordnance Survey is called the Ordnance Survey?” my friend asked.  “Is it something to do with the military?”  It seemed plausible, though I didn’t know for sure.  Despite being a keen walker with an ever-growing collection of Ordnance Survey maps, I knew very little about the origins of the organisation itself.  Nor was I particularly aware of the general history of cartography, despite being a life-long lover of maps (rolled up somewhere in my parents’ loft is a highly detailed chart of the stream running through the valley where I grew up).  “Now there’s an interesting topic for a blog,” I mused.

So here it is.  A blog on the history of mapmaking.  A full history would probably fill several volumes, so I have regrettably reduced it to a (very) swift journey through the highlights in the fascinating story of cartography.

Early History

The earliest known maps were of the stars, rather than the earth.  Dots on the walls of the Lascaux caves in southern France dating from 16,500 BC map out part of the night sky and the Cuevas de El Castillo in Spain contain a dot map of the Corona Borealis constellation dating from 12,000 BC.

The oldest known maps of the earth, however, are those preserved on Babylonian clay tablets, dating from around 2,300 BC.  Early maps covered small, local areas and were more artistic than accurate, since they were expensive and owning them a sign of status. Although the Babylonians produced the earliest known map of the 'world', it is far from accurate, deliberately excluding the Persians and the Egyptians, and depicting the world as a circular area of land surrounded by water.

Part of the Turin Papyrus Map

Other examples of early maps include silk maps from China and the Turin Papyrus Map, made by the Ancient Egyptians and believed to date from around 1160 BC.  Interestingly, it is thought to be the first map to show topographical detail, depicting the mountains east of the Nile where gold and silver were mined.  Trade routes are labelled in hieroglyphics and the map also contains accurate geological detail.

Ptolemy

The Greeks and Romans, masters of invention, continued to refine the art of mapmaking.  This all culminated with the work of the Greco-Egyptian scholar Claudius Ptolemaeus, known in English as Ptolemy.  Ptolemy published the important work Geographia (Geography) in about 150 AD, which contained thousands of references and maps of different parts of the world.  He also, significantly, included lines of longitude and latitude.  This system revolutionised European geographic thinking, by imposing mathematical rules on the composition of maps.  Ptolemy's work continued to influence Islamic and European map makers well into the Renaissance period.  It was Ptolemy’s calculations regarding the circumference of the globe that led Christopher Columbus to set off on his historic voyage, but Ptolemy wasn’t infallible and the figures were somewhat underestimated.  It’s possible that Columbus wouldn’t have set off if he had known the true figures, and that history would have taken a remarkably different course!

China

The Greeks and Romans were not the only ones producing maps.  Chinese mathematicians and cartographers were also developing mapping techniques.  Pei Xiu (224–271) has been called the 'Chinese Ptolemy' and is credited with influential work on the development of scale in maps, having noticed the inaccuracies in distance on early Chinese maps.  Pei also developed the work of earlier Chinese cartographers on using gridlines on maps.

The Middle Ages

Al-Idrisi's Map of the World

Few improvements were made in mapping during the Middle Ages in Europe.  Like all written material during this period, the majority of maps were made in monasteries and religious beliefs dominated their production, placing Jerusalem in the centre of world maps.  The maps also tended to include highly decorative religious imagery.

In contrast, Islamic cartography during this period was taking advantage of knowledge gained by explorers and merchants travelling across the Muslim world, from Spain to India, Africa, China and Russia.  Al-Idrisi, an Arab scholar in the court of King Roger II of Sicily, produced many brilliant ‘world’ maps and geographic works in the mid-12^th century, including the pleasingly titled ‘The Amusement of Him Who Desires to Traverse the Earth’.

Renaissance

The printing press brought maps to a far wider audience by the end of the 15^th century and they were no longer dominated by religious agendas.  The accompanying thirst for knowledge that characterised the Renaissance period drove the desire for the improvement in mapping, as well as further exploration of the wider world.  The first whole-world maps began to appear in the early 16th century, following voyages by Columbus and others to the New World, with the first world map generally accredited to the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.  Produced in 1507, Waldseemüller’s map drew on Ptolemy’s work and was the first map to use the name America for the New World

Modern Maps

From the 16^th century onwards, maps gradually became more detailed and more accurate.  Like many inventions, the greatest improvements were driven by military needs.  As wars increased in their numbers and scale, precise information was needed about territory.  Alongside this, the growth and development of transport, in particular the railways in the 19^th century, necessitated accurate maps of large areas as well. It was during World War I that the use of aerial photography, for the initial purpose of mapping the trenches and frontlines, made its first impact on improving standards of mapping.

Ordnance Survey

A Ramsden Theodolite

As predicted, the Ordnance Survey was developed for military needs.  Rebellion in Scotland and a war against France prompted George II to commission a military survey of the Scottish Highlands in 1746.  By 1790, Europe was in turmoil and there were fears that the French Revolution would spread across the Channel.  The Government therefore ordered the Defence Ministry (then the Board of Ordnance) to begin a survey of England’s southern coast.  To aid with this, the Board purchased a huge new Ramsden theodolite.  Jesse Ramsden’s innovative surveying instruments consisted of a mounted telescope which rotated to give the angle of view and were very accurate.  Only a few were ever built.

The first one-inch map of Kent was produced in 1801, followed by a similar map of Essex.  Within 20 years, about a third of England and Wales had been mapped in one-inch scale.  Major Thomas Colby (Director General of the Ordnance Survey) walked 586 miles in 22 days on a reconnaissance in 1819.  In 1824 Parliament asked Colby and his staff to produce a 6-inch to the mile survey of Ireland.  Colby was a very hands-on boss, travelling with his staff to set up camps and bringing them plum puddings on the top of mountains!  The first Irish maps appeared in the mid-1830s.

The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, alongside the demands of railway engineers, prompted calls for 6-inch surveys of England and Wales, which was agreed by the Treasury in 1840.  In 1841, following a fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London, the Survey moved their offices to Southampton.  During the 1860s, Major-General Sir Henry James used his directorship of the Survey to exploit the new science of photography to cheaply and quickly enlarge maps, and he designed an elaborate glass studio at Southampton for processing photographic plates.  By 1895, a twenty-five inch survey of Britain was complete.

Following the disruption of the First World War, it became apparent that the Ordnance Survey’s maps were woefully outdated.  In 1935 the Davidson Committee was established to review Ordnance Survey's future. That same year, the far-sighted new Director General, Major-General Malcolm MacLeod, launched the re-triangulation of Great Britain.  Surveyors began the mammoth task of building concrete triangulation points on remote hilltops across Britain.  The re-triangulation was finally completed after the Second World War, utilising new methods, such as improvements in aerial surveying and up-to-date drawing techniques.

The Davidson Committee's final report set Ordnance Survey on course to face the challenges of the 21st century. The National Grid reference system was introduced, using the metre as its measurement. An experimental new 1:25,000 scale map was launched.  The digitisation of maps began in 1973. By this point, the organisation itself was changing too.  In 1974 the position of Ordnance Survey Director General became a civilian post, and in 1983 it became a wholly civilian organisation.

Further change took place in 1999 when the agency became a government trading fund and as of 1 April 2015 it has operated as a Government owned limited company.  The Ordnance Survey digitised the last of some 230,000 maps in 1995, making Britain the first country in the world to complete a programme of large-scale electronic mapping.  It remains a world-leading mapmaking organisation, regularly surveying all 243,241 square kilometres of the British Isles and making thousands of updates on a daily basis.

Read more about the history of the Ordnance Survey here.

Maps of the Future

Satellite technology and GIS are improving the accuracy of maps all the time.  Mass publication has made them cheaper and street maps are now freely available on the internet.  This has had an impact on organisations such as the Ordnance Survey, which has sometimes struggled to stay up to speed with the changing face of cartography.

However, even today’s maps are not completely accurate representations of the real world.  As with anything man-made, all measurements are subject to human error.  Aerial photographs and satellite images show only certain portions of the light spectrum.  Maps portray features using symbolic styles defined by classification schemes.  All maps are made according to certain basic assumptions, such as sea level measurements, which are not always verifiable.

In spite of these weaknesses, maps remain an essential tool for social interaction.  Maps of all kinds – be they highly detailed maps of footpaths in the Lake District, a world map showing at a glance our position on the planet, a scribbled diagram on the back of an envelope showing a friend how to get to the train station, or a childish hand-drawn creation warning of the places where the river will definitely go over the top of your wellies – will always be a part of our human desire to understand and interpret the world around us.

Review: In the Land of Blood and Honey

In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) is not the sort of film you would expect Angelina Jolie to make. As war films go it's bleaker, gorier and more shocking than most.  It tells the story of Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Bosnian Muslim living in Sarajevo at the outbreak of the war in 1992, and her relationship with her Bosnian Serb prison guard, Danijel (Goran Kostić), as the war progresses.

It’s a daring premise for a film about so recent a war.  When it premiered in Sarajevo, audiences were moved to tears by the memories that film brought to the surface; it is certainly jolting to see images of Sarajevo under siege again.  The treatment of women during the Bosnian war is a topic that is being explored more and more, in academia and literature, and although it is laudable what Jolie is trying to do with this film, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work.  Watching it, you feel you are being shown a clumsily polemic humanitarian lecture rather than a work of any true artistic value.

For starters, the film doesn't appear to know if it's a love story or a psychological exploration of the relationship between captor and prisoner.  Viewers are unsure if we are supposed to feel sympathy for Danijel, as a man overtaken by his circumstances, or to abhor him as a weak-willed misogynist.  If the former, then sadly Danijel is such a creepy and unlikeable character that it is impossible to feel sorry for him.  The chemistry between the two leads throughout is uncertain, as though they are equally unsure how to feel about their characters.

Aside from taking some locational liberties with Sarajevo, there are number of dubious directorial calls in the film.  Including gratuitous female nudity in a film about the objectification of women and juxtaposing quasi-romantic sex scenes with scenes of systematic rape seem nothing more than distasteful.  The war was awful.  It was messy and confusing and people did terrible things to one another, and any film about it will necessarily be harrowing.  In the Land of Blood and Honey, however, dwells on the violence with very little exploration of the motivations and feelings of the individuals involved.

The film caused outrage amongst Serbs on its release and it’s easy to see why.  The Bosnian Serbs are portrayed as cartoonish villains filled with Nazi-esque levels of vitriol towards their Muslim neighbours, whilst the Bosnian Muslims are exclusively shown to be helpless victims clinging idealistically to a vision of a multicultural Bosnia.  I am by no means an apologist for the actions of the Bosnian Serb Army, but the film does little to demonstrate the complexities of the wider war, other than a brief allusion to Srebrenica, and the Muslim-Croat war is never mentioned at all.

Of course, these complaints would have been obscured by a stronger story.  At heart, this is a weak story, poorly told.  The action jumps from scene to scene, seemingly too desperate to educate and shock in equal measure; there is no build-up of suspense and we are never given the opportunity to really get to know the characters.  The result is that the unsettling relationship between Danijel and Ajla is utterly incomprehensible.

The title itself is a controversial choice, evocative of Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts and the myth of ancient hatreds that influenced John Major's thinking during the war.  Presumably the honey is supposed to be the sweet antithesis to the blood soaking the land, but there is very little sweetness in this film.  Coffee might have been a more appropriate choice.

It is estimated that up to 60,000 women were raped in prison camps during the Bosnian War.  Their suffering, and that of women in all wars, is a commendable cause to highlight, but there have been better films made about the impact that this sexual violence had on Bosnia’s women (Esma’s Secret/Grbavica (2006), for one).  Since In the Land of Blood and Honey was released, when people find out that I have studied the Bosnian War they often ask if I have seen it.  Now I can say that I have – and that I wouldn’t recommend it.  If you’re looking for good films about the Bosnian War, Hollywood has done it far better in Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), and Bosnians excelled at it in No Man’s Land (2001).  In both educational and artistic terms, this film has sadly little to offer.

The Curse of the Unshockable World

In the photograph, a man kneels on the floor of a brightly lit shopping centre, blood on his hand and running down the side of his face, congealed in his matted hair, whilst another man reaches down a hand to help.  Two people were killed and several more injured in the rocket attack on a Donetsk shopping centre in Ukraine last October.  In another picture, this time from Syria and taken earlier this month, a man carries an bloody-faced, injured and wailing child out of dusty ruins following a government airstrike on Aleppo.

Once upon a time we would have been shocked by images like these.  Now they tend to pass us by, as we flip through our papers, at best raising a sigh and a weary shake of the head as we bypass them to gorge on stories of the latest MP to fall from grace.  We read about another gruesome video posted by ISIS, despair at how it will all end and skip to the weekend football results.

Whilst I was researching the portrayal of violence in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, I trawled through reels and reels of newspaper footage from the early 1990s on the noisy old microfiche reader in the University library.  At least one person was killed virtually every day during the 1992-95 siege of the Bosnian capital, but the newspapers covered only the most dramatic events - the breadline massacre, killing 16, in May 1992, right at the beginning of the war; the February 1994 shell in the Markale marketplace, killing 68, the images of which I can never get out of my mind; and the second shell which landed there in August 1995, killing 37 and in part triggering the western response that would finally end the war.  But despite the best efforts of the journalists based in Sarajevo, surrounded by these horrors, the everyday deaths did not make the news outside of Bosnia.

The Bosnian War, and Sarajevo in particular, was an unprecedented situation for war reporting.  Since UN control of Sarajevo’s airport meant that journalists could fly in and out of the city with relative ease, correspondents were able to feed out a constant stream of images of the atrocities, using the most modern of satellite technology.  Other areas of the country did not receive such close attention, but certain horrifying images, such as those of the Omarska concentration camp, uncovered by ITN in August 1992, did reach the international news from time to time.

Despite heavy coverage of the war, it took three and a half years for any determined military intervention to arrive in Bosnia.  The Syrian conflict, which began in earnest in early 2011, is coming up on that dubious milestone.  The bad news for Ukraine is that their war has only been raging for just over a year.  The worse news is that it is increasingly difficult to find that one shocking image – that Markale Marketplace, or Napalmed child – that will prompt the world to declare enough is enough.  What could we be shown now that we have not seen before?

We have grown desensitised to images of war over the last few decades.  We are overexposed to them in video games and films, so that we forget what is real and what is fiction.  Events are captured on mobile phones and tweeted all over the world instantly.  We are overwhelmed with these images, so much so that we begin to feel that there are just too many wars and there is nothing to be done: the world is simply a terrible place.  It appears that war is the constant state of being in these far away countries of which we know little about.

And yet our war correspondents keep sending back these photographs and keep writing their articles; keep putting their lives in danger.  Some might argue that it’s exploitative to make a living recording the suffering of others, when journalists can fly in, take a few snaps, make an award-winning documentary, and fly back home to plaudits and safety.  Perhaps it is.  On the other hand, without these images, how would anyone ever know what was going on?  How would anyone ever be so sickened as to demand that it ends?

War correspondence as a craft grew alongside literacy rates in the 19^th century.  William Howard Russell, widely considered to be the founder of modern war correspondence, reported for the Times on the Crimean War of the 1850s.  His reports shocked Victorians reading it at home, as he exposed the British military’s blunders and the appalling conditions of the soldiers.  Although radio and early television were used, the reporting was often heavily censored, especially during the First World War, and the pen remained the most accurate source of information from frontlines around the world.  Bulky camera equipment meant that many of the cinema newsreels during the Second World War were stock footage narrated in the studio, often serving as little more than government propaganda films.

It was the Vietnam War that really changed the face of war reporting.  Dubbed the ‘television war’, the graphic, uncensored footage fed back to the American public on a nightly basis revealed the brutality of war in all its gory detail.  Roving reporters with portable camera equipment had unrestricted access to the war zone.  Iconic photographs, such as Eddie Adams’ of a Viet Cong being executed by a Southern Vietnamese General during the 1968 Tet Offensive, and later Nic Ut’s image of a young girl running from her Napalmed village in 1972, changed public perception of the war in the US.  Support for the war plummeted, a vocal and sizeable anti-war movement developed, and eventually the decade-long conflict ended in a messy and ignominious retreat for the US.

Bosnia was arguably the next big television war, but it was by no means the only conflict of the early 1990s.  The Rwandan civil war, which took place concurrently with the Bosnian war, received much less coverage.  This was undoubtedly in part due to the accessibility of Bosnia to journalists, but more importantly Rwanda was not a white, European country.  Bosnia’s familiarity to western eyes might have helped its cause a little; made those images just a little more shocking.  Then-Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, caused an uproar when he visited Sarajevo in December 1992 and told the besieged population: “You have a situation which is better than ten other places all over the world. I can give you a list of ten places where you have more problems than in Sarajevo.”  This, he explained, was why the UN was not going to intervene in Bosnia's fight.

The sentiment that are just too many wars to do anything about has endured.  However many images are fed to us, we will not be moved because we have relentless evidence that war is inevitable; because we have seen these photographs of suffering too many times before.  There is nothing we can do to help and we’ve got problems of our own.  The sad fact is that Putin and Assad, and all the others, know this too.