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.

Dayton's Discontents: Life After Peace in Bosnia

More than any other European nation, Bosnia has struggled to shake its association with war in the eyes of the western world.  Tell someone you’re off on a trip there and more often than not they’ll ask, with a look of surprise, “is it safe?”  Until last week, apart from the landmines scattered across Bosnia’s beautiful countryside, the only signs of the war that tore the country apart in the 1990s were bullet and shell marks peppering buildings in many towns and cities.  To the casual traveller, passing through, Bosnia is a country of culture, history, good food and stunning scenery and Sarajevo easily holds its own against any of the European capitals as a vibrant, cosmopolitan city.  But scratch a little deeper and you’ll find the divisions and disillusions that have flared into violent protests over the last few days.

It started in the north-eastern town of Tuzla last Wednesday.  Unemployed workers took to the streets to protest about their poor pensions and unpaid benefits in a town that was once an industrial hub.  By the weekend the protests had spread to Sarajevo, Zenica and Mostar, where government buildings were set on fire and protesters clashed with the police.  Bosnians are taking to the streets to object to the corruption, nepotism and petty squabbling of their politicians, who they hold responsible for Bosnia’s economic stagnation.

Official statistics put unemployment in Bosnia at 27.5%, but it is believed that up to 44% of Bosnians are out of work.  Youth unemployment is estimated at around 60%.  The Bosnian economy has never fully recovered from the war.  Privatisations of state firms have been rife with crooked deals.  Added to the fact that most of these companies had already racked up massive debts during the collapse of the Yugoslav economy in the 1980s is the sad truth that Bosnia no longer has any industry to speak of and no service economy to fall back on.

The war in Bosnia ended nineteen years ago, in December 1995, with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords.  They left the country divided between the semi-autonomous Republika Srpska (RS) and the Bosnian-Croat Federation.  The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina is headed by a three member presidency - a Bosniak and a Croat from the Federation and a Serb from the RS – with the Chair rotating every eight months.  Though the idea of electing politicians based on ethnicity is troubling, in reality Bosnia’s politicians are distant, bloated elites barely distinguishable from one another, regardless of their nominative party.  Below the national government are layers of local government, divided into cantons, which in turn are subdivided into municipalities.  This multi-layered and unwieldy system leads to frequent political deadlock, such as that seen last summer over the failure to pass a law on issuing ID numbers.  The stalemate, which resulted in the death of a young baby unable to leave the country for vital medical treatment, sparked protests in Sarajevo, which died down after only a few days.  But the embers have been glowing ever since, and last week were ignited once more.

The aim of the Dayton Peace Accords was to end the fighting in a way that would be acceptable to all sides.  In many ways it is an impressive piece of diplomacy, creating a structure within which Bosnia could begin its recovery from the conflict free from inter-ethnic power struggles.  But, nearly twenty years on, Dayton has its critics.  Eric Gordy believes that Dayton created a “permanent,parasitic political class.”  Like naughty schoolchildren, Dayton left Bosnia under international guardianship, in the shape of the Office of the High Representative, an international envoy who is unaccountable to the Bosnian people.  Others have argued that Dayton left Bosnia’s political situation unstable and divided along ethnic lines.

Prior to Dayton, the most serious attempt at a peace deal was the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP), put forward in 1993, which proposed division of Bosnia into ten semi-autonomous cantons.  The VOPP was rejected by the three warring parties, who could not agree on the divisions.  By August 1995, when an intense bombing campaign by NATO finally forced the BSA to surrender, the situation on the ground had changed sufficiently to allow the parties to sign a peace deal without losing face.  The UN “safe areas” in Eastern Bosnia had fallen to the BSA, eliminating the troublesome Bosniak pockets and allowing virtual ethnic homogeneity in the east of the country, and the Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats had formed an uneasy alliance against the Bosnian Serbs.  Under these circumstances, peace was achieved and Bosnia, which had dominated news bulletins for three years, slipped from the public consciousness.

 “Look at us now, my God! Look at Vucko and cry.”

The world had forgotten about Bosnia.  It took three days for western news outlets to pick up on last week’s protests, and they have now disappeared once more from the headlines.  It would seem that as long as the Bosnians aren’t killing each other, the world doesn’t want to know.  In a somewhat jarring juxtaposition with the protests, British gold medal-winning ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean returned to Sarajevo today to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of their success in the 1984 Winter Olympics.  It seems it is easier to remember the Bolero than to remember the plight of the Bosnian people.

There have been calls for both further engagement by the international community and Bosnian self-determination in equal measure.  Peace deals imposed by foreign diplomats which leave nations crippled, humiliated and disgruntled can be dangerous.  Yet Dayton cannot take all the blame and it is important to note that the protests are targeted against internal politicians, not the international community.  Discontent has been brewing in Bosnia for some time, held back only by fear of descent into the violence of the 1990s.  Bosnians need to take ownership of the problems in their country.  The protests, which have resulted in the resignation of the leaders of a number of cantons, are a start.  Far better than accepting the terms imposed by outsiders is initiating internal reforms; by the people, for the people.

Whilst some believe that the protests have united Bosnians from all ethnic backgrounds, the protests have yet to have much of an impact in the RS.  Some Bosnian Serbs are fearful that the movement will undermine the autonomy of the RS, which is not as dysfunctional as the Federation.  Although it seems impossible to talk of Bosnia without mentioning ethnic divides, there is a danger that the ethno-nationalists will try to hijack the growing national discourse for their own ends and steer it off course.  If real change is to be effected in Bosnia, this cannot be allowed to happen.

"Courts and police are protecting the gangs in power"

The protests need direction if they are to achieve anything.  The frustration is understandable, but mindless vandalism is not the answer.  There are signs that the protests are starting to organise, with a series of plenums organised across the country.  The ruling political class cannot be expected to tear down a system from which they reap such great financial rewards.  What the protesters need is someone to direct the anger and despair; leaders who are not part of the status quo, who can translate their frustrations into the reforms that are needed to stimulate the economy.  The early elections that have been called for will be pointless until someone emerges to take on this mantle.  When they do, Bosnia’s Spring may finally bloom.

Dear Sarajevo, I’ll never forget the first time we met…

The first time I saw Sarajevo was from the window of a train, having spent a sweat-soaked three days travelling across Europe in the late-June heat.  Our compartment was air-conditioned by way of a spare bootlace tying the window open.  We had left Zagreb at 9 that morning and it was now approaching 6pm as the hills fell away to reveal the outskirts of the city.  We disembarked the packed train and the crowds dissipated into the city, leaving us standing bewildered in virtually disserted plaza outside the station.

I was finally there, in the city I had spent four years studying and many more obsessing over.

It was all a little surreal.  Here were the landmarks I’d seen on archive TV news footage burning and shattering into dust, whilst shells and sniper fire echoed around.  In the peaceful evening sunshine, it was hard conflate the two images.  The tram we took to our hostel passed under the Holiday Inn, still towering in garish ochre over the expanse of Sniper Alley.  That day, cars, trams and pedestrians made their way untroubled along the wide road out to Ilidža.  I looked up at the surrounding hills, clambering down into the town at this point, orientating myself in this strange new reality.

My friends and I stayed six days before heading south to Mostar. I could have stayed for six weeks.  You can devour everything there is to read about somewhere, but until you visit, you cannot appreciate the taste, the touch and the sound of a place.  The random juxtaposition of Euro-pop and the call to prayer; the bitterness of your first Bosnian coffee, drunk in a tiny front room up a spiral staircase; walking barefoot home from a mountain-top restaurant in a summer storm.

I was just eight years old when the war ended in 1995, so my vague memories are limited to the coverage on Newsround.  My curiosity about Bosnia was piqued at a much later age and my visit served only to cement the country's place in my heart.  I am not arrogant enough to presume that because I have visited Sarajevo I can even begin to imagine how they suffered during the siege.  I do not pretend to know the city like a local.  Far from it.  There is so much more to learn, to experience and discover in this fascinating European capital.  I highly recommend a visit.

Sadly, all too often, Sarajevo is associated with war.  The Latin Bridge spanning the River Miljacka, on which Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is a stark reminder that this is the city in which the war to end all wars began.  And if they are unaware of that connection, many people automatically connect Sarajevo with the horrific images of the 1990s.

But despite spending three-and-a-half years under almost constant fire from encircling forces in the mountains around the city, Sarajevo survived.  In the summer months, the BSA turned off the water; in the winter, they cut off fuel supplies.  They arbitrarily sniped at pedestrians as they sprinted across road junctions and landed shells at random.  Against this backdrop, Sarajevans held a film festival and classical music concerts.  They dug a tunnel under the airport to bring supplies in from beyond the frontline.  And when the war was over, they quietly picked up the pieces of their lives and rebuilt their multicultural city, where East meets West.

Being the only student of the war in the group, I didn’t inflict too much history on my fellow travellers.  We visited what remains of the airport tunnel and the siege exhibition in the historical museum.  But, to the informed eye, the signs of the conflict which was raging just twenty years ago are everywhere.  Pavements and buildings are pock-marked with bullet holes and shell craters.  I watched in a dumbstruck trance as my friends shopped in the Markale marketplace.  The only sign of the shell that fell there in February 1994 is a memorial along the back wall bearing the names of the 68 who died there; you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it.  A market trader accidentally knocked his sack trolley into it the glass casing around the shell crater.  And there were the railings over which I had seen the image of a mutilated body slumped.

Yet it felt necessary not to be seen noticing these things.  Whether it was due to my own awkwardness, being intimately acquainted with the pusillanimous efforts of the British government to end the war, or a sense of intrusion, it seemed somehow inappropriate, or at the very least impolite, to mention the war.

Aside from one moment of tension on arrival, when, confused and tired from travelling across seven countries and dealing with four different currencies in one weekend, we attempted to pay for our room with Croatian Kuna and were curtly informed that Bosnia was a different country, it was not apparent from the Bosnians we spoke to that a war had taken place.  We were accepted on face value as tourists and the people we met were eager to show us the delights of their beautiful country.

There was a sense almost as if the people were holding their breath.  The government buildings were set apart from the rest of the vibrant city, shrouded in a fearsome quiet.  Sarajevans were reclaiming their lives through hospitality, culture and congeniality, not through politics, which, since Dayton, have become toxic in the capital which suffered so much during the siege.  Declarations of political intent could tear apart a city which has restored itself to peace so successfully.

Over the last month, however, Sarajevo has awoken.  Sparked by the political stalemate over legislation governing the allocation of ID numbers, which has left babies born since February without numbers and therefore without access to insurance and passports, protesters have come out in force onto the streets of Sarajevo. The demonstrations have been further fuelled by the story of baby Berina, whose life-saving medical treatment in Serbia was delayed because she could not be issued a passport.  An emergency 180 day law was passed on 5 June allowing ID numbers to be allotted, but it was too late for Berina, who passed away on 13 June.

The sticking point is that politicians from the Republika Srpksa, the Bosnian Serb entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, want the ID numbers to contain a signifier identifying the bearer’s region.  Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim politicians want the numbers to be allocated randomly.  As a result, Parliament is at an impasse.  The protesters set a deadline of 30 June for the government to break the deadlock, but that date has passed and the vote on the new draft law has been postponed until next week.

The public’s prior reluctance to protest is perhaps understandable.  The last mass protest in Sarajevo was a peace rally in April 1992.  Snipers shot into the crowd and killed two civilians.  Three-and-a-half years of war followed.  The Dayton Accords, signed in November 1995, left Bosnia-Herzegovina in a state of limbo, governed in an uneasy peace by the Federal government in Sarajevo and the Republika Srpska, with its de facto capital in Banja Luka.  The Bosnian Serbs want independence, whilst the Federal government wants unification and so the political system remains balanced on a knife edge.

Bosnians are now beginning to come out of political hibernation and exercise their democratic rights.  There has been plenty to inflame tensions in the last few weeks – the returning of 405 recently-identified bodies to Srebrenica on the 18th anniversary of the massacre, the reversal of Radovan Karadžic’s acquittal on charges of genocide in The Hague and the posturing of Bosnian Serb politicians boycotting Parliament and claiming that Sarajevo is not a safe place for Serbs.  But in Sarajevo the people have not reacted with violence but with a resounding demonstration that they will not allow the political elite to drag them back into conflict with one another.  Ethnicity has not played a part in the protesters’ message.

The recent of accession of Croatia to the EU has further highlighted the petty infighting amongst Bosnia’s politicians.  They had five years to prepare for it, but the Bosnian government still managed to miss the 1 July deadline for reforming legislation in order to allow its farmers to continue exporting food to neighbouring Croatia once it joined the EU.  Bosnia has now lost its largest export market worth 22 million euros annually.  Even if the legislation can be passed, it will take EU inspectors up to six months to give the exports the seal of approval, whilst Bosnian farmers search desperately for markets elsewhere.  Dissatisfaction with bickering politicians who appear more concerned with furthering their own personal interests than those of the Bosnian people is mounting.

It is true that the root of Bosnia’s current problems lie in the poor construction of the Dayton Accords, which left the country over-reliant on the international community and nationalist political parties.  But part of the blame lies with the people who have buried their heads in the sand and elected these politicians back into power time and time again.  With Croatia joining the European Union, perhaps the Bosnians now have a realistic goal to strive towards.  Croatia was also devastated by war twenty years ago, though admittedly not to the same extent as Bosnia, and has now recovered to a point where it can be accepted into political union with the rest of Europe.  Bosnia has a long way to go – it is predicted that they won’t be joining the EU until 2015 at the very earliest – and a lot of changes to make, but a resurgent political consciousness amongst Sarajevans may just be a start.