When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Vulliamy filed his report, which was published in The Guardian on 7 August. But he immediately ‘shied from calling them concentration camps’, he later wrote, ‘because of the inevitable association with the bestial policies of the Third Reich’.53 However, on reflection he later decided that ‘concentration camp’ was ‘exactly the right term for what we uncovered that day’.54 Eight months after Vulliamy and the ITN teams first visited the camps, the UN’s Human Rights Committee also decided that they were concentration camps.55 A year later so did the UN’s Independent Commission of Experts.56 But, when their report was published on 27 May 1994, they reflected the ICRC’s comments of 3 August 1992: the reality had been that all sides had operated camps of varying descriptions, but it had taken two years to assemble a corroborated analysis.57

  Over the months following the ITN footage broadcast on ITV and Channel 4 and the Guardian reports, many other stories were published about the camps, and the image of Fikret Alić was widely used, often juxtaposed with photographs of the Third Reich’s concentration camps. The three reporters’ stories had stimulated some short-term political action and it raised public awareness about what was going on in Bosnia, which heaped pressure on the politicians to act.

  The impact of the reports had been such that all three journalists received awards: Penny Marshall and Ian Williams shared the 1992 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best News/Actuality Coverage and from the Royal Television Society (RTS) its International News Award for 1992. In the United States they jointly won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism; Ed Vulliamy received several awards, including the 1992 British Press Awards International Reporter of the Year.58 And there the story might have ended. Save for one of those unpredictable twists of fate. In this case the arrest of one man in Munich.

  Hague trial

  After the civil war in Bosnia ended, the long process of establishing the peace began. The United Nations set up a commission of experts under a Security Council resolution which took detailed evidence on all the camps in Bosnia operated by Serbs, Croats and Muslims. The commission concluded that ‘all information all information available about Logor [Serbo-Croat meaning camp] Omarska seems to indicate that it was more than anything else a death camp’.59 Of Trnopolje the commission concluded that it was not a death camp in the same sense as Omarska, but ‘the label “concentration camp” is none the less justified for Logor Trnopolje due to the regime prevailing in the camp’.60 One of the other crucial components for establishing peace was bringing to justice at least some of those who were accused of committing war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. A special court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was set up in The Hague to try those who had been arrested. In the years since the war finished ICTY has been hearing cases – as soon as suspects have been apprehended and taken into custody in the Netherlands. In some cases justice was relatively swift because suspects were quickly apprehended. But in other cases suspects were fugitives for years and bringing them to justice was a protracted and complicated process, as the cases against Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić show.61

  One suspect brought to justice at the outset was a minor military commander, a former café-owner and electrician called Duško Tadić. Tadić was accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, ‘grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions’ and ‘violations of the laws or customs of war’. The charges related to his participation in the ethnic cleansing of Bosniak Muslims from parts of the Prijedor region of northern Bosnia – including Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje camps.62 He was arrested in Munich early in 1994 by ‘a plain-clothes special commando unit of the Bavarian police’.63 His trial was initially going to be held in Germany, but with ICTY set up he was transferred to the tribunal’s jurisdiction in April 1995. Tadić was one of many figures in the conflict, but he was ‘alleged to have been part of a cruel plan, and he’s a symbol of why this tribunal was created’.64 His trial opened in May 1996 and he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment (April 1997).

  In making its preparations for the trial the prosecution had asked ITN to supply copies of the uncut video material of the camps at Omarska and Trnopolje, which had been taken by Penny Marshall’s and Ian Williams’s cameramen. ITN agreed but this was a decision which was to earn it criticism and enemies.

  At the opening of the trial Ed Vulliamy wrote in The Guardian that ‘the core of the case is the Omarska concentration camp for Muslim and Croat prisoners, uncovered by The Guardian and ITN in August 1992’. The prosecutor, Grant Niemann, alleged that Tadić had been ‘one of the perpetrators of … the most horrific Serbian violence’.65 Vulliamy said that Tadić, who had ‘pleaded not guilty to a litany of killings, torture, sexual assaults, and other physical and psychological abuse and to persecution’ was accused of ‘playing a pivotal role in the ethnic cleansing that swept across north-western Bosnia during 1992’. When the video material was shown in open court Vulliamy wrote in The Guardian,

  I had not seen ITN’s ‘rushes’ – the untransmitted footage – of that day, with which the court accompanied my account. I have described the scene a thousand times but it never fades and here it was in vivid detail. The yard drill, the canteen, those spindly fingers, lantern jaws and burning eyes, the guards swinging their guns…66

  The still images of beatings at Trnopolje taken on a camera owned by Dr Azra Blazević, who was called as a prosecution witness, lent considerable weight to the case.

  Given the importance of the video material in the proceedings, Tadić’s defence team decided to engage the services of a media expert, Thomas Deichmann, who would help it understand the news coverage that had identified Tadić and establish any weaknesses that would help refute the prosecution’s case. Deichmann was editor-in-chief of a bi-monthly small-circulation journal called Novo, and his journalism had been published in Europe and the United States.67 He ‘specialised in German foreign politics and as a result of that also on the Bosnian war, the crisis in Yugoslavia and the Balkans’. The topics were ‘intensively connected’ because ‘Germany was the first country to recognise Croatia and Slovenia’ and there had been public debate about it.68

  In the words of one academic, Professor David Campbell, it was ‘Deichmann’s views’ that ‘were the probable reason that led him to be hired as a media expert’ by Tadić’s defence team. Tadić’s lawyers had ‘sought to discredit’ the news media’s work in identifying their client by arguing that it was really ‘the extensive media coverage in Germany, rather than first-hand experience in Bosnia’ – that is eyewitness testimony – which had firmly identified him and his alleged activities. In other words without the press evidence there would be little else upon which to base a prosecution. Campbell said that ‘Deichmann’s content analysis of the German media provided the empirical basis’ for the argument which had apparently impressed the judges, but ultimately had not prevented Tadić from being found guilty.69 It was while Deichmann was evaluating the evidence that he gained access to ITN’s camp footage, via the defence team. He took a copy of the video.

  Deichmann studied the rushes in detail and thought that he saw something that to him was very interesting. He compared the uncut material with the footage used in the broadcast television news reports and concluded that the latter was misleading. He considered that the images used in both Penny Marshall’s and Ian Williams’s reports had given a very different view of Omarska and Trnopolje from that which he saw in the uncut rushes; and in particular, the barbed wire and chicken wire through which Fikret Alić had been filmed was not what he thought it seemed. Rather than Alić being behind the fencing, Deichmann thought he detected that the journalists were the ones who were behind the fence – he calculated that they were in a compound filming outwards – and that the area where the inmates had gathered was not bounded by fences at all, but rather was open to the countryside. He thought what he had seen would be a story worth publis
hing, because he considered that what he had seen amounted to a misrepresentation of the visual evidence.

  When he returned to Germany from The Hague, he contacted the editor of a magazine whose articles Novo had sometimes published in translation, Living Marxism, or LM as it would later be called, along with a number of editors of other European publications. He put all on notice that he might be able to provide a story for them sometime in the future about ‘this question of Trnopolje camp and the location of barbed wire’.70 LM’s editor, Mick Hume, recalled that Deichmann had told him that he ‘had something very interesting, and he sent me the transcript of an interview that he had done with Professor Mischa Wladimiroff’, who had been the leading member of Tadić’s defence team. Deichmann told Hume that Wladimiroff had appointed him as an expert to help with the defence case.71 Hume told Deichmann that he was indeed interested in publishing the story because ‘I knew him as a very reliable researcher, a good journalist’.72 Hume read an edited version of the Wladimiroff interview in which the professor ‘had some very interesting things to say about the famous barbed wire fence at Trnopolje’. Hume eventually published ‘a shortened version’ of the interview in LM.73

  Press release

  Ultimately, Deichmann completed his research – including a visit to the Trnopolje camp’s site four years after it had closed – and readied his article for publication in LM. Before it was published, LM put out a press release to draw attention to it, which was distributed by Two-Ten Communications, a wire service. When ITN management saw it they were horrified. The press release was promoting an article that not only accused two of the company’s leading journalists of misrepresenting what they had seen in the camps, but also that they had deliberately distorted the facts. By doing so the article in effect alleged that ITN had contravened its statutory obligation to broadcast balanced, impartial and objective news stories. This was serious stuff: it impugned ITN and its reporters and damaged its credibility and standing worldwide. If sustained it would be difficult to shrug off those allegations and it would have damaging repercussions with its overseas customers, destroying a reputation it had carefully and conscientiously built up over more than forty years. ITN decided it had no choice but to reject the allegations and fight to set the record straight.

  Through its lawyers ITN managed to get hold of a pre-publication copy of the magazine from the BBC, which had been contacted by Deichmann and offered a copy of ITN’s rushes. There they read that Fikret Alić’s picture, which had ‘for many … become a symbol of the horrors of the Bosnian war’, was ‘misleading’. Deichmann’s article went on to say that the inmates at Trnopolje ‘were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence’ because it wasn’t surrounding the camp at all. ‘Trnopolje camp … was not a prison, and certainly not a “concentration camp”, but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished.’74

  ITN discovered that the BBC’s media correspondent, Nick Higham, was already working on the story, and they suspected that he was taking a perspective that LM’s allegations might just be true. ITN’s editor-in-chief, Richard Tait, who had been the editor of Channel 4 News when Ian Williams’s story had originally been broadcast, interviewed all of the people involved in bringing the reports back from Bosnia, viewed the broadcast items and the rushes and researched LM’s background and motives. He concluded that it was clear that LM’s story ‘was a wicked lie from a weird fringe organisation with a track record of supporting the Bosnian Serbs and of vilifying the previous reporting of the camps by Roy Gutman’. He decided that ‘we [ITN] had to defend ourselves and our teams’.75

  At that stage there was more than just professional pride at stake. LM magazine had been in touch not only with the BBC but ITN’s customers, like CNN, who had transmitted the original stories around the world. Understandably CNN told ITN of their concerns. As Richard Tait was ‘fielding calls from ITN’s customers and friends’ he got wind that the BBC and a number of newspapers were planning imminent coverage of the allegations.

  I had been the editor-in-chief of ITN who approved the transmission of the original reports. Now, having been promoted to chief executive of the company, I supported the new editor-in-chief’s recommendation that ITN should be prepared to take legal action. It was to prove a controversial decision. On 24 January ITN sent a ‘letter before action’ telling LM that the story was untrue and that they should withdraw it and apologise.

  However, according to Tait, ‘LM continued its campaign of vilification’ and the company had to reassure its customers (ITV and Channel 4), its main regulator (the Independent Television Commission, later absorbed into Ofcom), and those that had given it awards (BAFTA and the RTS), that the allegations were completely unfounded. Meanwhile, the editor of LM, Mick Hume, called on ITN’s awards to be withdrawn and made claims that the BBC and The Times thought LM had a great story on its hands.

  Writ

  In the light of these developments ITN decided that it had no alternative other than to issue a writ for libel, which it did on 31 January 1997. However, the magazine continued to attack. On 10 February it demanded that RTS, BAFTA, Broadcast and two international awards bodies should strip ITN of its prizes.

  Mick Hume was described by BBC reporter Martin Bell as ‘a professional contrarian’,76and, according to The Guardian’s Luke Harding, the magazine’s supporters were a ‘surprisingly soigné army of students and media studies lecturers’ who appeared undeterred by the writs that were flying around, and were ‘turning the issue into a wider ideological crusade’.77 In an article Harding said a Living Marxism fundraising event in March 1997 heard from ‘a heavily-accented Serbian’ speaker who ‘announced blithely from the audience: “We have investigated the question of rape. There have only been eight documented cases in the former Yugoslavia.”’

  Harding wondered why ‘a small left-wing revolutionary group, whose cadres appear to come largely from the former polytechnic sector’ was ‘making common cause with a bunch of unreconstructed Serbian nationalists’. He said LM argued that the causes of the Bosnian civil war lay not in ‘resurgent Balkan nationalism’ but in the Western powers’ self-interest.78 The magazine was also against gun control.79

  In response Hume wrote to The Guardian declaring that ‘Luke Harding doesn’t like Living Marxism, me or Thomas Deichmann. But it might have been more useful for your readers if he had bothered to deal with the actual evidence that Deichmann has presented … Instead, on this central issue, there is a resounding silence.’80

  At various times the magazine’s supporters included the former Conservative MP George Walden, who had written ‘an article praising LM in the London Evening Standard’, and its advertisements included ‘admiring quotes from Fay Weldon and J. G. Ballard’.81

  But in an article headlined ‘I Stand by My Story’ Ed Vulliamy vigorously rejected Deichmann’s arguments. He wrote, ‘I was interviewing Fikret Alić while he was filmed. He had arrived from another camp, Keraterm, where he had witnessed the massacre of 200 prisoners in a single night – a crime confirmed by subsequent investigations.’ He rejected Deichmann’s claim ‘that ITN “cooked” the picture, eager to show Alic behind the fence to give the impression that he was a captive’ because they had been under pressure to come back with a concentration camps story. In his view Deichmann’s contention was ‘poison in the water supply of history, contaminating the reservoir of truth’.82 But it went deeper than what might have been dismissed as personal pride. Vulliamy continued, ‘One of the many things that this poison does is to very seriously defame ITN, The Guardian (for whom I wrote the story), Penny, Ian, the crew and myself.’ However, Deichmann’s article also suggested that Vulliamy ‘wilfully misled The Hague war crimes tribunal by bringing our alleged conspiracy into my evidence’.

  Vulliamy noted in passing another possible dimension – that it was ‘especially scandalous since the [LM] article emerges just as the judges in … the trial of Duško Tadić … are d
ue to give their verdict’. Vulliamy then reminded readers that ‘unsurprisingly’ Deichmann had been one of Tadić’s defence witnesses.

  In the meantime, ITN had launched an action as well against Two-Ten Communications, which was owned by the Press Association. In the High Court on 17 April 1997 the company apologised through its solicitor, Karen Mason, and said that it distributed press releases supplied by its clients without making any editorial input or amendment. ITN accepted the apology.83

  As to its dispute with LM itself, ITN felt it had to take the case to trial. But by issuing a writ for libel the company committed itself to a court hearing unless LM apologised. ITN could hardly drop the action without receiving an apology and an admission of fault on LM’s part because doing this would have implied to the outside world that there must have been a germ of truth in the allegations.

  ITN concluded that LM did not have any evidence to back up its allegations and hoped for an out-of-court settlement, which would have saved everyone the expense of a full trial hearing. But LM’s editor and publishers declined to offer a full apology and retraction.

  However, it was becoming increasingly clear to ITN that, despite the lack of any evidence supporting LM’s allegations, the idea that there was something wrong with its story was being fairly widely discussed in journalistic and official circles. ITN’s chairman, Mark Wood, had had a meeting with BBC executives who told him of their presumption that there was something in the coverage that was faked. ITN also discovered that a senior UN official had spoken disparagingly of its reporting. Those undercurrents determined ITN’s course of action: if ITN’s good reputation was to be preserved it would be down to a libel jury to do it.