Talk:Trnopolje camp: Difference between revisions

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There has been a lot of contention in recent years about reports from Trnopolje in 1992. The reports, for which ITN's Penny Marshall won a prestigious award, may have been deliberately fraudulent. The British journal LM published an article by the German writer Thomas Deichman in which he made a very convincing argument that the death camp images were fakes, and a video is now available for purchase which uses footage from a Serb television crew shadowing Marshall's to demonstrate how it was done.

More information is available at the following links (working as of March 6, 2006):

I believe that inserting some of this information may be warranted, and also changing the caption of the featured photo on this entry, as it appears to feature subject matter in contention.

22:54, 6 March 2006 (UTC) Tskorick

Regarding the video, now I understand how revisionism and denial machinary is financed. There is a ton of evidence that can shame this garbage back to its rat hole from which it came. However, I am OK with noting that this kind of propaganda exists so some sort of aknowledgement may be added to the article. --Dado 01:23, 7 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

But before you make any changes I would suggest to check your sources. “Living Marxism” site has been sued and convicted of libel by ITN for disputing the image and report that accompanied it. At least 3 out of 5 links that you provided are basing their stories on same premises. Inclusion of this information may be libelous to Wikipedia as well. Bear it in mind as(if) you consider your(to) edit

Quote: … while researching for the War Crimes trial on the Bosnian war, a German journalist, Thomas Deichmann, discovered that the barbed wire in the photograph was attached to the poles from the inside. He then argued in an article in Living Marxism in 1997 that the Muslims were not standing behind a fence but in front of one-that Trnopolje was not a prison or concentration camp but a refuge camp that the Muslims themselves created. ITN responded with (and won) a libel suit against Living Marxism. According to the courts, the photograph was incontestable evidence of concentration camps in Europe. [1] --Dado 01:49, 7 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's possible that the video provides more information that just the article -- I'll try to find a copy for review. Timmay 19:29, 7 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In light of comments above and regarding the addition:

"[ITN]'s August 1992 coverage of Trnopolje has been subject to considerable scrutiny by independent media observers in Europe and the United States."

Provide sources on which independent medias, other than nationalist medias, have scrutinized the issue

"Allegations have been made that the infamous video-still of Fikret Alic (shown above) was misrepresented as evidence of deliberate starvation by the Bosnain Serbs. Extant video evidence of the ITN film crew in action includes an explanation by a fellow English-speaking refugee, Mehmet, that Alic had some form of long-standing deformity. "

What deformity?? Provide evidence. There were dozens of detainees who looked even worse than Alic.

"The video evidence also shows that the reporters were inside a barbed-wire and chicken-mesh enclosed maintenace yard (i.e. the detainees were not enclosed in barbed wire). "

Provide evidence.

"Some critics believe that ITN and the other Western journalists present were manufacturing evidence of Serb attrocities to back the positions their respective news organisations had already taken."

Yes, and same were sued by ITN and rulled against by the court.

Edits, to say the least lack credibility and commonly accepted sources. Reverting for now.--Dado 01:30, 14 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to agree at this point. The video casts some doubt on certain aspects of ITN's story, but not to the extent represented in the article. I think that it would, however, be appropriate to add a mention of the fact that there is controversy regarding ITN's story on the camp, but then again I can't imagine a Western opinion on this war that wouldn't be contested by some side. Timmay 18:28, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Make a suggestion here and we can work from there. --Dado 05:21, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

According to subsequent testimony from witnesses, Trnopolje was a minimal-security staging area for the forcible deportation of non-Serbs from the Prijedor area, and detainees were fed only sporadically, but were allowed to forage for food outside the detention area's perimeter (http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/kvo-ai001026e.htm), which explains the widely varying nourishment condition of the inmates in the video that I've just finished watching for the third time. There were some reported killings from the camp, but far more reported incidents of systematic rape of female detainees. I believe the Deichmann article should be referenced as a footnote with a link to the ITN libel lawsuit results, but it doesn't belong in the main article body as the ITN story probably wasn't a deliberate fraud.

What do you mean it wasn't a deliberate fraud? There was clearly a sutained effort to give a false impression of a Nazi-style death camp, which was clearly not the case here. The detainees were not even being incarcerated.

Timmay 21:52, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I generally agree with you. One element that may become problematic is that there is a comparison between rapes and murders where one is overstating another. I would keep them separate. According to ICTY there were about 300 killed at Trnopolje. Personally I don't think it is a small number but for ICTY it was small enough to reduce the indictment against one of the accused by eliminating the charge of genocide. Perhaps we can add this:

"According to subsequent testimony from witnesses,compared to other detention camps in the region, Trnopolje was a relatively minimal-security staging area for the forcible deportation of non-Serbs from the Prijedor area, and detainees were fed only sporadically, but were allowed to forage for food outside the detention area's perimeter (http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/kvo-ai001026e.htm), which explains the widely varying nourishment condition of the inmates. There were about 300 reported killings in the camp, and far more reported incidents of systematic rape of female detainees."--Dado 22:21, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The ICTY is hardly a non-partisan bastion of the truth here. The ICTY rules allowed the prosecution to introduce hearsay evidence, leaving the defence teams with very limited opportunity to cross-examine witnesses.

That is thorough and concise, I'm on board. Timmay 00:33, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The video is actually downloadable here http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/judgement.rm

The nutritionally deprived ie very emaciated status of some of the inmates at Trnopolje was also due to their recent arrival from Omarska with its starvation regime (eg Fikret Alic). --Opbeith 17:31, 26 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Barbed wire thing

Um, didn't Living Marxism lost a case after "The picture that fooled the world"? So much they had to close their paper? --HanzoHattori 16:57, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

They lost the case because they couldn't prove ITN intended to fool people. As Mick Hume, editor of LM, writes: Perhaps the most surreal thing of all was that we lost the case, even though the central fact in Thomas Deichmann's article, 'The picture that fooled the world' - that the barbed-wire fence at Trnopolje surrounded the ITN journalists - was never seriously questioned. Indeed, Gavin Millar did such an impressive job of proving it through cross-examination that Justice Morland had to concede in his summing up, 'Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their TV teams were mistaken in thinking they were not enclosed by the old barbed-wire fence', before adding in his even-handed way, 'but does it matter?'.

As defendants under England's repugnant libel laws, we were deemed guilty unless we could prove our innocence not only by proving the actual facts in the LM article, but by justifying an implicit meaning that a reader might take from it. Summing up, the judge asked the jury to consider one question: 'Have the defendants established that Penny Marshall and Ian Williams had compiled television footage which deliberately misrepresented an emaciated Bosnian Muslim, Fikret Alic, as being caged behind a barbed-wire fence at the Serbian-run Trnopolje camp on 5 August 1992 by the selective use of videotape shots of him?' With the judge repeatedly emphasising the word 'deliberately', which never actually appeared in the article, we were being asked to prove not only what the ITN journalists did in 1992, but what was going on in their heads at the time. It is difficult to see how that could have been achieved without the aid of a time machine and a mind reader. The law demanded that we prove the unprovable. It was no real surprise when the jury decided, after four hours of deliberation, that we had failed to do so. [2]

What ever else may be said about Trnopolje, saying that the camp was surrounded by barbed wire is just blantantly false. Enden 22:45, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The question was whether the nature of the enclosure was that significant when the prisoners were already under threat from the intimidatory and intermittently murderous violence of the camp regime and the prospect of being killed if they ventured outside the camp into the area from which the non-Serb population was being cleansed. The evidence that Idris Merdzanic gave was so strong that LM's lawyers chose not to cross examine him. So yes - the physical nature of the enclosure did not matter. Fikret Alic, who had been starved and beaten in Omarska, from which he had just been transferred, was not the only emaciated detainee, as anyone who has seen Ron Havib's photographs is aware. As I understand it after the British journalists left Alic's life was saved by his brothers who hid him when other prisoners who had spoken to the journalists were killed. Alic has since thanked penny Marshall and Ian Williams because he believes that it was thanks to their report drawing the attention of the international public to what was going on in the Prijedor concentration camps that his life was saved. --Opbeith 16:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone who's interested in an analysis that's more respectful of the truth and more humane than the emperors-clothes version of the ITN-LM dispute would find it useful to read Prof. David Campbell's "Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia - the case of ITN versus Living Marxism"[3]. A search on "Living Marxism" "Spiked Online" and "Revolutionary Communist Party" will provide more information about where the controversy about Trnopolje and Omarska comes from. --Opbeith 17:25, 26 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 51: / Line 51: @@
 According to subsequent testimony from witnesses, Trnopolje was a minimal-security staging area for the forcible deportation of non-Serbs from the Prijedor area, and detainees were fed only sporadically, but were allowed to forage for food outside the detention area's perimeter (http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/kvo-ai001026e.htm), which explains the widely varying nourishment condition of the inmates in the video that I've just finished watching for the third time.  There were some reported killings from the camp, but far more reported incidents of systematic rape of female detainees.  I believe the Deichmann article should be referenced as a footnote with a link to the ITN libel lawsuit results, but it doesn't belong in the main article body as the ITN story probably wasn't a deliberate fraud.
+::What do you mean it wasn't a deliberate fraud? There was clearly a sutained effort to give a false impression of a Nazi-style death camp, which was clearly not the case here. The detainees were not even being incarcerated.
 [[User:Tskorick|Timmay]] 21:52, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
@@ Line 58: / Line 60: @@
 "According to subsequent testimony from witnesses,compared to other detention camps in the region, Trnopolje was a relatively minimal-security staging area for the forcible deportation of non-Serbs from the Prijedor area, and detainees were fed only sporadically, but were allowed to forage for food outside the detention area's perimeter (http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/kvo-ai001026e.htm), which explains the widely varying nourishment condition of the inmates.  There were about 300 reported killings in the camp, and far more reported incidents of systematic rape of female detainees."--[[User:Dado|Dado]] 22:21, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
+::The ICTY is hardly a non-partisan bastion of the truth here. The ICTY rules allowed the prosecution to introduce hearsay evidence, leaving the defence teams with very limited opportunity to cross-examine witnesses.
 That is thorough and concise, I'm on board.