Resources

A reader, Paul Bogdanor (he is the son of the well-known constitutional expert Professor Vernon Bogdanor), has sent me a couple of documents that are well worth consulting.

One is a two-part study from the Journal of Human Rights of the libellous claims of Living Marxism (which is, owing to that libel, no longer living) about the supposedly faked pictures of the Serb-run Trnopolje camp. Part one can be read here, and part two here. The abstract of the article reads:

Among the many images of atrocity that emerged from the Bosnian War, the picture of Fikret Alic and others imprisoned at the Trnopolje camp in the Prijedor region stands out. Taken from a 1992 British television report that detailed the role of camps such as Omarska and Trnopolje in the ethnic cleansing strategy of the Bosnian Serb authorities, the image of Alic has become the focal point of a controversy about how the Bosnian camps were represented, and the political impact and purpose of those representations. Resulting in a legal clash between Independent Television News (ITN) and Living Marxism (LM) magazine, this controversy is the subject of this two-part article. In Part 1, the allegations concerning the filming of the Trnopolje inmates is considered in detail. In Part 2 ... the argument moves beyond the specifics of the case and the camp to an exploration of the historical, political and visual context in which those specificities are located. This involves understanding the significance of the camps in terms of the Bosnian War and the history of the concentration camps, as well as discussing the question of photography and the Holocaust to question how particular atrocities are represented. The articles conclude with the issue of intellectual responsibility and the politics of critique in cases such as these.

The article is pretty much the last word on this vexed subject of intellectual responsibility and war crimes.

Paul has also written a useful document assessing just some of the curious claims of Noam Chomsky, available here. Some of the claims refuted are bizarre and tendentious interpretations, and some outright falsehoods, but what comes out clearly is that Chomsky is not a reliable source in either facts or interpretation of post-war history and international relations.