Sara Villiers questions the objectivity of a controversial exhibition
showing atrocities against the Serbs
THIS week a makeshift space, the Converse Gallery in King Street,
Glasgow, is playing host to ''A Selective Silence: An Exhibition of
Censorship and Bias in the Yugoslav War.'' Consisting of about 20
photographs, the small display has courted considerable controversy. The
organisers claim that the exhibition, depicting atrocities against
Serbs, has been ''banned by the British Government.''
The exhibition has already been displayed in London and after Glasgow
it goes to Edinburgh's 369 Gallery on April 2, then the European
mainland. In fact it is only ''illegal'' because it is part of a
Belgrade Exhibition, ''Genocide against the Serbs,'' and trade with the
capital of Serbia is prohibited under UN Resolution 757. Whatever
statements are implicit in the pictures and presentation, there is no
question of them being censored.
Organised by Bojana Isakovic, a Serb from the Serbian Academy of
Sciences, the photos feature the appalling war crimes committed by the
Croatian Ustashe during the Second World War and more contemporary
horrors. These are harrowing images which deserve an audience.
They humanise statistics by putting names, family backgrounds and
circumstances to burned, blooded, and dismembered lumps: a Serbian girl,
suffocated in PVC then dumped in a mechanics pit; the bloodstained body
of a threeyearold shot dead; a Muslim soldier holding the severed head
of a Chetnik, providing an eerie parallel with photos showing the
Ustashe with similar macabre trophies.
The photos are not unique. Such pictures flew around the world at the
start of the Balkan Wars. They are easy to get; very little action in
them and none of hitherto unknown crimes.
''Censorship,'' ''Bias,'' and ''Banned'' are emotive words. The
pictures pertain to truth, but aren't most lies told by omission? The
organisers claim that Serbia (they do not distinguish between the
deceived Serb in the Balkan street, who has suffered tremendously and
malevolent rulers and army who hold sway in the region) has been
scapegoated by the British Government and press.
Kirk Williams, one of the organisers of the Converse exhibition,
claims the attention is not proSerbian; the showing of only Serb victims
is an objective exercise, compensating for the demonisation of Serbs by
a blinkered Western media bent on some illdefined censorship conspiracy.
Do they imagine that editors/journalists are having daily consultations
with shady Foreign Office figures? Are they unaware of the close
historical ties which predispose Britain (and France and Russia) towards
the Serbs?
What is particularly ironic is the socalled stance against
''censorship'' from a group who are sympathetic to the Serbian
Government. Under the guidance of the Serb dictator, Slobodan Milosevic,
a man whose violence and intelligence are exceptional, UN peacekeeping
forces are pictured on state television, which he personally oversees
each day, with commentary stating that the UN is fighting alongside the
Muslims who are striving to establish a fundamentalist state.
Of course this exhibition should be allowed but the ''ban'' is not
controversial. Despite the attentionseeking pleas for confrontation, the
Department of Trade and Industry has yet to swoop down, Big Brother
style. What is contentious is the assumption that the public is so
stupid that we don't know there are innocent victims on both sides of
this, and every, conflict.
Nor is it wise to rely on our faith in coincidence; Milosevic was an
apparatchik, who has, since he came to power in 1987, continued in
preGlasnost fashion, filling his government benches with cronies from
the Stambolic and Tito regimes. The exhibition is organised by the
hideously unfashionable and anachronistic Revolutionary Communist Party
who are, of course, free thinkers fighting bias ...
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