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 ...