The Curse of the Unshockable World

In the photograph, a man kneels on the floor of a brightly lit shopping centre, blood on his hand and running down the side of his face, congealed in his matted hair, whilst another man reaches down a hand to help.  Two people were killed and several more injured in the rocket attack on a Donetsk shopping centre in Ukraine last October.  In another picture, this time from Syria and taken earlier this month, a man carries an bloody-faced, injured and wailing child out of dusty ruins following a government airstrike on Aleppo.

Once upon a time we would have been shocked by images like these.  Now they tend to pass us by, as we flip through our papers, at best raising a sigh and a weary shake of the head as we bypass them to gorge on stories of the latest MP to fall from grace.  We read about another gruesome video posted by ISIS, despair at how it will all end and skip to the weekend football results.

Whilst I was researching the portrayal of violence in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, I trawled through reels and reels of newspaper footage from the early 1990s on the noisy old microfiche reader in the University library.  At least one person was killed virtually every day during the 1992-95 siege of the Bosnian capital, but the newspapers covered only the most dramatic events - the breadline massacre, killing 16, in May 1992, right at the beginning of the war; the February 1994 shell in the Markale marketplace, killing 68, the images of which I can never get out of my mind; and the second shell which landed there in August 1995, killing 37 and in part triggering the western response that would finally end the war.  But despite the best efforts of the journalists based in Sarajevo, surrounded by these horrors, the everyday deaths did not make the news outside of Bosnia.

The Bosnian War, and Sarajevo in particular, was an unprecedented situation for war reporting.  Since UN control of Sarajevo’s airport meant that journalists could fly in and out of the city with relative ease, correspondents were able to feed out a constant stream of images of the atrocities, using the most modern of satellite technology.  Other areas of the country did not receive such close attention, but certain horrifying images, such as those of the Omarska concentration camp, uncovered by ITN in August 1992, did reach the international news from time to time.

Despite heavy coverage of the war, it took three and a half years for any determined military intervention to arrive in Bosnia.  The Syrian conflict, which began in earnest in early 2011, is coming up on that dubious milestone.  The bad news for Ukraine is that their war has only been raging for just over a year.  The worse news is that it is increasingly difficult to find that one shocking image – that Markale Marketplace, or Napalmed child – that will prompt the world to declare enough is enough.  What could we be shown now that we have not seen before?

We have grown desensitised to images of war over the last few decades.  We are overexposed to them in video games and films, so that we forget what is real and what is fiction.  Events are captured on mobile phones and tweeted all over the world instantly.  We are overwhelmed with these images, so much so that we begin to feel that there are just too many wars and there is nothing to be done: the world is simply a terrible place.  It appears that war is the constant state of being in these far away countries of which we know little about.

And yet our war correspondents keep sending back these photographs and keep writing their articles; keep putting their lives in danger.  Some might argue that it’s exploitative to make a living recording the suffering of others, when journalists can fly in, take a few snaps, make an award-winning documentary, and fly back home to plaudits and safety.  Perhaps it is.  On the other hand, without these images, how would anyone ever know what was going on?  How would anyone ever be so sickened as to demand that it ends?

War correspondence as a craft grew alongside literacy rates in the 19^th century.  William Howard Russell, widely considered to be the founder of modern war correspondence, reported for the Times on the Crimean War of the 1850s.  His reports shocked Victorians reading it at home, as he exposed the British military’s blunders and the appalling conditions of the soldiers.  Although radio and early television were used, the reporting was often heavily censored, especially during the First World War, and the pen remained the most accurate source of information from frontlines around the world.  Bulky camera equipment meant that many of the cinema newsreels during the Second World War were stock footage narrated in the studio, often serving as little more than government propaganda films.

It was the Vietnam War that really changed the face of war reporting.  Dubbed the ‘television war’, the graphic, uncensored footage fed back to the American public on a nightly basis revealed the brutality of war in all its gory detail.  Roving reporters with portable camera equipment had unrestricted access to the war zone.  Iconic photographs, such as Eddie Adams’ of a Viet Cong being executed by a Southern Vietnamese General during the 1968 Tet Offensive, and later Nic Ut’s image of a young girl running from her Napalmed village in 1972, changed public perception of the war in the US.  Support for the war plummeted, a vocal and sizeable anti-war movement developed, and eventually the decade-long conflict ended in a messy and ignominious retreat for the US.

Bosnia was arguably the next big television war, but it was by no means the only conflict of the early 1990s.  The Rwandan civil war, which took place concurrently with the Bosnian war, received much less coverage.  This was undoubtedly in part due to the accessibility of Bosnia to journalists, but more importantly Rwanda was not a white, European country.  Bosnia’s familiarity to western eyes might have helped its cause a little; made those images just a little more shocking.  Then-Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, caused an uproar when he visited Sarajevo in December 1992 and told the besieged population: “You have a situation which is better than ten other places all over the world. I can give you a list of ten places where you have more problems than in Sarajevo.”  This, he explained, was why the UN was not going to intervene in Bosnia's fight.

The sentiment that are just too many wars to do anything about has endured.  However many images are fed to us, we will not be moved because we have relentless evidence that war is inevitable; because we have seen these photographs of suffering too many times before.  There is nothing we can do to help and we’ve got problems of our own.  The sad fact is that Putin and Assad, and all the others, know this too.