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Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 4.2 (2004) 1-38



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Domesticating NATO's War in Kosovo/a

(In)Visible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism


In April 1999, American news media extensively reported on the NATO bombings in Serbia and Kosovo/a,1 a 78-day military effort led by the United States to force the regime of Slobodan Milosevic to end the persecution of the Albanians in the formerly autonomous region of Kosovo/a. Throughout the 1990s, news media reported on genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, including stories of rape, torture, concentration camps, and mass killings by Serbian forces primarily against Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, but also against Croatians, Slovenians, and others. In Kosovo/a, a campaign by Serbian and Yugoslav military, paramilitary, and government forces against ethnic Albanians (who made up 90 percent of the population in the province) began in 1998 and intensified through 1999. Human Rights Watch (2001) estimates as many as 850,000 were expelled during this period while several hundred thousand more were internally displaced. After the war, estimates ranged from two thousand to four thousand deaths. While reported rapes were low compared to Bosnia, most observers presume the actual number to be much higher. Statistics, even today, are hard to establish, in part because of exaggerated claims by NATO and NATO governments during the war, and in part because of Serbian and Yugoslav efforts to hide these crimes (Human Rights Watch 2001). [End Page 1]

Since most acts of torture and repression remained hidden from Western news cameras, photojournalists visualized the mounting crisis through pictures of fleeing refugees and crowded refugee camps. Prominent in this portrait of victimization were pictures of women with small children. For instance, the April 12 cover of Time shows a young woman in the foreground, close to the picture plane, walking toward the camera while staring blankly ahead of her (fig. 1). She wears a white headscarf that draws attention to her face. Her heavy coat emphasizes the cold weather made visible by the snow on the ground. The woman's light skin and contemporary clothing encourage a reading of her within a Western racial logic of whiteness. She looks tired and worried as she holds a baby nursing at her partially visible breast. Slightly out of focus, a line of refugees behind her contextualize her situation, but little is seen of the landscape and nothing else distracts the viewer's gaze from the woman. The photograph thus narrows the perspective on war to a racialized gender ideal of maternal suffering familiar to U.S. audiences. The headline on Time's April 12 cover, "Are Ground Troops the Answer?" assumes that the question is how, not whether, to rescue this "white" woman, the nursing baby, and, by extension, the other innocent victims of this war.

It is perhaps axiomatic to state that in the twentieth century visual reportage has played a crucial role in mediating audiences' knowledge about military conflicts. Critics of the 1991 Gulf War, for instance, argue that American news organizations readily accepted military censorship and willingly promoted the war.2 Photographs of U.S. military technology dominated the visual coverage, with few depictions of either Iraqi or American casualties, making this look like a "clean" war (Hallin 1994, 56). Likewise, news coverage of the NATO air strikes depended heavily on photo-reportage. Unlike the Gulf War, however, these pictures featured human casualties of war, including Kosovar refugee women holding small children and babies. Notably, media representations of Albanian Muslims, elsewhere categorized as non-Western people of color, are here (mis)represented as white victims to be rescued. This manipulation of racial categories in the American media, in turn, supported the U.S. government's militaristic foreign policies designed to aggressively maintain economic and political global dominance. When critically examining news coverage of war, we need to confront the often compelling arguments made about the political imperative of visibility. Photojournalists have long claimed that their photographs publicize conflicts that [End Page 2]


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