United Nations Television in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Project Description

This network brings together historians, film scholars, museum professionals, migration researchers, peacebuilding experts, journalists, filmmakers, and survivors of displacement and genocide to re-examine the work of United Nations Television (UNTV) in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) during the Yugoslav Wars. The UNTV film unit, active in 1993-5, aimed to provide content for TV broadcasts to support UN peacekeeping operations in former Yugoslavia, and recorded more than 200 reports about conditions in front-line areas from which refugees had been displaced, plus 'video letters' in which refugees sent messages to separated family members. UNTV's collected films and papers (including these recordings, more than 2000 unedited rushes, and contextual documents such as administrative correspondence, newspaper clippings and interview transcripts) were saved from disposal by the UNTV series producer Roy Head as UN peacekeeping in BiH wound up. IWM acquired this collection audiovisual media, war and conflict, including the NATO Collection of more than 350 hours of film from the 1940s-90s and the British Army Film and Photographic Unit's 'dope sheets' from the Second World War.

The UNTV films differ from other broadcasters' footage because they were recorded to inform displaced survivors and formed part of UN humanitarian and peacekeeping strategy. While the UNTV team viewed the videos as interventions made to further immediate UN objectives during the Bosnian crisis, they have since acquired unforeseen documentary functions of interest to filmmakers, museum curators, and survivors. This network will be investigating UNTV's role in peacebuilding and the meanings of its films today at a time when historians, heritage professionals and refugee support charities are using evidence from 20th-century European refugee history to inform public understandings of migration in the present, including IWM's own Displacement public programming season in 2020. This reassessment takes place after two decades of political and economic stagnation in BiH, which call the record of international peacebuilding there – always overshadowed by the UN's wartime failure to protect civilians from genocide - into question even further. The prominence of EU border and refugee resettlement policies as a factor in today's refugee crisis, which have readily been viewed through postcolonial lenses, meanwhile invites scholars to link this earlier European refugee crisis into the same global framework. In these regards, the under-used UNTV collection offers a valuable prism through which to explore questions about media, peacebuilding, and the aesthetics of testimony and memory.

The network's findings will feed into IWM's Displacement season. A dedicated microsite on the IWM website will host blog posts and videos based on workshop contributions, and public events at IWM London and in Hull will link into the 25th anniversaries of the Srebrenica genocide and the end of the Croatian/Bosnian wars. Together, participants will explore what role the UNTV films could play in peacebuilding and what lenses audiences view them through today.