Photography in the Docket, as Evidence

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On a cool spring day at the beginning of the Bosnian war in 1992, Ron Haviv watched Serbian paramilitary soldiers pull a middle-aged Muslim couple from their home in Bijeljina. Shots rang out, and although members of the Arkan Tigers militia had warned him not to take photographs, Mr. Haviv stepped behind a truck and squeezed off a few frames.

It wasn’t the first time he had witnessed an execution, but he had promised himself that if there was nothing he could do to stop it, he would never let another pass without at least getting visual evidence. The soldiers shot the woman as she knelt over her dying husband. They brought another woman out of the house and shot her, too.

As the soldiers â€" members of an elite unit led by the charismatic commander Zeljko Raznatovic, also known as Arkan â€" departed, Mr. Haviv took one more frame. The chilling image (Slide 1) of a soldier kicking one of the corpses still resonates two decades after it was made.

Ron Haviv/VII A Bosnian Muslim woman attended to her husband after he was shot in Bijeljina, Bosnia, by Arkan’s Tigers. She was shot moments later, as was her sister-in-law.

Mr. Haviv drove to the airport and shipped the photos to Paris, hoping his images would embolden the United Nations to intervene and stop another war in the former Yugoslavia, where the Croatian had war just ended. Many people did see the photo in Time magazine and other publications

But no one intervened. The killing continued.

“The photographs really didn’t have any of the effect that I had hoped they would,” said Mr. Haviv, who was put on a death list by Arkan. “I was hoping to prevent the war. And of course, there was no reaction. The war started, 100,000 to 200,000 people were killed on all sides and several million more became refugees - which led to the war in Kosovo.”

While the images did not stop the Bosnian ethnic cleansing, his photos have had another life: as evidence used by investigators and prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, where two weeks ago the image of the soldier kicking the bodies was presented in the trial of the former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic. Some images had been used to indict Arkan for war crimes before he was assassinated in 2000.

There is a certain satisfaction for Mr. Haviv. He allowed the International Criminal Tribunal to use any of his published photos as evidence and offered to verify that the captions were truthful and accurate. But, expecting to be asked to testify in the Arkan trial before his assassination, Mr. Haviv decided that he shouldn’t. He had no doubt that he had witnessed genocide, and he wanted to see justice served. But he didn’t think it was his place to testify.

“It was my job as a journalist and a photographer to document what I saw,” Mr. Haviv, 47, said. “I had those photographs published and the world saw what I had done. The work was enough to show the world what this ethnic cleansing actually looked like. “

Traditionally, photojournalists’ role is to document what they see, and rarely do they willingly participate in trials. Just being thought of as a potential witness in a war crimes trial would make it even more difficult to photograph conflict.

After covering the Liberian civil war, the photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington worked as an investigator for the United Nations Security Council’s Liberia Sanctions Committee. In a 2009 interview with Lens, he noted the quandary and questioned whether he was crossing a line.

“It was using my knowledge and the information that I amassed for something useful, so although I felt I was crossing the line it was done with the best interest at heart of Liberia,” he said.

When Mr. Haviv took the photographs in Bijeljina 21 years ago, he hoped for an immediate impact. It was, he acknowledges, naïve. But it was based on his own experience.

Mr. Haviv was covering the 1989 election in Panama when he made a dramatic, bloody image (below) of Guillermo Ford, a candidate for vice president, being attacked by paramilitary supporters of Gen. Manuel Noriega. President George Bush later singled it out during a national address on the United States invasion.

Ron Haviv/VII Vice President Guillermo Ford of Panama, left, fought off an attack by a paramilitary member of the Dignity Battalion in Panama City. Ford had called for the reinstatement of elections that were nullified by Gen. Manuel Noriega.

But Mr. Haviv has since discovered that photographs rarely have such a dramatic, easily identifiable effect. War, starvation and genocide still happen despite powerful images. And bearing witness to evil does not seem to necessarily prevent future evil. Still, he says, it is important for photojournalists to do their work even if they change only one person’s thinking.

“I’ve now documented three genocides â€" Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur â€" and I look back to the lessons of the Holocaust, which were ‘never again,’ ” he said. “Nobody should be able to say they didn’t know what was happening. What we do as photographers is to attempt to create a body of evidence to hold people accountable.”

To him, it is not just the soldier executing people or even his commander or the politician who gave the order who needs to be held accountable. It is the public too.

Ron Haviv/VII A Bosnian Serb reacted to the burning of her apartment in Grbavica, Bosnia. March 18, 1996.

Ron Haviv is a co-founder of the VII photo agency His book, “Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal” was published by TV Books/Umbrage in 2000.

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