Photojournalism and War Crimes: Ethical and Humanistic Limits

Abstract

While traveling with the war criminal Arkan and his militia in 1992 in Bosnia, the photojournalist, Ron Haviv, took numerous award winning photos of the bodies of murdered civilians and civilians about to be executed. One photo shows a young man pleading for his life to the camera. While Arkan’s militia ordered Haviv not to take these photographs, Haviv nevertheless did. When Haviv’s images were presented at the Hague to indict Arkan, Arkan put Haviv on a death list. It is unrealistic, given Haviv’s powerlessness in this situation, to expect him to intervene on behalf of the civilians being executed. Moreover, Haviv was Arkan’s guest. Still, it is important to ask to what degree Haviv’s presence contributed to the war crimes that were occurring? How did a person being executed feel about being photographed before being executed? Was Haviv an unwitting accomplice to the pogrom? Was his camera a mirror in which war criminals promoted their terrifying mages to the world and the victims’ community? Is there a degree of necrophilia in war photojournalism? Genocide survivors in Rwanda say it is morally unconscionable to take a picture of a genocide victim during a genocide; their reflections are extrapolated to the subjects Haviv photographed in order to recover the victims’ perspective