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| Revulsion and pathos: Covering the war in Afghanistan |
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Revulsion and pathos: Covering the war in Afghanistan by Mark Dunden
Since September 13, clusters of postage-stamp portraits of those who died on September 11 have been published in the pages of The New York Times, as the paper gives little obituaries to each person who lost her or his life. They extend and magnify the tradition of pathos and sentiment in memorial portraiture, help focus hatred on the prime suspect behind the attacks--Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida regime--and they serve as a daily reminder to American citizens of the necessity of George W. Bush's escalating war on terrorism. As the world's greatest military power bombs one of the world's poorest nations, however, war seems a somewhat inappropriate description of what is going on, since war implies a dual relation between adversaries. Like the Gulf War it is more an act of domination than war. (1) Media coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan, both in the United States and in Britain, could not have been more affected by the particularly charged context of feeling in the West after the events of September 11, when atrocity and terrorism was brought suddenly and shockingly home to the world's greatest power. In beginning to understand the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (WTC) towers that triggered the military response, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, we should have the courage to see the attacks not as a threat from a "purely evil Outside" but recognize in this Outside "a distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the 'civilized' West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the 'barbarian' Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo." (2) The relentless and repeated video and still images of the exploding WTC towers, the succession of portraits and stories about those who died, the pictures of Ground Zero, have been followed by a generally controlled and limited photographic coverage of the war in Afghanistan. While abject images of dead Taliban in the British press disrupted any idea that this is a clean and sanitized war, there is much that has remained absent or underrepresented after over four months of bombing. Portraits of Osama bin Laden have been a recurrent subject and focus of revulsion in the British press, from his appearance on a mock "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster in response to Bush's frontier-style ultimatum to the blurry stills from the video showing him talking to an unidentified Saudi sheikh about how he masterminded the attacks of September 11. The most explicit headline, in relation to a still from this video that appears to show him grinning at the camera, was The Mirror's "YOU GLOATING BASTARD," December [4. Following the Pentagon's release of his most recent video broadcast, a subsequent article in The Times, December 28, compared the appearance, gestures and posture of bin Laden with earlier pictures and video footage of him. He is said to look tired and undernourished in the video, harrowed by eight weeks of bombing. That he still remained uncaptured at that point, his whereabouts unknown, is never discussed. Visible evidence of his change in bearing is sufficient for the writer to suggest that the B52 bombers have "knocked the stuffing out of bin Laden, stripped him of his arrogance." Arrogant, smiling, taunting, gloating, even gaunt, bin Laden's face in the media provides the focus for public contempt and helps maintain the illusory sense of a simplistic binary between a fundamental "evil outside" and a "just" and "civilized" West. But as the war continues and the longer he appears to have escaped and eluded the United States military forces, his face can also begin to serve as a reminder of the failure of one of the main objectives of the bombing of Afghanistan. While initial coverage of the war was controlled and limited--night images of explosions over Kabul, a fascination with the weapons and military aircraft used, aerial "before and "after" images intended to confirm "surgical" strikes--as early as the second week into the conflict, The Mirror showed us the first faces of children wounded by a U.S. bombing blunder. On October 25 The Independent ran the critical headline, "Families blown apart, infants dying. The terrible images of this 'just war'." Underneath this visceral heading, the front-page picture showed us an injured baby lying on a hospital bed in Ouetta, Pakistan, her face badly cut after a U.S. attack on a village near Kandahar. On October 29, The Mirror rather defiantly gave the lead article and front page to its former foreign correspondent, John Pilger. His denouncement of the war as a fraud was accompanied by shocking pictures of dead children killed by U.S. bombs and the Christians massacred by fanatics at a church in Pakistan. If such images of injured or dead children began to raise serious doubts about the justness of this war, the excesses of other newspapers' cover stories countered them. The Sunday tabloid, The News of the World, November 4, for example, provided a riposte to the war's detractors in devoting a front-page image to a little boy holding an urn that contained ash from Ground Zero--all he has to remember his British father by, who was killed on September 11. The bewildered expression on this child's face should remind us all, said the newspaper's headline, "Why We're at War." On November The Mirror drew analogies with Vietnam as the U.S. started to use 852 bombers. Beneath the heading "A War Like No Other?" an image showing the smoke clouds from bombs dropped on Tutakhan Hill in Afghanistan is paired with an archival photo from Vietnam in 1965 of bombing in ladring Valley. In contrast, while The Times ran the same image of the bombing of Afghanistan, the onslaught being pictured seemed to be justified and offset by being spread beneath a first-hand account of an Afghan Alliance soldier's brutal treatment under the Taliban--"Clamps on my hand and foot, they began to cut." Pictures showing clouds of smoke rising from distant hills, sometimes witnessed by Northern Alliance soldiers in the foreground, provided a recurrent representation of this stage of the conflict. It was only during the "liberation of Kabul, when we encountered pictures that brought us closer to what was happening on the ground, that the coverage began to bring out something of the war's full horror and atrocity. Two of the tabloids, The Mirror and The Daily Mail, November 14, devoted their front pages to the same graphic color image showing Northern Alliance soldiers committing an atrocity--evidencing the merciless execution of a Taliban fighter, stripped of his trousers and his dignity. Page three of both newspapers showed a similar sequence of four pictures, leading up to the murder shown on the front page. Such images are of interest on a number of counts. They exemplify the classic war photographer's dictum--Robert Capa's, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." (3) The witnessed execution is also fraught with the usual problem concerning the photographers non-intervention. When the BBC broadcast its coverage of the violence of the "liberation," the camera's presence was, according to reporter John Simpson, preventing executions. In the photo sequence what is shocking is not just the event but the photographer's proximity to that atrocity, brought out in the most painful picture of the sequence, captured when the photographer looks over the shoulders of troops to record the captive's face--gripped with fear as he stares at his assailants. While such pictures bring us close, such "mediaeval savagery" (as one reporter described it) serves to confirm these images' distance from us, reiterating the idea that what we are witnessing is an uncivilized barbaric world, far from the civilized Wes t's. Usually prose tends to be more graphic in its detailing of the horrors of war photography. Here, however, both reporters remain rather elliptic and vague about what is shown us in the pictures, neither stating the fact that the Taliban has been castrated, evidenced by his bloodied trousers. Such pictures did not appear in the broadsheets, where a certain politeness and decorum concerning images of the war was maintained. In accordance with The Daily Telegraph's consistently sanitized images, its cover showed a scene of jubilation as crowds liberated from the Taliban" ran toward the camera as they escorted the Northern Alliance troops entering Kabul. As in The Guardian, we had to look to the inside pages for a photograph of the vanquished: both used the same striking color photograph of the body of a Taliban soldier. It is a low-angle shot in the landscape format that is monumentalizing the fallen soldier: the outline of his body is aligned with the distant hills behind and the color of his clothing echoes the blue of the sky above. There is a disquieting aesthetic beauty and grace found in the war dead. The picture speaks of the artistic ambitions of the photojournalist. It is an iconic idealizing image that dresses up the fallen enemy in an aesthetic of painting--one could liken him to one of Manet's fallen matadors--which inculcates a distance from the brutal horror, evidenced in the sequence of photos which ran in the two tabloids. Of course the tabloid pictures serve the sensationalizing tendency of such newspapers; such explicit and shocking images of horror sells. Yet such pictures do at least raise questions about the brutal nature of this and every war. On November 29 both The Independent and The Guardian featured graphic color images of the aftermath of mass killings of Taliban prisoners by U.S. warplanes and Northern Alliance fighters at a fortress outside the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif. One single photograph on the front page of The Guardian, above the heading "Allies Justify Mass Killing," showed an alliance soldier collecting boots from the dead Taliban littering the ground. A cropped version of this picture also appeared on the cover of The Independent, together with two other images, one showing graphic evidence of the dead huddled in a shallow grave, and the other, a detail of one alliance fighter trying to wrench the gold teeth out of the mouth of a dead Taliban. This was the first time reporters were allowed into the fortress where hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war had been killed over three days in a battle with Afghan soldiers and U.S. and British special forces. The atrocity images on the cover were further compounded by a damning polemic in The Independent's comment pages, by Robert Fisk, arguing that with the strategic assistance of the U.S. Air Force, a war crime was committed with the killing of prisoners near Mazar-i-Sharif. Bush's "war of civilization" was blatantly ignoring its own "rule of law" by condoning and participating in what can only be described as the execution of prisoners of war. On December to a reporters face was on the front cover of The Independent. The face of the journalist, Robert Fisk, bandaged and bleeding from a head wound, anxiously looked back at the camera, It is unusual for the press to give such space to the portrait of a reporter. On one hand it could be seen to make a hero of the journalist and thereby index the vulnerability and dangers associated with reporting this conflict, one in which as many journalists have been killed as Western combatants. (4) The report accompanying it detailed how Fisk was beaten up by refugees on the Afghan border. The headline quotes Fisk in a passive voice, "My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war." When thousands of innocent civilians are dying under U.S. air strikes, Fisk says he can understand his attackers' motives. It is through the reporter's injured face, we are left to begin to identify with the mounting pain and suffering of the Afghan peoples. After over four months of bombing, more Afghan non-combatants are now reported killed in the war than those who died in the WTC attack. (5) The World Food Program estimates that between 3 and 4 million people have fled their homes as a result of the bombings. (6) A recent Guardian story, now no longer front-page news, speaks about the disastrous humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan: "too Afghans perish daily as strained aid network collapses under flood of new arrivals." (7) The faces of suffering and pain so visible in the British press coverage of the war in Kosovo have in this war been mostly absent. With the war in Kosovo, the plight of the Kosovan refugees served to bolster and support Nato's bombardment of Yugoslavia. (8) The faces of the suffering Afghan peoples would not only serve to query the justness of this current war, but compete with the empathetic pull of the portraits of those who died on September 11. As a result there remains an inadequate humane perspective in records of this war in Afghanis tan. And much as one can understand the use of abject images evidencing Northern Alliance atrocities, they ultimately are still viewed at a distance, confirming the brutality of troops that, while they might in this warm temporarily be allied with the West, are essentially meant to be seen as "mediaeval," separate and other. As images of revulsion they unfortunately feed into the rhetoric behind this war, which draws a line between the civilized and the barbaric, good and evil. In this respect the media use of the battered face of the journalist becomes a more powerful and effective image in upsetting such a binary, as empathy for the injured reporter leads us into an understanding of his attackers. NOTES (1.) Both Jean Baudrillard and Noam chomsky questioned whether what took place in the Gulf in 1990-1991 was a war. See Paul Patton's Introduction to Jean Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did not Take Place (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). (2.) Slavoj Zizek, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" at www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/times/10gzizek.htm. (3.) Quoted in Fred Ritchin, In Our Own Image (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1990). p. 72. (4.) According to Madeleine Bunting's "A Fairy Tale at Christmas" In The Guardian, December 17, 2001. (5.) On December 6 one estimate of the civilians reported dead was put at 3,767. See the Web site www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm. (6.) See Madeleine Bunting's "A Fairy Tale at Christmas" in The Guardian, December 17, 2001. (7.) Doug McKinlay, The Guardian, January 3, 2002. (8.) See my "Balkan Image War" in Creative Camera (June/July, 1999), pp. 36-39. MARK DURDEN is reader in History and Theory of Photography at the University of Derby, England. He has published numerous articles on photography and recently co-edited the book Face On: Photography and Social Exchange (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000). |
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