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Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Thomas Keenan
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Extract

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (30)

Here in Sarajevo, hundreds of TV crews parade before our very eyes; dozens of foreign journalists, reporters, and writers. Everything is known here, right down to minutest details, and yet, nothing …

—Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger (qtd. in Dizdarevic 39)

With these epigraphs I aim to abbreviate a frequently cited “lesson of bosnia”——That a country was destroyed and a genocide happened, in the heart of Europe, on television, and what is known as the world or the West simply looked on and did nothing. Bosnians, said one to the American journalist David Rieff, “felt as you would feel if you were mugged in full view of a policeman and he did nothing to rescue you” (140). Or, as Rieff says with slightly more precision,

200,000 Bosnian Muslims died, in full view of the world's television cameras, and more than two million other people were forcibly displaced. A state formally recognized by the European Community and the United States […] and the United Nations […] was allowed to be destroyed. While it was being destroyed, UN military forces and officials looked on, offering “humanitarian” assistance and protesting […] that there was no will in the international community to do anything more. (23)

Type
Talks from the Convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States , January 2002 , pp. 104 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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