The Tapes of Srebrenica

In July 1995, a local TV station in Belgrade, Serbia (Studio B) aired a roughly-edited report celebrating the fall of the Srebrenica enclave in Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbian forces. The video material was recorded on an amateur camera by Serbian journalist Zoran Petrović, who gained privileged access to the organized exodus of the Muslim population, and the rounding up of men and boys who had tried to escape.

Several years later, Petrović licensed the footage to the BBC, who in turn handed the tape over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). However, significant portions of the tape that the BBC received had been blacked-out. In search of the missing images, the ICTY eventually obtained a copy of the report that was originally broadcast. Several shots in that version were missing from Petrović’s witness tape, most notably a fleeting glimpse of bodies in front of the Kravica warehouse, where between 1,000 and 1,500 Muslim men were killed. In various locations around Srebrenica, Serbian forces planned and carried out the massacre of more than 8,000 civilians. After broadcasting his report once, Petrović erased from his tape traces of the scale of the atrocity.

Petrović’s camera was one of at least seven that had taped events surrounding the genocide of Srebrenica. Select shots from these videotapes have been used as evidence in war crime trials, and as archival material in dozens of films about the genocide. Yet there is a way in which these images — and many others in the tapes — have never been properly seen. Interested in reconstructing the timeline of the massacre, previous research engaged the video material as a neutral record supporting witness testimony. It gave little attention to the authorship of the images or the intentions and agendas of those who made the images. However, the tapes have their own stories to tell.