PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK
Shooting War
Ron Haviv dodges bullets to get the shot
Hiding between a cab and the trailer of an abandoned truck, Ron Haviv looked through the lens of his camera as the rifles fired and the blood spilled.
Zeljko Raznatovic, the notorious Serbian militia leader better known as Arkan, was patrolling the deserted streets of Bijeljina, a town in northeastern Bosnia, with his killing squads of “Tigers.” It was April 1992. Haviv had asked Arkan if he could roll with the unit and Arkan had agreed. “Arkan really thought he could control the media, that he was very smart, and that nobody could really screw him,” Haviv explains.
Three busloads of Tigers hunted Bosnian Muslims house to house, finally arriving at the center of the town, where they searched a mosque. They tore down a flag colored with Islamic symbols, proudly displaying it like a trophy. Screams echoed through the neighborhood. Haviv watched as other gunmen dragged the town butcher and his wife from their home. He slipped from view about thirty feet from Arkan’s men and began snapping photographs. Shots were fired. The butcher, middle-aged and defenseless, fell to the ground. His wife bent down next to him, placing her hand over his chest, trying to stop the bleeding. Again a rifle shot rang out. The woman crumpled to the pavement. The Serbs then pulled the woman’s sister out of the house, executing her as well.
Haviv knew that to document the crime he had to capture the Tigers and their victims in the same frame. As soldiers started to leave the scene, Haviv wandered into the open. Just then a young Serbian soldier, sunglasses tilted back on his head, cigarette burning in his left hand, casually walked over to the dying family of Bosnians, raised his black boot and, as Haviv took aim, kicked one of the women in the head. “When he kicked her,” Haviv would say later, “it was like the ultimate disrespect for everything.”
Quickly unloading the film, Haviv hid the incriminating rolls, just in case, and later smuggled them out of the bloodied town. Magazines and newspapers around the world published the pictures, the first documented evidence of atrocities occurring in the region, eyewitness proof of Serbian war crimes. The image of the soldier kicking the woman in Bijeljina “was the most important picture in the conflict,” says Chuck Sudetic, a friend of Haviv’s and a former New York Times reporter who covered the Balkans between 1990 and 1995. “You had lots of descriptions of events coming your way, but where was the real sound evidence? Here was this set of pictures coming in from up there in the north where I couldn’t get, and it underscored the reality. It gave lots of reports we had heard great credibility.”
The photographs also caught the attention of Arkan. The paramilitary gunman fumed, publicly crying that he wanted to taste Haviv’s blood. Serbian thugs later abducted the photojournalist, handcuffed and beat him. American, French, and Russian diplomats brokered his release three days later.
Haviv returned home to New York City for about a month, rested and regrouped. Then he flew back to Sarajevo. The torturous experience had only steeled his resolve. “In the end it just reaffirmed my dedication to doing what I was doing,” he says. “It kept me going to a certain degree.”
For ten years, between 1991 and 2001, Haviv photographed the genocidal breakup of Yugoslavia, from Croatia to Kosovo and beyond. His book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, captures the cruelties of ethnic rage — Srebrenica’s mass graves; starved, hollow-eyed young men in Bosnian prison camps; snow soaked red with the blood of an elderly Serb.
Why pursue war? Haviv says that he has both selfish and altruistic reasons. “The selfish part is that it’s amazing to be there in these places, to watch history unfold before you,” he says. More broadly, though, Haviv believes that photographing war and disaster pushes the international community to confront abuse and end injustice. Sometimes pictures generate immediate reaction from world leaders. Other times, it takes longer. “In Sarajevo, for instance, there was myself, my colleagues — for four years we kept saying, ‘Look what’s going on! Look at the pictures. Listen to the radio. Watch the television. Read the reports.’ It was basically ignored. Nobody was really paying attention. But, now ten years later, that work exists as evidence to prove to people that it did happen. We can play a historical role in terms of documentation.” In fact, prosecutors at the Hague requested the Bijeljina photos as they investigated Slobodan Milosevic and his supporters. And a Blood and Honey exhibit of Haviv’s work is now a permanent exhibit in the historical museum in Sarajevo, seen there by many students, as well as a traveling exhibit. “I’m very positive about using it as a shock treatment,” Haviv says, “to say to the kids, ‘If you don’t grow up with an open mind, this can happen again.’”
Given the bombs and blood he tracks around the world, you might expect Haviv to exude a Rambo-like presence, but he’s a mild-mannered, thirty-six-year-old photojournalist who takes in the world through soft brown eyes framed by a gentle face and a black mop of unkempt curls. A native New Yorker, Haviv studied journalism as an undergraduate at New York University. He enjoyed photography as a relaxing hobby at first, but that offhand interest quickly developed into a passion. He felt himself drawn to the universality of the visual. “Images can have often more of an immediate impact and reach a broader number of people, especially crossing languages, which I think is important,” Haviv says. “I’m not just working specifically for an English-speaking audience. My images are seen in Germany and France and Italy. Photographs are much more universal in their ability to communicate.”
After graduating in 1987, Haviv got some assignments from Agence France-Presse, supplementing his income as a bicycle messenger and Good Humor man. His career took off in 1989 when he became friendly with Chris Morris, a battle-tested war photographer for Time. Morris invited Haviv to tag along to cover the Panamanian presidential election in 1989. When General Manuel Noriega nullified the election results, riots exploded in the streets as rival parties clashed. Haviv photographed the Panamanian vice president being stabbed and beaten. The dramatic image made the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, and encouraged Haviv to pursue conflict photography as a profession. “It kind of registered in my mind that you could do something valuable here,” Haviv says, “that this could be really interesting for me, and have an effect on the world.”
Today, as a contract photographer for Newsweek and represented by the VII Photo Agency, Haviv parachutes into the world’s hot spots, covering drug wars in Colombia, refugees in Rwanda, political earthquakes in Haiti. He spent three months last fall photographing the war in Afghanistan. His new book from those months, Afghanistan: The Road To Kabul, showcases the dramatic sweep of wartime experience. Mixed in with the upsetting scenes — a one-legged girl, the victim of a mine-field, or bandaged, shrapnel-scarred soldiers — are uplifting images, of smiling Afghanis playing a game of volleyball, or a group of young men earnestly trying to study on a deserted field of gravel and sand.
Still, it is the Balkan conflict that remains closest to Haviv’s heart, both because of the number of years he spent chronicling that war, and because he feels that the rest of Europe and the United States need to understand that conflict in order to avoid repeating the tragedy. “The people in the Balkans were just like somebody in New York City or Los Angeles,” he says. “You could interchange them very easily. It struck me that given the right circumstances, that could easily happen in France or the United States.” Haviv continues traveling throughout the Balkans, bearing witness through his lens. He took pictures of the outbreak of fighting in Macedonia last year, and stood outside the home of Milosevic to photograph the former Serb president as he was arrested.
A decade of photographing war has left Haviv somewhat more measured
about what he thinks the craft of photojournalism can accomplish.
“I don’t think that I ever thought, ‘Wow, photography
can totally change the world by itself,’” he says. “But
I totally believe that there is a political process that occurs,
and that photojournalism absolutely plays a role, and an important
role."
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