Volume 1 Number 1 March 2002

Among the many images of atrocity that emerged from the Bosnian War, the picture of Fikret Alic and others imprisoned at the Trnoppolje camp in the Prijedor region stands out. Taken from a 1992 British television report that detailed the role of camps such as Omarska and Trnopolje in the ethnic cleansing strategy of the Bosnian Serb authorities, the image of Alic has become the focal point of a controversy about how the Bosnian camps were represented, and the political impact and purpose of those representations. Resulting in a legal clash between Independent Television News (ITN) and Living Marxism (LM) magazine, this controversy is the subject of this two-part article. In Part 1, the allegations concerning the filming of the Trnopolje inmates is considered in detail. In Part 2 (forthcoming), the argument moves beyond the specifics of the case and the camp to an exploration of the historical, political and visual context in which those specificities are located. This involves understanding the significance of the camps in terms of the Bosnian War and the history of the concentration camps, as well as discussing the question of photography and the Holocaust to question how particular atrocities are represented. The articles conclude with the issue of intellectual responsibility and the politics of critique in cases such as these.

Countries going through democratic transition have to address how they will deal with the human rights crimes committed during the authoritarian era. In the context of amnesty for perpetrators, truth commissions have emerged as a standard institution to document the past. Increasingly, claims are made that truth commissions have beneficial psychological consequences, that is, that they facilitate 'catharsis', or 'heal the nation', or allow the nation to 'work through' a violent past. This article draws on trauma counseling experience and anthropological fieldwork among survivors to examine these claims in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It argues that nations are not like individuals in that they do not have collective psyches, that nation-building discourses on reconciliation often subordinate individual needs, and that truth commissions and individual processes of healing work on different time lines. Calls for reconciliation may demand too much psychologically from survivors and retribution may be just as effective as reconciliation at creating symbolic closure.

In this essay, the case against pacifism is deepened by linking its rejection to a fundamental analysis of morality. The key is that morals are for everyone, and concern ordinary, discernible actions and effects, among which death and its avoidance rank very high. We all have in common that we must be alive if we are to accomplish our goals, realize our interests, experience value. It is in everyoneís interest that others refrain from molestation of them, and this interest does not need to be taken through any sort of ideological hoops to make us see the point of it. By contrast, ideologies, including religions, have the disadvantage of being inexplicable to 'outsiders'. They are divisive, whereas the common interest in peace is clear and obvious. This interest yields a right against aggression: aggressors are in the wrong and a morality that denies this would be pointless and would undermine the very basis of our lives. When aggressors make us choose between their lives and ours, common morality requires that primacy be given to the lives of those who are under attack. Pacifism endangers the basic right of self-defence against aggression.

The search for a better understanding of the Israeli/ Palestinian peace process is not only timely and related to the authors' own particularistic concern with the collapse of the process but also reflects a universalistic outlook. With the nature of conflict around the world changing form predominantly international to intra-national, the question of rights of the members of communities involved in various struggles arises at a more significant level. Within this context, this article explores the issues at stake in our own conflict. While there may be other important reasons for the breakdown of the Oslo process - such as leadership failure, intercultural misunderstandings, contending negotiating styles and previous traumatic experiences - the prospects for 'humanizing the peace process' need to be revisited, appraising its adds value and creative outlooks.

Has post-Cold War international society developed new legal and political norms of justifiable humanitarian intervention? IN what follows it is argued that, at least in the case of genocide, the answer would appear to be yes. The focus of the article, however, is on the complex interactions of the competing demands of law morality and politics. It is argued that changing conceptions of security and sovereignty, driven in part by the deeper penetration of international human rights norms and values, have produced a political environment where the previously unchallengeable legal norm of non-intervention is beginning to give way. Nonetheless, the principle of non-intervention retains considerable force. In addition, there are serious problems of multilateral institutional (in)capacity that pose unusually difficult problems of unilateral action. As a result, justifying either humanitarian intervention or non-intervention today seems problematic. When faced with massive suffering, both intervening often seem both demanded and prohibited.