User:Prioryman/ITN and Informinc Ltd

ITN and Informinc Ltd, also referred to as ITN vs. LM, was an English libel case that involved Independent Television News (ITN) and Informinc Ltd, the publisher of LM Magazine (previously known as Living Marxism). The case focused on the publication by LM of an article by the German writer Thomas Deichmann that argued that two ITN journalists, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, had fabricated a report on prisoners being held at the Bosnian Serb-run concentration camps of Omarska and Trnopolje during the Bosnian War. LM was found guilty of libelling ITN and was fined £375,000. It was also given a bill for £600,000 in legal costs. The decision resulted in LM being declared bankrupt and having to close.

Background
During the early months of the Bosnian War in 1992, forces of the self-declared Republika Srpska set up a number of concentration camps for non-Serbs in north-western Bosnia. The camps were under the authority of the Bosnian Serb military and police authorities and were used to intern thousands of non-Serbs. Those in administrative, political, religious, academic and business positions were particularly targeted, including judges, lawyers, academics, intellectuals, artists, doctors and law-enforcement personnel. Conditions at the camps were appalling and several operated as de facto death camps. At Omarska camp alone, by some estimates between 4,000 and 5,000 people are thought to have died.

By July 1992, the Bosnian Serbs had seized control about 70 per cent of the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Refugees, aid workers and officials began bringing word to Western journalists of concentration camps operating in Serb-held territory. Newsday's Roy Gutman brought the existence of the camps to wider attention with an article about Omarska published on 19 July 1992. The Irish journalist Maggie O'Kane followed up with an article published in The Guardian on 29 July, but Gutman's own follow-up article, titled "Death Camps", which ran in Newsday's 2 August 1992 edition, resulted in a public furore and condemnation of the Bosnian Serbs from politicians and the media. CNN's Christiane Amanpour told viewers on 5 August: "What's happening right now are the first allegations of a sort of Nazi-styled, World War II-styled genocide going on, and this is obviously why it's created such an uproar."

ITN reporting and political repercussions
After Maggie O'Kane's article was published at the end of July, ITN's diplomatic editor Nik Gowing sought the reaction of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who was visiting London at the time. Although Karadžić initially denied the existence of the camps, he eventually agreed to let ITN's reporters visit the camps at Omarska and Trnopolje to check the allegations.

ITN's reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams and The Guardian's Ian Vuillamy were the first Western journalists to visit the camps. The reports by Marshall and Williams were broadcast on 6 August 1992 on ITV and Channel 4 News respectively and were rebroadcast by CNN and ABC. The footage showed an emaciated 22-year-old Bosniak prisoner, Fikret Alić, standing behind wire fencing at the Trnopolje camp as well as scenes of the prisoners eating their meagre rations. The journalists were not allowed to interview the prisoners or see their living quarters. After the journalists left the camp, Serb guards killed seven of the prisoners who had been filmed by the ITN team, although Alić escaped a few days later.

The stark image of Alić became iconic; Time magazine, for instance, used it to illustrate its 17 August 1992 issue under the caption "Must It Go On?". Vuillamy later wrote: "With the rib-cage behind the barbed wire of Trnopolje, Fikret Alić had become the symbolic figure of the war, on every magazine cover and television screen in the world." Mike Jermy, ITN's foreign editor, called the picture of Alić "one of the key images of the war in former Yugoslavia". It had a profound political impact and led directly to Western powers deciding to mount a military humanitarian intervention in Bosnia. Twenty minutes after the pictures were screened on US television, President George H. W. Bush announced that the US would support a United Nations Security Council resolution authorising the use of force in Bosnia. British Prime Minister John Major called his Cabinet back from holiday for an emergency meeting at which it was decided that 1,800 British soldiers would be sent to support UN operations in Bosnia. A few months later, the United Nations created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed in the conflict.

LM commentary
In February 1997 LM magazine, formerly Living Marxism – a publication of the Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a British far-left splinter group – published an article by Thomas Deichmann called "The Picture That Fooled The World". Deichmann was a writer for a tiny German Trotskyite publication called Novo. He campaigned to redress what he saw as anti-Serb bias in the German media and was hired as an expert witness in the defence of Duško Tadić, a Bosnian Serb who was convicted and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment in 1996 for war crimes committed at the camps. The defence sought unsuccessfully to use Deichmann's testimony to discredit the evidence of witnesses who placed Tadić at the camps. LM was later to promote Deichmann as "an expert witness to the UN War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague", though it failed to clarify that he had been hired as an expert witness by the defence, not by the Tribunal itself.

Living Marxism had a long history of opposition to Western military interventions of any sort; as a member of the RCP told Luke Harding of The Guardian in 1997, the UK should not have intervened against Hitler because "that would have been fighting for the British ruling classes". The RCP had taken a pro-Serb line since 1990 and argued that "imperialist" Western governments had caused the Yugoslav wars. During the 1990s its house magazine, Living Marxism, gained a niche and a significant following, with a monthly circulation of 15,000 copies. According to Andy Beckett of The Guardian, it pursued a course of being "calculatedly, divertingly offensive," taking aggressively contrarian stances on topics such as global warming, the Rwandan genocide, animal rights, child pornography and gun control. A year before the magazine published Deichmann's article, it published an article arguing that the killings in Rwanda did not constitute genocide, prompting protests from various parties including the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and it published denials that the Srebrenica massacre had happened. After the Serbian camps had been exposed, Living Marxism ran articles on "genocide against the Serbs" in 1993 as an effort to rebut what it called "reporting of non-existent Serbian 'death camps' in Bosnia".

In his 1997 article, Deichman claimed that Marshall and Williams had fabricated their report by using "camera angles and editing" to depict the occupants of the Trnopolje camp as prisoners rather than refugees who were free to come and go. He wrote:

"If Fikret Alić and the other Bosnian Muslims were imprisoned inside a barbed wire fence, why was the wire fixed to the poles on the side of the fence on which they were standing? ... It occurred to me then that perhaps it was not the people in the camp who were fenced in behind the barbed wire, but the team of British journalists."

He went on to argue that the television crew had in fact been inside the enclosure and the Bosniaks were at liberty on the outside and were not, in fact, prisoners but refugees who had voluntarily gathered at a relocation centre. Deichmann claimed that the journalists had sought to mislead the public into thinking that the facility was a Nazi-style concentration camp. The article was based on unbroadcast ITN footage that had been provided to the ICTY for trials related to the camps. It had been released to the prosecution and defence, and was subsequently copied by Deichmann without the knowledge or permission of the defence.

Controversy and litigation
As well as being disseminated in the pages of LM, Deichmann's claims were also promoted by the magazine in a press release issued through a company called Two Ten Communications. The press release was picked up by the Independent on Sunday. In response, ITN threatened to sue LM, the Independent on Sunday and Two Ten Communications. The Independent on Sunday published an apology on 2 February 1997 in which it stated: "Having investigated the matter ourselves, we accept that ITN°S award-winning reports were fair and impartial." A couple of months later, Two Ten Communications issued an apology with costs at the High Court of Justice in London. The company accepted that the claims were untrue and apologised for causing "very real distress and damage".

However, LM doubled down on its original claims and promoted them further with press conferences in London and Bonn in which Deichmann participated.