Operation Irma

Operation Irma was the name applied to a series of airlifts of wounded civilians from Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Siege of Sarajevo. The airlifts were initiated after the wounding of five-year-old Irma Hadzimuratovic attracted international media attention. The programme was reported to have evacuated hundreds of wounded Sarajevans during during the second half 1993, but attracted significant controversy concerning its scale, evacuee selection criteria, and the motivations of the western European governments and press that inspired it.

Wounding of Irma Hadzimuratovic

On 30th July, 1993, a mortar shell fired by Bosnian Serb troops hit a Sarajevo marketplace, injuring five-year-old Irma Hadzimuratovic and killing 15 others, including her mother. Sarajevo's overstretched Kosevo hospital was unable to provide adequate treatment for Hadzimuratovic 's spinal, head, and abdominal injuries, and she developed bacterial meningitis.^[1] Edo Jaganjac, the surgeon treating Hadzimuratovic, tried unsuccessfully to have her evacuated on a UN relief flight, and resorted to giving her photograph to foreign journalists in Sarajevo. Several picked up Irma's story, giving it widespread coverage in the international (and especially the British) press.^[1] On the evening of Sunday, August 8th, the BBC news led with coverage of Irma's injuries. On August 9th, British Prime Minister John Major personally intervened,^[2] sending an RAF Hercules^[3] to airlift Irma to London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.^[4]

Shelled buildings in Sarajevo

In the following days and months dozens more Bosnians were evacuated under a program the UK media dubbed 'Operation Irma.' During the week beginning August 9th, 41 people were taken out of Sarajevo.^[5] It was reported later that hundreds were eventually evacuated under the programme.^[6] Other countries, including Sweden and Ireland, also organized airlifts,^[5] and the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Poland also offered hospital beds.^[7]

Reaction and criticism

Though Operation Irma was widely publicized, and was reported in September 1993 to have raised £1 million in donations to evacuate the wounded from Sarajevo,^[8] it attracted a number of criticisms. These addressed the operation's limited scale; the motivations of the British press and foreign governments in launching the airlifts; the use of evacuation instead of supplying resources to local medical services; and the broader issue of the UK's response to the war in Bosnia.

Criticisms over scale

Some critics focused on the small numbers of persons evacuated via the operation. During August 1993 the violence in Bosnia killed on average three children each day, and thousands of others were injured or made homeless. Since the beginning of the siege on April 5, 1992, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had approved only 200 of Sarajevo's 50,000 critically wounded patients for medical evacuation.^[1] The British press storm had prompted offers of 1250 hospital beds in 17 countries by August 15th;^[9] though a massive increase on prior offers of help, the total was dwarfed by the estimated 39,000 children requiring hospital treatment throughout Bosnia.^[10]

The "supermarket" argument

As well as the scale of the response, critics questioned the decisions about which patients should be evacuated. At first the UK was challenged over its decision to include only children in the transports while tens of thousands of adults remained wounded in the city. Sylvana Foa, spokesperson for the UNHCR, commented that Sarajevo should not be regarded as a "supermarket" of photogenic potential refugees, asking "Does this mean Britain only wants to help children? Maybe it only wants children under six, or blond children, or blue-eyed children?"^[11] Patrick Peillod, head of the United Nations medical evacuation committee, said that the UK had treated Bosnian children "like animals in a zoo"^[12] and was trying to pick and choose evacuees to suit a public relations agenda.^[13] When the government revised its approach and included adults on flights out of the city, claims were made that wounded combatants had been among those taken to the UK, Sweden, and Italy, and that patients had paid bribes to be included in the transports.^[14]

UK Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, on 9 August, countered that though the operation would evacuate relatively few of the city's wounded, it was still a benefit: "Because you can't help everybody, it doesn't mean you shouldn't help somebody."^[4] Sylvana Foa also later acknowledged that, after months of European indifference toward the war in the former Yugoslavia, the new public sympathy inspired by Irma's case was "like day following night."^[15]

Criticisms of the British government and press

UK prime minister John Major, architect of Operation Irma, photographed in Sarajevo in 1995

Beyond these questions of scale and selection, the motives of both the British press and the government in publicizing Hadzimuratovic's case and then in launching Operation Irma were challenged. Some critics questioned the intensity of the coverage relating to a particular victim of a drawnout siege. In December 1993 another Sarajevo evacuation program, 'Operation Angel,' received minimal press coverage in the UK, and the Financial Times suggested that such human interest stories captured the popular imagination only during the British press's summer 'silly season' when Parliament was in recess.^[15] Susan Douglas, in the October 1993 edition of American magazine The Progressive, said British papers had indulged in "a ghoulish competition to scoop each other over Irma's condition and to use her evacuation to salve British guilt about standing apart from the carnage in Bosnia."^[16]

The British government was widely depicted as having launched Operation Irma in direct response to the level of press interest.^[7][1][17] A Council of Europe publication later noted that European governments had been criticized for regarding the exercise as having "more to do with a political and media operation than with humanitarian relief."^[18] If the mission was a PR effort, British press commentators deemed it an unsuccessful one: Mark Lawson in The Independent called prime minister Major's efforts with the mission a "failure ... to silence the hostile snipers" based on a misunderstanding of popular indecision about Bosnia and on a failure to manage domestic press skepticism.^[19]

Meanwhile, within the former Yugoslavia, Operation Irma was regarded as proof that the British government had taken sides in the conflict, favouring Bosnian Muslims over Croats or Serbs.^[20]

Evacuation or local treatment?

The head of Kosevo Hospital's plastic surgery department said "It would be much better if you sent the tools to do our jobs properly than for you make a big show of a few token evacuations."^[10] Countering this, A.D. Redmond of the Overseas Development Administration (the predecessor to the Department for International Development) wrote in November 1993 to the British Medical Journal:

"The Overseas Development Administration has been foremost in supplying medical and humanitarian aid to the people of Bosnia throughout the conflict... In some circumstances medical teams are needed, requested, and supplied, but in others medical supplies alone are the most appropriate form of aid. I have also, however, received personal pleas from doctors whom I know well to evacuate patients who cannot be treated in Sarajevo... No solution will suffice. We are all trying to help."^[21]

Aftermath

Bosnian refugees photographed in 1993

The press coverage surrounding the evacuation was later cited as an example of 'disaster pornography', in academic analyses concerned with the portrayal of child victims of violence and disaster in ways that reaffirm those victims' remoteness from and subjectivity to western (here, Northwestern European) agency.^[22] It has also been portrayed as representative of a trend whereby public reaction to media coverage of disasters leads and shapes official state response.^[23] Erica Burman, developing this theme, has argued that Irma Hadzimuratovic became an "emotional focus" for a British public dismayed by its government's ambiguous and cautious attitude to the conflict in Bosnia:

"The widespread anxieties and consternation over government inactivity throughout the crisis could be deflected and resolved by rescuing a handful of children. In terms of recovering a sense of agency (in a conflict characterised by protestations of powerlessness by political and military authorities alike), the desire to do (and be seen to do) something was expressed and assuaged by transporting and incorporating some of the need and distress into the UK where it could be tended to and made better."^[22]

Textbooks on public relations have cited the episode as an example of a "bargaining game" in which various players - the UNHCR, British government, and press - all sought to achieve individual advantage.^[24]

Despite initial improvement, Irma Hadzimuratovic was paralyzed from the neck down and required a ventilator to breathe.^[25] She died of septicaemia in Great Ormond Street in September 1995 following 20 months in intensive care.^[26] The coroner at her inquest called Irma 'a victim of war.'^[4]

References