Doctors of the World – Médecins du Monde

In winter 1992/3, the humanitarian organization “Doctors of the world” launched in France a broad billboard and newspaper campaign. One of the posters featured side-by-side photos of Hitler and of Milošević, with the title: “The speeches on ethnic cleansing, doesn’t that remind you of something?” Another poster featured side-by-side a photo of an Auschwitz watch tower and a photo of Muslim detainees in a camp run by Bosnian Serb nationalists in Prijedor in the northwest of Bosnia. The photos of emasculated half-naked men behind barbed wire were taken and published worldwide in August 1992 and instantly became a symbol for the atrocities committed in BiH. The text on this poster read: “A camp where groups are ethnically cleansed, doesn’t that remind you of something?”

In an information text on the campaign, “Doctors of the World” explained: “Why this message? Médecins du Monde has decided to present the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in ex-Yugoslavia as a ‘crime against humanity’, because it reminds us of Nazism. Our testimony is based on what our teams have experienced and seen on the spot on a daily basis. (…) Nazism is for all of us, Europeans, the ‘reference’. The crimes committed by the Serbs, on the other ethnic groups, are reminiscent of this still recent event in the French mind. (…) We specify: the Serbian nationalists and not all Serbs. (…) Our objective is to mobilise opinions and consciences on the drama that is unfolding in ex-Yugoslavia. (…)”

The campaign attracted a lot of attention and also stirred controversies whether it was legitimate to make comparisons with the Third Reich and the Holocaust. At the same time, another campaign was launched by “Médecins sans frontières” (Doctors without borders) which also used the photo of camp detainees from Prijedor, with the title: “Now we will not be able to say that we didn’t know.” Both campaigns aimed to highlight the discrepancy between the “Never again”-sermon after 1945, and the current passivity towards the atrocities in BiH. Both organisations also regularly criticized international governments for using humanitarian aid as an ersatz for political action, as an alibi and an excuse not to do more, politically and militarily, thereby reducing the war in BiH to a humanitarian problem instead of treating it as a political issue.