Warriors : Cinematic ontologies of the Bosnian war

War crimes in Bosnia and international peacekeeping

The wars of Yugoslav disintegration started in 1991, following decades of growing nationalisms and various processes that led to the secession and declaration of independence of its republics: Slovenia and Croatia seceded first, on 25 June 1991, and Bosnia and Herzegovina followed on 15 October 1991. In the spring of 1991, in the midst of Croatian preparation for independence, Serbs living in Croatia declared loyalty to Yugoslavia, fearing (and rightly so) the change of their constitutional status in the new country. Their resistance to Croatian independence included a temporary partitioning of Croatia by proclaiming an independent Serb region – the Republic of Serbian Krajina. ⁴

In Bosnia, the partition went two ways. Towards the end of 1991, an independent region – Herzeg Bosnia – was declared by the Bosnian-Croat population. ⁵ By that time, although the war in Bosnia had not started as yet, many local Bosnian-Croat paramilitaries had already formed. Some of those paramilitaries were linked to political parties, others acted independently, but most of them worked in coordination with the newly formed National Army of Croatia. The Serbian population within BiH also announced its independence from BiH in February 1992, forming the basis of Republika Srpska. ⁶ During the same month, in February 1992, the UN Security Council approved the creation of UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) to supervise (one of many) cease-fire agreement(s) between Croatia and Yugoslavia. But, instead of subsiding in Croatia, the violence spread to Bosnia and in April 1992 the Bosnian war stared.

The secession from Bosnia of the territories with a predominant Bosnian-Serb and Bosnian-Croat population was part of a plan designed by the then Serbian and Croatian Presidents Milosevic and Tudjman, respectively, who aimed at annexing those territories to their respective states. The objective of those partitions was the creation of territories with mono-ethnic populations, in a region within which ethnicity has already become the main – and the only official – mode of being. Both physical and symbolic violence was used to achieve this objective. Strategies of physical violence included widespread destruction, expulsion and massacres of populations, sexual violence against women and men, especially within the war camps, and finally, genocide. Strategies of symbolic violence included the erasure of all public traces and memories of multi-ethnicity and togetherness, and of the presence of specific groups within specific territories, be it in language, cultural production, school curricula, or street names. Equally important were essentialized, demonized cultural representations of the Other in literature, film and the broadcast media. Physical and symbolic violence often went hand in hand, as for example religious buildings, public monuments and cultural heritage being deliberately targeted for physical destruction precisely because of their symbolic values. ⁷

Since the declaration of Herzeg Bosnia, in 1991, almost until the end of the war in 1995, local Bosnian-Croat forces ⁸ (often directly supported by the Croatian Army) used those violent strategies in fighting a two-way war: in the territory of Herzeg Bosnia, which they considered theirs, they mainly fought against Muslim forces; in other parts of Bosnia they fought with Muslim forces against Bosnian-Serb Forces. Muslim civilians were a major target of these war strategies. In April 1993, a number of small towns and villages in a stretch of the central Bosnian Lasva Valley territory were attacked by Bosnian-Croat forces simultaneously from several directions, with the aim of territorial appropriation into Herzeg Bosnia. On 16 April 1993, local Bosnian-Croat forces devastated the small village of Ahmici, killing over 100 Muslim civilians and burning their houses, while leaving the houses of Bosnian-Croat villagers intact. Muslim civilians were executed at point blank, killed in the fields as they fled the village, and burned alive in their houses.

The UN forces in the region consisted of a British battalion, stationed in central Bosnia since autumn 1992, under the mandate of delivering humanitarian aid. The narrative plot of the British two-part TV drama Warriors centres on the massacre in Ahmici. The title of the film – Warriors – comes from the name of the British armoured vehicle but also reflects an irony of the soldiers’ position: with one exception, their UN mandate does not allow them throughout the film to be classical ‘proper warriors’ – i.e. the brave heroes who defend the powerless civilian victims and punish the perpetrators.

The screenplay for Warriors was written by Leigh Jackson and Peter Kominsky, and directed by Kominsky, a well-known British director of socially engaged and often controversial documentaries, docudramas and films (Harper, 2011). It was first screened on BBC 1, in November 1999, ⁹ and later in the USA as Peacekeepers. It received the British Academy Film and TV Award (BAFTA) in 2000 for Best TV Drama Serial ¹⁰ and very good reviews. As Harper (2011: 21–22) notes, it was praised for not being bombastic or melodramatic, not fetishizing violence, and not heroicizing soldiers. Its depiction of war, its causes and the history of the region is basically seen as offering a ‘fair reflection of what occurred’ (2011: 21) and being ‘generically true’ (2011: 22). I will question those compliments in my analysis.

On genre and cinematic choices

Warriors has a rather straightforward tripartite structure (Harper, 2011) of a war film: home – front – home. It begins by showing a number of young men in their home environment, Liverpool, 1992: lads drinking in a local pub, a guy visiting his family on a farm, people planning a wedding in a luxurious villa. They are all called to join their military unit and go to Bosnia in different functions – as foot soldiers or commanders, respective of their class background indicated in the opening scenes. Their UN mandate is explicitly declared – to deliver humanitarian aid and not get involved with the local population or local forces whatsoever, and especially not in acts that could be interpreted as ‘aiding ethnic cleansing’. They face a variety of situations of war violence and are continuously prohibited to protect Muslim civilians, while continuously coming face-to-face with Croat and Serb paramilitaries. They systematically express emotional distress because of the violence they see, or moral outrage against the orders of non-intervention, disobeying on one occasion. They see the aftermath of the Ahmici massacre. They also communicate with their families in the UK, often frustrated by the incompatibility of the two worlds – the everyday horrors of war violence in Bosnia and the everyday banality of peace in the UK. Upon return to the UK each of them deals with his war trauma and of what they did not do to protect civilians. They see themselves, each other and their acts as failed (‘shitty’), as well as heroic. They are all male, all white and all heterosexual. ¹¹

In terms of genre, this is a very classical war movie, with the focus on the ‘band of brothers’. It is dominated by scenes of solidarity and involvement of soldiers in each other’s civilian and war lives. Equally important for this genre, there is ethical clarity about good and bad, even when the good is not done, or possible to do. The soldiers’ traumas and the lack of understanding of those traumas ‘back home’ act as a mode of separation of histories and geographies of war and peace, Self and Other, that symbolically strengthens the bonds between the soldiers. Bosnian ‘locals’ are played by local actors, using the local language and English; the UK cast consists of actors who are soon-to-become (also thanks to Warriors) well known.

There are a few very clear cinematic and narrative choices, directly linked to the genre. The soldiers stand absolutely central to the narrative. Time-wise, the film is dominated by scenes of their activities, their war experiences and their emotional states. Two other dominant types of scenes are violence against civilians and face-to-face encounters between UK soldiers and Croat and Serb paramilitaries. Much shorter time in the film is given to scenes of peace – the life of the soldiers before and after the deployment. Narrative-wise, the film consists of a number of interwoven plots, where the story of each soldier is followed individually. The ‘local’ population – when given individuality, rather than being represented as masses of villagers or paramilitaries – exists only in relation to the UK soldiers, without an independent narrative plot of their own. Speaking of classical movie narratives, Thanouli (2006: 185) notes that they are most often based on the interweaving of two plots: ‘the formation of [a] heterosexual couple with the undertaking of the mission’. As I will discuss later, both are present in Warriors, and both follow a very classical, linear time-line.

Harper (2011) notes the ‘powerful sense of authenticity’ for which the film was widely credited by critics (and BAFTA). The film itself makes an interesting claim to authenticity before the opening frame: the film is made ‘in cooperation with those who were there’. With the narrative focus on the UK soldiers, it is obvious that the statement refers to the UK soldiers, rather than the ‘local’ people ‘who were there’. But the claim is not substantiated by any other explanation (for example, with a mention of interviews, documents or the like). Nevertheless, the scenes of the Ahmici massacre follow very closely the existing photo and other documentation, published in international and UK media and websites ¹² and submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Furthermore, the names of the local Bosnian-Croat military commanders mentioned in the film are authentic (for example, Dario Kordic, tried and sentenced to 25 years for involvement in the Ahmici massacre, among other crimes). ¹³

There are, however, two gross factual mistakes in the film. One is the placing of Serb paramilitaries within the territory. Between 1992 and 1993 Lasva Valley (part of Herzeg Bosnia) was under the control of Bosnian-Croat forces, or being fought for control between Bosnian-Muslim and Bosnian-Croat forces. No Serb military forces were active in this particular region at the time of the Ahmici massacre. Given that the existence of Herzeg Bosnia and the activities of Croat and Bosnian-Croat paramilitary forces in Bosnia were hardly known to the general public internationally, the narrative placing of Serbs in the Lasva Valley and around Ahmici allowed for a rather problematic symbolic short-cut, attached to the internationally dominant, easily recognizable image of ‘the Serbs’ as the villains of the Bosnian war. Another gross mistake, a total nonsense, actually, but again, with an extremely potent symbolic meaning, is the mentioning of Srebrenica as a direction towards which the Muslim civilians fleeing Ahmici would head for safety. The only reason to mention Srebrenica here would be to symbolically express the hopelessness of the refugees’ plight, because geographically, this statement makes no sense whatsoever. I will come back to both of these points later.

As already mentioned, belonging to the classical war genre, this film has soldiers as its central characters. Every element of the cinematic narrative and every other character in the film contribute to the building of the individual profiles of a handful of UK soldiers whose stories the audience follows from the beginning to the end of the film. The classical war genre also means that there are two important types of characters the main characters meet: other soldiers and civilians. I will reflect first on the way the UK soldiers are depicted, then examine representations of their military and civilian counterparts, and then reflect on the ways those representations produce larger narratives of ontological differences between the people, the worlds and histories of Bosnia and the UK.

Warriors – or not exactly?

The life stories of the individual UK soldiers are developed from the very start of the film. In this respect, there is no doubt where the narrative focus lies. We first meet the soldiers as civilians embedded in their class environment, in rather stereotypically recognizable ways. Working class is following football in the local pub, drinking beer, shouting, best mates saving each other in a fight, a little sister relating to big-solider-brother. Once they are in the war in Bosnia their individual psychological profiles develop further, with emotional outbursts, manly tears as well as manly restraint. There is a military hierarchy which follows the class hierarchy ‘back-home’, but there are also solidarity, support and understanding that defy class: a hand on the shoulder, a few precious words by which despair is softened after a death of a mate, and order restored in moments of anger. The soldiers follow orders – from the foot soldiers who listen to the unit commanders, to the unit commanders who listen to the higher-up commands. However, while following orders is the imperative of a proper military hierarchy, the film shows from the very start that there is a higher imperative: a moral order. Throughout the film, the soldiers loudly protest the military orders that prevent them from aiding and protecting civilians. Every encounter with civilians under attack by Serb and Croat forces is filled with outbursts of resentment and anger against the limits of the rules of the mission, and with empathy for the civilians. This moral order wins in the end, as the UK soldiers at one point create deliberate radio silence so that they cannot be reached while disobeying the mission rules and escorting Muslim civilians to safety. Their solidarity is at its highest at that moment, as they all express loyalty to the morally driven commander, even if this means court-martial for them all.

In short, there is almost no surprise in the representations of the UK soldiers as proper, true warriors. Almost, because there is one element in the build-up of the main characters that may be seen as not belonging to the classical solider-hero script. Personal doubts, psychological pain and moral torment can all still be seen as part of the classical soldier-hero’s character. They are part of the plot that makes the soldier both human and humane. The heavier the personal torment, the grander the heroism. But those characteristics apart, Warriors also depicts the powerlessness and even humiliation of the UK soldiers, such as at a moment when they are subjected to the document check and personal insults of Serb paramilitaries, standing in a line, silent. They witness the horrors of war with a continuing sense of powerlessness. The title of the film – Warriors – at moments sounds almost ironic as the soldiers continuously express frustration precisely for not being allowed to be ‘true warriors’ – i.e. to engage in direct warfare with the enemy. My point is not that they become emotional, but rather that they are depicted in situations of humiliation and helplessness. The film narrative, however, offers some redeeming elements, or even rebuffs, to such moments. Humiliation is returned in kind, when one UK solider screams in anger, and challenges a Croat solider to ‘show his dick’ – a challenge that secures the UK soldier a moral victory. Powerlessness and helplessness are resolved narratively in two ways: first, helplessness is framed as helplessness to aid civilian victims – i.e. because of following the military orders, rather than because of being personally weak. When a UK soldier is emotionally broken (i.e. shows emotion that could be interpreted as weakness), this too is for a ‘good’ reason: ethical struggle with the horrors they see. Furthermore, the blame for failing to protect civilians is regularly placed on the UN or other higher command, not on the UK soldiers and their unit, or the other UK commanders! Thus the apparent powerlessness and weakness to act actually shows the moral strength and proper training of the UK soldiers. Furthermore, at one point the soldiers actually ‘do the right thing’ and help the civilians despite the explicit order not to do so. In this respect, British military masculinity in Warriors corresponds to Dunlap’s (2007) third type of military masculinity in Hollywood films – ‘realistic masculinity’ – where men’s emotions are not a sign of weakness but a sign that men think about the orders they receive and the duties they perform; and remain heroic even while questioning their role.

At the same time, there remains a serious allegation within the film narrative – expressed explicitly, in words, by one character, and implied by the other through an attempted suicide – that what they did was simply ‘shit’, ‘leaving people to die’, that the whole mission was a huge failure, and has seriously jeopardized their own wellbeing. But – next to placing the blame for the ‘shit’ on the UN – the narrative actually offers a continuous rebuff of such perspectives, in the words of others who stress the ‘great job’ the soldiers did, how ‘proud’ they should feel and how ‘heroic’ they are. Besides countering the explicit language of doubt about the greatness of the mission by explicit language of praise, the film narrative offers yet another way to soften potential criticism and sarcasm: by showing what the UK soldiers were up against; in other words, through the representation of the ‘enemies’ and their ways of waging war. And there we see the return to the classical war movie genre which closely follows the script of Self and Other. In Warriors, soldierly solidarity and morality stand central not just to the narrative of war, and the narrative of warring manhood, but through those, to the narrative of warring nations: the British military as a ‘community of interveners’ (Heathershaw and Lambach, 2008: 270), those on whose behalf they intervene, and those against whom they intervene.

On enemies, victims and lovers

So who are the ‘enemy soldiers’ to the UK peacekeepers? They are members of the Croat and Serb military forces, and the shortest way to convey their representation in Warriors is: gruesome caricatures. Against the clean-shaven, emotional, moral, tall and handsome British men stand small, ugly, dirty, bearded, vicious, Serb and Croat paramilitaries. Driving the moral plot to the extremes, Warriors takes physical differences as symbols, making absolutely sure that the audience recognizes the ‘good’ in the ‘handsome’ and the ‘bad’ in the ‘ugly’. The only ‘local’ male character who is approximately as tall as the British soldiers is a Muslim man they save (who is mostly in a horizontal position, because of his injuries).

Interestingly, Warriors does not give any educational dialogues or elements of the narrative plot that would convey an idea about the historical and political causes of the war in Bosnia. ¹⁴ The representational effect of this absence is that the war appears to be fought solely because of the viciousness of Serbs and Croats, and their hatred of Muslims. Thus, the internationally dominant discourse of the ‘history of ethnic hatred’ is taken as a sole cause of the war, fixing the spatial and temporal dimensions of the war within the locale wherein the violence takes place, and simultaneously separating it from the (apparently) democratic geographies and histories of the western, neoliberal world (Springer, 2011).

The Serb and the Croat paramilitaries, while quite equal in ugliness and viciousness, are not equally present on the screen, visually, or in the dialogues. As noted earlier, the Bosnian-Serb paramilitary forces were actually not active in the region during the Ahmici massacre. But in the film, they are visually present, and explicitly referred to in dialogues while present. Bosnian-Croat forces, on the other hand, while part of the narrative plot, are seldom explicitly identified as such in dialogues and their presence is indicated through visual symbols: the red and white chequered flag on their vehicles and the coat of arms on their uniforms. For the international audience, however, those insignias would mean nothing, even if noticed, for I imagine that few members of general UK or US audience would know what the Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) flag or coat of arms looked like. Even the mention of a Croatian commander by name would mean little to anybody who did not closely follow the war in that particular part of Bosnia. Thus, if the UK audience were to carefully follow who did what to whom in Warriors, ethnic differences between Serb and Croat forces would not count for much as both were ultimately depicted as vicious – almost demonic in some acts of violence – cowards attacking helpless civilians rather than engaging in face-to-face fighting. Harper (2011: 22–24) argues that both Serb and Croat atrocities are depicted as equally vicious, and ‘associated with those of the Nazis with creditable even-handedness’, thus contradicting the dominant representation of Serbs as the main villains. I would argue, however, that such an interpretation disregards the fact that Serb forces were not supposed to be part of the narrative plot in the first place. Consequently, having them there follows, rather than contradicts, international discourses of demonization of ‘the Serbs’, even if the film narrative offers factual references to the viciousness of Bosnian-Croat forces.

Thus, the importance of the equation of viciousness of Serbs and Croats, I suggest, lies somewhere else: in the creation of different ontological worlds. The depiction of the ‘locals’ has representational consequences for the British nationhood, masculinity and military: they belong to a world utterly different from the world inhabited by the Serb/Croat masculinities, militaries and ethnicities and their shameful ways of waging war. Balkanism as a joint ontological reference wins here over specific ethnic differentiation between Serbs and Croats. This allows for a production of symbolic geographies marked by differences between Britain and the Balkans, between war fought by the UK military and war fought by the Serb/Croat paramilitaries, and between British and Serb/Croat men. Those symbolic geographies are also moral geographies, as UK soldiers, their world and thus their engagement in the Bosnian war are represented as morally just. This resort to ethical discourses is not surprising, given that they became an important element of UK international politics in the mid-1990s, culminating in 1999, and then in 2001, when Tony Blair used them to offer justification of the NATO bombing of Serbia and of the ‘war on terror’, respectively. ¹⁵

Bosnian-Serb and Bosnian-Croat forces are not the only ‘local’ military the UK soldiers meet. There are Muslim forces, too. Or rather, there are two individuals who belong to the Muslim military units, without the actual units being visible. One of those individuals is – surprisingly – a woman. She is introduced as a commander of a unit, without the unit ever being on the screen. She is escorting the civilians fleeing Ahmici, hoping for the protection of the UK forces, which never comes. Her place is among the fleeing civilians, her history unknown, her future a lost cause: she is the one who says she’ll take the refugees towards Srebrenica. The other Muslim soldier is actually a civilian-turned-fighter, captured by Croatian forces, wounded, and saved by the UK soldiers. His history is given in the narrative. He is the husband of a woman who develops an emotional attachment to one of the UK commanders. He and his wife speak about the multi-ethnic Bosnia of the past and their present struggle for normalcy in the midst of war. In the cinematic narrative, he is someone who does not fit anywhere any longer: his past world of peace destroyed, together with his family; in his present world, as a civilian-turned-soldier he is rescued by UK peacekeepers, thus not someone who can find his way in soldiering. And certainly not in the kind of soldiering that is symbolized by Serb and Croat forces. The wounded man, neither civilian nor solider, stays in a hospital bed with the photos of his murdered family, with no clear future and no place to go. Here the UK soldiers appear as those who can rescue individuals at least, if not the communities.

Besides soldiers, UK troops also encounter civilians. In the UK, the civilians are families, friends and future wives. Most of them are women, but none of them understands, and one even explicitly refuses to know what is going on in Bosnia, keeping the world of war at distance. They are totally embedded in UK civilian life, choosing cribs for babies to come. There is however a moment of recognition of the different time-worlds of the ex-Yugoslavia, a moment where the peace of the UK meets with the past peace of Yugoslavia: ‘We went for a holiday to Dubrovnik. I hear they are bombing it now’, one UK woman says, acknowledging a moment of shared history and geography, now bombed out of existence. The representational function of these women is important: they are the UK national Self, showing ‘normal life’ in a ‘normal country’, marking the difference between the ‘home’ and the ‘front’, reinforcing the classical gendered, heteronormative narrative of war, with the men ‘over there’ fighting, and the sisters and wives mourning the fallen, and getting ready to give birth. ¹⁶ But they are also the UK military’s Other, as there is no female soldier among the UK peacekeepers. In addition, all the UK military and civilian characters are white. With the racialized representations of the vicious Serb-Croat ‘local’ soldier as an absolute Other to the UK forces, the whiteness of the UK characters reinforces the racist imagination of the UK as a nation, as well as its its military.

Among the Bosnian civilian characters, next to the de-personalized masses of refugees, there are only a few individual characters who are important enough to have names: the earlier mentioned Muslim man, and a number of women. Two of the women are translators; one in a sexual relationship with one of the (married) UK soldiers, another in what appears to be a developing emotional attachment to another UK soldier. But they have no personal histories, and no futures. Consequently, these relationships are not meant to convey a message that the UK and Bosnian worlds may have a common future, despite the differences. Rather, those relationships are for the ‘here and now’ of the Bosnian war – once the UK soldiers go home one of the translators is killed; the other not mentioned any longer. Yet another local female character gets a bit more attention, as she develops a platonic relationship with the main UK commander. She is the wife of the rescued Muslim man. The encounters between her and the UK commander are full of meaningful looks without words, and of softly spoken, short sentences about life and war. She remembers times ‘when nobody cared about each other’s religion’, lived nicely, had proper professions. She speaks English, her daughter listens to loud pop music. In such representation a possibility is created for a shared world with the civilian world of the UK. But her (and her daughter’s) death put an end to such a possibility, and, again, as no alternative plot is offered, the two worlds remain separate.

In this respect, the representational function of the ‘local’ women is to support heteronormativity as a crucial feature of the classical war narrative. Jeff Walsh (2004) has argued that feminist and gay and lesbian movements have left a mark on the cinematic representations of both femininities and masculinities since the 1990s. But in the case of Warriors, the possibility of an alternative gendered-cum-sexual narrative seems to have been overwritten by the dominant Balkanist-cum-Orientalist narrative. So, while the British solders’ masculinity is far from a hypermasculine, sexist, homophobic one, Bosnian women’s femininities remain locked into the heteronormative script, they have (literally and symbolically) ‘supportive roles’ and more importantly, the script of victimization (with death as the ultimate proof of their victimhood). ‘Local’ women offer gentle touch on a shoulder, or a saying look, they do not ask questions about the future and all in all show that the UK soldiers are a very desirable lot.

Next to this, the ‘local’ women also translate the war to the UK soldiers: they mediate the access of the peacekeepers to the locals (be they soldiers or civilians), first by literally translating between English and the local language; but then also by being emotionally and bodily accessible to the UK soldiers.

But there is a larger narrative here too. The local women are all – presumably – Muslims. The married woman is explicitly depicted as a modern, secular Muslim who remembers and loved multi-ethnic Bosnia. Her fate – death – symbolizes the destruction and future impossibility of such a modern, secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia, and simultaneously marks Bosnia as feminine. Multi-ethnicity is a ‘once upon a time’ nostalgic, historic tale. There are no other ‘local’ characters who remember, let alone treasure, the past world when Bosnians did not care for each other’s religious differences. Thus, the audience is not just told that Serbs and Croats are vicious and the Muslims are victims, but that modern, urban, secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia is only cared about by Muslims, and is ultimately an impossible project.

This narrative is not about Bosnia only, however. As we are given no explanations about the war save for local hatreds, the war is localized and irrationalized in its causes and effects, while the ‘outsiders’ – in this case the UK and its military – appear as those who try to stop it. This outside world is the world of manly honour and moral clarity, the world of peace, the world so remote civilizationally from the barbarity of the Bosnian war that it rejects even its own soldiers ‘who were there’, in order to prevent self-contamination. As the soldiers and their emotional experiences are central to the film, the representational effect of seeing their distress carries certain criticism of the UK public and the government for abandoning them when they return traumatized to the UK. While building their individual profiles, throughout the film, the camera follows their faces with close-ups, their emotional torments at the forefront of the screen. But this criticism of the UK for abandoning its soldiers after the war also carries another message, linked to the causes of the soldiers’ traumas: the viciousness of the male-cum-ethnic Other. Thus the message may also be read as: let us not engage in places of gruesomeness, in places we know and understand nothing about, in places where decent, ethical UK military men and gentle, secular, civilian, Muslim women are impotent – not through their own fault but through the fault of the vicious, male, Serb/Croat Other.

Consequently, Warriors creates two ontological worlds: one for the male, Serb/Croat military Other who is totally dehumanized, and with whom no similarity is allowed; another for the UK soldiers and their families whose very humanity and ethics stand in the way of understanding or relating to the former. The women of Bosnia belong to neither of those two ontologies. They exist in the liminal spaces, between destroyed pasts and impossible futures, anchored to both through gendered heterosexualities, either as victims, or as wives, sisters and (potential) lovers. But they are still represented through religion and ethnicity – as Muslim women – even when they are young, modern, secular and urban, that is, even when their representation defies the usual mainstream depictions of old, rural, headscarfed Bosnian Muslim women.

Conclusions

I started this article asking: what are the representations of the British and Bosnians in Warriors? What are the spaces and times that the main characters inhabit and share? And what do these tell us about cinematic ontologies?

It is clear that in Warriors cinematic characters stand symbolically for specific collectivities, specific ontological worlds. The British soldiers symbolize the nationhood and military manhood of the UK. Through them the UK is rather explicitly defined as a world of the highest moral values, even when one cannot act upon them. This is also what creates the clear and firm ontological distinctions between Britain and the Balkans as two different, irreconcilable worlds. That both of those worlds are represented through soldiering men is not really a surprise. The classical gendered narrative of war, after all, brings men into the forefront as defenders and protectors, or as attackers, as ultimate social, political and national protagonists. The differences between those two worlds of men are a constant throughout the film, never crossed, never relativized: the world of morals and the world without morals are as far apart as possible. Nevertheless, Warriors creates yet another ontological position, one that does not belong to the warring men. It is a world of women and civilians, of those who suffer either as direct victims of war (as the killed Bosnian civilians and the main local female characters) or because of the absence of the men (as the British women at the ‘home front’). The time of that ontological position is the time of destroyed pasts and impossible futures; its space is that of trauma and love. This liminal world allows for an ontological recognition of the Other, albeit in very limited and specific roles – as actual or potential heterosexual partners. It is important to stress that ontological recognition here does not mean erasure of differences. To the contrary, the female, gentle, loving Other is still the Other, but this liminal world at least allows for some shared time-space where she can be met, despite the differences; it allows for the female Other to be seen and recognized as a human being, albeit as a very different human being. That ontological recognition is not granted to the ethnicized, military male Other – for he remains characterized by an ultimate unrecognizability.