They can't read the words, but the pictures give them hope: Frederick Baker reports on how the people of former Yugoslavia respond to Western media images of their war

IT WAS a year ago that the world first saw that emaciated torso behind the barbed wire at Trnopolje, the detention camp run by nationalist Bosnian Serbs. In the television footage, Penny Marshall, the ITN reporter, walks fast, as if towards a mirage, which she has to touch to believe. She stretches out her hand. A bony hand reaches out through the wire and shakes hers. The good manners of Penny's greeting, 'Dober Dan' ('Good day'), serve only to heighten the shock at seeing men penned together like sheep.

The camera slowly pans up the bony torso of the prisoner. It is the picture of famine, but then we see the barbed wire against his chest and it is the picture of the Holocaust and concentration camps. When the camera eventually shows the man's face it is amazing that he is still alive.

The pictures of that torso have been repeated hundreds of times, and seen by millions of viewers. Mike Jermey, ITN's foreign news editor, says it is one of the key images of the war in former Yugoslavia. It filled front pages and even brought John Major's cabinet back from holiday for an emergency meeting, on 18 August last year, at which it was decided to send 1,800 British ground troops to Bosnia.

But what did viewers in former Yugoslavia think of those images? British television coverage is available in all parts of former Yugoslavia, either direct via satellite or on news digest programmes, which record, translate and, according to Aernout Van Lynden, a reporter for Sky News, even re-edit British news reports for their local viewers.

Velimir Zugic in Belgrade saw the pictures on Sky News. As an engineer, he was one of the first on his block to have a satellite dish. To start with it was a curiosity, but once the war began it was 'a window on the world'.

Mr Zugic is no fan of Serbia's President, Slobodan Milosevic; in fact, as technical director of the government- controlled TV Serbia, he was sacked for protesting at the lack of air time given to Mr Milosevic's rival, Milan Panic, in last year's elections. He also feels that British reporting of the camps was distorted.

He recalls his reaction to seeing the Trnopolje pictures on Sky TV: 'I was, of course, shocked. But once I saw them, I looked around a bit . . . The reporter tried to be sensationalist, and in a terrible war they should not be. For instance, in the middle you have a very skinny fellow. He really is just skin and bones, but around him there are fairly fat people. Of course, we all concentrate on that terribly sick person (or maybe he's not sick, just skinny). 'I say the war is terrible, the camp is terrible, but that is where the reporting is wrong. It takes the worst part and it should be more even.'

Hundreds of kilometers away on the Adriatic coast, in a refugee camp for Bosnian Muslins, Asima Kokic, a young law student from Jajce, laughs sarcastically at these accusations. 'Those who are less skinny have probably been there for only three or four days. I met a man who was in Manjaca camp, he came out looking like a real skeleton. He was tortured there. He has two brothers, one is still there.'

For Ms Kokic and her fellow refugees huddled in the dark around a neighbour's small black and white television, 'it's only the international media that can help us. Only from them can we expect the real truth.'

In conversation with Penny Marshall, the truth of the Trnopolje pictures emerges. For her, it was Omarska, the first camp, not Trnopolje, that will give sleepless nights. It was only when she saw the footage after she had got out of Bosnia that she realised the power of the Trnopolje images. (Indeed, it turned out that the skinny prisoners at Trnopolje had recently been brought there from Omarska; many of them had come for their own protection.)

Speaking to some of the few Bosnian refugees given refuge in Britain, Ms Marshall replied to Mr Zugic's criticisms: 'I totally refute it was sensationalist. That was part of a five- minute report, which in turn was part of a 20-minute bulletin, which in turn was part of an output that ITN puts out nightly.

'I bent over backwards, I showed guards - Bosnian Serb guards - feeding the prisoners. I showed a small Muslim child who had come of his own volition. I didn't call them death camps. I was incredibly careful, but again and again we see that image being used.'

For those with relatives still missing in Bosnia, the balance of the pictures is irrelevant. Tears were what the report provoked in the eyes of Ms Kokic's neighbour, Hankija Causevic, whose brother, Edhem Kafedzic, is still missing - according to word of mouth, still in a detention camp. Her message to British journalists was clear: 'I would like foreign jounalists to go to Foca and shoot a film about the camps. It could help. If the foreign journalists can't help, who can?'

For people who see the impotence of the UN and UNHCR in Bosnia, journalists have become their only hope: weeks after the pictures of that emaciated torso hit the world's screens and front pages, Trnopolje and Omarska were shut. Bosnian refugees may not be able to read English journalists' words, but they can clearly see the results of their pictures.

The writer directed the Bosnian report in this Friday's special edition of Right to Reply, 'Bloody Bosnia', on Channel 4 at 8pm.

(Photograph omitted)