Following the pioneering work of the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said (1978, 1994), it is now commonplace to claim that the non-Western world has been central to the articulation and reproduction of Western identities. Said’s examination of ‘Orientalism’, that is British and French representations of the Middle East, remains hugely significant in shaping our understanding of how the West, especially those countries with substantial imperial portfolios, encountered ‘others’. Specifically, Said contended that the Middle East and its inhabitants were routinely depicted as backward, mysterious and/or exotic while set against the modern, developed and progressive West. An entrenched hierarchy of places, people and practices figured within Oriental representations, especially in visual culture. The formal decolonisation of European empires did not offer any kind of cultural respite. As Derek Gregory (2004) has reminded us, we live in an era of the ‘colonial present’ and those oriental discourses and practices have endured and manifest themselves via US military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The notion of the other, moreover, is used in two senses; as a noun and as a verb with due emphasis given to the ways in which individuals and groups distinguish, identify, name and locate those outside a particular community and norm. Distance in this context might refer to both a geographical sense (with attendant ideas of proximity and remoteness) and a socio-cultural context, which highlights how it might be possible for a ‘distant other’ to live in close proximity. The presence of immigrants and refugees within host communities might be indicative of how others could be both socially distant and geographically close. The way in which ‘other’ places, people and cultures are represented in the media and popular culture is rarely unproblematic, however. In a detailed analysis of Hollywood’s depiction of Arabs and the Middle East, Jack Shaheen (2001) has noted how the film industry consistently represents Arabs as mysterious, irrational, highly sexualised and anti-Western, with the most egregious including
Iron Eagle (1986) and
True Lies (1994). Echoing Said’s broader critique concerning Orientalism within Western cultures, Shaheen also draws attention to why and how these representations matter in terms of shaping American understandings of Islam and the Middle East. This has arguably become more pronounced in the aftermath of 9/11 when Arab-Americans complained of harassment and demonisation. Organisations such as the Council for Arab-American Relations complained that Hollywood films, even those made prior to 9/11, such as
The Siege and
Rules of Engagement (2000), do not help because they perpetuate a view that Arabs are prone to violence and incapable of acting reasonably. In the case of
Rules of Engagement, US servicemen are forced to open fire on an Arab crowd while defending the US Embassy in the Yemen. Footage of the ensuing massacre shows that the American Marines were apparently justified because even children in the crowd were shown to be shooting at the Americans. The inference seems clear – ‘these people’ are even prepared to put their children in harm’s way and are taught from a young age to hate Americans. And it seems clear that film and visual culture more generally are credited with considerable capacity to shape prevailing understandings of people and places.
This chapter considers the manner in which the ‘distant other’ is represented and made to be ‘distant’, as well as the way in which the other speaks for him/herself, offering a critique and a parody of Western practices of distancing, othering and moral indifference. As before, this concern is explored through a series of interventions using some examples to illustrate different aspects of this concern. First, we consider the seeming indifference of the West towards conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s, through a discussion of
No Man’s Land. Second, we consider how the distant other provides an opportunity for America and the West more generally to show its superior military-technological capacities while saving a feminised non-Western other.
Tears of the Sun is used to animate this point. Third, we investigate how and with what consequences the distant other might resist subjugation and marginalisation. The Turkish film
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq provides an interesting example of a film provoking considerable debate in Turkey for its depiction of US/Turkish relations. In the conclusion to the chapter we consider some of the ways in which such representations of the distant other come to figure prominently in debates relating to foreign policy. In particular, we are concerned with how the distant other is presented as a ‘problem’ to the West, and the ways in which cultural representations can shape the response to such ‘problems’, either through engendering a sense of indifference, or by providing a simplistic solution (often violent) to a complex issue. We draw on Gearoid Ó Tuathail’s notion of an ‘anti-geopolitical eye’ as a potential way of reading film; ‘an eye that disturbs and disrupts the hegemonic foreign policy gaze, a way of seeing that … persistently transgresses, unravels and exceeds the frameworks scripting Bosnia [or elsewhere] in Western geopolitical discourse’ (1996b: 173).
Indifference to the ‘Distant Other’
An Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film,
No Man’s Land is set in the context of the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995. The film uses a combination of tragedy, farce and comedy to expose the absurdity both of the conflict itself and the attendant discourses of Western military intervention. In his discussion of the geographical scripting of Bosnia, Ó Tuathail draws attention to the way in which the journalist Maggie O’Kane provides a way of seeing that ‘records the fractured lives and broken bodies of the victims of the war, lives that fall between the lines of official governmental cartographies of the war’ (1996a: 171; see also 1996b). While it goes about it in a very different way,
No Man’s Land can also be understood in terms of this effort to displace the neat geographies suggested by lines on a map. This sense of being out of place and of falling between the ‘official cartographies’ of conflicts dominates throughout, as much of the film takes place in an abandoned trench between Serbian and Bosnian lines, where two soldiers from opposing sides become trapped. There is no remote satellite system to get a global view, no view from above. Rather, the perspective offered in much of the film is that from the ground, from the trench, a view that is partial, situated and lacking in clarity. Indeed, this sense of a lack of orientation is evident in the fact that the opening scene takes place in fog, with the very first lines uttered being: ‘Fuck me if he knows where we are.’
Literally and figuratively trapped in No Man’s Land, whilst the world watches on
In this context, the fact that the film does not provide a clear sense of the wider geopolitical conflict is appropriate because it is precisely the clear lines of this conflict that the film seeks to disrupt. That is not to suggest that the film does not situate itself within wider geographies and contexts. This is done in various ways, using humour and irony. The ‘bouncing mines’ (mines that when triggered bounce into the air before spraying thousands of ball bearings across a radius of fifty yards) that are laid by Serbian soldiers near the beginning of the film have ‘made in the EU’ written on the bottom. While reading a newspaper, a soldier on the Croatian lines exclaims, ‘what a mess in Rwanda’. And at one point in the film we learn that all the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) officers in Bosnia are unavailable because they are attending a seminar about media relations in Geneva. More explicitly, the film addresses the wider context for the events through embedding a sequence of news footage about a third of the way through its length. Against the backdrop of actual news footage, a voiceover outlines the ‘background to UN involvement in the conflict’ (see Myers, Klak and Koehl 1995). The sequence begins with Radovan Karadzic telling the participants in peace talks in Geneva that ‘you’re pushing Bosnia-Herzegovina to follow the same path of horror and suffering as Slovenia and Croatia. You’ll lead Bosnia into hell, and this may end up exterminating the Muslim people!’ Then, against the backdrop of actual news footage, the voiceover continues as follows:
Radovan Karadzic didn’t wait long to carry out his threat. Bosnian Serb and paramilitary forces, largely helped by the Yugoslav Army, furiously attacked Bosnian cities, which were defended only by armed Bosnian civilians and the rest of the police forces loyal to the Bosnian government… Today Bosnians are still denied the right to defend themselves by a UN-imposed weapons embargo although at this very moment war continues without any signs of pacification. The tragedy of the Bosnian nation continues, and the only help they’ve got now is 120g of humanitarian aid per day.
The voiceover accompanying this footage is clearly framed in terms of a critique of Western (non-)intervention. However, this is one of the central aims of the film – a critique of the moral contradictions of Western intervention, a rebuke to the seeming indifference of the West to its not-so-distant ‘other’. The moral contradictions of intervention are neatly summarised through the frustrations of characters that feel themselves caught up in a situation that has no clear rules of intervention. In No Man’s Land a number of UNPROFOR soldiers (nicknamed ‘the smurfs’ by Bosnian and Serbian soldiers) manning a checkpoint voice this concern and frustration in the following way:
– Why the fuck are we here?
– Good question.
– I reckon it’s simple. To stop the locals killing each other.
– Except we can’t use force or get into dangerous situations.
Frustrated by the refusal of his superiors to sanction intervention that will allow the evacuation of the soldiers from the trench, an UNPROFOR officer uses the only leverage he has – the threat of media exposure. He aligns himself with a journalist from ‘Global News’ who threatens to broadcast a story about the lack of action on the part of UNPROFOR. In this way the film acknowledges that in a contemporary context where popular media are crucial to the way in which conflict is managed and represented, such media have the potential to disrupt hegemonic scripts.
At one point the film presents the unfolding coverage by Global News of the events in the trench:
– For those of you joining us now, we have breaking news from Bosnia, where a few men are caught in no man’s land. Our correspondent Jane Livingstone is there. We’re waiting to see which measure, if any, will be taken by UNPROFOR. Is there anything you would like to add Jane?
– Yes Olivia. I would like to repeat the words I heard here only moments ago. Neutrality does not exist in the face of murder. Doing nothing to stop it is in fact choosing. It is not being neutral.
Through the voicing of such frustrations No Man’s Land explicitly challenges the way in which UN intervention in Bosnia was framed by an ethics of moral abdication (see Ó Tuathail 1999). Ultimately however, the film refuses to follow this critique through with a morally redemptive ending. Thus, while some of the UNPROFOR soldiers, members of the media and those stuck in no man’s land all voice a degree of frustration, this does not lead to successful action. This is, in part, because the head of UNPROFOR in Zagreb lacks any protocols for dealing with a situation in which both sides agree and want the same thing (i.e. the removal of the soldiers from between the lines, the presence of whom is only serving to complicate the clarity of the opposing lines). It is also, and more simply, because they lack the expertise to remove the Bosnian soldier from the mine that will kill him if he moves. Faced with this inadequacy, the commanding UNPROFOR officer orders his soldiers to leave the Bosnian soldier in the trench while also making it appear to the assembled media (through the use of a dummy) that this man has, in fact, been rescued. This is crucial because it signals the intention of the film to refuse to use the issue of intervention in order to reclaim a narrative of heroic, morally redemptive rescue. In No Man’s Land, the message is that if the script of intervention does not fit with what the rules of engagement dictate, then intervention is not possible, regardless of the consequences. Avoiding any clear resolution, the film ends in a state of tension, with a view of the Bosnian soldier lying on the mine in the trench, presumably waiting to die, having been rendered morally invisible.
Saving the Distant Other
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, there was an influx of neo-conservative ideas and practices relating to US power and influence around the world. Many of his key appointments were Vietnam-era political figures that witnessed first-hand the debacle of the early 1970s, and consequently, the first few months of his presidency were marked by a relative withdrawal from the international arena, an unwillingness to become involved in the messiness of other people’s problems. By contrast, Bush’s foreign policy after 9/11 was informed by a willingness to use military force in order to pursue values such as liberty and freedom around the world. Indeed, during the first years of his administration, films such as
Black Hawk Down (2001) and
We Were Soldiers (2002) tackled US interventions in Somalia and Vietnam respectively with, in both cases, emphasis given to American heroism and the actual experiences of combat (see Carter and McCormack 2006). In these films and others, such as
Behind Enemy Lines (2001) which was based on the real-life experiences of a downed airman in Bosnia, the focus is on a small group of (male) soldiers and their ‘testing’ experiences in combat zones (see Ó Tuathail 2005).
The role of the distant other is critical here, both as adversary and as victim to be saved/rescued by American forces. American military action is, as a consequence, represented as defensive and proportionate to the scale of the dangers being encountered in distant and unpredictable places. One of the most striking examples of a film that valourises US soldiers and their violence on behalf of distant others is Tears of the Sun, starring Bruce Willis as a naval special forces commander (Lieutenant A. K. Waters) tasked with rescuing Dr Lena Kendricks (Monica Belluci), an American citizen trapped in war-torn Nigeria. Kendricks had been working as a doctor at a Catholic mission, along with a few other white European Christians. With the security situation deteriorating, a small group of US military personnel, under the command of Waters, are ordered to evacuate her from the mission in eastern Nigeria.
The opening scenes of the film are important in terms of the characterisation of place and the geopolitics of the country. Television news footage is reproduced, purporting to show a country gripped by violence. As the news report notes the country has ‘120 million people, 250 ethnic groups [and] a long history of ethnic enmity’. There are reports of rival factions committing extra-judicial killings, children brutalised and civilians terrorised. The Nigerian state no longer seems to enjoy effective sovereignty – a ‘failed state’ in the geopolitical parlance of the 1990s. It is divided, so the television report concludes, between the Muslim North (Fulani) and the Christian South (Ibo). As a result of the conflict, the presidential family was murdered and a rebel general installed in power. The religious/ethnic geography of the country is critical to the subsequent narrative and the moral positioning of the US soldiers in terms of their mission.
Thereafter, the story concentrates on the attempts of this small group of American soldiers to extract the doctor and return her to the safety of an American aircraft carrier located ‘somewhere off the coast of Africa’. As the commander explains the mission, a large map of Nigeria is projected on a screen, which is used to show the geographical remit of the mission. They are warned to expect a ‘hostile reception’. Once they land, they struggle to persuade Kendricks to leave as Waters warns her: ‘This jungle is filling up with rebel troops … they will kill everything that they see, including privileged white doctors.’ Upon learning that the remit of the rescue mission does not include her patients, Kendricks refuses to leave. Waters makes radio contact with his superiors who re-iterate that their task does not include getting involved with the conflict; the soldiers have their mission and it does not involve the widespread rescue of black African adults and children (cf. Hotel Rwanda (2004)). Waters eventually tricks Kendricks into leaving the camp – the other Europeans, including a priest and two nuns, decide to stay. As the helicopters depart, Waters sees the rebel troops advance into the mission and begin to attack those left behind. We thus reach a crucial turning point in the movie; in the face of evidence of mass slaughter at the mission, Waters orders the helicopters to land and he, with some reluctance from his men, contradicts his orders and agrees to walk with the party to the comparative safety of the border with Cameroon. In his review of the film in the New Yorker, David Denby argues that this ‘twist’ in the narrative is important in the framing of the film as a ‘fable of American military virtue … The Americans turn away from self-interest and do the right thing; the nation’s military purpose is moral in the end’ (2003).
Having made the decision to rescue not only Kendricks but also the Christian Nigerians from the hospital compound, Waters and the men under his command begin the task of leading the group to safety. Unbeknownst to the party, they are being tracked by a ruthless gang of Muslim Nigerian soldiers who are portrayed as determined to kill them all. The film does not dwell on why this party might be so murderous in intent but their ‘Muslim’ identity is implicitly portrayed as significant in terms of judging their likely (violent) behaviour. Waters’ commanding officer warns, via the radio, that they are in effect on their own because ‘Nigerian air space’ is unsafe – an unlikely scenario given the presence of a hypermodern US aircraft carrier stationed off the West African coastline. After a series of encounters and near-escapes in the jungle, the American soldiers decide to enter a village in order to stop an ongoing massacre. Waters tells his men, ‘We are already engaged’ and they save other Christian Nigerians and prevent women from being further assaulted. After the violent encounter, Waters is shown standing in front of the burning village slowly taking in the horrors that confront him – the dead bodies, the burning village and the wounded and injured. Nigeria, in this film, is shown to be an anarchic space with difficult physical terrain – a literal and figurative ‘jungle’.
The party is consistently shown to be vulnerable to the advancing rebel troops. Filmed as if they were ‘swarming’ over the landscape, they appear relentless in their progress. A furious firefight begins in the jungle and continues on the flood plains of a river close to the border. Deaths multiply as soldiers and civilians die. Waters helps to rescue his comrades. Injured and hopelessly outnumbered, the fleeing party is eventually saved by American air power; large bombs are dropped and the rebel troops are incinerated. The American-led party finally reaches the border but the Cameroonian guards appear unwilling to open the border gates. Waters’ commanding officer lands in his helicopter and orders the gates to be opened in another example of extra-territorial authority. Waters and his team are evacuated along with Dr. Kendricks, while the Nigerian members of the party are left behind.
Tears of the Sun can be understood both as a fairly typical example of the action-adventure movie and as a cinematic reflection on the politics of military and humanitarian intervention. Set as it is in a supposedly ‘ethnic’ conflict in Africa, it perhaps bears most resemblance to the Rwandan crisis of the mid-1990s, in which the Western powers appeared both unable and unwilling to influence events. In this sense the film might well be interpreted as a critique of the non-interventionist policies pursued by the West during that decade, not only in Rwanda but also in Bosnia. Indeed, some critics have argued that this was perhaps the main political argument of the film – Denby, for example suggested that ‘the overall meaning of the movie is that Africa has dropped out of the American consciousness – that we are guilty of neglect in places like Rwanda, and that we must act to stop atrocities in the future’ (2002). The politics of
Tears of the Sun are, however, much more complicated than this.
As well as being understood as a comment and critique of the failure of Western powers to meaningfully intervene in the humanitarian crises of the 1990s, Tears of the Sun must also be read as a comment on the geopolitical context in which it was released – two years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and more or less precisely at the moment in which the US led the invasion of Iraq. Understood within these contexts the film takes on a different set of meanings. As Tarak Barkawi (2004) rightly notes, the image of the West (and in particular the United States) as an enlightened and militarised liberator is an important element in contemporary representations of Western military action in the non-Western world. Tears of the Sun is emblematic of a wider popular cultural tradition in the West of representing the native population as savage, irrational and hell-bent on using violence to settle matters – which in the case of other films, such as Spy Game (2001), is shown to be susceptible to manipulation by American intelligence agents in places like Lebanon while at the same time being able to manipulate well-meaning but politically innocent Western women. This is aided and abetted by public dialogues and discourses from the 1990s onwards about the dangers posed by failed states and wild zones in the ‘Global South’ where the authority of states was compromised. By way of contrast, the US soldiers in this film are shown to be capable of dialogue, to act with reason, and to resort to force only in desperate circumstances. Tears of the Sun mobilises colonial and humanitarian rationales for Western military intervention – feminised black men and women must be saved from the violent behaviour of other hyper-masculine and violent black men in particular.
As Cynthia Weber (2005) has noted, with reference to the rather more nuanced film
Safar e Ghandehar (
Kandahar, 2001), this kind of humanitarian narrative visualises a particular moral and spatial grammar of the War on Terror – needy, pitiful and feminised Global South subjects needing and willing to be rescued by Western saviours. These films help to re-map the geographies of international politics with the United States as a force for good willing to enter ‘wild zones’ in order to save non-Western others. In the case of
Tears of the Sun, however, a white American citizen (and doctor) is a catalyst for the accidental rescue of those black African men and women. Without her presence, it is clear that this party of heavily armed American servicemen would not have entered war-torn Nigeria in the first place – those Christian Africans would have been left to the mercy of violent Muslim militias. Moreover, the military intervention depicted in the film is shown to work – and to be appreciated by those ‘liberated’ by the process. Jonathan Barnes concludes that ‘playing as a paean to US post9/11 interventionist foreign policy,
Tears of the Sun is a film only Donald Rumsfeld could love… The film’s concluding tableau seems a projection of the Bush administration’s preferred finale to the Iraq adventure with tearfully grateful natives waving goodbye as American helicopters depart, and a US-sympathetic government about to assume power’ (2003).
‘Tearfully grateful natives waving goodbye’ (Barnes 2003); Tears of the Sun
The Distant Other Fights Back!
One of the most controversial films to emerge from Turkey in recent years is Valley of the Wolves – Iraq. Lerna Yanik (2009) has provided a compelling geopolitical analysis of the film and its reception in Turkey, noting that the film not only offers a positive representation of Turkey and what might be called Pax Ottomana but also conjures up a searing critique of the post-2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The film provides a powerful resource for thinking about how it might be possible to visualise a certain generic form (the action-thriller) performing a rather different role in terms of projecting particular representations of place, identity and state power. So much so the film was accused of putting a strain on US/Turkish relations by its unflattering portrayals of American geopolitical power, at the same time as being lambasted for its anti-Semitism.
Valley of the Wolves – Iraq caused something of a sensation when it was released in Turkey – it was the most expensive, popular and arguably most controversial film ever released in Turkish cinema. The anti-American tone of the film mirrors a wider reaction against the US in Turkish popular culture at the time, which included a bestselling novel,
Metal Firtina (
Metal Storm) by Orkun Uçar and Burak Turna, published a year earlier that projected Turkey and the US as adversaries. The film emerged from a popular television series about a Turkish secret agent and his friends who enter American-occupied Iraq to secure justice for some Turkish soldiers captured and humiliated by American military personnel. Therefore, the movie situates itself via a fictionalised depiction of a real-life incident in July 2003, when US troops arrested and hooded eleven members of the Turkish Special Forces who were operating in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah.
The film opens with one of the Turkish men involved recounting the circumstances leading up to the hooding incident in his suicide letter:
For all this time that we were in Iraq, we asked ourselves: what business did we have there? Over time we realised that those who conquered these lands always tormented the people on it. Only our ancestors did not do this. And, that day we did live up to legacy of our ancestors.
He then shoots himself while dressed in his army uniform. Thereafter, the story focuses on the efforts of a Turkish unit, led by Commander Polat Alemdar (Necati Sasmaz), to track down Sam Marshall (Billy Zane) and the other American soldiers responsible for the detention and hooding. Marshall is the living embodiment of the Bush administration’s military strategy post-9/11. He is convinced about his mission in Iraq and resolute in using overwhelming force, wherever necessary – nowhere is out of bounds. He and his men are also culturally ignorant and geographically out of place. At the start of the film, they raid a wedding party and kill the groom and guests because they are convinced that the celebratory gunshot fire is evidence of ‘terrorist’ activity. In the midst of their assault on the wedding guests, a small child is shot in front of his parents because the boy sticks a branch up the barrel of one of the soldiers’ guns. After that calamitous incident, the Americans then fire wildly, shooting the bridegroom, guests and children. Some of the guests kill a few American soldiers.
The survivors of the massacre are then shoved into an airtight container truck and sent to ‘Abu Ghraib’ prison. On route, in response to fears that they might suffocate, one of Marshall’s men fires some bullet holes into the truck killing some of the prisoners in the process and then kills another American soldier who threatens to report the incident. While the survivors are bundled out of the truck, a Jewish doctor is shown packaging trans-plant-ready organs to the United States and Israel. The killing of civilians in Iraq by American soldiers is represented in the film as shockingly routine. The use of cargo containers and Abu Ghraib prison provide powerful visual reminders of how suspected illegal combatants were stripped, deprived of Geneva Convention protections and tortured. In one particularly shocking scene, the naked prisoners are forced to form a human pyramid by the soldiers with guard dogs in close proximity (no doubt with direct reference to the notorious Abu Ghraib photos; see Butler 2004).
Alemdar and his contingent attempt to detain and hood Marshall at a local hotel. At that stage, the group intends to simply humiliate Marshall and then get locally-based media to photograph and film the event itself. Having planted bombs in the basement of the hotel, the Turkish group are convinced that Marshall will not be able to escape his public humiliation. Unfortunately for them, the American commander uses some Iraqi children as a human shield and entertains them by playing the piano while one of his men defuses a bomb under his seat. Before escaping, Marshall cannot resist baiting the Turkish men about the state of their country:
Look Turk … you love to brag, you have your own rules and you have unchanging Iraq policies and red lines. You always say no one can do anything here. Let me tell you something: we screwed up your Iraq policy and your red lines … How can you forget that you begged us to protect you from the communists? I will tell what drove you mad: we do not need you anymore.
The bride of the dead man, Leyla (Bergüzar Korel), killed at the wedding party becomes an important element of the narrative – revenge takes on added poignancy not just on behalf of the Turkish soldier but now in the name of those who were killed at the earlier Iraqi Arab wedding – all were, the narrative suggests, Muslims regardless of their nationality. While Leyla is persuaded not to become a suicide bomber by a local sheikh, she commits herself to helping Almedar and his colleagues capture and kill Marshall. Juxtaposing their image as occupiers, the American soldiers are also seen to be delivering aid and working in partnership with some Iraqi forces. While some may have benefitted from that aid, others are internally displaced as a consequence of the anti-occupation violence. And as the sheikh notes to Alemdar, the Americans ‘gave the desert to the Arabs, mountains to the Kurds and kept oil for themselves and we do not have any place to go’. As the American soldiers encounter the Turkish forces, their shooting is shown to be indiscriminate and results in the death of so-called non-combatants. Marshall simply shoots someone for looking through a house window. The devastation is widespread, Almedar stabs Marshall with the aid of Leyla’s family dagger after a desperate final confrontation.
Geopolitically the film depicts the American soldiers as brutal, ignorant and inept when it comes to dealing with local communities. Politically, the characterisation is fairly clear with three distinct groups being depicted as evil, corrupt and/or undesirable – the collaborating Kurds of northern Iraq, Christian Americans and most controversially, certainly within Israel and the United States, the role of an identifiably Jewish-American doctor shown to be harvesting body parts from injured civilian prisoners for transplantation to clients in Israel, the US and the UK. The Turkish special forces, like their American counterparts, are also ruthless as Alemdar and his colleagues kill three Iraqi Kurdish paramilitaries at a checkpoint within northern Iraq. However, the movie is also critically aware in the sense that some of the dialogue is in Kurdish and the narrative contains some acknowledgment of the Kurdish presence in Turkey, provided Kurds are not collaborating with the Americans or anti-Turkish elements.
While critics in Turkey and beyond were left rather underwhelmed and at times outraged by the movie’s controversial depiction of characters and events, it is noteworthy not only for its explicit critique of US geopolitical strategy but also for challenging some of the dominant representations of Turkey as a loyal ally of the United States and the West and/or as an Oriental space with attendant anxieties and concerns for Western actors. The actions of the Turkish soldiers are explained, in large part, by the logic not only of revenge for the treatment of their colleagues but also a commitment to uphold national pride and honour. Released in the midst of strong anti-American sentiment within Turkey, the film coincided with widespread anger at the invasion of Iraq, the creation of a
de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq and Turkey’s problematic relationship with the European Union.
The film not only tackles the use and abuse of American power in the Middle East but also considers multiple references to Turkish nationalism and the Ottoman Empire. In other words, the film is as much a critique of American geopolitics as it is a lament for the loss of a Turkish/Ottoman empire, which once extended over much of modern-day Iraq and the Levant. The Turkish soldiers in the film note ruefully the loss of empire and Iraqi Arab citizens are shown to be welcoming of their arrival in Iraq. Alemdar’s desire to hood Marshall is in part motivated by revenge, but also informed by a willingness to reverse past and present Turkish humiliations. For the Americans, Turkey and Turks are considered disposable in the post-Cold War era, with the absence of the Soviet threat. In the Valley of Wolves – Iraq is suggestive of new possibilities for Turks to resurrect their influence and stature across the region.
Distance, Proximity and the ‘Other’
Often constructed as a ‘problem’ within security discourses, the ‘distant other’ appears most prominently in such ways of thinking in connection with the issue of ‘intervention’. The question of intervening in the affairs of another sovereign state is, in turn, one of the central issues within both the study and practice of international relations and, moreover, it is an issue that is increasingly couched in the language of humanitarianism and human rights (including ‘right to protect’). Issues of how to relate to, or indeed how to understand ‘distant others’, therefore lie at the very heart of the practice of international relations. The three films discussed here address, in differing ways and with varying effects, both the lives of ‘distant others’ and this question of intervention. In the case of
Tears of the Sun, we have argued that there is a tendency in this kind of genre to depict an idealised version of the West back on itself, or in other words to produce an account of Western intervention where the only problem lies in the mechanics of execution of the redemptive act by the heroic Western male.
Valley of the Wolves – Iraq, however, works in an entirely different visual register. Here, many of the tropes of the Hollywood action-thriller, especially those that revolve around the US military’s interventions overseas (for example, over-simplification, unsympathetic portrayal of the adversary), are reversed in order to
critique the presence of the US military and the broader geopolitical strategies within which they operate. In this sense the film turns the discursive and rhetorical techniques of much American cinema and geopolitics
against itself.
However, No Man’s Land offers, in our opinion, the most thoughtful and ultimately rewarding set of reflections on the ambiguity and contradictions of the notion of intervention in general, and the West’s self-image in particular. Offering a trenchant critique of the seeming indifference and impotence of ‘the West’ in the face of the Balkan wars, No Man’s Land offers a cinematic version of what Gearoid Ó Tuathail has elsewhere termed ‘the anti-geopolitical eye … an eye that disturbs and disrupts’ (1996b: 173). He uses this term to describe the journalism of Maggie O’Kane during the conflict in Bosnia, suggesting ‘what O’Kane’s anti-geopolitical eye does is release the dam and let Bosnia bleed into our world, on to our newspapers and on our television screens. With the intense power of her prose, she corrodes the self-protective layers of indifference of the West’ (1996b: 181).
It is not our intention here to review the extensive history of political, legal and moral debate on the issue of intervention, but a number of remarks are germane to our ensuing analysis. First, it is necessary to consider the geopolitical paradox that lies at the heart of these debates. This paradox can be summed up by Klaus Dodds’ question, ‘how can humanitarian intervention be justified when it occurs within an international political system premised on state sovereignty and norms of non-intervention?’ (2005: 160). In other words, the practice of one state intervening in the affairs of another brings two international norms (the protection of human rights on the one hand, the protection of state sovereignty on the other) into direct conflict. Furthermore, far from being enduring ‘universal truths’, both of these norms are historically and socially produced, and thus subject to the play of language and the weight of discourse and debate. The formation of foreign policy, then, is necessarily a considered articulation of these competing norms, and thus the framings and discursive constructions brought to bear upon any given situation or context are of considerable significance – see, for example, David Campbell’s
Writing Security (1998). The US-led War on Terror provides ample evidence of just such discursive strategies as justifications for military interventions (see also Dittmer 2012). Fred Halliday (2010), for example, explores the extensive new vocabulary developed during the conflict for this very purpose; Cynthia Weber (2005) notes the appropriation of the film
Kandahar by George W. Bush as discursive legitimation for the military intervention in Afghanistan; and Stuart Elden (2009) argues that the US administration re-articulated the notion of internal sovereignty (in the case of Afghanistan) as a set of obligations to be met (rather than a right to be asserted), and that if neglected, this made foreign intervention permissible.
Second, it is necessary to recognise that the practice of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ has greatly increased in recent decades, and thus a better understanding of its construction – politically, culturally and morally – is an important project. A dramatic increase in the use of ‘humanitarianism’ as a guiding logic for military intervention took hold in the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the ending of the Cold War. Thomas Weiss, for example, notes that the UN Security Council passed twice as many resolutions between 1990 and 1994 than it had in the previous 45 years of its existence, and that that during the 1990s ‘humanitarian issues have played a historically unprecedented role in international politics’ (2004: 136). As this chapter has shown, this upsurge in ‘humanitarian intervention’, and the ethical and political questions it raises, has been reflected in a wide array of films. Indeed, the argument has been made elsewhere that cinema itself can be seen as a form of intervention into the ‘logics’ of intervention (see Carter and McCormack 2006).
Third, and finally, this upsurge in the incidence of ‘intervention’ does need to be contextualised within the discursive and visual practices (of which film is certainly part) that make it possible. Despite recent attempts to codify the criteria under which intervention should happen (such as the Responsibility to Protect protocols; see Bellamy 2008), decisions to intervene essentially remain based upon firstly, some notion of ‘Western interest’, and secondly, a series of discursive justifications. In other words, intervention remains a case of ‘selective engagement’, and thus an understanding of how such selections are both made and justified is an important question. In this regard a number of scholars have proposed the so-called ‘CNN effect’ – the idea that the foreign policy response of Western governments to international events can be driven and shaped by media coverage of those events. As the work of Jon Western (2002) on the US intervention in Somalia shows, the reality is often more complex than this, but nevertheless, the fact remains that the ways in which international events become framed and understood does play a part in international responses to them.
It is worth concluding this discussion with an illustration – that of the delayed, partial and fragmented Western intervention that occurred in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and to which No Man’s Land is clearly addressed. In a stinging critique of the ‘failure of the West’ to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia, Brendan Simms argues that the British diplomatic community hold a particular responsibility for such a failure. He argues that the British government developed a particular ‘storyline’ about the conflict in Bosnia that ‘held sway for three long years of slaughter, siege and senseless brutality in Bosnia’ (cited in Ó Tuathail 2004: 492). In other words, he argues that the British diplomatic community were able to articulate a set of ideas about the causes of the crisis and the likely outcomes of any Western intervention in the region that effectively made the case for nonintervention. Elsewhere, Ó Tuathail (1996b) suggests that there were two dominant ‘scripts’ pertaining to the popular representation of the war in Bosnia – one that understood events as a ‘new Vietnam’, a quagmire that would ensnare any intervening forces in a prolonged and messy conflict, and the other that scripted Bosnia as a site of a ‘new holocaust’ and into which the West must intervene in order to prevent the spread of ethnic cleansing. Whilst the former held sway amongst political and diplomatic elites (at least in the early years of the conflict), Ó Tuathail reminds us that there are other ‘ways of seeing’ (1996b: 173). Given the essentially discursive nature of political decisions over questions of intervention and questions of action on behalf of a ‘distant other’, this seems to us a potentially important role of critical cinema, such as No Man’s Land.