By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Sep 20 2006 (IPS)

Hollywood is shooting in Bosnia these days, and bringing back scenarios of conflict long before the film gets made.

A Hollywood crew began shooting the thriller ‘Spring Break in Bosnia’ last week. Star Richard Gere drew large crowds of fans as shooting began in capital Sarajevo.

The filming drew unprecedented media coverage. But the political tone of the film set many thinking, and set them apart.

The film is about a U.S. journalist’s search for Radovan Karadzic, one of the most wanted war criminals of the 1992-95 conflict, director Richard Shepard explained at press conferences around the city.

And that is where media coverage becomes deeply divergent, in a country of four million whose post-war structure resembles the division of its ethnicities.

Post-war Bosnia is made of the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic of Srpska. Its three ethnic groups remain deeply suspicious about each other after a war that took more than 100,000 lives, mostly of Bosnian Muslims. They live separated in their entities, with little mutual contact.

The Sarajevo media used the filming to recall the terrors of the 1992-95 war, when the predominantly Muslim capital came under siege from Bosnian Serbs.

‘Notorious war criminal hunted’ ran one headline in the Sarajevo press; ‘Wartime saga re-lived’ said another. Papers used the opportunity to re-tell the story of the siege and of Serb cruelty. Some 10,000 people are believed to have been killed in the course of that siege.

On the other hand, Bosnian Serb media and media in neighbouring Serbia have been mocking the story, and Richard Gere. A nationalist paper in Serbia dubbed him “the American Gigolo”, referring to one of his old movies, and called his latest role “dubious”.

Most Serbs regard Karadzic as a wartime hero, although he stands accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia of genocide and war crimes against Bosnian Muslims.

Together with his wartime military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, he is held responsible for the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica when it was overrun by the Bosnian Serb Army in July 1995. Mladic is also in hiding..

Karadzic is thought to be hiding in the border region of eastern Bosnia and his native Montenegro, in some of the secluded Orthodox monasteries. His wartime commander Mladic is believed to be somewhere in Serbia. The extradition of both to the war crimes tribunal blocks Bosnia’s and Serbia’s chances of joining the European Union.

All this baggage has come now to the shooting of the Hollywood film.

Gere told reporters he knew “little about Bosnia.” Shepard said he only “wanted to understand what really happened” after reading a long article by U.S. journalist Scott Anderson in 2001. But Bosnian Serbs see the film as renewing a smear campaign against them.

“This is yet another effort to portray Karadzic worse than he ever was,” Bosnian Serb politician Jovo Vukeljic told Bosnian Serb and Serbian media. He suggested the film would be banned by the Republic of Srpska.

Many Serbs are fed up with a portrayal as villains. There was similar anger earlier this year over the film ‘Grbavica’ by Sarajevo director Jasmila Zbanic. It is about a Muslim woman who becomes a victim of rape by Serb soldiers, who has a teenage daughter by one of the rapists, and faces problems when the daughter confronts the truth.

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