The Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia has been awarding an award for investigative journalism for more than twenty years, and since 2020 this award bears the name of Dejan Anastasijević (1962–2019), one of the best and bravest journalists in the region, a journalist who spent most of his working life in "Vremen".
..."KILL FOR PHOTOGRAPHY": The book by B. Matejčić, published by Sandorf, can be found in Croatian bookstores
This year, the first "Dejan Anastasijević" prize was awarded to Barbara Matejčić for the text "Killing for a photograph: What is hidden behind the only photograph of death in the war in Yugoslavia", which was published in May 2025 on the BIRN Serbia website and the "Novosti" portal in Croatia. During the award ceremony, the president of Nuns, Željko Bodrožić, drew attention to the fact that the award was given to "a story characterized by the quality of storytelling and courage in choosing the topic, firmly established on brilliant professionalism, but also a story about a huge, dark stain on journalism." This research on the origin of photography, awarded by the World Press Photo in 1993, sheds new light on the question of whether photojournalists only recorded the brutal killing of prisoners or were their lenses not only witnesses but also accomplices to the crime?
Barbara Matejčić, freelance journalist, researcher and professor of investigative journalism, is the author of many texts and radio broadcasts focused on social issues and human rights. During her career, she received many awards, including international awards, the European Journalism Award, the Investigative Journalism Award for Europe, and the Lighthouse for Reporting on Poverty and Social Inequality (Croatia, 2021 and 2025). Her text "Killing for a photograph: What is hidden behind the only photograph of death in the war in Yugoslavia" was awarded the "Srđan Aleksić" Regional Journalism Award in the "For Courage" category last year, and was also shortlisted for the European Journalism Award in 2026. For this issue of "Vremena", Barbara talks about the motivation to investigate and expose important topics for society and the future of Croatia and the region, the approach to journalistic work, the challenges she faced during research, as well as echoes of his work.
"WEATHER" It seems that your journalistic career is marked by research into the relationship between the state and its institutions towards citizens, lack of responsibility, and exposing institutionalized discrimination and impunity in Croatia and neighboring countries. Is there a moment in your life that you, so to speak, determined or have always been interested in these topics?
BARBARA MATEJČIĆ: If you mean whether I work from the experience of my own skin, the answer is - no. My close journalist friend teases me that there isn't a single topic I deal with that doesn't directly concern me, not even the female experience of discrimination and oppression, although I haven't been able to get away from it completely, nor can any woman. But I've been a Bunji since childhood. I was not obedient and quiet, neither a girl nor a teenager, and later I was able to articulate that, as well as my early feeling of the injustice of the world - although not on my own example, because I grew up quite comfortably - through journalism. I think that the biggest drivers in my work are injustice, which is produced by the system, and by individuals, or which happens to you at birth, as well as curiosity, that is, the need to understand the world around me. And in the background is the conviction, probably derived from the experience of living in these areas, that the system is never our friend.
In the last decade and a half your texts they tell stories o, let's say, photo of the execution in Brčko in 1993, femicide, rapes, search for missing migrants and attempts to identify dead migrants... In an interview, you said that you use narrative journalism, which contains basic journalistic questions, ali "ko" becomes a character in the story, "gde"- scenography, "Kada"- passage of time, "what"- the plot, a "kako" i "why"- the process by which we learn complex things about others and ourselves. Why do you choose that particular style?, or writing technique?
Few things in journalism can touch people like good narrative journalism. I know this primarily as a reader. The goal of narrative journalism, which does not have much of a tradition in our region, is to try to suck the readers into the text, transport them to the places that are being written about, bring the people to life, almost position them as observers of events and, if you succeed in this, connect them with what you are writing about. That's why I choose it, and because it's both challenging and fun, but I don't always use that kind of storytelling. Different topics require different approaches and it is important for me to hear what kind of voice and way of "performance" is needed for the story. Working on audio documentaries, which is different than writing, teaches me that.
For some topics, this type of narration is superfluous, it can be intrusive and even kitschy. Sometimes a simple, dry, reporting way of writing is more appropriate and even more effective. I think it is important that as journalists we can move through different styles of writing, and for some types of journalism it is not even necessary. Anyway, I'm not loyal to any style.
Comments "Killing for a photo... " it was published almost exactly one year ago. In the 1990s, different information came from the war-torn area, what you write about was also discussed, but information without evidence remained at the level advertising she said. How did you decide to research this topic??
The whole story about photos from Brčko started for me with the book by photographer Sandra Vitaljić War of images: Contemporary war photography, in which short interviews with photojournalists who were on various battlefields in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia in the 1990s were published. Among those interviews was the one with the photographer Srđan Ilić, who during the war worked for the "Associated Press" agency, and in that interview he said that two kids in the Writers' Club in Belgrade practically bragged that they had paid a murderer so that they could take photos of the killings in Brčko. I couldn't believe what I was reading and that it wasn't already a big, well-known story. I started asking around among my colleagues in Serbia and it turned out that a lot of people who work in journalism, especially war photojournalists, know about that story, but everything else is at the level of gossip. And then in 2022, I decided to deal with that topic as a journalist. I opened an excel sheet and listed all the sources I needed and all the potential clues. I knew right away that it would take me a lot of time, but that it was important to try to determine what happened. That whole story, not only about how the photographs were created, but also how they traveled around the world and brought glory to the photographer, as well as how it was done in the war, is the story of our profession. Although I was too young to be a war reporter, I consider that to be my professional legacy.
How long did the research take?? What was the most difficult for you in that process?, did you have any ethical dilemmas and how did you resolve them?
It took about three years from the beginning of the research to the publication, but I didn't work only on it during that period, because I couldn't afford it. On the contrary, I dealt with it for the most part in my free time. Journalists Natalija Jovanović and Ruben Brugnera also took part in the research. The most difficult thing was to reach everyone involved. It's not my first time dealing with something that was 30 years ago, so I knew it would be detective work with an uncertain outcome. For example, Goran Jelisić, the murderer of civilians who is in the police uniform in those photos, is still serving the forty-year prison sentence he received at the Hague Court precisely for the murder of civilians in Brčko, and the information about the place where he served his sentence is not public. I managed to locate him, but the Italian judiciary refused my request to visit him several times. To finally manage to talk to him, I needed both ingenuity and luck and it took about a year. It was similar with tracking down the main photographer, who has not lived in Serbia since 1993 and whom several people told me had died. In the end, I managed to reach everyone who is important to the story. I know I have ethical dilemmas in my work, but I didn't have any important ones here, and those I did, I addressed in the text. At the beginning of writing, I was more troubled by how to structure that amount of diverse material into a clear story that holds attention.
The text also relies on the findings of the Hague Tribunal, clearly you read the transcripts in what must be excruciating detail. As in other research, as a journalist you had to process information, images and destinies that point to the worst aspects of humanity. How do you deal with that??
I have dealt with war and war crimes before, I was in the fields, I spoke with witnesses, even the perpetrators, and I spent a lot of time reading court archives, especially in The Hague. And I came across all kinds of disturbing content, but I am also exposed to horrors through other topics that I deal with. In a way, maybe even more, because war is a special state of chaos and disintegration of norms, in which the worst of human behavior can be expected, and in so-called peace I do not expect such institutional violence as that of the Croatian police against unarmed, harmless people trying to cross the border or the extreme poverty in which Roma children live, for example. It helps that I'm balanced so that I can tolerate some cruelty, maybe because it never surprised me, even when I was a child, what a cruel place the world is. But yesterday I was not able to fully watch the video in which young men and women brutally beat a foreign sailor in Rijeka and record it.
Based on the findings presented in your text, The Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia is with the Association of Journalists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and with the permission of the family of the murdered Husein Krša, sent to the World Press Photo Foundation in mid-April (WPP) official request to withdraw Bojan Stojanović's prize awarded in 1993. for the execution photo. Do you have any comments??
Even for smaller offenses than that, WPP has so far taken away rewards. So, for example, in 2010, Stepan Rudik, winner of the third prize in the sports photography category, was disqualified, because he removed a part of the foot of a person in the background from one of the photos in his series, and neither the foot nor the person were important to the photo. According to the WPP code of ethics, among other things, the signatures under the photo must be correct, and with the photo from Brčko, there was a lie for decades that the murdered Husein Kršo was a sniper, until I sent them equally decades-old proof that he was not, and it is a documentary from Dutch public television in which the photographer himself says at the WPP exhibition that the murdered man was an ordinary civilian. Only then did they correct the signature. Besides, WPP was not interested in the information I collected. They did not even want to approve my multiple requests to speak with the director of the Foundation. I think it is up to the journalist associations to continue to deal with it. And that is especially important for the Kršo family. Just as it would be important for them to finally be able to mark the place where their husband and father were killed, but the authorities in Brčko prevent that. Not even to put up an ordinary commemorative plaque. It is, let's say, an injustice that I do not bear easily.
Ten years ago you published a book "How are you? ", with stories about the fates of citizens who are often invisible to the majority of society. There is talk that you are preparing a new book, what is it about?
I don't know what's being said, but it's very cool, just a few days ago the book "Killing for Photography" was published by Sandorf in Croatia, and the American edition is also being prepared next year. It was unplanned for me, at the initiative of the publisher. The book that I've had in my mind for a couple of years, I can't even start, let alone write, because I don't have the time, that is, the money to buy time for research and writing. And it concerns the end of life and dying. It is a subject that disturbs, frightens and occupies me.
NUNS and BHN demand the revocation of the award to Bojan Stojanović
The Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS) and the Association of BiH Journalists (BHN) sent a request to the World Press Photo Foundation that the award Spot News from 1993, awarded to Bojan Stojanović for the photograph of the execution of Husein Krša, will be revoked based on the knowledge presented in Barbara Matejčić's research text. In his text, Matejčić emphasizes that this and other photos of the event cannot be viewed as a mere document of a spontaneous crime, but that there is credible evidence that the photographer knew in advance that the murder would occur. The associations remind that these allegations are also based on the transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The testimony of Goran Jelisić, a war criminal whose actions are depicted in the award-winning photo, indicates that two photographers were brought in to record the murders of two Muslim prisoners for propaganda use in Serbia.
NUNS and BHN request the revocation of the award to Stojanović, the publication of a correction and a public statement on the steps that will be taken to ensure full compliance with the Ethical Guidelines of this organization.
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