British
“Inside Kosovo with the KLA”
Shot: April 1999
ITN / Channel Four News

Judges Quote:
"I could have watched it without the voiceover and still followed the story from the images, which is the work of an excellent cameraman."

Three weeks into NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia, Tony Birtley became the first British journalist to cross back into Kosovo. He linked up with the KLA and spent 8 days living with a KLA unit around the border town of Kosare, site of some of the worst massacres carried out by Serbs on Albanians. His film, often shot whilst he was under fire and working in extremely difficult terrain, shows that while NATO remained committed to air attacks alone, the KLA, relying on ill-equipped and virtually untrained soldiers, was waging a guerrilla war on the ground.

A journalist for more than twenty years, much of it as a freelance, Birtley has covered wars all over the globe. In 1992 he set up Vanguard Television News, based in Cyprus, from where he covered difficult assignments in Afghanistan, Somalia, Burma, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo. It was in Srebrenica in 1993, whilst working as a contract correspondent to ABC News, that Birtley was severely wounded and almost lost his leg. His rehabilitation took seven months and eight operations. For his reporting in Srebrenica and Bosnia, Birtley was awarded the Royal Television Society Television Reporter of the year in 1994. Birtley now works completely independently, operating between Cyprus and Zagreb in Croatia.

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