'Behind Enemy Lines' is a 2001 American film directed by John Moore, starring Owen Wilson, and Gene Hackman).
On June 2, 1995, an American F16 fighter plane (in the film, an F18) making a surveillance flight over Yugoslavia, part of a NATO operation, was shot down using a surface to air missile by the Serbian forces; and the pilot Scott Francis O'Grady, never caught by the serbs, and surviving on the surroundings, was rescued after 6 days, by US Marine Corps. The film merges the later (1996) discoveries of Bosnian mass graves [Ref 9] into the Scott O'Grady story.
During the disintegration of 'Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia', after the independence of Slovenia and Croatia from the federation in 1991, the multi-ethnic 'Socialist Republic of Bosnia & Herzegovina', which was inhabited mainly by Muslim Bosnians (44%), Orthodox Serbs (32.5%) and Catholic Croats (17%), passed a referendum on 29 February 1992, and declared independence (which gained international recognition). Following this the Serbs in Bosnia, supported by the Yugoslavian government under President Slobodan Miloševic and the Yugoslav People's Army, mobilized their forces inside the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to secure Serbian territory (Bosnian War). The Bosnian War soon became an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Bosnian Muslim and Croat population, which spanned a long 3 and a half years (1992–1995), while the US and Europe remained as mute spectators. The Bonsinan ethnic cleansing, led to the expulsion of 25,000–30,000 (1 million in certain accounts) Bosnian civilians out of the nation. In 1995 July, the war turned worst when the Serbs attacked the Bosninan town of Srebrenica and murdered more than 8000 Bosnian Muslims. It was only after this massacre that the US and the NATO intervened, ending the war in 1995. After the war ended numerous mass graves of the massacred victims were discovered. Srebrenica mass grave (discovered in 1996, second largest so far, 629[3] bodies dug up); Tomasica (discovered in 2013, more that a 1000[3] bodies, 5,000 sq m (53,820 sq ft)[Ref 3].[Ref 3-9]) Later, Slobodan Miloševic, the president of Yugoslavia, was arrested and tried for war crimes committed in Bosnia, at the 'International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia' (ICTY), until he died of cardiac arrest in his prison cell in Hague on 11 March 2006.
May things in the film go against my standards for a good film, namely the merger of the discoveries of mass graves into the Scott O'Grady story, and the too cinematic, too spectacular and unreal climax. But the film is notable being the only American film throwing light into the discoveries of the Bosnian mass graves and thus, into the Bosnian massacres in the erstwhile Yugoslavia. Probably that's why this films is so hated by western critics. It is notable that the film received negative reviews from American and European critics, quite interestingly citing jingoism for a reason, while overly jingoistic films like 'Air Force One' did not call such criticisms. The film depicts one of the best visualization of an aircraft marked by a guided missile, and the counter measures.
References:
1.
New York Times, April 6, 1996, Another Mass Grave Is Excavated in Bosnia.
2.
CNN, July 7, 1996, Excavations of Bosnian mass graves begin
3.
BBC, November 1, 2013, Huge Bosnia mass grave excavated at Tomasica
4.
CNN, November 1, 2013, Hundreds of bodies found in Bosnia mass grave
5.
Daily Mail, October 4, 2013, Dozens of bodies discovered in Bosnian mass grave believed to be victims of genocide carried out by Serb forces
6.
Daily Mail, April 16, 2014, Bosnians see victims excavated from mass grave
7.
Strange Remains, November 26, 2013, Excavations at Bosnia’s largest mass grave will be suspended through winter
8.
Global News, April 16, 2014, Bosnians come to see family members excavated from newly discovered mass grave
9.
BBC, July 16, 2014, Horror of Srebrenica's mass graves from the air
10.
Guardian, 4 July 2015, How Britain and the US decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate
11.
Wikipedia, Srebrenica Massacre
12.
Wikipedia, Bosnian Genocide
13.
Wikipedia, Bosnian War
14.
Wikipedia, Slobodan Milošević
15.
Guardian, November 9, 2001, The accidental hero
16.
The America that Reagan Built, J. David Woodard, P190
17.
FREEDOM ON FIRE, John Shattuck
