Operation Irma

The programme was reported to have evacuated hundreds of Sarajevans during the second half of 1993, but attracted significant controversy concerning its scale, evacuee selection criteria, and the motivations of the western European governments and press that inspired it.

[4] On 30 July 1993, a mortar shell fired by Bosnian Serb troops hit a Sarajevo neighbourhood, injuring five-year-old Irma Hadžimuratović and killing several others, including her mother.

On 9 August, British Prime Minister John Major personally intervened,[6] dispatching an RAF Hercules[7] to airlift Irma to London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.

[10] Other countries, including Sweden and Ireland, organized further airlifts,[9] and the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Poland also offered hospital beds.

These addressed the operation's limited scale, the motives of the British press and foreign governments in launching the airlifts, the devotion of resources to evacuation instead of supplying material support to local medical services, and the broader issue of the United Kingdom's response to the war in Bosnia.

Between the beginning of the siege on 5 April 1992 and the first airlifts under Operation Irma the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had approved only 200 of Sarajevo's 50,000 critically wounded patients for medical evacuation.

"[16] Patrick Peillod, head of the United Nations medical evacuation committee, said that the UK had treated Bosnian children "like animals in a zoo"[17] and was trying to pick and choose evacuees to suit a public relations agenda.

"[8] Sylvana Foa also later acknowledged that, after months of Western European indifference toward the war in the former Yugoslavia, the new public sympathy inspired by Irma's case was "like day following night.

[32] In a similar vein, Dominic Strinati has presented the press interest in Operation Irma as evidence of a popular appetite for news stories that resemble the structure and tone of fictional narratives on war: "War films work most effectively ... by stripping back the too easily confusing contextual details of a conflict and focusing instead on the 'existential' problem of the protagonist's experience – the problem of being human in dehumanising circumstances ... News reporting – in this case from the Balkans – then has to compete even at the level of basic comprehension with this already established way of understanding things ...

"[33] The operation has also been portrayed as representative of a trend whereby public reaction to media coverage of disasters leads and shapes official state response,[34] even precipitating the creation of policy where none has existed before.

In terms of recovering a sense of agency (in a conflict characterised by protestations of powerlessness by political and military authorities alike), the desire to do (and be seen to do) something was expressed and assuaged by transporting and incorporating some of the need and distress into the UK where it could be tended to and made better.A textbook on public relations cites the episode as an example of a "bargaining game" in which various players – the UNHCR, British government, and press – all sought to achieve individual advantage.