The DJ and the War Crimes

The Problem

In 1992, an iconic photograph by Ron Haviv captured a member of the “Arkan’s Tigers” paramilitary unit kicking a dying civilian in Bosnia. Despite the image becoming a global symbol of the conflict, the perpetrators largely escaped justice, and the soldier in the photo went on to live a public life as a European club DJ. Decades later, the digital record of the massacre faced two threats: aggressive revisionism and denialism by those seeking to discredit the photo, and the fragility of critical evidence—like state payroll logs—hidden within centralized government and tribunal archives.

The Solution

Over an 11-month investigation, Starling Lab collaborated with Rolling Stone and the VII Foundation to build a “living archive” of the massacre. The team utilized the Starling Framework to authenticate and preserve hundreds of assets, including Haviv’s original 35mm film scans and unredacted Serbian State Security payroll records. By using tools like Webrecorder and cryptographic signing, the lab registered these digital records on decentralized ledgers (Numbers Protocol, Avalanche, and LikeCoin) and stored them on the Filecoin network. This created a permanent, verifiable dossier that allows anyone to audit the metadata and prove the integrity of the evidence against future tampering.