By Anes Alic
Serbia’s state-run television RTS apologized last week to the publics of the former Yugoslavia for serving as a propaganda tool of wartime Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
This move is likely to be followed by apologies from other state broadcasters in the countries of the former Yugoslavia as they all share responsibility for enflaming ethnic animosity, even though RTS perhaps more pointedly served the interests of politicians.
It is a significant development on an ethical level, though it is not likely to result in any major consequences for journalism or any major improvements in the field: no editors or journalists were held responsible for their false and biased reporting, and indeed many of them remain active and influential.
The apology is the first ever issued by Serbia’s state broadcaster, which was one of the symbols of Milosevic’s era marked by wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
The station’s newly appointed managing board said its statement that “during the tragic events of the 1990s, RTS with its reporting on many occasions hurt the feelings, moral integrity and dignity of the Serbian citizens, intellectuals, members of political opposition, journalists, ethnic and religious minorities, as well as certain neighboring peoples and states.”
The statement also said that the content of RTS programs at the time had been deliberately designed to discredit the Serbian opposition and its leaders.
The apology will certainly represent a positive step toward improved relations among the countries of the Western Balkans – across the region media played a decisive role in the violence. The real question is whether the RTS apology – or the possible future apologies by state broadcasters in Croatia and Bosnia – is enough; whether the key players in those media outlets should be tried for war crimes, as their propaganda encouraged many murders.
When he came to power in the late 1980s, Milosevic appointed trusted associates to head the national broadcaster and turned it into his regime’s tool all until 2000 when he was toppled. From the beginning of the conflicts in 1991, RTS management and reporters portrayed Serbs as the victims of ethnic attacks in the former Yugoslavia. This propaganda led many Serbs to volunteer for the frontline, seeking revenge.
In 1991, while reporting from the Croatian frontlines, RTS journalists fueled anti-Croatian hysteria by saying that Croatian fighters were cutting off Serb children’s fingers and making necklaces out of them. They also reported that Croats were suffocating Serb babies with plastic bags in a nursery in eastern Croatia. The reports were later proven to be false, but the damage was done.
One witness, a Serb paramilitary volunteer, testified during the Vukovar war crimes trial that he had joined Serb paramilitary forces in Croatia after watching a news program in Serbia. When Vukovar fell to the Serbs, paramilitaries seized prisoners, taking some 200 of them to a pig farm in Ovcara where they were beaten, tortured and killed. Their bodies were later found in mass graves.
In 2009, Serbian prosecutors initiated investigations against several journalists and editors from pro-Milosevic media for inflammatory reporting during the 1990s.
Serbia’s Special War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office has launched a preliminary inquiry into the role of journalists in inciting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, focusing on reporting on atrocities in Vukovar in Croatia, and the Bosnian city of Zvornik.
While prosecutors announced they would have preliminary results within two months, in late 2009, the job proved more challenging than anticipated.
The Serbian Prosecutor’s Office said the aim was not to persecute journalists, but to establish whether there were elements of criminal activity in reporting.
Of course, it was not only RTS that contributed to the spreading of ethnic hate; several other media outlets such as daily newspapers Politika and Vecernje novosti, and the Tanjug news agency served as the as mouthpieces of the Milosevic regime. They enjoyed all the privileges of the regime, including the exclusivity of reporting from war zones.
Neither was Serbian media alone in this practice.
Though no debate has been launched on this issue in Croatia and Bosnia, there is no doubt that the wartime media outlets in both countries will also have to answer some tough questions. With the RTS apology out there, the international community will expect others to follow.
Serbia is working hard to win EU candidate status this year and is under pressure to show that it is moving away from the nationalist impulses that drove those wars.
Most likely, ex-Yugoslavian media will not face any war crimes probes at the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as media did in the case of the genocide in Rwanda.
It would be difficult for prosecutors to establish firm links between wartime reporting and war crimes, and the challenge of proving that journalists intentionally provoked atrocities in former Yugoslavia will likely go unmet.
Most recently, a Bosnian investigative journalist was sacked after footage was released on the internet of him reporting for the Bosnian Serb radio station from Srebrenica on the day the city was overrun by the Bosnian Serb army.
In the footage, Slobodan Vaskovic and his colleagues were interviewing an elderly Bosnian Muslim prisoner, forcing him to say that the Bosnian Serb army was liberating the city from the mujahideens and that the Bosniak army had committed atrocities against Serbs in the villages surrounding Srebrenica.
It would be unfair to accuse Vaskovic and other reporters for the Srebrenica massacre, but such reporting certainly could have influenced members of the Serb regular and paramilitary forces to seek revenge and escalate the conflict.
Many of those wartime reporters and editors remain public figures, some working in media outlets as writers, columnists and trainers of a younger generation of reporters, while others are professors and even ambassadors.
The investigation into the extent of their role in the conflicts certainly should be conducted in full, and the public should be aware of who they are. This is particularly important as public broadcasters in all three countries continue to produce biased, unsourced and highly selective reporting, particularly when it comes to issues of war crimes and their neighbors.
Excerpts from former Yugoslav wartime media:
-“It seems that Muslim extremists invented the most horrific crime on the planet. Last night they fed Serb children to the lion at the Sarajevo Zoo.” RTS broadcasted this story by their Bosnian correspondent, Rada Djokic, in 1992 after a tipoff from Bosnian Serb soldiers from the frontline.
-”Muslims are still in Makarska.” Bosnian Croat Smiljko Sagolj reported this for Croatian television after many Bosnians sought refuge in the Croatian resort town after the start of the Bosniak-Croat war. One day after the story was broadcast, a bomb exploded in a Bosnian refugee camp near Makarska.
-“Every Muslim should pick a Serb to kill when the time comes.” A Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) journalist wrote this in the magazine “Zmaj od Bosne,” which is associated with the main Bosniak Party for Democratic Action (SDA).
-”Turk women claim that we rape them, but just recently in a refugee camp one of the rape victims gave birth to a black child.” Bosnian Serb anchor Risto Djogo said during a Bosnian Serb Television (SRT) news broadcast.
–by Anes Alic for ISA Intel. Copyright 2011, ISA Intel. All rights reserved.
