1. US fabricated evidence in Yugoslavia, says former official
February 6, 2003
2. DATELINE YUGOSLAVIA: THE PARTISAN PRESS
by Peter Brock
FOREIGN POLICY Number 93, Winter 1993-94, p.152-172.
=== 1 ===
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/izbor/yu_kriza/2003-04-16_2.html
US fabricated evidence in Yugoslavia, says former official
Any US evidence against Iraq should be viewed with skepticism
by Frank in Stockholm, Unknown News correspondent
February 6, 2003
The US "fabricated evidence" against former Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic during clashes between Serbia and Bosnia in the
mid-1990s, according to a prominent and experienced international
peacekeeping official who served there.
Retired Swedish Brigadier General Bo Pellnas, who was head of UN
Military Observers (UNMOs) in Croatia, now says that the US should not
be trusted. Pellnas says that he learned to distrust US-provided
evidence during peacekeeping service in the former Yugoslavia.
Pellnas's misgivings are described in an article from the Swedish
daily newspaper Aftonbladet. Here is an English-language translation
of this article:
In an interview with Sweden's leading news-wire TT, retired
Brigadier Bo Pellnas claims that the US "faked evidence to suit their
own interests."
"If the US were to present evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, the countries of the Western world would have no way to
substantiate these reports due to the technical superiority of the
US."
These are the words of retired Brigadier Bo Pellnas, who says he
witnessed the US "fabricating fact to suit their own needs." Pellnas
says he witnessed this first-hand when he led an international force
which safeguarded the borders between Serbia and Bosnia in the
mid-1990s, where he gained a very good insight and understanding of US
operations.
"The technical superiority of the US gives their politicians the
option of bringing forth fake evidence, in this case in front of the
United Nations Security Council."
Pellnas served in Yugoslavia during a time when US efforts, led by
then Secretary of State Madeline Albright, presented evidence to the
UN Security Council that Milosevic's Belgrade government ran
unmonitored arms shipments. Pellnas claims that Albright's staff
presented manipulated satellite photos to document false allegations,
leading the Security Council to act in accordance with the US hard
line against Milosevic.
"There might be a possibility that Albright thought the pictures to
be true," says Pellnas, "but several incidents pointed towards the
fact that the US lied." The US stood firm by their claims, refusing to
show supporting evidence to Pellnas and other members of the
peacekeeping crew.
"If the US were to come forth with evidence against Iraq which were
"difficult to confirm," the permanent members of the Council will be
put in a difficult situation, since they lack the sufficient tools to
research and verify such claims."
Pellnas said he hopes that nations of the European Union make it
their responsibility to build their own intelligence agency which has
the capability to act as a counterbalance to the US. "It would be
great indeed if the EU could act as a balance to the world's only true
superpower, which acts alone these days."
In addition to his UN duties, Pellnas was also in charge of an
international monitoring mission to Yugoslavia in 1994 sponsored by
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and
worked with the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia
(ICFY), a group established in 1991 to find a peaceful solution to the
region's conflicts.
=== 2 ===
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/kosta/autori/brock.peter/partizan.press.html
FOREIGN POLICY Number 93, Winter 1993-94, p.152-172.
DATELINE YUGOSLAVIA: THE PARTISAN PRESS
by Peter Brock
The international news story since mid-1991 has been
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the atrocities, the refugees, and the
World's inaction. In most accounts, the villain has been
denounced for the worst crimes committed on European
soil since the death of Adolf Hitler and the demise of
Joseph Stalin.
The evidence appears overwhelming that the military
forces of the Bosnian Serbs have perpetrated grave
offenses. But throughout the crisis the Serbs have
complained that they were also victims, and there is
apparent evidence to support their complaint.
The almost uniform manner by which the international
news media, including the American media, dismissed
Serb claims has played a critical role in the unfolding
tragedy in the former Yugoslavia. As the first phase of
the crisis perhaps now draws to a close, it is time for a
searching look at the performance of the international
media.
The verdict is anything but positive. As one of
America's most prominent journalists on America's
most prestigious newspaper said in a risky moment of
candor early last Summer, "I despair for my profession,
and I despair for my newspaper. And this is very
definitely not for attribution." As the routine, sometimes
zealous bearers of bad news, especially in war,
news-people cynically shrug off criticism (and
especially abhor self-criticism) and trudge back to the
trenches. But in the Yugoslav civil war, the press itself
has been a large part of the bad news. Legitimate
concern for personal safety undoubtedly affected the
coverage. Many stories that deserved a follow-up did
not receive it because journalists could not get to the
scene of the conflict and were forced to rely on
less-than-perfect sources. But a close look at the record
since the war began on june 27, 1991, reveals avoidable
media negligence and a form of pack journalism that
reached its extreme last winter and spring.
During that period, readers and viewers received the
most vivid reports of cruelty, tragedy,and barbarism
since World War II. It was an unprecedented and
unrelenting onslaught, combining modern media
techniques with advocacy journalism.
In the process, the media became a movement,
co-belligerent no longer disguised as noncombatant and
nonpartisan. News was outfitted in its full battle dress of
bold head-lines, multipage spreads of gory photographs,
and gruesome video footage. The clear purpose was to
force governments to intervene militarily. The effect
was compelling, but was the picture complete?
In fact, the mistakes were blatant:
- street scenes of ravaged Vukovar in 1991 were
later depicted as combat footage from minimally
damaged Dubrovnik on Western television
networks.
- the August 17, 1992, Time cover photo, taken
from a British television report, showed a smiling,
shiftless, skeletal man who was described as being
among "Muslim prisoners in a Serbian detention
camp." In fact, the man was a Serb - Slobodan
Konjevic, 37, who, along with his brother Zoran,
41, had been arrested and confined on charges of
looting. Konjevic, more dramatically emaciated
that others who wore shirts in the picture, had
suffered from tuberculosis for 10 years, said his
sister in Vienna, who later identified her brothers
in the picture.
- the 1992 BBC filming of an ailing, elderly
"Bosnian Muslim prisoner-of-war in a Serb
concentration camp" resulted in his later
identification by relatives as retired Yugoslav
army officer Branko Velec, a Bosnian Serb held in
a Muslim detention camp.
- among wounded "Muslim toddlers and infants"
aboard a Sarajevo bus hit by sniper fire in August
1992 were a number of Serb children - a fact
revealed much later. One of the children who died
in the incident was identified at the funeral as
Muslim by television reporters. But the
unmistakable Serbian Orthodox funeral ritual told
a different story.
- in its January 4, 1993, issue, "Newsweek"
published a photo of several bodies with
accompanying story that began: "Is there any way
to stop Serbian atrocities in Bosnia?" The photo
was actually of Serb victims, including one clearly
recognizable man wearing a red coat. The photo,
with the same man in his red coat is identical to a
scene in television footage from Vukovar a year
earlier.
- CNN aired reports in March and May 1993 from
the scenes of massacres of 14 Muslims and then 10
Muslims who were supposedly killed by Serbs.
The victims later turned out to be Serbs. There
was no correction.
- in early August 1993, a photo caption in "The
New York Times" described a Croat woman from
Posusje grieving for a son killed in recent Serb
attacks. In fact, the Croat village of Posusje, in
Bosnia near the Dalmatian coast, had been the
scene of bloody fighting between Muslims and
Croats that had caused 34 Bosnian Croat deaths,
including the son of the woman in the photo.
By early 1993, several major news organizations
appeared to be determined to use their reporting to
generate the political pressure needed to force U.S.
military intervention. In testing the effects of their
stories, U.S. networks and publications conducted
numerous polls during the Yugoslav civil war. But no
matter how pollsters sculpted their questions, majorities
of public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to all
forms of armed intervention. Finally, on August 11, an
ABC news - "Washington Post" poll said that six out of
ten Americans supported allied "air strikes against
Bosnian Serb forces who are attacking the Bosnian
capital of Sarajevo." The poll also showed that
Americans overwhelmingly rejected air strikes by the
United States, "if the European allies do not agree to
participate." But the poll sought no objective opinions
about Bosnian government forces who, according to
many credible reports, frequently fired on their own
positions and people in Sarajevo and manipulated
artillery attacks elsewhere in Bosnia for public relations
and other purposes. A "Washington Post" spokeswoman
said opinions were not asked about that because pollsters
were "not sure the public would understand it." Also, she
said, there "was not enough space" for other questions in
the poll's format.
In May 1993, United Nations Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali chided the media for breaking
the first commandment of objectivity as he addressed
CNN's fourth world report contributors conference in
Atlanta: "Today, the media do not simply report the
news. Television has become a part of the events it
covers. It has changed the way the world reacts to crisis."
Boutros-Ghali accurately described the routine and
consequence of coverage of the Yugoslav civil war:
"Public emotion becomes so intense that United Nations
work is undermined. On television, the problem may
become simplified, and exaggerated."
Three months earlier, several high-ranking U.N.
officials in Belgrade, usually reserved in their
criticisms, privately shared confidences from
journalists-verified during subsequent interviews in
Belgrade with the correspondents themselves. The
correspondents reported that they had met obstructions
from editors. They told of stories changed without
consultation and in some cases totally revised to coincide
with the pack journalist bias that prevailed in Western
news bureaus.
"The American press has become very partisan and
anti-Serbian. They are very selective and manipulative
with the information they use," said one U.N. official.
"The reporters here have had their own wars with their
editors. It was driving one literally crazy until she
demanded to be transferred."
"I've worked with the press for a long time, and I have
never seen so much lack of professionalism and ethnics
in the press," and another, "Especially by the American
press, there is an extremely hostile style of reporting."
"A kind of nihilism has been established," said yet
another U.N. official.
"I was shocked when a relative read a story to me over
the telephone," added an American correspondent in
Belgrade. "My byline was on top of the story, but I
couldn't recognize anything else." Another reporter in
Belgrade, previously singled out by one group of
Serbian-Americans as especially one-sided, said he had
argued with his editors at the New York Times until
"they finally said I could write it like it really was. I
finished the story and moved it to them. And after they
read it, they killed it."
Also killed in the Yugoslav war was the professional
mandate to get all sides of a story and to follow upon it
despite the obstacles. A British journalist angrily
recalled how in May 1992 she had received an important
tip in Belgrade. More than 1,000 Serb civilians,
including men, women, children, and many elderly from
villages around the Southwestern Bosnian town of
Bradina were imprisoned by Muslims and Croats in a
partly destroyed railroad tunnel at Konjic, near Sarajevo.
"My editors said they were interested in the story," the
reported said. "But I told them it would take me three
days to get there, another day or so to do the story and
another three days to get back. They said it would take
too much time." Months later, the same reporter was
near Konjic on another story and managed to verify
details of the earlier incident, though the Serb prisoners
were no longer there. "The story was true, but several
months had passed." she said. "I did the story anyway,
but it wasn't played very well because of the late
timing."
By late 1992, the majority of the media had become so
mesmerized by their focus on Serb aggression and
atrocities that many became incapable of studying or
following up numerous episodes of horror and hostility
against Serbs in Croatia and later in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
REPORTING FROM A DISTANCE
The imbalance in reporting began during the war in
Croatia. Despite steady reports of atrocities committed
there by Croatian soldiers and paramilitary units against
Serbs, which some Belgrade correspondents were later
able to confirm, the stories that reached the world talked
only of Serb abuses. The other stories went unreported
"because it was difficult to get close to those villages in
Croatia. "And it was damned dangerous," said one
Belgrade correspondent. Reporters tended to foxhole in
Sarajevo, Zagreb, or Belgrade and depend on their
networks of "stringers" and outlying contacts. Most
arriving correspondents spoke no Serbo-Croatian, and
interpreters were often domestic journalists or
"stringers" with established allegiances as well as keen
intuitions about what postcommunist censors in the
"new democracies" in Zagreb and Sarajevo preferred.
Reporters began to rely on aggressive government
spokespeople - the government Information Ministry in
Zagreb soon acquired scores of english-fluent publicists,
and the Bosnian government also mobilized scores of
handlers for the Western media. In that struggle for
media attention, the Serbs were handicapped by the
media sense that "the story"lay in the plight of the
Muslims and by the isolation of Serbia because of U.N.
sanctions and its own policies, which continued the
previous official communist disdain for foreign media.
Media newcomers to Belgrade, where the Yugoslav
Federal Information Ministry included a mere
half-dozen publicists, were therefore at a disadvantage.
Coming from Western culture, they were accustomed to
patronage, cooperation, access, and answers. But,
isolated and denounced, the Belgrade government simply
ignored their harangues. So, as some reporters freely
admitted last February, they wrote what they wanted,
often in adversarial tones. When official Belgrade read
the results, it was confirmed in its original suspicion and
passive media policies continued. Soon antagonisms
became entrenched all around. Yet, unlike the controlled
press in Zagreb, it was remarkable how domestic and
foreign media through mid-1993 continued to lambaste
the Serbian government. Perhaps Belgrade had a
legitimate story to tell above the rising din form
Sarajevo and Zagreb, where persistence, intensity, and
volume had won the ears of the West. But, if so, it went
untold because of official negligence, international
sanctions, and a lack of media professionalism.
Before the Summer of 1991, only a handful of Western
correspondents had been based in Belgrade. The
majority, along with new reporters who arrived in late
1991 and 1993, eventually migrated to Sarajevo or
Zagreb, where technical communications with the West
became cantered - especially following the imposition
of U.N. sanctions against Serbia on May 30, 1992.
Establishing Zagreb as the communications and media
hub during late 1992 and 1993 was all the more
astonishing in light of Croatia's own repression of
domestic media, which has included the resurrection of a
communist-era law that threatens five years'
imprisonment for anyone in the media, domestic or
foreign, who criticizes the government.
Not surprisingly, Western journalists failed to produce
meaningful stories with Zagreb datelines or hard-hitting
reports that might shed unfavorable light on Croatian
government figures or the darker sides of that "new"
Balkan democracy, where libraries where being purged
of volumes unsympathetic to official policies. Although
some stories were filed, foreign journalists tended to
look the other way as the government reclassified
requirements for Croatian citizenship and ordered new
policies for religious instruction in public schools.
Boulevards and public squares were brazenly renamed
for World War II Ustashi figures.
Meanwhile, by late 1991 Belgrade-based journalists and
correspondents were nervously confronting the arrival of
60,000 Serb refugees from Croatia who had horrifying
accounts of atrocities and of the destruction of scores of
Serb villages. Nearly 100 of the 156 remaining Serbian
Orthodox churches in Croatia had been razed, according
to the Patriarchate in Belgrade (more that 800 Serbian
churches stood in Croatia before World War II). Media
skepticism at the reports of refugees and Serbian
officials limited any reporting about "concentration
camps" holding Serb inmates, such as the one reported at
Suhopolje among 18 destroyed Serb villages in the
Grubisno Polje district. Another, later confirmed to
exist, was at Stara Lipa, among the remains of 24 Serb
villages in the Slavonska Pozega district where Serbs
had been evicted from their homes.
A Reuters photographer, who returned from Vukovar to
report the discovery of the bodies of 41 Serb children in
plastic bags, was initially quoted in other wire stories.
But because he had not personally seen the bodies, news
organizations pulled their stories about the alleged
massacre. The same media standards regrettably did not
apply when Western newspeople dealt with reports
based on second-and third-hand sources of massacres of
Croats and later Muslims. The willingness to print
without confirmation later affected the coverage of
stories about tens of thousands of rapes of Muslim
women.
By January 1992, it was too late to tell the Serbs' side of
the war in Croatia because that war had ended. The war
in Bosnia was about to erupt, with a host of new
complexities. Few could follow the bewildering and
abrupt alliances and counteralliances as Bosnian Serb
and Croat forces attacked Bosnian government and
Muslim troops and then Muslims fought Bosnian Croat
forces.
When the Yugoslav civil war was nearly a year old,
writer Slavko Curuvija diagnosed the cause of the
media's disorientation: the role played by Western
journalists who possessed minimal capabilities for
covering a vexing civil war among South Slav cultures
and nationalities. "The greatest difficulty for West
European politicians and commentators in dealing with
Yugoslavia is that most knew next to nothing about the
country when they first delved into its crisis," he wrote
in "The European." "Now that everything has come
loose, they are disgusted by the chaos and their
powerlessness to change anything overnight."
It did not help the Western media that there were few
credible guides to lead outsiders thought the twisted
madness of Yugoslav fratricide. U.N. officials,
primarily because they spoke English, became
corroborating sources, spokespeople, and patient rotors
for journalists, but they too lacked sufficient Balkan
orientation. Editors back home were even less
experienced about the new Balkan events and were quick
to accept the offerings from the pack. Helpful U.N.
officials were often uncertain about details or even the
veracity of incidents reported, but within minutes
Western news agencies accepted their background
speculations as fact. The media, U.N. staffers noted with
eventual bitterness, cast the U.N. as anti-Serb and then
latter as pro-Serb. U.N. officials in Belgrade and
Sarajevo winced when named as the source for
prematurely blaming Bosnian Serbs for the fatal
shooting of ABC-television news producer David
Kaplan in August 1992. Senior U.N. officials later stated
that their investigation had determined the shot could
not have been fired from Serb-held areas, but the
disclosure went almost unreported. Similarly, U.N.
spokesman Larry Hollingsworth in Sarajevo was widely
quoted in April 1993 when he angrily stated his hope
that the "hottest corners of hell" were reserved for Serb
gunners in an artillery salvo that fell on Srebrenica,
killing 56 civilians. But absent from news reports was
any similar condemnation by him or others concerning
allegations that the Bosnian army inside Srebrenica had
fired its tanks on Serb positions first, triggering the Serb
artillery response, as the U.N. was attempting to broker
a ceasefire.
THE HIDDEN HAND
"Fingerprints" in the media war could be traced to
public relations specialists, including several
high-powered and highly financed U.S. firms, and their
clients in government information ministries. The
Washington public relations firms of Ruder Finn and
Hill & Knowlton, Inc. were the premier agents at work
behind the lines, launching media and political salvos
and raking in hundreds of thousands and perhaps
millions of dollars while representing the hostile
republics, sometimes two at a time, in the Yugoslav war.
Hill & Knowlton had for several years represented
agencies in the previous Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
before it disintegrated (the firm is best remembered for
producing the phony witness who testified before a
Congressional committee about the alleged slaughter of
Kuwait infants after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait).
Ruder Finn, having simultaneously represented the
governments of Croatia and Bosnia until mid-1993,
when both stepped up ethnic cleansing of each other's
civilians in Bosnia, with its liberal donations from
Islamic countries. Soon after, Ruder Finn scored a public
relations homerun in helping its Bosnian muslim clients
dominate the June 1993 Conference on Human Rights in
Vienna, virtual hijacking the two-week agents that
climaxed with 88-to-1 vote deploring the failure of the
U.N. to stop the war and demanding that the arms
embargo on Bosnia be lifted. Especially in the early days
of the war in Croatia, few journalists were able to step
back to take a clearer look at the images being
manipulated to shape their stories. Many rookie Balkan
reporters at first could do nothing but obediently attend
nonstop press conferences. As Steve Crawshaw reported
in the London "Independent":
"One thing is certain; nobody can complain that the
Croatian publicity machine is overcautious about
unsubstantiated allegations. If it is colorful tales that you
are looking for, then Croatia can always oblige... if
sometimes seems the ministers who turn up to the press
conferences live in a rhetoric-rich, fact-free fairyland."
The London "Times" noted on November 18, 1991, that
"clarity was an early victim of the war in Yugoslavia
and reality has become progressively enveloped in a
blanket of fog... as the desperate attempts to win the
hearts and minds of Europe grow, the claims become
wilder, the proof simpler. But the
(government-controlled) Croatian media are convinced
that officials in London and Washington can be outraged
into submission, so the assault continues unabated."
There can be little doubt that media advocacy from the
field fed editorial responses at home. A typical "Time"
cover story (March 15, 1993) led with "the agony of
Yugoslavia keeps replaying itself with new
bombardments, massacres, rapes and "ethnic cleansing."
At each horrifying recurrence, world opinion is outraged
and opinion leaders call for an end to the barbarism".
Far rarer was the introspection about the media's
coverage of the war that Charles Lane voiced in
"Newsweek" seven months earlier: "There is hypocrisy
in the current outrage of Western journalists, politicians
and voters. And perhaps even a strain of racism."
An excellent case of hyperbole was the peculiar
statement that appeared in the March 15 "Time" cover
story. In that article, Sadako Ogata, U.N. High
Commissioner for refugees, was quoted as telling
members of the U.N. Security Council that "civilians,
women, children and old people are being killed, usually
by having their throats cut." Ogata then said her
information was derived from uncorroborated
broadcasts by unidentified ham radio operators in
Eastern Bosnia. Yet, such transmissions, an increasing
source of on-the-scene propaganda, were frequently
disproved after U.N. troops arrived. Nevertheless Ogata
added, "if only 10 percent of the information is true, we
are witnessing a massacre." "Time" thus concluded: "In
fact Ogata, like other U.N. officials and foreign
journalists, had no first hand knowledge of what was
happening."
"Time" also repeated that 70,000 "detention camp
inmates" still existed. That echoed an exaggerated and
uncorroborated statistic from a State Department
spokesperson, whose mistake the Associated Press and
"The New York Times" publicized during January 1993.
A State Department official had admitted when
confronted with the figure of 70,000 that it was a
typographical error. The correct State Department
estimate, she said, was less than 7,000.
News reports themselves showed that Bosnian Serbs
were unusually cooperative in allowing international
inspection of their camps, while Bosnian Muslims and
Croats either refused or obstructed inspection of their
camps - but that fact also received little public attention.
The media's effort to inflict a "massada psychology"
upon Serbia, as political scientist and Carleton
University (Ottawa) professor C.G. Jacobsen calls it, has
not completely escaped the notice of several academics
and a handful of journalists who have condemned
manipulation and negligence in the press. "The myopia
and bias of the press is manifest," Jacobsen wrote in his
report to the Independent Committee on War Crimes in
the Balkans. "The Washington Post," France's
"L'Observateur" and other leading newspapers have
published pictures of paramilitary troops and forces with
captions describing them as Serb, though their insignia
clearly identify them as (Croat) Ustasha."
In a three-month study of news reports, Howard
University Professor of International Relations Nikolaos
Stavrou detected "a disturbing pattern in news
coverage." He claimed most of the stories were based on
"hearsay evidence," with few attempts to show the
"other side's perspectives. Ninety per cent of the stories
originated in Sarajevo, but only 5 per cent in Belgrade.
Stavrou's analysis cited ethnic stereotyping, with Serbs
referred to as primitive "remnants of the Ottoman
empire" and Yugoslav army officers described as
"orthodox communists generals." News stories about
Serbs abounded with descriptions of them as "eastern,"
"byzantine," and "orthodox", all were "repeatedly used
in a pejorative context." Stavrou said Croats were
described as "western," "nationalist," "wealthiest,"
"westernized," and most advanced in development of
their "western-style democracy," while newspaper
photographs neglected to show suffering or dead Serbs
or destroyed Serb churches and villages.
THE MEDIA BECOME A MOVEMENT; CO-BELLIGERENT NO LONGER
DISGUISED AS NONCOMBATANT AND NONPARTISAN
The 1993 double-barreled Pulitzer Prize for
international reporting, shared between "Newsday's Roy
Gutman and "New York Times" correspondent John
Burns, raised at least a few eyebrows. Burns received the
award primarily for his account of seven hours of
interviews with a captured Bosnian Serb soldier,
Borislav Herak. Herak's confession of multiple rapes
and murder occurred under the approving eyes of his
Bosnian Muslim captors. Assured he would not be
subjected to brutality as a prisoner, Herak also alleged
that the then-commanding general of the U.N.
Protection Forces (UNPROFOR), Lewis Mackenzie, had
committed multiple rapes of young Muslim women.
Despite its vulnerable nature, the lengthy story about the
confession, without mention of the bizarre accusations
against Mackenzie, went over "The New York Times"
wire service on November 26, 1992, targeted for
publication in large Sunday newspapers with almost no
opportunity for challenge or timely rebuttal. Belgrade
officials expressed serious doubts about Herak's mental
competency, but during his trial the question was
ignored and prosecutors offered little additional
evidence beyond Herak's original confession.
In a subsequent advertisement in the May 1993 issue of
"The American Journalism Review," "The Times" used
curious wording to describe Burns's achievement. He
"has written of the destruction of a major European city
and the dispossession of Sarajevo's people. He virtually
discovered these events for the world outside as they
happened." According to "The Washington Post", the
story about Herak "knocked everyone (in the Pulitzer
jury) over."
One of Burns's first stories after his arrival back in
Sarajevo in July 1993 contained a reference to the
infamous "bread line massacre" of the previous year,
which Bosnian Muslims used to pressure the U.N.
Security Council as it prepared to vote for sanctions
against Serbia. A year after some U.N. official
acknowledged that Muslims, not Bosnian Serbs, had set
off explosive that killed 22 civilians outside a Sarajevo
bakery. Burns and the "Times" still reported the claim
that a Serb mortar had caused the tragedy. Ironically,
that same July 5 story by Burns focused on Bosnian
paramilitary police in Sarajevo who were firing mortars
on nearby Bosnian army units. Repeated attempts to
interview Burns, who returned briefly to Toronto last
June, were unsuccessful.
There have also been questions about Roy Gutman's
pulitzer-winning scoops in August 1992 about two
Serb-run "death camps." Gutman constructed his
accounts, to his credit, admittedly so, from alleged
survivors of Manjaca and Trnopolje. But as one British
journalist, Joan Phillips, has pointed out: "The death
camp stories are very thinly sourced. They are based on
the very few accounts from hearsay. They are given the
stamp of authority by speculation and surmise from
officials. Gutman is not guilty of lying. He did not try to
hide the fact that his stories were thinly sourced." But it
is also true, as Phillips noted, that Gutman's disclaimers
were placed near the end of the article. Yet those stories
were the principal basis for the world's belief that the
Serbs were not simply holding Muslim prisoners but
were operating death camps in Bosnia. Phillips also
drew attention to Gutman's visit in September 1992 to
the scene of a massacre of 17 Serbs near Banja Luka,
which went unreported until December 13, three months
later. Gutman could not be contacted and "Newsday"
editors would not explain the lapse in publication.
Gutman did discuss his reporting later on: in an
interview in the July 1993 "American Journalism
Review," he explained that he had abandoned strict
objectivity in his coverage in order to pressure
governments to act.
PLAYING FAVORITES
The entire media response to the issue of atrocities
against Serbs raises a troubling question: why did the
press show such minimal interests in Serb claim of death
camps housing their own people? Documents submitted
to the European parliament and U.N. by Bosnian Serbs
have included horrible claims:
* late March 1992 - Serb females imprisoned at
Breza were raped and then murdered by Muslims;
their bodies were later incinerated.
* May 27, 1992 - female prisoners from Bradina
were taken to the camp in Celebici where they
were repeatedly raped.
* July 26, 1992 - an escapee from Gorazde
reported Muslims forced Serb fathers to rape their
own daughters before both were murdered.
* August 27, 1992 - an affidavit by Dr. Olga
Drasko, a former inmate of an Ustashi camp at
Dretelj, described rapes and mutilations of
women, including herself, during her three month
confinement.
* November 1992 - a group of Serb women
released from Tuzla requested late-term abortions
after having been repeatedly raped by Muslim
during lengthy captivities.
* December 10, 1992 - in Belgrade, Serbian
Orthodox Patriarch Pavle told official of the
Swiss Federal Parliament and representatives from
European Ecumenical Movements that 800 Serb
women were documented as repeated rape victims
in 20 camps operated by Muslims and Croats. The
Patriarch also cited parts of an August 2, 1992,
report from the State Center for Investigation of
War Crimes (Serb Republic of
Bosnia-Herzegovina). Compiled for the U.N. in
November 1992, it identified locations at
Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bugojno, Konjic, Bihac, and
Slavnoski Brod where Serb women were allegedly
confined and raped by Croat and Muslim soldiers.
Also unnoticed by the media was the submission on
December 18, 1992, of the lengthy report (s/24991) by
the U.N. Security Council to the General Assembly. The
report includes some of the depositions by Serb rape
victims from the incidents above. U.N. officials have
never explained why it was not made publicly available
until January 5, 1993, even though it was the only report
produced by an international agency that contained
documented testimonies from any rape victims up until
that time. Yet, while that report was receiving minimal
circulation at the U.N., the news media were focusing on
undocumented claims soldiers had committed as many as
60,000 rapes of Muslims women.
From the start of the Bosnian war in April 1992 until
November of that year, thousands of refugees fled into
Croatia and other countries. There, extensive interviews
failed to disclose allegation of "systematic rape." Then
suddenly, in late November and early December, the
world received a deluge of reports about rapes of
Muslim women. The accounts originatedin the
Information Ministries of the governments of Croatia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The January 4, 1993,
"Newsweek," for one, quoted unsubstantiated Bosnian
government claims of up to 50,000 rapes of Muslims by
Serb soldiers.
A European Community delegation headed by dame
Anne Warburton made a hurried investigation during
two brief visits to the region in December 1992 and
January 1993. It reported that it had visited primarily
Zagreb but obtained only minimal access to alleged
Muslim victims of refugee centers where victims were
supposedly located. Of note, the delegation said it had
encountered additional reports about rapes of Croat and
Serb women. Although it declined to specify the source
of "the most reasoned estimates suggested to the
mission, "Warburton's group decided to accept and
report "the number of victims at around 20,000."
An inquiry by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights
soon presented a more moderate estimate, however. Its
investigators visited Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia from
January 12 to 23, 1993. In its report of February 10, the
Commission, while refraining from giving an official
estimate, mentioned a figure of 2,400 victims. The
estimate was based on 119 documented cases. The report
concluded that Muslims, Croats, and Serbs had been
raped, with Muslims making up the largest number of
victims.
Finally, the EC's Committee on Women's Rights held
hearings on February 17 and 18 on the Warburton
delegation's findings, eventually rejecting the estimate
of 20,000 Muslim rape victims because of the lack of
documented evidence and testimony. At the hearing,
U.N. War Crimes Commission Chairman Frits
Kalshoven testified that the evidence collected up to that
point would not stand up as proof in a court. Similarly,
representatives from the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees concluded that not enough independent
evidence could be found, while Amnesty International
and the International Committee of the Red Cross
concurrently declared that all sides were committing
atrocities and rape.
The resulting handful of rape-produced births also
clearly contradicts claims of waves of systematic
rape-induced pregnancies supposedly treated in Bosnia
hospitals and reported by Bosnian government
authorities and Western journalists.
The general lack of follow-up on the rape allegations is
in stark contrasts to the lone account of French journalist
Jerome Bony, who described in a February 4, 1993,
broadcast on the French television program "Envoye
Special" his trek to Tuzla, notorious for its concentration
of Muslim rape victims:
"When I was at 50 kilometers from Tuzla I was told, 'go
to Tuzla high school ground (where) there are 4,000
raped women'. At 20 kilometers this figure dropped to
400. At 10 kilometers only 40 were left. Once at the site,
I found only four women willing to testify."
At the height of the rape story, media gullibility reached
new levels. In mid-February 1993, the Associated Press,
citing only a Bosnian government source, reported
alleged cannibalism by starving Muslims in Eastern
Bosnia. The story achieved instant headlines in the
United States. Receiving little if any play, however, was
the vigorous denial the following day by U.N. officials
in Bosnia, who rushed to the scene of supposedly
starving villagers and discovered them still in possession
of livestock and chickens.
In its effort to force Western military intervention, the
media also critically neglected to report essential details
about the 17-hour debate last may that led to the
Bosnian Serb Parliament's rejection of the Vance-Owen
plan. No fewer than 50 reports were filed on the
Associated Press and "New York Times" wire services
in the 18 hour period following the final vote by the
Bosnia Serb Parliament, but only one of them attempted
a minimal description of the plan.
Among their objections were the following:
- the plan's narrow umbilical connection between
Serbia and Serb-populated territories adjacent to
Croatia and within Bosnia was not a defensible,
long-term proposition.
- some 460,000 Bosnian Serbs would end up in
Muslim provinces and 160,000 Bosnian Serbs
would be located within Croat provinces.
- of a total of $31,4 billion in identified assets in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Vance-Owen plan
apportioned $18 billion to Muslims, $7,3 billion
to Croats, and $6.1 billion to Serbs.
- none of the known deposits of bauxite, lead,
zinc, salt, or iron would be given to the Bosnian
Serbs.
- out of 3,900 megawatts in electrical generating
capacity, Muslims would receive 1,765
megawatts, and Croats would receive 1,220
megawatts, and Serbs would receive 905
megawatts (all 10 hydroelectric plants would
essentially be under the control of Bosnian
Croats).
- of the 920 total kilometers of railway lines, 260
through Croat areas, and 160 through
Serb-controlled lands.
- only 200 out of 1,200 kilometers of improved
roadways would lie within Bosnian Serb
jurisdictions.
- Bosnian Serbs would have been required to
relinquish or would have otherwise lost nearly 24
percent of the land they have held for generations.
AWKWARD REALITIES
"The mauling of Sarajevo, the worst single crime against
a community in Europe since Auschwitz, cannot be
watched impassively night after night on television news
bulletins," as Robert Fox of the London "Daily
Telegraph" put it. That was the general image. But
another side of the story deserved more attention.
As early as July 1992, senior Western diplomats had
stated publicly that Bosnian Muslim forces in Sarajevo
were repeatedly provoking Serb shelling of the city to
trigger western military intervention. But few wire
stories from Sarajevo bothered to establish that the
almost daily artillery barrages and ceasefire violations
were not always started by Bosnian Serbs, who often,
officials said repeatedly, were returning fire from
Muslims who had fired on Serb targets and
neighborhoods first. Without making such distinctions,
stories implied that the Serbs were alone to blame for
the "Siege of Sarajevo." Also, U.N. observers were
positioned primarily to detect artillery actions by Serbs,
raising questions about the volume of non-Serb artillery
fire, which was often observed to be almost as intense as
Serb shelling.
"Kosevo" hospital in Sarajevo was a favorite backdrop
for television journalists who, when the hospital's water
supply was interrupted because of the shelling, eagerly
awaited the first birth without water in the maternity
ward. Once they got their pictures, the Western film
crews dismantled their cameras and returned to the
nearby Holiday Inn, where hot water was abundant.
Unreported was the fact that on their exit from the
hospital they had to avoid tripping over a shielded
Bosnian army mortar emplacement that was never
identified as the probable reason why Serbs sporadically
fired at the hospital.
Countless news stories rarely heeded statements from
U.N. officials that Bosnian Muslim units frequently
initiated their own shelling of Muslim quarters of the
city as well as Serb neighborhoods. For instance, on
March 23, 1993, major Pee Galagos of UNPROFOR in
Sarajevo described the previous day's exchanges; "There
were 341 impacts recorded: 133 on the Serbian side and
208 on the Bosnian side with 82 artillery rounds, 29
mortar rounds and 22 tank rounds hitting the Serbians;
and 115 artillery, 73 mortar and 20 tank rounds hitting
the Bosnians."
It was a rare exception to the media's usual tilt when, on
July 22, 1992, the "Guardian" reported U.N. commander
Mackenzie's reaction to attacks on civilian targets in
Sarajevo: "Mortars are set up beside hospitals, artillery
beside schools, mortars and other weapons are carried in
ambulances. I've never seen the Red Cross abused like
that, on both sides." Such reports seldom appeared in the
American media, which may explain some dramatic
differences in the public perspectives about intervention
between Europe and the United States.
French general Phillipe Morillon, following his relief as
commander of UNPROFOR in late June 1993,
emphatically blamed the Bosnian Muslim government
for failing to lift the siege of Sarajevo. In an interview
with the Prague daily "Lidove Noviny", Morillon said
the Bosnian regime wanted to keep Sarajevo a focal
point for world sympathy and repeatedly refused to
allow UNPROFOR to achieve a ceasefire.
By mid-1993, the ability to tell the Serb side of the
story was gone, as some observers recognized. "The
Serbians have much to say and as yet have had virtually
no opportunity to do so," argued Mary Hueniken in "The
London Free Press." "Sanctions slapped on Serbia
prevent it from hiring a PR firm to help it put its two
cents in," reported the June 7, 1993, issue of "O'Dwyer's
Washington Report," a public relations and public
affairs publication that monitors the PR industry in
Washington.
"As a result, Serbs, thought surely guilty of numerous
atrocities, have been pilloried in the press. Reporters,
meanwhile, cheer on the out-gunned Bosnians, who
undoubtedly have their own skeletons in the closet, and
give Croatia, which wants to carve up its own chunk of
Bosnia, a free ride. The U.S. public won't get a clear
picture of what is really happening in the Balkans until
Serbia is allowed to present its case through PR."
The tentative media self-criticism that has emerged so
far has focused superficially on television coverage of
the Yugoslav civil war. According to the Center for
Media and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research
organization in Washington, for the first three months of
1993 the major networks aired 233 stories on Bosnia
during prime-time news, as opposed to only 137 stories
on president Bill Clinton's economic plans.
Similarly, Marc Gunther, of Knight-Ridder newspapers,
noted the "depressing regularity" of ABC's "World
News Tonight" broadcasts about Bosnia. "Is ABC doing
too much with the story, or are its rivals not doing
enough? And what accounts for the different
approaches?" he wrote. Gunther's story was based on the
"Tyndall Report", which monitors evening newscasts. It
found that ABC's Yugoslav war reporting had provided
301 minutes of coverage, compared with 179 for NBC's
"Nightly News" and 177 for the CBS'S "Evening News"
during the 11 months that ended in March."
"In 1992, excluding the election, the most covered story
on ABC was the Balkans," Gunther continued. "CBS's
top story was the Los Angeles riots, while NBC devoted
the most minutes to Somalia. ABC's "Nightline",
meanwhile, has devoted more than a dozen programs to
the Balkans since last year, many consisting entirely of
reporting from the scene of the fighting." The analysis
suggested a special ABC commitment to the Bosnian
war. Gunther noted that Roone Arledge "has a personal
connection to the war because, as president of ABC
sports, he produced coverage of the 1984 Winter
Olympics in Sarajevo. Last year, David Kaplan, a
producer for ABC's "Prime Time Live", was killed by a
sniper's bullet while preparing a report on the war."
Gunther also underlined Peter Jennings's "personal
convictions on Bosnia" and his admonitions that the
world community had failed to ease the suffering there.
An ABC spokesman, contacted for response, said
Gunther and the Knight-Ridder story were "right on the
money."
In ABC's case, the motive for its coverage may be easy
to find. But that is not the case for many other news
organizations. In the wake of the negligence and pack
journalism that have distorted the coverage of the
Yugoslav civil war to date, the media would be
well-advised to gaze into their own mirrors and
consider their dubious records. At some point, historians
or unofficial international investigation will determine
the true culpability of all the actors in the Yugoslav
tragedy. But one of those actors is the press itself. In
Bosnia, where major governments had few intelligence
assets and where the role of international public opinion
was central, it was critical that the news media report
with precision and professionalism. Instead, the epitaph
above the grave of objective and fair reporting in the
Yugoslav war probably will be written with the
cynicism conveyed in an internal memorandum of April
19, 1993, from a cartoonist to his syndicate's
editorial-page editors:
"I was SKEDed earlier today for a cartoon on the
Rodney King verdict to be faxed out this afternoon.
However, given the racial and legal complexities
of the case we have decided that such an issue is
best left unaddressed in the uncompromising
language of an editorial cartoon. I will be sending
a cartoon on the war in Bosnia instead."
* * *
* Peter Brock, a special projects and politics editor at
the "El Paso Herald-Post", has lectured and written
about Yugoslavia, as well as Eastern Europe and Russia,
since 1976. He is writing a book on the Western media in
the Yugoslav civil war.
February 6, 2003
2. DATELINE YUGOSLAVIA: THE PARTISAN PRESS
by Peter Brock
FOREIGN POLICY Number 93, Winter 1993-94, p.152-172.
=== 1 ===
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/izbor/yu_kriza/2003-04-16_2.html
US fabricated evidence in Yugoslavia, says former official
Any US evidence against Iraq should be viewed with skepticism
by Frank in Stockholm, Unknown News correspondent
February 6, 2003
The US "fabricated evidence" against former Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic during clashes between Serbia and Bosnia in the
mid-1990s, according to a prominent and experienced international
peacekeeping official who served there.
Retired Swedish Brigadier General Bo Pellnas, who was head of UN
Military Observers (UNMOs) in Croatia, now says that the US should not
be trusted. Pellnas says that he learned to distrust US-provided
evidence during peacekeeping service in the former Yugoslavia.
Pellnas's misgivings are described in an article from the Swedish
daily newspaper Aftonbladet. Here is an English-language translation
of this article:
In an interview with Sweden's leading news-wire TT, retired
Brigadier Bo Pellnas claims that the US "faked evidence to suit their
own interests."
"If the US were to present evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, the countries of the Western world would have no way to
substantiate these reports due to the technical superiority of the
US."
These are the words of retired Brigadier Bo Pellnas, who says he
witnessed the US "fabricating fact to suit their own needs." Pellnas
says he witnessed this first-hand when he led an international force
which safeguarded the borders between Serbia and Bosnia in the
mid-1990s, where he gained a very good insight and understanding of US
operations.
"The technical superiority of the US gives their politicians the
option of bringing forth fake evidence, in this case in front of the
United Nations Security Council."
Pellnas served in Yugoslavia during a time when US efforts, led by
then Secretary of State Madeline Albright, presented evidence to the
UN Security Council that Milosevic's Belgrade government ran
unmonitored arms shipments. Pellnas claims that Albright's staff
presented manipulated satellite photos to document false allegations,
leading the Security Council to act in accordance with the US hard
line against Milosevic.
"There might be a possibility that Albright thought the pictures to
be true," says Pellnas, "but several incidents pointed towards the
fact that the US lied." The US stood firm by their claims, refusing to
show supporting evidence to Pellnas and other members of the
peacekeeping crew.
"If the US were to come forth with evidence against Iraq which were
"difficult to confirm," the permanent members of the Council will be
put in a difficult situation, since they lack the sufficient tools to
research and verify such claims."
Pellnas said he hopes that nations of the European Union make it
their responsibility to build their own intelligence agency which has
the capability to act as a counterbalance to the US. "It would be
great indeed if the EU could act as a balance to the world's only true
superpower, which acts alone these days."
In addition to his UN duties, Pellnas was also in charge of an
international monitoring mission to Yugoslavia in 1994 sponsored by
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and
worked with the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia
(ICFY), a group established in 1991 to find a peaceful solution to the
region's conflicts.
=== 2 ===
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/kosta/autori/brock.peter/partizan.press.html
FOREIGN POLICY Number 93, Winter 1993-94, p.152-172.
DATELINE YUGOSLAVIA: THE PARTISAN PRESS
by Peter Brock
The international news story since mid-1991 has been
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the atrocities, the refugees, and the
World's inaction. In most accounts, the villain has been
denounced for the worst crimes committed on European
soil since the death of Adolf Hitler and the demise of
Joseph Stalin.
The evidence appears overwhelming that the military
forces of the Bosnian Serbs have perpetrated grave
offenses. But throughout the crisis the Serbs have
complained that they were also victims, and there is
apparent evidence to support their complaint.
The almost uniform manner by which the international
news media, including the American media, dismissed
Serb claims has played a critical role in the unfolding
tragedy in the former Yugoslavia. As the first phase of
the crisis perhaps now draws to a close, it is time for a
searching look at the performance of the international
media.
The verdict is anything but positive. As one of
America's most prominent journalists on America's
most prestigious newspaper said in a risky moment of
candor early last Summer, "I despair for my profession,
and I despair for my newspaper. And this is very
definitely not for attribution." As the routine, sometimes
zealous bearers of bad news, especially in war,
news-people cynically shrug off criticism (and
especially abhor self-criticism) and trudge back to the
trenches. But in the Yugoslav civil war, the press itself
has been a large part of the bad news. Legitimate
concern for personal safety undoubtedly affected the
coverage. Many stories that deserved a follow-up did
not receive it because journalists could not get to the
scene of the conflict and were forced to rely on
less-than-perfect sources. But a close look at the record
since the war began on june 27, 1991, reveals avoidable
media negligence and a form of pack journalism that
reached its extreme last winter and spring.
During that period, readers and viewers received the
most vivid reports of cruelty, tragedy,and barbarism
since World War II. It was an unprecedented and
unrelenting onslaught, combining modern media
techniques with advocacy journalism.
In the process, the media became a movement,
co-belligerent no longer disguised as noncombatant and
nonpartisan. News was outfitted in its full battle dress of
bold head-lines, multipage spreads of gory photographs,
and gruesome video footage. The clear purpose was to
force governments to intervene militarily. The effect
was compelling, but was the picture complete?
In fact, the mistakes were blatant:
- street scenes of ravaged Vukovar in 1991 were
later depicted as combat footage from minimally
damaged Dubrovnik on Western television
networks.
- the August 17, 1992, Time cover photo, taken
from a British television report, showed a smiling,
shiftless, skeletal man who was described as being
among "Muslim prisoners in a Serbian detention
camp." In fact, the man was a Serb - Slobodan
Konjevic, 37, who, along with his brother Zoran,
41, had been arrested and confined on charges of
looting. Konjevic, more dramatically emaciated
that others who wore shirts in the picture, had
suffered from tuberculosis for 10 years, said his
sister in Vienna, who later identified her brothers
in the picture.
- the 1992 BBC filming of an ailing, elderly
"Bosnian Muslim prisoner-of-war in a Serb
concentration camp" resulted in his later
identification by relatives as retired Yugoslav
army officer Branko Velec, a Bosnian Serb held in
a Muslim detention camp.
- among wounded "Muslim toddlers and infants"
aboard a Sarajevo bus hit by sniper fire in August
1992 were a number of Serb children - a fact
revealed much later. One of the children who died
in the incident was identified at the funeral as
Muslim by television reporters. But the
unmistakable Serbian Orthodox funeral ritual told
a different story.
- in its January 4, 1993, issue, "Newsweek"
published a photo of several bodies with
accompanying story that began: "Is there any way
to stop Serbian atrocities in Bosnia?" The photo
was actually of Serb victims, including one clearly
recognizable man wearing a red coat. The photo,
with the same man in his red coat is identical to a
scene in television footage from Vukovar a year
earlier.
- CNN aired reports in March and May 1993 from
the scenes of massacres of 14 Muslims and then 10
Muslims who were supposedly killed by Serbs.
The victims later turned out to be Serbs. There
was no correction.
- in early August 1993, a photo caption in "The
New York Times" described a Croat woman from
Posusje grieving for a son killed in recent Serb
attacks. In fact, the Croat village of Posusje, in
Bosnia near the Dalmatian coast, had been the
scene of bloody fighting between Muslims and
Croats that had caused 34 Bosnian Croat deaths,
including the son of the woman in the photo.
By early 1993, several major news organizations
appeared to be determined to use their reporting to
generate the political pressure needed to force U.S.
military intervention. In testing the effects of their
stories, U.S. networks and publications conducted
numerous polls during the Yugoslav civil war. But no
matter how pollsters sculpted their questions, majorities
of public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to all
forms of armed intervention. Finally, on August 11, an
ABC news - "Washington Post" poll said that six out of
ten Americans supported allied "air strikes against
Bosnian Serb forces who are attacking the Bosnian
capital of Sarajevo." The poll also showed that
Americans overwhelmingly rejected air strikes by the
United States, "if the European allies do not agree to
participate." But the poll sought no objective opinions
about Bosnian government forces who, according to
many credible reports, frequently fired on their own
positions and people in Sarajevo and manipulated
artillery attacks elsewhere in Bosnia for public relations
and other purposes. A "Washington Post" spokeswoman
said opinions were not asked about that because pollsters
were "not sure the public would understand it." Also, she
said, there "was not enough space" for other questions in
the poll's format.
In May 1993, United Nations Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali chided the media for breaking
the first commandment of objectivity as he addressed
CNN's fourth world report contributors conference in
Atlanta: "Today, the media do not simply report the
news. Television has become a part of the events it
covers. It has changed the way the world reacts to crisis."
Boutros-Ghali accurately described the routine and
consequence of coverage of the Yugoslav civil war:
"Public emotion becomes so intense that United Nations
work is undermined. On television, the problem may
become simplified, and exaggerated."
Three months earlier, several high-ranking U.N.
officials in Belgrade, usually reserved in their
criticisms, privately shared confidences from
journalists-verified during subsequent interviews in
Belgrade with the correspondents themselves. The
correspondents reported that they had met obstructions
from editors. They told of stories changed without
consultation and in some cases totally revised to coincide
with the pack journalist bias that prevailed in Western
news bureaus.
"The American press has become very partisan and
anti-Serbian. They are very selective and manipulative
with the information they use," said one U.N. official.
"The reporters here have had their own wars with their
editors. It was driving one literally crazy until she
demanded to be transferred."
"I've worked with the press for a long time, and I have
never seen so much lack of professionalism and ethnics
in the press," and another, "Especially by the American
press, there is an extremely hostile style of reporting."
"A kind of nihilism has been established," said yet
another U.N. official.
"I was shocked when a relative read a story to me over
the telephone," added an American correspondent in
Belgrade. "My byline was on top of the story, but I
couldn't recognize anything else." Another reporter in
Belgrade, previously singled out by one group of
Serbian-Americans as especially one-sided, said he had
argued with his editors at the New York Times until
"they finally said I could write it like it really was. I
finished the story and moved it to them. And after they
read it, they killed it."
Also killed in the Yugoslav war was the professional
mandate to get all sides of a story and to follow upon it
despite the obstacles. A British journalist angrily
recalled how in May 1992 she had received an important
tip in Belgrade. More than 1,000 Serb civilians,
including men, women, children, and many elderly from
villages around the Southwestern Bosnian town of
Bradina were imprisoned by Muslims and Croats in a
partly destroyed railroad tunnel at Konjic, near Sarajevo.
"My editors said they were interested in the story," the
reported said. "But I told them it would take me three
days to get there, another day or so to do the story and
another three days to get back. They said it would take
too much time." Months later, the same reporter was
near Konjic on another story and managed to verify
details of the earlier incident, though the Serb prisoners
were no longer there. "The story was true, but several
months had passed." she said. "I did the story anyway,
but it wasn't played very well because of the late
timing."
By late 1992, the majority of the media had become so
mesmerized by their focus on Serb aggression and
atrocities that many became incapable of studying or
following up numerous episodes of horror and hostility
against Serbs in Croatia and later in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
REPORTING FROM A DISTANCE
The imbalance in reporting began during the war in
Croatia. Despite steady reports of atrocities committed
there by Croatian soldiers and paramilitary units against
Serbs, which some Belgrade correspondents were later
able to confirm, the stories that reached the world talked
only of Serb abuses. The other stories went unreported
"because it was difficult to get close to those villages in
Croatia. "And it was damned dangerous," said one
Belgrade correspondent. Reporters tended to foxhole in
Sarajevo, Zagreb, or Belgrade and depend on their
networks of "stringers" and outlying contacts. Most
arriving correspondents spoke no Serbo-Croatian, and
interpreters were often domestic journalists or
"stringers" with established allegiances as well as keen
intuitions about what postcommunist censors in the
"new democracies" in Zagreb and Sarajevo preferred.
Reporters began to rely on aggressive government
spokespeople - the government Information Ministry in
Zagreb soon acquired scores of english-fluent publicists,
and the Bosnian government also mobilized scores of
handlers for the Western media. In that struggle for
media attention, the Serbs were handicapped by the
media sense that "the story"lay in the plight of the
Muslims and by the isolation of Serbia because of U.N.
sanctions and its own policies, which continued the
previous official communist disdain for foreign media.
Media newcomers to Belgrade, where the Yugoslav
Federal Information Ministry included a mere
half-dozen publicists, were therefore at a disadvantage.
Coming from Western culture, they were accustomed to
patronage, cooperation, access, and answers. But,
isolated and denounced, the Belgrade government simply
ignored their harangues. So, as some reporters freely
admitted last February, they wrote what they wanted,
often in adversarial tones. When official Belgrade read
the results, it was confirmed in its original suspicion and
passive media policies continued. Soon antagonisms
became entrenched all around. Yet, unlike the controlled
press in Zagreb, it was remarkable how domestic and
foreign media through mid-1993 continued to lambaste
the Serbian government. Perhaps Belgrade had a
legitimate story to tell above the rising din form
Sarajevo and Zagreb, where persistence, intensity, and
volume had won the ears of the West. But, if so, it went
untold because of official negligence, international
sanctions, and a lack of media professionalism.
Before the Summer of 1991, only a handful of Western
correspondents had been based in Belgrade. The
majority, along with new reporters who arrived in late
1991 and 1993, eventually migrated to Sarajevo or
Zagreb, where technical communications with the West
became cantered - especially following the imposition
of U.N. sanctions against Serbia on May 30, 1992.
Establishing Zagreb as the communications and media
hub during late 1992 and 1993 was all the more
astonishing in light of Croatia's own repression of
domestic media, which has included the resurrection of a
communist-era law that threatens five years'
imprisonment for anyone in the media, domestic or
foreign, who criticizes the government.
Not surprisingly, Western journalists failed to produce
meaningful stories with Zagreb datelines or hard-hitting
reports that might shed unfavorable light on Croatian
government figures or the darker sides of that "new"
Balkan democracy, where libraries where being purged
of volumes unsympathetic to official policies. Although
some stories were filed, foreign journalists tended to
look the other way as the government reclassified
requirements for Croatian citizenship and ordered new
policies for religious instruction in public schools.
Boulevards and public squares were brazenly renamed
for World War II Ustashi figures.
Meanwhile, by late 1991 Belgrade-based journalists and
correspondents were nervously confronting the arrival of
60,000 Serb refugees from Croatia who had horrifying
accounts of atrocities and of the destruction of scores of
Serb villages. Nearly 100 of the 156 remaining Serbian
Orthodox churches in Croatia had been razed, according
to the Patriarchate in Belgrade (more that 800 Serbian
churches stood in Croatia before World War II). Media
skepticism at the reports of refugees and Serbian
officials limited any reporting about "concentration
camps" holding Serb inmates, such as the one reported at
Suhopolje among 18 destroyed Serb villages in the
Grubisno Polje district. Another, later confirmed to
exist, was at Stara Lipa, among the remains of 24 Serb
villages in the Slavonska Pozega district where Serbs
had been evicted from their homes.
A Reuters photographer, who returned from Vukovar to
report the discovery of the bodies of 41 Serb children in
plastic bags, was initially quoted in other wire stories.
But because he had not personally seen the bodies, news
organizations pulled their stories about the alleged
massacre. The same media standards regrettably did not
apply when Western newspeople dealt with reports
based on second-and third-hand sources of massacres of
Croats and later Muslims. The willingness to print
without confirmation later affected the coverage of
stories about tens of thousands of rapes of Muslim
women.
By January 1992, it was too late to tell the Serbs' side of
the war in Croatia because that war had ended. The war
in Bosnia was about to erupt, with a host of new
complexities. Few could follow the bewildering and
abrupt alliances and counteralliances as Bosnian Serb
and Croat forces attacked Bosnian government and
Muslim troops and then Muslims fought Bosnian Croat
forces.
When the Yugoslav civil war was nearly a year old,
writer Slavko Curuvija diagnosed the cause of the
media's disorientation: the role played by Western
journalists who possessed minimal capabilities for
covering a vexing civil war among South Slav cultures
and nationalities. "The greatest difficulty for West
European politicians and commentators in dealing with
Yugoslavia is that most knew next to nothing about the
country when they first delved into its crisis," he wrote
in "The European." "Now that everything has come
loose, they are disgusted by the chaos and their
powerlessness to change anything overnight."
It did not help the Western media that there were few
credible guides to lead outsiders thought the twisted
madness of Yugoslav fratricide. U.N. officials,
primarily because they spoke English, became
corroborating sources, spokespeople, and patient rotors
for journalists, but they too lacked sufficient Balkan
orientation. Editors back home were even less
experienced about the new Balkan events and were quick
to accept the offerings from the pack. Helpful U.N.
officials were often uncertain about details or even the
veracity of incidents reported, but within minutes
Western news agencies accepted their background
speculations as fact. The media, U.N. staffers noted with
eventual bitterness, cast the U.N. as anti-Serb and then
latter as pro-Serb. U.N. officials in Belgrade and
Sarajevo winced when named as the source for
prematurely blaming Bosnian Serbs for the fatal
shooting of ABC-television news producer David
Kaplan in August 1992. Senior U.N. officials later stated
that their investigation had determined the shot could
not have been fired from Serb-held areas, but the
disclosure went almost unreported. Similarly, U.N.
spokesman Larry Hollingsworth in Sarajevo was widely
quoted in April 1993 when he angrily stated his hope
that the "hottest corners of hell" were reserved for Serb
gunners in an artillery salvo that fell on Srebrenica,
killing 56 civilians. But absent from news reports was
any similar condemnation by him or others concerning
allegations that the Bosnian army inside Srebrenica had
fired its tanks on Serb positions first, triggering the Serb
artillery response, as the U.N. was attempting to broker
a ceasefire.
THE HIDDEN HAND
"Fingerprints" in the media war could be traced to
public relations specialists, including several
high-powered and highly financed U.S. firms, and their
clients in government information ministries. The
Washington public relations firms of Ruder Finn and
Hill & Knowlton, Inc. were the premier agents at work
behind the lines, launching media and political salvos
and raking in hundreds of thousands and perhaps
millions of dollars while representing the hostile
republics, sometimes two at a time, in the Yugoslav war.
Hill & Knowlton had for several years represented
agencies in the previous Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
before it disintegrated (the firm is best remembered for
producing the phony witness who testified before a
Congressional committee about the alleged slaughter of
Kuwait infants after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait).
Ruder Finn, having simultaneously represented the
governments of Croatia and Bosnia until mid-1993,
when both stepped up ethnic cleansing of each other's
civilians in Bosnia, with its liberal donations from
Islamic countries. Soon after, Ruder Finn scored a public
relations homerun in helping its Bosnian muslim clients
dominate the June 1993 Conference on Human Rights in
Vienna, virtual hijacking the two-week agents that
climaxed with 88-to-1 vote deploring the failure of the
U.N. to stop the war and demanding that the arms
embargo on Bosnia be lifted. Especially in the early days
of the war in Croatia, few journalists were able to step
back to take a clearer look at the images being
manipulated to shape their stories. Many rookie Balkan
reporters at first could do nothing but obediently attend
nonstop press conferences. As Steve Crawshaw reported
in the London "Independent":
"One thing is certain; nobody can complain that the
Croatian publicity machine is overcautious about
unsubstantiated allegations. If it is colorful tales that you
are looking for, then Croatia can always oblige... if
sometimes seems the ministers who turn up to the press
conferences live in a rhetoric-rich, fact-free fairyland."
The London "Times" noted on November 18, 1991, that
"clarity was an early victim of the war in Yugoslavia
and reality has become progressively enveloped in a
blanket of fog... as the desperate attempts to win the
hearts and minds of Europe grow, the claims become
wilder, the proof simpler. But the
(government-controlled) Croatian media are convinced
that officials in London and Washington can be outraged
into submission, so the assault continues unabated."
There can be little doubt that media advocacy from the
field fed editorial responses at home. A typical "Time"
cover story (March 15, 1993) led with "the agony of
Yugoslavia keeps replaying itself with new
bombardments, massacres, rapes and "ethnic cleansing."
At each horrifying recurrence, world opinion is outraged
and opinion leaders call for an end to the barbarism".
Far rarer was the introspection about the media's
coverage of the war that Charles Lane voiced in
"Newsweek" seven months earlier: "There is hypocrisy
in the current outrage of Western journalists, politicians
and voters. And perhaps even a strain of racism."
An excellent case of hyperbole was the peculiar
statement that appeared in the March 15 "Time" cover
story. In that article, Sadako Ogata, U.N. High
Commissioner for refugees, was quoted as telling
members of the U.N. Security Council that "civilians,
women, children and old people are being killed, usually
by having their throats cut." Ogata then said her
information was derived from uncorroborated
broadcasts by unidentified ham radio operators in
Eastern Bosnia. Yet, such transmissions, an increasing
source of on-the-scene propaganda, were frequently
disproved after U.N. troops arrived. Nevertheless Ogata
added, "if only 10 percent of the information is true, we
are witnessing a massacre." "Time" thus concluded: "In
fact Ogata, like other U.N. officials and foreign
journalists, had no first hand knowledge of what was
happening."
"Time" also repeated that 70,000 "detention camp
inmates" still existed. That echoed an exaggerated and
uncorroborated statistic from a State Department
spokesperson, whose mistake the Associated Press and
"The New York Times" publicized during January 1993.
A State Department official had admitted when
confronted with the figure of 70,000 that it was a
typographical error. The correct State Department
estimate, she said, was less than 7,000.
News reports themselves showed that Bosnian Serbs
were unusually cooperative in allowing international
inspection of their camps, while Bosnian Muslims and
Croats either refused or obstructed inspection of their
camps - but that fact also received little public attention.
The media's effort to inflict a "massada psychology"
upon Serbia, as political scientist and Carleton
University (Ottawa) professor C.G. Jacobsen calls it, has
not completely escaped the notice of several academics
and a handful of journalists who have condemned
manipulation and negligence in the press. "The myopia
and bias of the press is manifest," Jacobsen wrote in his
report to the Independent Committee on War Crimes in
the Balkans. "The Washington Post," France's
"L'Observateur" and other leading newspapers have
published pictures of paramilitary troops and forces with
captions describing them as Serb, though their insignia
clearly identify them as (Croat) Ustasha."
In a three-month study of news reports, Howard
University Professor of International Relations Nikolaos
Stavrou detected "a disturbing pattern in news
coverage." He claimed most of the stories were based on
"hearsay evidence," with few attempts to show the
"other side's perspectives. Ninety per cent of the stories
originated in Sarajevo, but only 5 per cent in Belgrade.
Stavrou's analysis cited ethnic stereotyping, with Serbs
referred to as primitive "remnants of the Ottoman
empire" and Yugoslav army officers described as
"orthodox communists generals." News stories about
Serbs abounded with descriptions of them as "eastern,"
"byzantine," and "orthodox", all were "repeatedly used
in a pejorative context." Stavrou said Croats were
described as "western," "nationalist," "wealthiest,"
"westernized," and most advanced in development of
their "western-style democracy," while newspaper
photographs neglected to show suffering or dead Serbs
or destroyed Serb churches and villages.
THE MEDIA BECOME A MOVEMENT; CO-BELLIGERENT NO LONGER
DISGUISED AS NONCOMBATANT AND NONPARTISAN
The 1993 double-barreled Pulitzer Prize for
international reporting, shared between "Newsday's Roy
Gutman and "New York Times" correspondent John
Burns, raised at least a few eyebrows. Burns received the
award primarily for his account of seven hours of
interviews with a captured Bosnian Serb soldier,
Borislav Herak. Herak's confession of multiple rapes
and murder occurred under the approving eyes of his
Bosnian Muslim captors. Assured he would not be
subjected to brutality as a prisoner, Herak also alleged
that the then-commanding general of the U.N.
Protection Forces (UNPROFOR), Lewis Mackenzie, had
committed multiple rapes of young Muslim women.
Despite its vulnerable nature, the lengthy story about the
confession, without mention of the bizarre accusations
against Mackenzie, went over "The New York Times"
wire service on November 26, 1992, targeted for
publication in large Sunday newspapers with almost no
opportunity for challenge or timely rebuttal. Belgrade
officials expressed serious doubts about Herak's mental
competency, but during his trial the question was
ignored and prosecutors offered little additional
evidence beyond Herak's original confession.
In a subsequent advertisement in the May 1993 issue of
"The American Journalism Review," "The Times" used
curious wording to describe Burns's achievement. He
"has written of the destruction of a major European city
and the dispossession of Sarajevo's people. He virtually
discovered these events for the world outside as they
happened." According to "The Washington Post", the
story about Herak "knocked everyone (in the Pulitzer
jury) over."
One of Burns's first stories after his arrival back in
Sarajevo in July 1993 contained a reference to the
infamous "bread line massacre" of the previous year,
which Bosnian Muslims used to pressure the U.N.
Security Council as it prepared to vote for sanctions
against Serbia. A year after some U.N. official
acknowledged that Muslims, not Bosnian Serbs, had set
off explosive that killed 22 civilians outside a Sarajevo
bakery. Burns and the "Times" still reported the claim
that a Serb mortar had caused the tragedy. Ironically,
that same July 5 story by Burns focused on Bosnian
paramilitary police in Sarajevo who were firing mortars
on nearby Bosnian army units. Repeated attempts to
interview Burns, who returned briefly to Toronto last
June, were unsuccessful.
There have also been questions about Roy Gutman's
pulitzer-winning scoops in August 1992 about two
Serb-run "death camps." Gutman constructed his
accounts, to his credit, admittedly so, from alleged
survivors of Manjaca and Trnopolje. But as one British
journalist, Joan Phillips, has pointed out: "The death
camp stories are very thinly sourced. They are based on
the very few accounts from hearsay. They are given the
stamp of authority by speculation and surmise from
officials. Gutman is not guilty of lying. He did not try to
hide the fact that his stories were thinly sourced." But it
is also true, as Phillips noted, that Gutman's disclaimers
were placed near the end of the article. Yet those stories
were the principal basis for the world's belief that the
Serbs were not simply holding Muslim prisoners but
were operating death camps in Bosnia. Phillips also
drew attention to Gutman's visit in September 1992 to
the scene of a massacre of 17 Serbs near Banja Luka,
which went unreported until December 13, three months
later. Gutman could not be contacted and "Newsday"
editors would not explain the lapse in publication.
Gutman did discuss his reporting later on: in an
interview in the July 1993 "American Journalism
Review," he explained that he had abandoned strict
objectivity in his coverage in order to pressure
governments to act.
PLAYING FAVORITES
The entire media response to the issue of atrocities
against Serbs raises a troubling question: why did the
press show such minimal interests in Serb claim of death
camps housing their own people? Documents submitted
to the European parliament and U.N. by Bosnian Serbs
have included horrible claims:
* late March 1992 - Serb females imprisoned at
Breza were raped and then murdered by Muslims;
their bodies were later incinerated.
* May 27, 1992 - female prisoners from Bradina
were taken to the camp in Celebici where they
were repeatedly raped.
* July 26, 1992 - an escapee from Gorazde
reported Muslims forced Serb fathers to rape their
own daughters before both were murdered.
* August 27, 1992 - an affidavit by Dr. Olga
Drasko, a former inmate of an Ustashi camp at
Dretelj, described rapes and mutilations of
women, including herself, during her three month
confinement.
* November 1992 - a group of Serb women
released from Tuzla requested late-term abortions
after having been repeatedly raped by Muslim
during lengthy captivities.
* December 10, 1992 - in Belgrade, Serbian
Orthodox Patriarch Pavle told official of the
Swiss Federal Parliament and representatives from
European Ecumenical Movements that 800 Serb
women were documented as repeated rape victims
in 20 camps operated by Muslims and Croats. The
Patriarch also cited parts of an August 2, 1992,
report from the State Center for Investigation of
War Crimes (Serb Republic of
Bosnia-Herzegovina). Compiled for the U.N. in
November 1992, it identified locations at
Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bugojno, Konjic, Bihac, and
Slavnoski Brod where Serb women were allegedly
confined and raped by Croat and Muslim soldiers.
Also unnoticed by the media was the submission on
December 18, 1992, of the lengthy report (s/24991) by
the U.N. Security Council to the General Assembly. The
report includes some of the depositions by Serb rape
victims from the incidents above. U.N. officials have
never explained why it was not made publicly available
until January 5, 1993, even though it was the only report
produced by an international agency that contained
documented testimonies from any rape victims up until
that time. Yet, while that report was receiving minimal
circulation at the U.N., the news media were focusing on
undocumented claims soldiers had committed as many as
60,000 rapes of Muslims women.
From the start of the Bosnian war in April 1992 until
November of that year, thousands of refugees fled into
Croatia and other countries. There, extensive interviews
failed to disclose allegation of "systematic rape." Then
suddenly, in late November and early December, the
world received a deluge of reports about rapes of
Muslim women. The accounts originatedin the
Information Ministries of the governments of Croatia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The January 4, 1993,
"Newsweek," for one, quoted unsubstantiated Bosnian
government claims of up to 50,000 rapes of Muslims by
Serb soldiers.
A European Community delegation headed by dame
Anne Warburton made a hurried investigation during
two brief visits to the region in December 1992 and
January 1993. It reported that it had visited primarily
Zagreb but obtained only minimal access to alleged
Muslim victims of refugee centers where victims were
supposedly located. Of note, the delegation said it had
encountered additional reports about rapes of Croat and
Serb women. Although it declined to specify the source
of "the most reasoned estimates suggested to the
mission, "Warburton's group decided to accept and
report "the number of victims at around 20,000."
An inquiry by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights
soon presented a more moderate estimate, however. Its
investigators visited Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia from
January 12 to 23, 1993. In its report of February 10, the
Commission, while refraining from giving an official
estimate, mentioned a figure of 2,400 victims. The
estimate was based on 119 documented cases. The report
concluded that Muslims, Croats, and Serbs had been
raped, with Muslims making up the largest number of
victims.
Finally, the EC's Committee on Women's Rights held
hearings on February 17 and 18 on the Warburton
delegation's findings, eventually rejecting the estimate
of 20,000 Muslim rape victims because of the lack of
documented evidence and testimony. At the hearing,
U.N. War Crimes Commission Chairman Frits
Kalshoven testified that the evidence collected up to that
point would not stand up as proof in a court. Similarly,
representatives from the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees concluded that not enough independent
evidence could be found, while Amnesty International
and the International Committee of the Red Cross
concurrently declared that all sides were committing
atrocities and rape.
The resulting handful of rape-produced births also
clearly contradicts claims of waves of systematic
rape-induced pregnancies supposedly treated in Bosnia
hospitals and reported by Bosnian government
authorities and Western journalists.
The general lack of follow-up on the rape allegations is
in stark contrasts to the lone account of French journalist
Jerome Bony, who described in a February 4, 1993,
broadcast on the French television program "Envoye
Special" his trek to Tuzla, notorious for its concentration
of Muslim rape victims:
"When I was at 50 kilometers from Tuzla I was told, 'go
to Tuzla high school ground (where) there are 4,000
raped women'. At 20 kilometers this figure dropped to
400. At 10 kilometers only 40 were left. Once at the site,
I found only four women willing to testify."
At the height of the rape story, media gullibility reached
new levels. In mid-February 1993, the Associated Press,
citing only a Bosnian government source, reported
alleged cannibalism by starving Muslims in Eastern
Bosnia. The story achieved instant headlines in the
United States. Receiving little if any play, however, was
the vigorous denial the following day by U.N. officials
in Bosnia, who rushed to the scene of supposedly
starving villagers and discovered them still in possession
of livestock and chickens.
In its effort to force Western military intervention, the
media also critically neglected to report essential details
about the 17-hour debate last may that led to the
Bosnian Serb Parliament's rejection of the Vance-Owen
plan. No fewer than 50 reports were filed on the
Associated Press and "New York Times" wire services
in the 18 hour period following the final vote by the
Bosnia Serb Parliament, but only one of them attempted
a minimal description of the plan.
Among their objections were the following:
- the plan's narrow umbilical connection between
Serbia and Serb-populated territories adjacent to
Croatia and within Bosnia was not a defensible,
long-term proposition.
- some 460,000 Bosnian Serbs would end up in
Muslim provinces and 160,000 Bosnian Serbs
would be located within Croat provinces.
- of a total of $31,4 billion in identified assets in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Vance-Owen plan
apportioned $18 billion to Muslims, $7,3 billion
to Croats, and $6.1 billion to Serbs.
- none of the known deposits of bauxite, lead,
zinc, salt, or iron would be given to the Bosnian
Serbs.
- out of 3,900 megawatts in electrical generating
capacity, Muslims would receive 1,765
megawatts, and Croats would receive 1,220
megawatts, and Serbs would receive 905
megawatts (all 10 hydroelectric plants would
essentially be under the control of Bosnian
Croats).
- of the 920 total kilometers of railway lines, 260
through Croat areas, and 160 through
Serb-controlled lands.
- only 200 out of 1,200 kilometers of improved
roadways would lie within Bosnian Serb
jurisdictions.
- Bosnian Serbs would have been required to
relinquish or would have otherwise lost nearly 24
percent of the land they have held for generations.
AWKWARD REALITIES
"The mauling of Sarajevo, the worst single crime against
a community in Europe since Auschwitz, cannot be
watched impassively night after night on television news
bulletins," as Robert Fox of the London "Daily
Telegraph" put it. That was the general image. But
another side of the story deserved more attention.
As early as July 1992, senior Western diplomats had
stated publicly that Bosnian Muslim forces in Sarajevo
were repeatedly provoking Serb shelling of the city to
trigger western military intervention. But few wire
stories from Sarajevo bothered to establish that the
almost daily artillery barrages and ceasefire violations
were not always started by Bosnian Serbs, who often,
officials said repeatedly, were returning fire from
Muslims who had fired on Serb targets and
neighborhoods first. Without making such distinctions,
stories implied that the Serbs were alone to blame for
the "Siege of Sarajevo." Also, U.N. observers were
positioned primarily to detect artillery actions by Serbs,
raising questions about the volume of non-Serb artillery
fire, which was often observed to be almost as intense as
Serb shelling.
"Kosevo" hospital in Sarajevo was a favorite backdrop
for television journalists who, when the hospital's water
supply was interrupted because of the shelling, eagerly
awaited the first birth without water in the maternity
ward. Once they got their pictures, the Western film
crews dismantled their cameras and returned to the
nearby Holiday Inn, where hot water was abundant.
Unreported was the fact that on their exit from the
hospital they had to avoid tripping over a shielded
Bosnian army mortar emplacement that was never
identified as the probable reason why Serbs sporadically
fired at the hospital.
Countless news stories rarely heeded statements from
U.N. officials that Bosnian Muslim units frequently
initiated their own shelling of Muslim quarters of the
city as well as Serb neighborhoods. For instance, on
March 23, 1993, major Pee Galagos of UNPROFOR in
Sarajevo described the previous day's exchanges; "There
were 341 impacts recorded: 133 on the Serbian side and
208 on the Bosnian side with 82 artillery rounds, 29
mortar rounds and 22 tank rounds hitting the Serbians;
and 115 artillery, 73 mortar and 20 tank rounds hitting
the Bosnians."
It was a rare exception to the media's usual tilt when, on
July 22, 1992, the "Guardian" reported U.N. commander
Mackenzie's reaction to attacks on civilian targets in
Sarajevo: "Mortars are set up beside hospitals, artillery
beside schools, mortars and other weapons are carried in
ambulances. I've never seen the Red Cross abused like
that, on both sides." Such reports seldom appeared in the
American media, which may explain some dramatic
differences in the public perspectives about intervention
between Europe and the United States.
French general Phillipe Morillon, following his relief as
commander of UNPROFOR in late June 1993,
emphatically blamed the Bosnian Muslim government
for failing to lift the siege of Sarajevo. In an interview
with the Prague daily "Lidove Noviny", Morillon said
the Bosnian regime wanted to keep Sarajevo a focal
point for world sympathy and repeatedly refused to
allow UNPROFOR to achieve a ceasefire.
By mid-1993, the ability to tell the Serb side of the
story was gone, as some observers recognized. "The
Serbians have much to say and as yet have had virtually
no opportunity to do so," argued Mary Hueniken in "The
London Free Press." "Sanctions slapped on Serbia
prevent it from hiring a PR firm to help it put its two
cents in," reported the June 7, 1993, issue of "O'Dwyer's
Washington Report," a public relations and public
affairs publication that monitors the PR industry in
Washington.
"As a result, Serbs, thought surely guilty of numerous
atrocities, have been pilloried in the press. Reporters,
meanwhile, cheer on the out-gunned Bosnians, who
undoubtedly have their own skeletons in the closet, and
give Croatia, which wants to carve up its own chunk of
Bosnia, a free ride. The U.S. public won't get a clear
picture of what is really happening in the Balkans until
Serbia is allowed to present its case through PR."
The tentative media self-criticism that has emerged so
far has focused superficially on television coverage of
the Yugoslav civil war. According to the Center for
Media and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research
organization in Washington, for the first three months of
1993 the major networks aired 233 stories on Bosnia
during prime-time news, as opposed to only 137 stories
on president Bill Clinton's economic plans.
Similarly, Marc Gunther, of Knight-Ridder newspapers,
noted the "depressing regularity" of ABC's "World
News Tonight" broadcasts about Bosnia. "Is ABC doing
too much with the story, or are its rivals not doing
enough? And what accounts for the different
approaches?" he wrote. Gunther's story was based on the
"Tyndall Report", which monitors evening newscasts. It
found that ABC's Yugoslav war reporting had provided
301 minutes of coverage, compared with 179 for NBC's
"Nightly News" and 177 for the CBS'S "Evening News"
during the 11 months that ended in March."
"In 1992, excluding the election, the most covered story
on ABC was the Balkans," Gunther continued. "CBS's
top story was the Los Angeles riots, while NBC devoted
the most minutes to Somalia. ABC's "Nightline",
meanwhile, has devoted more than a dozen programs to
the Balkans since last year, many consisting entirely of
reporting from the scene of the fighting." The analysis
suggested a special ABC commitment to the Bosnian
war. Gunther noted that Roone Arledge "has a personal
connection to the war because, as president of ABC
sports, he produced coverage of the 1984 Winter
Olympics in Sarajevo. Last year, David Kaplan, a
producer for ABC's "Prime Time Live", was killed by a
sniper's bullet while preparing a report on the war."
Gunther also underlined Peter Jennings's "personal
convictions on Bosnia" and his admonitions that the
world community had failed to ease the suffering there.
An ABC spokesman, contacted for response, said
Gunther and the Knight-Ridder story were "right on the
money."
In ABC's case, the motive for its coverage may be easy
to find. But that is not the case for many other news
organizations. In the wake of the negligence and pack
journalism that have distorted the coverage of the
Yugoslav civil war to date, the media would be
well-advised to gaze into their own mirrors and
consider their dubious records. At some point, historians
or unofficial international investigation will determine
the true culpability of all the actors in the Yugoslav
tragedy. But one of those actors is the press itself. In
Bosnia, where major governments had few intelligence
assets and where the role of international public opinion
was central, it was critical that the news media report
with precision and professionalism. Instead, the epitaph
above the grave of objective and fair reporting in the
Yugoslav war probably will be written with the
cynicism conveyed in an internal memorandum of April
19, 1993, from a cartoonist to his syndicate's
editorial-page editors:
"I was SKEDed earlier today for a cartoon on the
Rodney King verdict to be faxed out this afternoon.
However, given the racial and legal complexities
of the case we have decided that such an issue is
best left unaddressed in the uncompromising
language of an editorial cartoon. I will be sending
a cartoon on the war in Bosnia instead."
* * *
* Peter Brock, a special projects and politics editor at
the "El Paso Herald-Post", has lectured and written
about Yugoslavia, as well as Eastern Europe and Russia,
since 1976. He is writing a book on the Western media in
the Yugoslav civil war.