Propaganda during the Yugoslav Wars
[1] Media controlled by state regimes helped foster an environment that made war possible by attacking civic principles, fueling fear of ethnic violence and engineering consent.
During the 1990s, Dnevnik (Daily News) was used to promote the "wise politics of Slobodan Milošević" and to attack "the servants of Western powers and the forces of chaos and despair", the Serbian opposition.
[9] According to Danielle S. Sremac, contrary to the Croats and the Bosnians, Serbian public relations efforts were nonexistent, as the Milošević government held a disdain for the Western press.
Other PR activities included Burson-Marsteller, which handled the media and political relations for the visit of the new Yugoslav prime minister, Milan Panić, and a host of Serbian information centres and individual lobbyists from both sides.
[11] According to Professor Renaud De la Brosse, a senior lecturer at the University of Reims, a witness called by the ICTY's Office of the Prosecutor, Serbian authorities used media as a weapon in their military campaign.
His methods of controlling the media included creating shortages of paper, interfering with or stopping supplies and equipment and confiscating newspapers for being printed without proper licenses or other reasons.
[12] Human Rights Watch reported that five independent newspaper editors were charged with disseminating misinformation because they had referred to Albanians who had died in Kosovo as "people", rather than "terrorists".
Babic stated that during the events, and in particular at the beginning of his political career, he was strongly influenced and misled by Serbian propaganda, which repeatedly referred to an imminent threat of genocide by the Croatian regime against the Serbs in Croatia, thus creating an atmosphere of hatred and fear of the Croats.
Ultimately this kind of propaganda led to the unleashing of violence against the Croat population and other non-Serbs.Željko Kopanja, the editor of the independent newspaper Nezavisne Novine, was seriously hurt by a car bomb after he had published stories detailing atrocities committed by Serbs against Bosniaks during the Bosnian War.
Dr. Vesna Bosanac, the head of Vukovar hospital from which the Croatian prisoners-of-war and civilians were taken, said she believed the story of slaughtered babies was released intentionally to incite Serbian nationalists to execute Croats.
[23] Before the Siege of Dubrovnik, Yugoslav officers (namely Pavle Strugar[24]) made a concerted effort at misrepresenting the military situation on the ground and exaggerated the "threat" of a Croatian attack on Montenegro by "30,000 armed Ustaše and 7000 terrorists, including Kurdish mercenaries".
In one instance, TV Belgrade showed Tuđman shaking hands with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and accused them of plotting to impose "a Fourth Reich", and even the Holy See was blamed for "supporting secessionists".
[29] As a consequence, in September 1991, the German and Vatican embassies were targets of Serbian protesters, who shouted, "Pope John Paul II supports neo-fascism in Croatia".
[30] During the notorious false-flag Operation Opera Orientalis, which was conducted in 1991 by the Yugoslav Air Force intelligence service, the Serbian media repeatedly made false accusations in which Croatia was connected with World War II, fascism, Nazism and anti-Semitism with the aim to discredit the Croatian demands for independence in the West.
[33] However, the ICTY prosecutors obtained the integral tape of his speech, played it in its entirety during Martić's trial on 23 October 2006, and proved that Tuđman had never said that Croatia "wanted the war".
[36] After a series of massacres of Bosniaks, a few hundred (between 300[37] and 1,500[37]) Arabic-speaking mercenaries primarily from the Middle East and North Africa, called Mujahideen, came into Bosnia in the second half of 1992 with the aim of helping "their Muslim brothers".
Dr. Mirsad Mujadžić, a Bosniak politician, was accused of injecting drugs into Serbian women to make them incapable of conceiving male children, which in turn contributed to a reduction in the birth rate among Serbs.
[39][46] Moreover, in a "Kozarski Vjesnik" article dated 10 June 1992, Dr. Osman Mahmuljin was accused of deliberately having provided incorrect medical care to his Serb colleague, Dr. Živko Dukić, who had a heart attack.
[47][48] Encouraged by the initial United Nations Protection Force report, Serbian media claimed that the Bosnian government had shelled its own civilians to get the Western powers to intervene against the Serbs.
As the result of that effort, Serbian national television showed a report that stated, "Serb children being given as food for lions in Sarajevo Zoo called Pionirska Dolina by Muslim extremists".
It was established that the regular Bosnian troops in Srebrenica were often unable to restrain the large groups of starving civilians that took part in the attacks to get food from Serbian villages.
Slobodan Lazarević revealed alleged KOG clandestine activities designed to undermine the peace process, including mining a soccer field, a water tower and the reopened railway between Zagreb and Belgrade.
[71] In London, Croatian representatives entered negotiations with lobbying firms, including Hill and Knowlton, and offered 500,000 pounds for the creation of a media campaign to win official recognition and raise the profile of Croatia.
[14] After the war had broken out, Croatian propaganda progressively played into a moral superiority of the victims by showing the devastation in cities like Dubrovnik and Vukovar and omitting Serbian villages that were in flames.
[78][79] Croatian and Bosnian cinema followed the discourse started in the Hollywood by portraying Serbs and Serbia as conquerors, war criminals, robbers and terrorists as an instrument to raise national consciousness.
[11] In a 1993 interview, James Harff, the president of Ruder Finn, lauded his firm's contacts with politicians, human rights organizations, journalists and other members of the media and boasted about its accomplishments, most notably in winning over Jewish public opinion for Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovars following the antisemitic "historical past[s] of Croatia and Bosnia" during World War II.
[85] Some scholars and observers, such as Nicholas Cull, David Welch, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti and Scott Taylor argue that throughout the wars, the Western media framed the conflict in a way that amounted to demonizing not only Slobodan Milošević but also the Serbian people as a whole.
"[93] The journalist David Binder argues that US policy throughout the 1990s was ruled by a "simplistic dogma that blames one nation, the Serbs, as the origin of evil in the Balkans" and that the "unwritten doctrine was endorsed and spread by the mainstream media".
[111] Wolfgram also criticized reporting on the alleged Operation Horseshoe and explained that it was clear that there was co-ordinated action by Milošević's forces, but NATO had tried to make it known that it was reacting to something that had been underway since November 1998.
[117] Philip Hammond concluded that British media coverage of the NATO air campaign "encountered familiar problems of news management and propaganda" that were observed in post-Cold War conflict reporting.
