The War of Words: Expert Report on Propaganda Released
Monday, 24 February, 2003
The War of Words: Expert Report on Propaganda Released
Monday, 24 February, 2003
In both the Croatia and Bosnia indictments, one of Milosevic's alleged contributions to the joint criminal enterprise to ethnically cleanse large areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina is his use of Serbian state-run media to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred among Serbs by spreading 'exaggerated and false messages of ethnically based attacks by Bosnian Muslims and Croats against Serb people. . . .' According to de la Brosse, Milosevic began his efforts to gain control over the audio-visual media in 1986-87, a process which was complete by summer of 1991. 'The media offensive launched by Belgrade contributed to the appearance of equally detestable propaganda in other Yugoslav republics and its after-effects would be felt for years,' the report quotes former Reuters correspondent in Sarajevo, Daniel Deluce.
De la Brosse claims that Serbian authorities used the media as a weapon in their military campaign. 'In Serbia specifically, the use of media for nationalist ends and objectives formed part of a well-thought through plan -- itself part of a strategy of conquest and affirmation of identity.' It was effective, in part, because the society was in transition from Communism, an ideology that had formed a large part of the society's (and people's) identity for 50 years. Its demise left a vacuum, and people in search of who they were.
The nationalist ideology provided an answer. It defined the Serbs according to a historical myth, based part on fact, part on fiction. Not only did the ideology reach back 600 years to the defeat of Serbia by the Ottoman forces at the battle of Kosovo Polje. It also encompassed the more factual and more recent tragedies suffered by Serbs during WWII at the hands of Croatian Ustashe. An extremist element of rising Croatian nationalism fed the flames of fear, especially in Serb majority regions of Croatia, by rehabilitating Ustashe symbols such as the checkerboard flag. The new Serbian identity became one in opposition to the 'other' -- Croats (collapsed into Ustashe) and Muslims (collapsed into 'Turks,' though the vast majority were Slav or Albanian).
The report points out that Milosevic's propaganda campaign was based on the same fundamental techniques as those used by Adolf Hitler, with the added power of television. 'Nazi propaganda had shown that myths bind the masses together tightly. Indeed, it was through myths and, therefore, the appeal to the forces of the unconscious, to fear and terror, the instinct of power and the lost community that the propaganda orchestrated by Goebbels had succeeded in winning over the Germans and melding them into a compact mass. The Serbian regime would use a similar technique. To weld the population together official propaganda drew on the sources of the Serbian mystique, that of a people who were the mistreated victims and martyrs of history and that of Greater Serbia, indissolubly linked to the Orthodox religion.'
The fundamental principles of propaganda, identified by de la Brosse, are: 1. keep it simple; 2. project one's own faults onto the enemy; 3. use the news to one's own advantage through exaggeration, distortion and omission; 4. repeat the message endlessly; 5. rely on myths and history; 6. create a national consensus. Serbian television and radio's repetitive use of pejorative descriptions, such as 'Ustashe hordes', 'Vatican fascists', 'Mujahedin fighters', 'fundamentalist warriors of Jihad', and 'Albanian terrorists', quickly became part of common usage. Unverified stories, presented as fact, were turned into common knowledge, e.g. that Bosnian Muslims were feeding Serb children to animals in the Sarajevo zoo. In these stories, friends and neighbors, fellow countrymen and women were turned into 'the other,' lacking humanizing or individual characteristics. The easier to fear; the easier to justify expelling or killing.
Two members of the Federal Security Service (KOG) testified earlier in Milosevic's trial about their involvement in Milosevic's propaganda campaign. Slobodan Lazarevic revealed 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. These actions, at least one resulting in deaths and serious injuries, were blamed on Croats. The other KOG operative, Mustafa Candic, described the use of technology to fabricate conversations, making it sound as if Croat authorities were telling Croats in Serbia to leave for an ethnically pure Croatia. The conversation was broadcast following a Serb attack on Croatians living in Serbia, forcing them to flee. He testified that the propaganda war was code named Operation Opera. Another instance of disinformation involved a television broadcast of corpses, described as Serb civilians killed by Croats. Mr. Candic believed they were in fact the bodies of Croats killed by Serbs.
De la Brosse describes how RTS (Radio Television Serbia) portrayed events in Dubrovnik and Sarajevo: 'The images shown of Dubrovnik came with a commentary accusing those from the West who had taken the film of manipulation and of having had a tyre [sic] burnt in front of their cameras to make it seem that the city was on fire. As for the shells fired at Sarajevo and the damage caused, for several months it was simply as if it had never happened in the eyes of Serbian television viewers because Belgrade television would show pictures of the city taken months and even years beforehand to deny that it had ever occurred.' The Serbian public was fed similar disinformation about Vukovar, according to former Reuters correspondent Daniel Deluce, 'Serbian Radio Television created a strange universe in which Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, had never been besieged and in which the devastated Croatian town of Vukovar had been 'liberated''
While Milosevic, until the run up to the Kosovo war, allowed independent print media to publish, their distribution was extremely limited. His methods of controlling the media included creating shortages of paper, interfering with or stopping supplies and equipment, confiscating newspapers for being printed without proper licenses (he controlled licensing). For publicly owned media, he could dismiss, promote, demote or have journalists publicly condemned. In 1998, he adopted a Draconian media law which created a special misdemeanor court to try violations. It had the ability (and used it) to impose heavy fines and to confiscate property if they were not immediately paid. Between October 1998 and November 1999, the court levied fines amounting to $l.125 million. If that were not enough to deter any independent-minded journalist, there was the example of Slavko Curuvija, assassinated in front of his home shortly after the Kosovo war started.
According to the expert report, official Serbian propaganda reached more than 3.5 million people every night. Given that and the lack of access to alternative news, it is surprising how great was the resistance -- evidenced not only in massive demonstrations in Serbia in 1991 and 1996-97 both of which almost toppled the regime, but also widespread draft resistance and desertion from the military. Similarly, when Milosevic's regime was finally overthrown in October 2000, RTS was a primary target of demonstrators. After attacking the Parliament, the demonstrators headed for the RTS building.
Propaganda as a war crime (incitement to genocide) is the subject of a case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and figures prominently in the recent indictment of Vojislav Seselj, head of the Serbian Radical Party and an active player throughout the wars in the former Yugoslavia. According to the indictment, Seselj bears individual criminal responsibility for instigating crimes, including murder, torture and forcible expulsion on ethnic grounds. It reads, 'By using the word 'instigated', the Prosecution charges that the accused Vojislav SESELJ's speeches, communications, acts and/or omissions contributed to the perpetrators' decision to commit the crimes alleged.' De la Brosse cites an example of Seselj's provocative speech in his report: ' If its troops are in danger it has the right to use napalm bombs and everything else it has in its arsenals. It is more important to save an army unit than to fear there might be casualties. It's their own fault. They wanted war, now they have it.'
While propaganda is 'merely' words and images, it has a powerful effect as well as long term consequences. Quite simply, it creates the conditions for people to react and act out of fear and hatred. In Yugoslavia, it was effective in dividing people who had lived together in relative peace for decades. Not only dividing them, but allowing them to kill one another or sanction killing and destruction in their name. It's the distortion of reality that is perhaps the hardest to correct. After 12 or more years living with a certain worldview, it is a shock to learn it is false. After being lied to, it is forever after nearly impossible to trust what one is being told. For some, it is easier to hold onto the lie. There lies the challenge for reconciliation. The hope is that the Tribunal's process can assist in that painful, but necessary reawakening -- if not now, at some future time.
