By Rados Piletic

The mainstream media in the NATO countries have conveyed events in the former and new Yugoslavia in a very simplified manner, with deviations coming few and far between. The discourse on Yugoslavia’s disintegration has operated primarily on the assumption that Serbian aggression has destroyed the country. Much work was put into this discursive formation—there are many factors that have gone into the demonization of the Serbian people in order for this simplified version of events to be effective, to have mass appeal. This has been a difficult task, given that in recent history—WWI and II—Serbia had been allied with Britain, France and the U.S. against the Axis powers. Nevertheless, the Western media was up to the task, and one would have to be either extremely ignorant or extremely stubborn to suggest that it was the other way around—that the Western media have been allied with Serbia’s general perspective of the war. Because of this, most people who have heard anything about this situation believe that the Serbs have been the main aggressors.

However, there are many—Serbians notwithstanding—who would argue that the Serbs have been unjustly demonized by the Western media in order for the atrocities that have been committed against the Serbs and Yugoslavs in general by the West to be allowed, and even morally justified by their constituencies in the various Western countries that have taken it upon themselves to intervene in the "Crisis in Yugoslavia."

Journalists have done a lot of work in order to create the discourse through which the war has been understood as a war of Serb aggression. The following is a short list of what the New York Times, the London Times, the Guardian, the Independent Television Network, the British Broadcasting Company, The Washington Post, the LA Times, Time Magazine, Le Monde, and countless other newsmedia have engaged in in order to "demonize the Serbs."

Libel is the printed defamation of a person or group, prosecutable in many countries engaging in the conflict in Yugoslavia, including the U.S., GB, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. We need not enumerate the frequency of the term ‘Serbian atrocities’; let us accept the simple truth that, at least for the last ten years and particularly for the last year (1998-1999) wherever one would see the word ‘Serbian’, its faithful counterpart in the Western newsmedia ‘atrocities’ was not far from hand. An opinion article, ominously entitled "The Question of Evil," written by Anthony Lewis of the New York Times provides the most concise and condensed example of this libelous behavior in its opening paragraph: "There can be no doubt, now, about the scale of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo. Western reporters and warcrimes investigators have begun to confirm what Kosovar Albanian refugees described"  (1) How is it possible—much less logical—to believe that there can be "no doubt" if the investigators have only begun to confirm what the Albanian refugees described? The article goes on to suggest, in its sum, that thousands of Serbs are ‘evil’, that this is not solely the doing of one dictator in power: "what the Serbs did in Kosovo confronts us again with the question of the human capacity for evil." Is this not an example of pre-judicial accusation? And how well will Mr. Lewis’ case stand up in a court of law? We have yet to determine the answers to these questions.

There are several examples of situations in which the Serbs have been falsely accused, none of which are as obvious as the Market massacres in Sarajevo in 1993-1995. Many newstations and print media reported immediately after the events that overwhelming evidence pointed in the direction of the Serbs as the culprits in these bombings, and dismissed other accounts summarily:

It was not immediately known who fired the shell into the Bosnian capital, which is under siege by Bosnian Serbs fighting the Muslim-led government. But President Alija Izetbegovic’s spokesman, Kemal Muftic, charged that the 120mm mortar shell was fired from a Serb-held position north of Sarajevo. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, however, suggested that government soldiers had fired on their own people to persuade NATO to go ahead with threatened airstrikes on Serb positions. But there was no evidence to support this charge, which was dismissed by the Bosnian government. (2)

I have emphasized certain words and phrases in this article that must be investigated, for example, the statement that "there was no evidence" to support the Bosnian Serb charge. There was also very little evidence to prove the first charge either. What then is the result of emphasizing that one charge had no evidence while the other charge, which is almost equally lacking conclusive evidence, is not questioned by the reporter? The result is an action which hurts—in the legal sense of the term—its object, the Bosnian Serbs, without the evidence to prosecute such a claim. Even with the publication of a secret UN document which "blames the Bosnian Moslems for the February 1994 massacre of Moslems at a Sarajevo market," the damage has been done: most people, I would argue, believe that the Serbs are guilty for what are now called "the Marketplace Massacres." (3)

As may be expected, viable and prosecutable examples of defamation against Serbs in the Yugoslav wars are not as numerous as less-than-prosecutable cases, including jokes, cartoons, false analogies (to Nazi Germany in WWII), and, particularly, omission of information that would upset the established discourse. For example, on the New York Times’ Website (www.nytimes.com) there is a link to the Times’ "Chronology of the Events Leading to the Kosovo Crisis," in which the riots by Albanian agitators for Kosovo’s full republican status (and full separatism) in 1982 are mentioned briefly, but the most important events in those riots—the murder of nine Serbian civilians—are not mentioned in the summary. This gets even thicker when it is revealed that the New York Times reported the incident that year in an article entitled "Exodus of Serbians Stirs Province in Yugoslavia," written by Marvine Howe, Special reporter to the New York Times:

"Last year’s riots, in which nine people were killed, shocked not only the troubled province of Kosovo, but also the entire country into an awareness of the problems of this most backward part of Yugoslavia, which is made up of many ethnic groups... In June, a 43-year-old Serb, Miodrag Saric, was shot and killed by an Albanian neighbor, Ded Krasnici, in a village near Djakovica, 40 miles southwest of Pristina" (4)

There are no further mention in the article of the ethnicities of the people killed in the rioting, though there is much coverage of the fact that 57,000 ethnic-Serbs have left the province since it received its liberal autonomous status in 1974, under pressure from Albanian extremists who believe, according to an Albanian official, that "‘the nationalists have a two-point platform, first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.’" (5)

In the end, it is obvious to me that the Western media have often accused the Serbs of events in which the perpetrators have yet to be determined by a legal process, which, though it may sound stuffy and bureaucratic, is supposedly one of the founding principles upon which a democracy must operate. Examples abound: the numbers of 7-8,000 Muslim men massacred by Serbs in Srebrenica have not been corroborated by UN and International Red Cross investigations, which have confirmed a total of 767 dead; the Drenica Massacre in Kosovo in 1998 was blamed on the Serbs while evidence to that effect has yet to be substantiated; that the Racak Massacre in February of 1999—which precipitated the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (particularly Serbia)—was committed by Serb soldiers, as alleged by most U.S. media, has been questioned openly by the French and British media, after the viewing of a videotape shot by OSCE monitors in cooperation with the Yugoslav authorities; and of course, the alleged numbers of 100,000-250,000 dead Kosovar Albanians during the Serbian offensive on the KLA while NATO was bombing has been reduced by a factor of 10 and more to estimates—yes, still only estimates—of 10,000 killed total.

The colossal job of defaming the Serbs has created a situation in which any account by Serb sources is seen as propaganda. Serbs are guilty until proven innocent, and due process is marginalized in favor of a simplified story that is formulated in such a way as to justify what will inevitably have to be called the ‘indiscriminate bombing’ of Serbian civilians, according to the provisions set out in the UN Resolutions on War Crimes. The most obvious examples of indiscriminate bombing would have to be the bombing of the pharmaceutical and petrochemical factories in Pancevo, Serbia, and glaringly, the bombing of Radio Television Serbia—a media organ which was not killing anyone and was being operated by technicians, janitors, and news reporters. This incident represents for me the most obvious example of defamation: there is a ‘reckless disregard’ on the part of a broad range of Western newsmedia, including the New York Times, the London Times and the BBC, for whether or not RTS was an organ of the military, and there was immeasurable harm and damage done.

How did the United States-led NATO Alliance get away with war crimes in the eyes of their political constituencies? They made devils out of the Serbs, and then portrayed themselves as saviors, thereby justifying the killing and maiming of thousands of Serbian civilians and security personnel. They demonized the Serbs in order to justify what will someday be called a genocidal policy against the Serbian and other Yugoslav peoples in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Notes:

1. Anthony Lewis. "The Question of Evil" The New York Times, June 22, 1999.

2. Tony Smith. "Shelling of Sarajevo Market Kills 66: More Than 200 Wounded." Associated Press, February 6, 1994; page A01.

3. The direct quotation is from the article "Senior Official Admits to Secret UN Report on Sarajevo Massacre," Deutsche Press-Agentur; June 6, 1996. Another article in the Sunday Times issued an article to the same effect, only before the actual publication of the UN document, "Experts Warned US That Mortar Was Bosnian," October 1, 1995.

4. The New York Times, Monday, July 12, 1982.

5. Ibid. 4

Commission of Inquiry
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war crimes

Table of Contents: Selected Research Findings