Balkans: Media and War Crimes
By Anes Alic for ISN
Serbia's Special War Crimes Prosecutor's Office has launched a preliminary inquiry into the role of journalists in inciting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, focusing on reporting on atrocities committed in Vukovar, Croatia, and Zvornik, Bosnia.
The investigation should be complete within the next two months, after which a decision will be taken on whether there are grounds for a full-fledged investigation. The Prosecutor’s Office said the aim was not to persecute journalists, but to establish whether there were elements of criminal activity in reporting.
The probe was launched after Serbia's war crimes court in March sentenced 13 former Serb paramilitaries for the 1991 massacre of 200 Croats at a pig farm near Croatia's eastern town of Vukovar.
Last year, the court also sentenced three former Serb paramilitary members for their role in the 1992 killing of 25 Muslims from the eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik, which borders Serbia. According to the indictment, the three beat and tortured men for weeks, carving crosses on their foreheads, cut off their ears and testicles and forced them to eat them. In 1992, more than 900 Muslim civilians were killed in the Zvornik area.
Journalism as a weapon
Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office, told ISN Security watch that so far they had found some eight examples of instances in which the media could have provoked war crimes and that these could be used should the investigation reach the court. He said that the Prosecutor’s Office had taken the wartime archives from Serbian national television, RTS.
Vekaric said his team had “several examples” of reporting in which “lies” could be linked to strong reactions among people that led to killing someone “just because they saw on television or read in the newspaper something that has nothing to do with reality.”
One of those examples is false reporting by government-controlled media on the murder of Serb civilians in Croatia in 1991. Just days before Vukovar killings, Serbian media broadcast news that Croatian forces had external pagemurdered 41 Serb children, aged four to seven, in a primary school in Borovo Selo, near Vukovar.
The story was first reported by Reuters correspondent Vjekoslav Radovic, who claimed that he had seen the bodies of at least 40 small children in the school’s basement. The news rapidly spread among Serbian media, while RTS aired an all-night program on the issue, hosting witnesses claiming that they too had seen the bodies. An RTS journalist even external pagequestioned a Croat teenager held by Serb paramilitary forces, pressuring him to admit to the murders.
Though RTS later conceded that the information was false and all witnesses changed their statements to say that they had only seen a dozen closed body bags, which could have contained the bodies of Croats, and Reuters fired Radovic, it was too late. The information had done its damage and was absorbed by Serbs willing to join paramilitary groups in a campaign of revenge.
When Vukovar fell to the Serbs, paramilitaries seized the prisoners, taking some 200 of them to a pig farm in Ovcara, where they were beaten, tortured and killed. Their bodies were later found in mass graves.
Vekaric said that the prosecution was also analyzing statements given by some of those accused and convicted of war crimes. One witness, a Serb paramilitary volunteer, testified during the Vukovar trial that he had joined Serb paramilitary forces in Croatia after watching a news program in Serbia.
He confessed to having participated in the murder of 200 people in Ovcara after seeing stories in Serbian media about crimes committed by Croatian forces against Serb civilians. “I watched the program, and then I went out [to join paramilitary units] and gave them [Croats] what they deserved,” he testified.
Milosevic mouthpieces
Though the Prosecutor’s Office did not name any particular media outlets or journalists being covered in the probe, there are indications that RTS, the Serbian daily newspapers Politika and Vecernje novosti, and the Tanjug news agency will be central to the initial investigation. They all served as mouthpieces of the regime of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.
Side-by-side with former Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary units, journalists from these outlets reported on the successes of the Serb forces and the alleged crimes against Serb civilians committed by Croatian and Bosnian forces. And only selected media, hand-picked by Serbian authorities, could enter the conquered cities of Vukovar and Zvornik.
In the early stages of the war in Croatia, during the attacks on Vukovar and the coastal resort town of Dubrovnik, these media outlets broadcast a series of reports designed to provoke a strong reaction among viewers, particularly among potential paramilitary volunteers.
Aside from reports about the massacre of Serb civilians, there were reports that Croatian authorities had imported external pagekamikaze fighters from Korea, that external pageKurds (oddly enough described as speaking Arabic) were on the frontlines fighting against the Serbs, that 30,000 Croats were preparing to cross the Serbian border, and so on.
Unlike during the genocide in external pageRwanda, the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) never indicted journalists from the former Yugoslavia for their wartime reporting, though such an idea was tabled by Bosnian journalists associations right after the 1992-1995 war there.
The fury of fear
However, the role of the media in the conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia has been mentioned in a number of war crimes indictments and verdicts, revealing the negative role the media played during the war.
At the request of the ICTY, Renaud de la Brosse, a professor at Reims Champagne-Ardenne University in France, compiled a external pagereport for the case against Milosevic in which he analyzed the role of Serbian media during the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
In his report, de la Brosse claims the 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," he wrote.
"The atmosphere of distrust and of animosity towards others, which was nourished for ages by fears and which counted on the existence of extreme nationalism, started to manifest gradually in all republics of the former Yugoslavia from the late eighties," according to the report.
Furthermore, the expert concluded that politicians in other republics used similar tactics during the wars “to govern the media…turning them into the regime's propaganda instruments…” According to the report, the easier it was to fear other ethnic groups, the easier to justify their expulsion or killing.
The role of the media during the Yugoslav wars was also covered in a report by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, wartime special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Commission. In 1994, Mazowiecki external pagewarned about the ways in which the media informed the general public about the raging conflicts.
In his report, the special rapporteur wrote that “the information published by the media in the former Yugoslavia consisted of nationalistic discourse and omnipresent attacks and offences aimed at people of other ethnicities.”
Elusive evidence
It will be difficult for prosecutors to establish firm links between war time reporting and war crimes, and the challenge of proving that journalists intentionally provoked atrocities will likely go unmet.
Moreover, many of those wartime reporters and editors remain public figures, some working in media outlets as writers, columnists and trainer of a younger generation of reporter, while others are professors and even ambassadors.
The initiative of the Serbian War Crimes Prosecution, however, should be viewed as an excellent example for prosecutors from other former Yugoslavia republics, primarily Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, where the majority of wartime reporters could also be held to account for violating journalism ethics and provoking further violence, just as their Serbian colleagues.
Excerpts from former Yugoslav wartime media:
-“It seems that Muslim extremists invented the most horrific crime on the planet. Last night they fed Serb children to the lion at the Sarajevo Zoo.” RTS broadcasted this external pagestory by their Bosnian correspondent, Rada Djokic, in 1992 after a tipoff from Bosnian Serb soldiers from the frontline.
-"Muslims are still in Makarska.” Bosnian Croat Smiljko Sagolj reported this for Croatian television after many Bosnians sought refuge in the Croatian resort town after the start of the Bosniak-Croat war. One day after the story was broadcast, a bomb exploded in a Bosnian refugee camp near Makarska.
-“Every Muslim should pick a Serb to kill when the time comes.” A Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) journalist wrote this in the magazine “Zmaj od Bosne,” which is associated with the ruling Bosnian Party for Democratic Action (SDA).
-"Turk women claim that we rape them, but just recently in a refugee camp one of the rape victims gave birth to a black child." Bosnian Serb anchor Risto Djogo said during a Serb Television (SRT) news broadcast.
-“In my hand I am holding gold teeth. I was told that Croat criminals are pulling them out of Serb civilians.” An RTS correspondent stated this during the Vukovar battle. In the same story, he interviewed an older Serb civilian who was losing teeth due to natural causes.
RTS broadcasted a feature with the following dialogue:
Reporter: Do you have an example that they [Croats] killed someone, cut his throat, or similar examples of such crimes?
Interviewee: I left earlier, I didn’t see such things, but I heard from others that there was torturing.
Reporter: Like what?
Interviewee: Well, slaughtering, they were cutting off fingers, pulling fingernails off children…we have found children in pots ready to be baked. We discovered beheaded soldiers…
Reporter: They have no mercy for anyone, do they?