Propaganda during the Yugoslav Wars

Slobodan Milošević began his efforts to gain control over the media in 1986-87,[8] a process which was complete by the summer of 1991. In 1992 Radio Television Belgrade, together with Radio Television Novi Sad (RTNS) and Radio Television Pristina (RTP) became a part of Radio Television of Serbia, a centralized and closely governed network intended to be a loudspeaker for Milošević's policies. During the 1990s, Dnevnik (Daily news) was used to glorify the "wise politics of Slobodan Milošević" and to attack "the servants of Western powers and the forces of chaos and despair", i.e., the Serbian opposition.[9]

According to Danielle S. Sremac, contrary to the Croatian and Bosnian side, Serbian public relations efforts were non-existent as the Milošević government held a disdain for the Western press.[10] However, Wise Communications in Washington represented Serbia's interests through a contract with the Serbian-owned oil company Jugopetrol, until sanctions were imposed by the U.N. embargo on Serbia. Bill Wise, president of the firm stated that 'We arranged television interviews and placed articles in US publications for Slobodan Milosevic. Part of our role was to get some balance to the information coming out of Yugoslavia". A group of Serbian businessmen hired Ian Greer Associates to organise a lobby of Westminster, communicate the Serbian message, and prevent economic sanctions by the European Community. It too stopped working when the UN imposed sanctions in June 1992. 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, 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. "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."[12] According to de la Bosse, nationalist ideology defined the Serbs partly according to a historical myth, based on the defeat of Serbia by the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and partly on the Genocide of Serbs committed during the World War II by Croatian fascist Ustashe that were governing the Independent State of Croatia. The Croatian will for independence fed the flames of fear, especially in Serb majority regions of Croatia. According to de la Bosse, the new Serbian identity became one in opposition to the "others" - Croats (collapsed into Ustashe) and Muslims (collapsed into Poturice).[12] Even Croatian democracy was dismissed since ‘Hitler came to power in Germany within the framework of a multi-party mechanism but subsequently became a great dictator, aggressor and criminal’[13][14] Words such as "genocidal", "fascisoid", "heir of Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić" and "neo-Ustaše Croatian viceroy" were used by the Serbian media to describe Croatian president Franjo Tudjman. By contrast, Milošević was described as "wise", "decisive", "unwavering" and "the person who was restoring national dignity to the Serbian people".[15]

A propaganda poster celebrating the 1999 shootdown of the NATO F-117 Nighthawk

While Milošević, until the run up to the Kosovo War, allowed independent print media to publish, their distribution was 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, etc. For publicly owned media, he could dismiss, promote, demote or have journalists publicly condemned. In 1998, he adopted a media law which created a special misdemeanor court to try violations. It had the ability to impose heavy fines and to confiscate property if they were not immediately paid.[12] Human Rights Watch reported that five independent newspaper editors were charged with disseminating misinformation because they referred to Albanians who had died in Kosovo as "people" rather than "terrorists".[16] The government crackdown on independent media intensified when NATO forces were threatening intervention in Kosovo in late September and early October. Furthermore, the government also maintained direct control of state radio and television, which provided news for the majority of the population.[16] According to the report by de la Brosse, the Milošević-controlled media reached more than 3.5 million people every day. Given that and the lack of access to alternative news, de la Brosse states that it is surprising how great the resistance to Milošević's propaganda was among Serbs - 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.[12] More than 50,000 people participated in many anti-war protests in Belgrade, and more than 150,000 people took part in the most massive protest called “The Black Ribbon March” in solidarity with people in Sarajevo.[17][18] It is estimated that between 50,000 and 200,000 people deserted from the Yugoslav People's Army, while between 100,000 and 150,000 people emigrated from Serbia refusing to participate in the war.[19][20]

De la Brosse describes how RTS (Radio Television of 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 tire 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'."[12]

ICTY sentencing judgement for Milan Babić which has been first president of Republic of Serbian Krajina, a self-proclaimed Serbian dominated entity within Croatia will declare:

Babić made ethnically based inflammatory speeches during public events and in the media that added to the atmosphere of fear and hatred amongst Serbs living in Croatia and convinced them that they could only be safe in a state of their own. 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.

— The ICTY in its judgement against Milan Babić[21]

Željko Kopanja, the editor of the independent newspaper Nezavisne Novine, was seriously hurt by a car bomb after publishing stories detailing atrocities committed by Serbs against Bosniaks during the Bosnian War. He believed that the bomb was planted by Serbia's security services to stop him from publishing further stories. An FBI investigation supported his suspicions.[22]

During the Pakrac clash, Serbian newspaper "Večernje Novosti" reported that about 40 Serb civilians were killed in Pakrac on 2 March 1991 by the Croatian forces. The story was widely accepted by the public and some ministers in the Serbian government (e.g. Dragutin Zelenović). Attempts to confirm the report in other media from all 7 municipalities with the name Pakrac throughout the former Yugoslavia failed.[23]

A day before the execution of 264 Croatian prisoners of war and civilians in the Ovčara massacre, Serbian media reported that 40 Serb babies had been killed in Vukovar. Dr. Vesna Bosanac, the head of Vukovar hospital from which the Croatian POW's and civilians were taken, said she believed the story of slaughtered babies was released intentionally to incite Serb nationalists to execute Croats.[24]

A JNA soldier reads the propaganda of "Pobjeda", in which the newspaper describes Ustaše hiding behind the walls of Dubrovnik.

A flyer calling upon citizens of Dubrovnik to cooperate with the JNA against the Croats' "vampired fascism and Ustašism"

Before the Siege of Dubrovnik, JNA officers (namely Pavle Strugar[25]) 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".[26] This propaganda was widely spread by the state-controlled media of Serbia and Montenegro.[27]

In reality, Croatian military forces at the area in September were virtually non-existent.[28] The Croat forces consisted of just one locally conscripted unit, which numbered less than 1,500 men and had no tanks or heavy guns. Also, there were no mercenaries, Kurdish or otherwise, on the Croat side.[26]

During the Siege of Dubrovnik in 1991, while the Yugoslav Army shelled the Croatian port town, Radio Television of Serbia showed Dubrovnik with columns of smoke claiming that the local people were burning automobile tires to simulate the destruction of the city.[29]

The Belgrade-based media sometimes reported about the alleged conspiracy of ‘foreign forces’ to destroy Yugoslavia. In one instance, TV Belgrade showed Tuđman shaking hands with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, accusing them of plotting to impose 'a Fourth Reich', whereas even the Vatican was blamed for 'supporting secessionists'.[30] As a consequence, in September 1991, the German and Vatican Embassy were even targets of Serbian protesters, who shouted that ‘Pope John Paul II supports neo-fascism in Croatia’.[31]

During the notorious false flag Operation Opera Orientalis 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.[32][33]

The Serbian media emphasized that Croatian president Franjo Tuđman started the war in Croatia. In order to corroborate that notion, the media repeatedly referenced his speech in Zagreb, on 24 May 1992, claiming that he allegedly said: "There would not have been a war had Croatia not wanted one". During their trials at the ICTY, Slobodan Milošević and Milan Martić also frequently resorted to Tuđman's quote in order to prove their innocence.[34]

However, the ICTY prosecutors obtained the integral tape of his speech and played it in its entirety during Martić's trial on 23 October 2006, proving that Tuđman never said that Croatia "wanted the war".[35] Upon playing that tape, Borislav Đukić had to admit that Tuđman did not say that.[35] The quote is actually the following: "Some individuals in the world who were not friends of Croatia claimed that we too were responsible for the war. And I replied to them: Yes, there would not have been a war had we given up our goal to create a sovereign and independent Croatia. We suggested that our goal should be achieved without war, and that the Yugoslav crisis should be resolved by transforming the federation, in which nobody was satisfied, particularly not the Croatian nation, into a union of sovereign countries in which Croatia would be sovereign, with its own army, own money, own diplomacy. They did not accept."[36]

Serbian propaganda during the Bosnian War portrayed the Bosnian Muslims as violent extremists and Islamic-fundamentalists.[37] After a series of massacres of Bosniaks, a few hundred (between 300[38][39] and 1,500[38]) 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.[40] The Serb media, however, reported a much bigger number of Mujahideen and presented them as terrorists and a huge threat to European security[39] in order to inflame anti-Muslim hatred among Serbs and other Christians.[41][42] No indictment was issued by ICTY against any of these foreign volunteers. However, cases of Mujahideen units perpetrating war crimes, including the killing, torture and beheading of Serbian and Croat civilians and soldiers have been documented.[43][44][45][46] Former commander of the Bosnian army Rasim Delić was sentenced to three years in prison by the ICTY, partly for crimes committed by a Mujahideen unit that was part of his division who tortured, beheaded and mutilated captured Serb prisoners.[47]

Just before the Prijedor massacre of Bosniak and Croat civilians, Serb propaganda characterized prominent non-Serbs as criminals and extremists who should be punished for their behaviour. Dr. Mirsad Mujadžić, a Bosniak politician, was accused of injecting drugs into Serb women in order to make them incapable of conceiving male children, which in turn contributed to a reduction in the birth rate among Serbs, and Dr. Željko Sikora, a Croat, referred to as the Monster Doctor, was accused of forcing abortions onto Serbian women if they were pregnant with male children and of castrating the male babies of Serbian parents.[41][48] 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.

Mile Mutić, the director of Kozarski Vjesnik and journalist Rade Mutić regularly attended meetings of Serb politicians in order to get informed about the next steps of spreading propaganda.[41][42]

The Markale massacres were two artillery attacks on civilians at the Markale marketplace, committed by the Army of Republika Srpska during the Siege of Sarajevo.[49][50] Encouraged by the initial UNPROFOR report, Serbian media claimed that the Bosnian government had shelled its own civilians in order to drag the Western powers to intervene against the Serbs.[51][52][53] However, in January 2003, the War Crime Tribunal concluded that the massacre was committed by Serb forces around Sarajevo.[54] Although widely reported by the international media, the verdict was ignored in Serbia itself.[49][50][51]

During the Siege of Sarajevo, Serb propaganda was trying to justify the siege at any cost, and as the result of that effort the Serbian national television showed a report about Serb children being given as food for lions in Sarajevo Zoo called Pionirska Dolina by Muslim extremists.[12][55][56]

While the Srebrenica enclave was under siege by the Army of the Republika Srpska, its commander Naser Orić led several attacks around the nearby Serb held villages, many of which were Muslim villages prior to conflict overtaken by Serbian forces during the first months of the siege. These operations resulted in many Serb casualties. Orić was later indicted indicted by the ICTY. In his trial judgment, it was established that the regular Bosnian troops in Srebrenica were often unable to restrain the large groups of starving civilians who took part in the attacks to get food from Serbian villages.[57] Nonetheless, these attacks were described by some Serb media as the main trigger for the Serb attack on Srebrenica in 1995. A TV presenter in Pale told 'Srebrenica was liberated from terrorists' and that 'the offensive took place after the Muslim side attacked the Serb villages outside the Srebrenica protected zone'.[58]

Two members of the Federal Security Service (KOG) testified for the Prosecution in Milosevic's trial about their involvement in Milošević's propaganda campaign. 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. These actions were blamed on Croats. Mustafa Candić, one of four assistant chiefs of KOG, 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 to another instance of disinformation involving a television broadcast of corpses, described as Serb civilians killed by Croats. Candić testified that he believed they were in fact the bodies of Croats killed by Serbs, though this statement has not been verified. He also corroborated the existence of Operations Opera and Labrador.[12][59][60]

Building of RTS which was destroyed by NATO on 24 April 1999.

During the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the building of the Radio Television of Serbia in Belgrade was destroyed by NATO,[61][62] although not without controversy; France opposed the bombing and Amnesty International as well as Human Rights Watch condemned it as an attack on a civilian target.[63][64]

When Milošević's government was overthrown in October 2000, RTS was a primary target of demonstrators. After attacking the Parliament, the demonstrators headed for the RTS building.[12]

On 23 May 2011, Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) issued an official apology for the way their programming was misused for spreading propaganda and discrediting political opponents in the 1990s, and for the fact that their programming had "hurt the feelings, moral integrity and dignity of the citizens of Serbia, humanist-oriented intellectuals, members of the political opposition, critically minded journalists, certain minorities in Serbia, minority religious groups in Serbia, as well as certain neighbouring peoples and states."[65][66]

A number of Independent Serbian media outlets resisted Milošević's influence and control and attempted to counterbalance nationalist rhetoric. These included B92 radio, Studio B Television and Vreme magazine.[2][4] In May 1992, Vreme published articles on the destruction of cities in Bosnia and Croatia, and in November 1992, wrote about attacks on cultural heritage sites (by Serb and non-Serb forces).[67] The most notable dissident voice however came from the daily Belgrade newspaper Borba.[67][68][69] A team of researchers from the University of Ljubljana who studied Serbian and Croatian media during the war found that Borba tried to "maintain a rational attitude" towards the war which included the publishing of comprehensive information and objective reporting on the Croatian government's reactions to individual events, something that was lacking in Croatian media.[70] It was the first newspaper to cover the destruction of five mosques in the city of Bijeljina in March 1993 during the Bosnian War.[67] In the Milošević-controlled press, the editors of Borba were singled out as "traitors".[69] These outlets were regularly harassed and struggled to stay afloat.[4]

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's framing of the conflict amounted to demonization of not only Slobodan Milošević but the Serbian people as a whole.[87][88][89][90][91][92] Others reject the idea that Western media was involved in anti-Serb propaganda. Historian Marko Attila Hoare disputed these claims which he saw as coming from "left revisionists", emphasizing that "demonization of Serbs" actually represented a diversity of opinions on the war and that those on the "Western far left" making these types of arguments were among other things "cynical and hypocritical in [their] use of both facts and arguments".[93][94] Publishers Weekly's review of Parenti's book stated: "While other Balkan political and military leaders may also deserve blame, Milošević does not deserve a defense."[95]

Journalist David Binder argues that U.S. 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 this "unwritten doctrine was endorsed and spread by the mainstream media".[96] By contrast, Roger Cohen a columnist for The New York Times, stated that narratives asserting the "demonization" of the Serbs were used as a manoeuvre to turn the general view of the Yugoslav Wars on its head by transforming Serbs from aggressors into victims.[97] Journalist Michel Collon wrote that in cases where perpetrators of crimes were of Serbian ethnicity, the Western media would accuse the entire Serb nation ("the Serbs") instead of using precise terminology like 'Serb extremists'.[98] Philip Hammond, a professor of media and communications who focuses on the role of the media in post-Cold War conflicts and international interventions, claimed that while reporting on the Yugoslav Wars, the British media resorted to stereotypes of Serbians when reporting on the war.[99]

Sylvia Hale, commenting on the role of the media in legitimizing wars, stated that the Ruder Finn, a public relations company, established The Crisis Center that prepared regular stream of articles and war narratives for American media outlets.[73] She claimed that the Ruder Finn was focused only on Serb prison camps, although Bosnian Muslims and Croats also set up camps for people they considered a threat to the territory they controlled.[100] She also noted that vastly inflating numbers of causalites was another tactic in the mass media propaganda war.[100] American journalist Peter Brook examined 1,500 articles published in 1992 by a number of Western medias and agencies. The ratio of articles which presented a positive image of Serbs compared to articles which presented an overwhelmingly negative image was 40:1.[101]

Psychological warfare by NATO

Historians specializing in propaganda Nicholas Cull, David Holbrook Culbert and David Welch described the Kosovo War as the “extreme case of the use propaganda by all sides in late 20th century”, and also as the first war in which the internet played a significant role in the propaganda campaign.[102] They explained NATO countries viewed the public support for their actions as “critical areas of vulnerability”.[102] The strategy included daily special government press conferences and updates of websites.[87]

During the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration and NATO officials were accused of inflating the number of Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbs[103] in order to justify U.S. involvement in the conflict.[104] U.S. President Bill Clinton compared the events of Kosovo to the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews during World War II.[105] The administration repeatedly referred to the situation in Kosovo as a genocide.[106][107] On 16 May 1999, Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on CBS' Face the Nation where he suggested that 100,000 men might have been murdered.[108] Post-war examinations revealed these genocide statements and casualty figures to have been greatly exaggerated.[109][110][111][112] Canadian political scientist Mark Wolfgram said that Western media sources presented the executions in the village of Rogovo near Gjakova as the killing of ethnic Albanians, but failed to state that most of the killed were either Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters or supporters of the KLA, as reported by an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) investigation.[113] Rudolf Scharping, the German Minister of Defence, described the killings as a massacre of civilians.[113]

Wolfgram stated that there is no doubt that the Račak massacre was proven to be a war crime, but claimed there were many problematic parts with the story as reported and as manipulated by the Clinton administration, for example uncritical ignoring of the fact that the KLA used Račak as base to attack Serbian targets.[113] Following the massacre, the Clinton administration launched a "propaganda blitz" in order to convince the American people that intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary.[114] Public support for intervention among American citizens remained at only about 50%, even after the extensive media attention of Račak, denoting that war with Yugoslavia would be significantly less popular than previous conflicts and interventions the United States undertook in its recent history.[115] The accusations of mutilation through decapitation were false, although they attracted a lot of media attention as alleged evidence of "Serbian barbarism".[113]

Wolfgram also criticized reporting on the alleged Operation Horseshoe, explaining that it was clear that there was coordinated action by Milošević's forces, but that NATO had tried to make it known that they were reacting to something that had been under way since November 1998.[113] Many scholars, including Sabrina P. Ramet, question the existence of the Operation Horseshoe.[116][117][118] Jing Ke showed in his study that The Washington Times and The Washington Post failed or ignored to report some of the crucial issues related to the Kosovo crisis, such as part of the Rambouillet Agreement, cluster-bombing of non-military targets and the bombing of the Radio Television of Serbia.[119] Philip Hammond concluded that British media coverage of the NATO air campaign “encountered familiar problems of news management and propaganda” which were observed in post-Cold War conflict reporting.[99]

• Sremac, Danielle S. (1999). War of Words: Washington Tackles the Yugoslav Conflict. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-27596-609-6.
• Klaehn, Jeffery (2010). The Political Economy of Media and Power. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-1-43310-773-3.
• Kurspahić, Kemal (2003). Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace. U.S. Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 978-1-929-22338-1.
• Cull, Nicholas J.; Culbert, David Holbrook; Welch, David (2003). Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781576078204.
• Parenti, Michael (2002). To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia. Verso Books. ISBN 9781859843666.
• Thompson, Mark (1999). Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-1-860-20552-1.
• Udovicki, Jasminka; Ridgeway, James (2000). Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-822-32590-1.

• OHCHR (1993). "Fifth periodic report on the situation of human rights in the territory of the former Yugoslavia submitted by Mr. Tadeusz Mazowiecki". Retrieved 19 August 2017.