ANATOMY OF DECEIT
Copyright©
1997 by Jerry Blaskovich. Electronic edition by Studia
Croatica, by permission of the author
Chapter 7: The
Media Deception
"All
successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never
defend anyone of anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them,
they tackle it by denouncing someone else."
-- H. L.
Mencken
On the third
anniversary of Vukovar's fall, a spate of articles
lamented the dreadful living conditions that the Serbian conquerors had to
endure in the rubble of a once vibrant Croatian city and praised the Serbs'
courageous efforts to rebuild and adjust. The articles never mentioned that the
destruction of Vukovar had resulted from Serbian
military tactics. Rather than inquiring about the surviving Croatian victims
who were forced to live in refugee camps and desired to return to their
confiscated homes, the media's maudlin reports worried about how the Serbs
would be especially inconvenienced if the Croats attempted to take back their
territory.
While the
conflict was limited to Croatia, a majority of journalists received their
briefings in Belgrade, so their reports reflected the Serbian agenda. The media
invariably stated that all sides were guilty and excused the conflict as just
another episode in a long history of atrocities committed among the Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims. The press made it clear that outside intervention couldn't
mitigate such ancient ethnic rivalries.
The media
inaccurately characterized the conflict as a civil war. Journalists cited the
nefarious deeds of the Ustashe, a German puppet state
in Croatia during World War II, as justification for the Serbian actions of the
1990s, yet failed to mention the Serbian government's collaboration with the
Nazis or Chetnik crimes during the same period.
The British
press was guilty of blindly quoting Serbian sources without regard to accuracy.
One such example appeared in a November 22, 1992, Daily Telegraph article. The
article accused Croatian gangs of plundering supplies and money and, most
severely, of maltreating defenseless Muslim refugees. The Croats supposedly
said that racial superiority excused their mistreatment of the Muslims. Yet
after a long diatribe about Croatian improprieties, the article finally made it
clear that no evidence had been found to substantiate the allegations. The
article also failed to cite the source of the racial slur. In essence, The
Daily Telegraph reported a
non-event.
Former
President Richard Nixon said, "The judgment of history depends on who
wrote it." As victors in the Balkan conflict, Serbian revisionists were
able to write a version of history that the media accepted without challenge.
The Serbs had 70 years to practice their propaganda skills while they ruled and
exploited Yugoslavia's entire political and economic infrastructure. They
eventually became better at manipulating facts and history than even the
ominous Soviet regimes.
Astutely aware
of the value of public relations, the Serbian leadership nurtured an extremely
effective propaganda apparatus. The predominantly Serbian diplomatic corps of
Yugoslavia had been the voices of Serbia's agenda in the international
community. Their seeds of disinformation eventually reaped a bountiful harvest
when the international media reacted to the present conflict.
Following the
Watergate debacle, the media in the U.S. skeptically scrutinized every
Republican Party pronouncement. Yet American journalists blindly accepted Bush
administration characterizations of the Balkan crisis as an insoluble ancient
ethnic conflict in which all sides were equally guilty. Although the Clinton
administration made every effort to distinguish its domestic agenda from the previous
administration, Clinton wasted no time maintaining Bush's ill-conceived Balkan
policy. Both presidents successfully articulated the futility of involvement, and by doing so also achieved their goal of
limiting debate.
The American
public received background information from news programs such as the
McNeil-Lehrer Newshour and Nightline, but always from
the perspectives of guests like Lawrence Eagleburger, Lord David Owen, and
Cyrus Vance. Because these experts were intimately involved with the crisis and
part of the problem, their assessments were couched in the official language of
double-speak and self-service. None spoke frankly or
gave honest
analyses. The interviewers allowed their guests to pontificate without
scrutiny. So these news programs became pulpits for the status quo rather than
forums for the truth.
For example,
on March 25, 1993, the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour devoted
an extremely long segment to Lord David Owen. Instead of answering questions,
Lord Owen delivered a contrived monologue strewn with disinformation. Owen's interviewer accepted his pronouncements as gospel.
News programs
are commercial. Powerful newsmakers bring higher ratings. So if interviewers
probe too deeply, they risk losing the newsmakers as future guests. Because
programs like the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour avoided
analysis and contrary views, they were, in fact, propagators of the Bush
administration's agenda. President Bush's policy concerning Croatia had been to
publicly ignore it. News coverage reflected his
policy.
When the JNA
attacked Slovenia in July 1991, the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour
reported the assault twice.
While the JNA
laid waste to Croatia for six months, an attack that resulted in a massive
flight of refugees, the slaughter of defenseless civilians, and the destruction
of cultural monuments including much of the city of Dubrovnik, the Newshour broadcast only eight segments about these events.
Without exposure to accurate information, the media's passive audience readily
accepted persuasively reported misconceptions about history,
ethnic rivalries,
and blame for the atrocities.
President
Clinton based his policy on Robert D. Kaplan's book, The Balkan Ghosts, rather
than hard intelligence reports. Although publishers produced many books about
the crisis, no book was as influential as Kaplan's was. Kaplan's reportage was
excellent, but whenever he wandered away from straight observation and into
analysis and history, which was often the case, his book lost all credibility.
Kaplan's well-written half-truths soon became accepted as dogma by the
uninformed. Echoing Rebecca West, Kaplan's theses were based on generalities
about national character. He pontificated that primordial forces kept the
conflict beyond anyone's control. The Balkan Ghosts offered Croatia no sympathy
for its self-determination efforts and greeted atrocities committed against the
non-Serb population with nonchalance. In a McNeil-Lehrer Newshour
interview, Professor Fouad Ajami
of Johns Hopkins explained that Clinton reneged on his campaign promises and
stopped criticizing Bush's policy in Yugoslavia because he believed Kaplan's
half-truths and myths about Serbian military prowess.
The Bush and
Clinton administrations were successful in manipulating the media and keeping
the Croatian situation off the front pages. The British and French governments
found evasiveness more difficult to sustain because the crisis was occurring in
their backyards. So in order for the British and French to maintain the status
quo, they had to more blatantly propagate Serbian myths. British journalist
Nora Beloff remained loyal to her government's agenda
when she cleverly duped the public by juxtaposing certain facts about the
Balkan crisis and selectively omitting others.
In democratic
and open societies journalists should be the first to question governmental
pronouncements. The more emphatic the pronouncements, the louder the questions
should be asked. For most of us, the media is our primary source of information
about governmental shenanigans. Yet during the crisis in former Yugoslavia,
editors and news directors blindly perpetuated Serbian-generated disinformation
while ignoring a spate of evidence that unequivocally refuted the myths.
Hypocrisy has pervaded this conflict; the messenger failed to examine the
message and therefore became part of the problem. News coverage reflected the
conscious or unconscious agenda of the reporters and editors rather than
accurately portraying important events.
Whenever
journalists claimed that the causes of the conflict were too complicated to
explain, the reporters were confessing their own failures. Many journalists
deviated from the tenets of classic reportage by resorting to analysis and
editorializing when they were unable to get hard facts. Lacking any valuable
insight, the reporters were clearly working out of their depth.
Between 1990
and 1995, over 180 books and countless monographs and articles were published
about the conflict. The tragedy is that most of the authors were enamored with
former Yugoslavia and what it stood for -- especially its politics. Many were
products of an era that denied the realities and excesses of any communist
regime. They did little more than project the sentiments of policy makers like
Lawrence Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, and John Scalon.
While mourning the demise of Yugoslavia, these authors conveniently forgot that
the glue that once held Yugoslavia together was Tito's totalitarianism.
Professor Thomas Fleiner, Chairman of the CSCE Human
Rights Commission, who has studied the media's responses to the Balkan crisis
in depth, concluded: "The more power the media obtain and are able to
influence, through public opinion, political
decision-making on important foreign policy matters, the greater is their
responsibility. As far as the war in Croatia and Bosnia is concerned, it is
suspected [the] local [and] international media helped the division of peoples
and incitement of hatred."
Whether
knowingly or not, Senator John Warner participated in spreading disinformation
when he said, "My own research...indicates that...these people have fought
each other for not hundreds of years, but thousands of years for religious,
ethnic, cultural differences... There is certainly a history, going back, at
least into my study of the problem, as far back as the 13th century, of
constant ethnic and religious fighting among and between these groups (my
emphases added)." Americans should pity their country and those who voted
for Senator Warner if he researches the problems facing the U.S. in the same
way he researched the background of the Yugoslav crisis. Learning Senator
Warner's sources would prove illuminating.
This conflict
doesn't fit Webster's definition of war: "A state of usually open and
declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations." In this case,
an army possessing weapons of modern warfare -- tanks, planes, artillery,
cluster bombs -- attacked people who lacked those weapons and had no intention
of fighting except to defend their homes. Contrary to the rhetoric, the Serbian
invasions of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia can't be considered battles in a
civil war. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia had declared independence in accordance
with the Yugoslav constitution before the invasions.
Ethnic
rivalries between Serbs and Croats aren't ancient. The Croats and Serbs had a
remarkable symbiosis until they were cobbled together with other Balkan peoples
into a kingdom in 1918. Animosity ignited when the Serbs commandeered all the
political, military, and economic infrastructure of the country and imposed
draconian measures on non-Serbs. The first armed ethnic conflict between Croats
and Serbs occurred during World War II. But pundits such as Robert W. Tucker
(contributing editor of The National Interest) and David C. Hendrickson (associate
professor of political science at Colorado College), in their article
"America and Bosnia" in National Review (Fall 1993), helped
perpetuate the myth that the ethnic feuding was ancient.
Without citing
evidence, they ascribed the war to "notorious tribal hatreds and the
violent propensities of the Balkan peoples."
The Balkans
has been the scene of numerous bloody battles because the area was the fault
line between Christian Europe and the Islamic Asia. But none of the battles was
between the indigenous groups.
Anti-interventionists
cleverly limited the options for peace by implying that the problem found its
genesis in the violent tendencies of the Balkan people. The usually astute
former and present editors of Foreign Affairs, William Hyland and James Hogue,
nonetheless trumpeted this erroneous message.
The JNA attack
on Slovenia in June 1991 caught the international media off-guard. Because few
reporters covering Yugoslavia had been briefed by anyone, most had to resort to
their own devices and inherent skills. As a consequence, that initial battle
produced some of the most objective reporting of the conflict. Yet between July
1991, when the JNA invaded Croatia, and March 2, 1992, before Serbian
paramilitary forces set up barricades in Sarajevo, the majority of the
international media avoided the action and descended on Belgrade instead.
Reports from the Serbian capital were invariably distorted. Although
skilled articulators, most journalists aren't exceptionally bright. With
few exceptions, those reporting from the Balkans were ignorant of the region's
history and sheepishly bought into the notion that the Croats deserved the
carnage.
A study of
British editorials of the period is instructive. Most condemned the Croats for
daring to defend themselves against the right and might of the Yugoslav forces.
Only after the JNA besieged Dubrovnik and Vukovar was
there any semblance of objectivity.
While the
majority of the British press was vitriolic toward Croatia, the American media
remained largely ambivalent. But some U.S.-based opinion writers such as Peter
Brock, Alexander Cockburn, and A.M. Rosenthal filled their commentaries with
factual errors, half-truths, and historical revisions. Their articles were
simply thinly disguised attempts to support the Serbian agenda. Brock’s lack of
objectivity is not surprising since he is a member of the Serbian Unity Party.
Besides using
their own propaganda apparatus, the Serbs contracted a number of independent
firms. In Britain the Serbs hired Saatchi and Saatchi, the world's largest
public relations firm. SerbNet, an official Serbian
lobbying group in the United States, retained Manatos
& Manatos for its Washington, D.C. operation.
McDermott/O'Neill
& Associates, the largest American public and government affairs strategic
advisory firm, created a joint venture with David A. Keene & Associates to
further enhance the Serbian image in the United States. Thomas P. O’Neill III
headed the team that worked on the SerbNet account.
O'Neill is a former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, former head of the
Office of Federal-State Relations, and a member of the U.S. State Department
Ambassadorial Selection Committee. He is the eldest son of former Speaker of
the House of Representatives, Thomas "Tip" P. O'Neill.
Roy Gutman of Newsday reported that General Lewis Mackenzie,
who had been the highest ranking U.N. officer in former Yugoslavia, was paid
$15,000 by SerbNet at the time he testified before
the U.S. Armed Service Committee, met with congressional representatives, and
spoke before the influential think tank, the Heritage Foundation. But Mackenzie
disingenuously failed to mention his financial ties to the Serbian apparatus
during these engagements.
The worldwide
public relations campaign helped blunt the facts about Serbian atrocities,
created the impression that the conflict was nothing more than an insoluble
ethnic battle, and equated Croatian morality with Serbia's. Although the Serbs
never presented themselves as innocents, they portrayed the Croats and Muslims
as their moral equals. The more complicated the Serbs made the crisis seem, the
less likely the West was to intervene. Serb propaganda successfully clouded
every issue related to former Yugoslavia.
Some Western
media overtly helped Serbian propaganda. Reuters made world headlines after one
of its reporters said he had seen 41 Serbian children slaughtered by Croats. He
reiterated the gory details on Belgrade television. The next day the reporter
admitted the story was a lie, but his retraction never appeared in Serbia. His
false testimony continues to foment hatred of Croats among Serbs.
In another
case, the press reported that Croatian forces had slaughtered a number of
innocent Serbian civilians around the Croatian town of Pakrac.
The reports described the condition of the mutilated bodies and listed the
names and ages of the victims. The international media described the incident
as typical of the bloodthirsty Croatian character. But an investigation soon
revealed that the incident was a hoax perpetrated by Serbia's state-run media.
The fact that the international press was duped wasn't too surprising. After
all, the press' function is to report. But what made the reporters culpable in
this case was their failure to investigate the story's source or print a
retraction.
After the
Serbs had blocked the major highway linking Croatia and Serbia in May 1995,
Croatian forces broke the blockade and went on an offensive that resulted in
the retrieval of approximately 10% of Croatia's lost territory. The State
Department chastised Croatia's counter-offensive as "threatening a key
objective" of Clinton's policy in the Balkans. Until 1995 the Clinton
administration had never articulated an objective. The U.N. shrilly blamed the
Croatian action for ruining a chance for a negotiated settlement despite the
fact that the U.N. had failed to successfully negotiate with the Serbs for five
years. U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith warned that the Croatian
offensive in Western Slavonia would rekindle another war and would have
"all the civility of Bosnia and ten times the firepower." His
projections, like so many others by Western diplomats, proved to be entirely
unfounded.
The U.N.
Security Council was angered by Croatia's retrieval of territory that could not
be returned through inept negotiations. Without substantiating his charge, the
British delegate to the Security Council accused Croatia of widespread inhumane
treatment of Serbian civilians and prisoners taken in the Pakrac
offensive. But in this case the media actually contradicted a U.N. official's
pronouncement. An overwhelming majority of the reporters, particularly those on
the scene, stated that the conduct of the Croatian troops toward the vanquished
Serbs had been exemplary. European Union observers agreed with the media's
assessment.
Contrary to
the U.N.'s public accusations that the Croats had forcibly expelled the Serbs,
a June 9, 1995, internal U.N. report (s/1995/467) from the Secretary General of
the Security Council stated that the Serbian leadership had encouraged the
exodus of Serbs from Western Slavonia.
In retaliation
for Croatia's counter-offensive, the Serbs fired a series of missiles
containing anti-personnel cluster bombs at a number of Croatian cities,
including downtown Zagreb. Although cluster bombs are banned by international
law, no British, French, or American official government communiqués condemned
the attacks. For unknown reasons, the media remained focused on the status and
treatment of the Serbs who had remained in the recaptured territory of
Slavonia.
In the May 1,
1994, issue of the Catholic newspaper The Tidings, a front page article about
Professor Daniel Smith-Christopher opinions reiterated all the favorite Serbian
theses and excuses for their aggressions.
Clearly
Smith-Christopher's field of expertise wasn't Balkan history because his
statements were loaded with errors. Moreover, he chastised Catholics for their
lack of involvement in former Yugoslavia. Apparently he wasn't aware that
Catholics have been involved in the events in Croatia from the onset. Catholic
humanitarian organization Caritas was one of the first to supply aid and
comfort to victims. The Vatican was one of the first states to officially
recognize Croatia. In January 1994, Pope John Paul II, alone among world
leaders, castigated the international community for acting in a criminally
negligent manner. Because Smith-Christopher's article was one-sided and loaded
with half-truths, it provoked a number of letters to the editor in rebuttal;
but none was published. Unfortunately, The Tidings' readership was indelibly
etched with the impression that the Serbs were victims.
Terms that
were bandied about in media and government pronouncements about the Balkan
crisis like "quagmire," "civil war," and "ancient
ethnic rivalry" immediately clouded the facts and warned outsiders to keep
out, while terms like "war of aggression" or "genocide"
encouraged outsiders to act. By the time the latter terms became popular, the
conflict had already caused the deaths of at least 250,000, the wounding of
untold numbers, the rape of at least 25,000, and the flight or displacement of
over three million people. The former terms, “quagmire," "civil war,”
and “ancient ethnic rivalry,” has proven to be seeds planted in the vocabulary
of the international media and diplomatic corps by Serbia's propaganda machine.
The long list
of inaccurate media buzz-phrases includes "ethnic blood feud" and
"rebel" or "secessionist republics." Despite the existence
of experts in the field (none of them in government circles) and accessible
information about the background and history of the conflict, the international
media elected to ignore those sources and, instead, stick to the text the Serbs
provided.
The press
consistently justified the Serbian invasion of Croatia as a heroic attempt to
keep Yugoslavia intact. The 1990-1991 Yugoslav census
revealed that the percentage of citizens who acknowledged being Yugoslav was
formidable in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia. But no one from Serbia
proper elected to call himself a Yugoslav.
The press also
claimed that the Serbs were trying to protect the minority Serbs of Croatia.
But the majority of Serbs in Croatia was urbanized and had been integrated into
Croatian society. If Serbia had annexed the Croatian land they occupied in
1991, 70% of the Serbs who had lived in Croatia would still have remained
outside Greater Serbia.
Soon after
Croatian independence, the international media began lamenting that Serbs had
been unmercifully purged from Croatia's police force and state administrative
posts. The new government did purge many from its ranks. One of the
government's first acts was to dismiss Communist functionaries, regardless of
ethnicity. Because government appointments had previously required Communist
Party affiliation, and 40% of the party members in Croatia were Serbian, a
disproportionately high number of government bureaucrats had been Serbs. For
example, in 1980, 75% of Yugoslav federal bureaucrats were Serbs, while 8.6%
were Croats.
Ljubljana's
Daily Delo reported, in 1987 that out of 2,900
foreign ministry employees only 120 were Slovene or Croatian. Although the
Serbs dominated in raw numbers, their percentages in the upper echelons of the
party, secret police, and administration were even greater. The 1980 Yugoslav
census revealed that Serbs made up 11.5% of the population in Croatia, but held
more than half of all key administrative positions, and that 56.5% of the
uniformed policemen in Zagreb were Serbs. The significant number of Serbian
dismissals by the new Croatian government wasn't especially surprising because
many Serbs refused to swear allegiance to the new state. But reports of
large-scale discrimination and sacking of the Serbian minority workforce were
unsubstantiated.
Serbian
propagandists claimed that the Cyrillic script used by some Serbs, as opposed
to the Roman script used by the Croats, was banned by the new government in
Croatia. The charge was untrue. The Serbs were led to believe that they had
lost the right to publish newspapers and magazines. But the only hindrance to
publication was financial; the choice of script wasn't the problem. A perverse
patronage system ruled every aspect of the economy under the old regime. Every
enterprise of any consequence was subsidized by the state.
The press was
no exception. Because the new Croatian government was committed to free
enterprise, government patronage and subsidies were slowly phased out. The
Serbs had been the primary beneficiaries of the old system, so they had
difficulty relating to the new ways of doing business. They felt threatened
when money stopped flowing from Zagreb because the idea of raising capital privately
to set up publishing houses was foreign.
When the
theater of war shifted to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the reporting was mostly fair and
accurate about Bosnia. Nevertheless, the media continued to describe conditions
and events in Croatia as if they were taking place on another planet. The press
claimed that the war in Croatia was over and all but ignored the almost daily
shelling of Croatian cities and towns from Serbian positions behind the U.N.
peacekeeping curtain. The stories that came out of Croatia tended to dwell upon
the alleged reemergence of Ustashe symbols. More
editorials were directed toward these symbols than toward the very real Serbian
crimes against humanity.
A favorite
story bandied about in the media regarded the similarities between the Croatian
and Ustashe flags. Both flags were decorated with a
checkerboard shield. But the press failed to note that the centuries-old
Croatian national flag had also been decorated with a checkerboard. And in
Zagreb, the tiled roof of an intact medieval church bears the same coat of
arms. The Ustashe flag also differed from the present
and medieval flags because it was emblazoned with a large letter "U."
Whenever the
Croatian government announced the renaming of streets or city squares the
announcement provoked a media outcry. But most of the changes applied to
streets named by the Communist regime. Names such as "Lenin" or
"Socialistic Revolution Street" sounded repugnant to the new order.
Most often streets simply reverted to pre-World War II names that were many
centuries old. Yet the media shrilly denounced the new names as proof that the
Croatian government was a reincarnation of the Ustashe.
The press also
complained when Croatia converted its currency from the dinar to the kuna. The controversy revolved around the fact that the kuna was the name of the monetary unit under the Ustashe regime.
The worthless
dinar had been associated with Yugoslav economic inequity for seventy years,
and Croatia wanted to distance itself as much as possible from the Belgrade
regime. The kuna is named after an animal similar to
a marten whose pelt had been used for centuries in Croatia and Russia as means
of exchange. The Italian lira and the German mark were currencies of fascist
regimes, yet they continue to be used today without criticism. Why then should
the kuna be associated with the Ustashe?
Slavenka Drakulic, a Yugoslav writer championed by
Western literary circles, has been especially aghast over the new Croatian
regime's renaming of streets and its destruction of the Communist symbols and
monuments that she held sacred. A thinly disguised nostalgia for the good old
days of Communist privileges permeates Drakulic's
writings. Her background makes her nostalgia understandable. Her father was a
Yugoslav military officer and political commissar. Under the Communists,
commissars were the enforcers of the party line. Party members received
privileges normally denied to the general population, but the perks that the
super elite, like commissars, received was even more special.
A few streets
didn't revert to their pre-Communist names. Andrija Hebrang Street was one that kept its more recent name. Andrija Hebrang was a founding
member of Croatia's Communist Party who was murdered by the same people Drakulic's father helped keep in power.
The outside
world seemed unmoved by the destruction and bloodshed in former Yugoslavia
until the media began reporting mass rapes. Suddenly feminist groups rushed to
do something. Afternoon television talk shows buzzed with worry and concern.
But the frenzy died as suddenly as it started. The public's attention was
diverted to another circus elsewhere.
Rape occurs
and will continue to occur as a by-product of war. But the Serbs instituted a
rape policy in Croatia and Bosnia that is unprecedented in the history of war
crimes. The Catholic charity Caritas and The World Council of Churches
concluded independently that the Serbs were using rape as a weapon of war. The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that one-third of 300
refugee women interviewed mentioned rape. Detailed documents available in
Sarajevo in November 1992, revealed that 1,000 rape victims were between the
ages of 7 and 18, 8,000 between 18 and 35, 3,000 between 35 and 50, and 1,000
over 50. In the village of Kozarac, 2,000 women were
raped out of a population of 12,400.
Rape camps
aren't a new phenomenon; they have been used by conquerors throughout history.
But the Serbs used the camps to humiliate and destroy an entire culture's
values. In July 1992, international authorities verified the existence of 17
Serbian rape camps. By April 1993, 43 camps had been identified.
Typically
victims were raped repeatedly until they showed overt signs of pregnancy. Those
not killed were expelled and told to return to their Muslim communities so they
could bear Serbian children. Rape has been perceived by many as the most
humiliating form of genocide. These stigmatized women were reluctant to return
to their families and communities because the difficulties inherent in
reintegration compounded their humiliation. The cultural obstacles present in
Muslim culture made their situations even more difficult. Many rape victims
claimed to envy the dead.
According to
articles in the Croatian Medical Journal, all the pregnant rape victims
referred to the University of Zagreb's Psychiatry Department showed signs of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms included attempted suicide and
depression. Usually the victims would come with a female member of the family
who knew her "secret." None of the married patients wanted her
husband informed. They all negated their physical condition of pregnancy and
considered the fetus an alien or unnatural body that they wanted to abort.
Not one rape
victim accepted her infant upon delivery.
Most of the
stories are too shocking, too clinical, and too painfully graphic to be
restated openly. Many of the victims showed extraordinary signs of trauma in
the genital, anal, throat, and mouth areas. Most of these women refused to talk
about the terrible ordeal they had suffered, but readily talked about different
forms of physical maltreatment and abuses they had witnessed happening to other
women.
One story told
by a witness vividly sticks in my mind. After four Serbian soldiers gang-raped
a woman, she begged to breast feed her crying infant. One of the soldiers cut
off the infant's head and brought it to the mother's breast. After a hysterical
outburst precluded her use as an instrument of rape, she was taken out and
executed.
The archbishop
of Zagreb, Cardinal Franjo Kuharic,
proclaimed, "Raped women have not lost their dignity...They are worthy of
our deepest admiration and must be treated with respect by the family, society,
and the Church." These are words the world should heed.
Proponents for
the Serbian cause downplayed the rape issue. But what made the victims' stories
credible, objective clinical findings and pregnancies,
can't be faked and few women have any motive to make up stories that are so
stigmatizing.
Despite the
powerful influence of Western and Serbian political disinformation, the web of
deception finally began to unravel. Reports and editorials became more
objective after July 1995. Stephen Kinzer may have
been the first journalist to acknowledge Serbia's decisive role in
disinformation when he wrote in a July 10, 1995, International Herald Tribune
article: "The pro-government Serbian press played a crucial role in
whipping up nationalist fervor and hatred of non-Serbs.
"Newspapers
were full of vivid stories, many of them exaggerated and others completely
false, recounting gruesome atrocities committed against Serbs in Bosnia and
Croatia," Kinzer continued. "Television
news programs broadcast propaganda daily, never missing a chance to show a
destroyed village, a sobbing widow or a distraught refugee."
Kinzer concluded
that after the press stopped serving Serbia's political goals, President
Milosevic was forced to reverse his political course. Whipping up pan-Serbian
fervor no longer served Milosevic's interests and he abandoned all talk of a
Greater Serbia.
The Serbs’
manipulative role of the media was understood by serious students of the region
as early as 1991. What they couldn’t understand was why the media took so long
to reach the same conclusion. There were, however, some exceptional reporters
who were not misled and got the story right. Egon
Scotland of Suddeutshe Zeitung
died in the attempt. But the overwhelming majority were either too lazy to
investigate or followed the Janet Cooke tradition of journalism. Far fewer
innocents would have died had the media heeded journalist emeritus Walter
Cronkite's advice: "Journalists must ultimately have a peripheral role
because their job is not to educate but to convey facts, not to proselytize,
but be objective brokers of information."
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Pravne usluge – Prijevodi – Nekretnine – Ostavinski postupci – Punomoći – Upis pravo vlasništva – Ugovori– Oporuke
Dra. Adriana Smajic – Abogada y
Traductora pública de idioma croata – Attorney at Law – Odvjetnica – Abogado croata
– Traductor croata
www.adrianasmajic.blogspot.com adriana.smajic@gmail.com
Joza Vrljicak
– Master in Economics
(Concordia U, Montreal)
(+54-11) 4811-8706 (+54-911) 6564-9585 (+54-911) 5112-0000