Propaganda during the Yugoslav Wars

Milošević began his efforts to gain control over the media in 1986 to 1987,[8] a process that had been completed by the summer of 1991. In 1992, Radio Television Belgrade, together with Radio Television Novi Sad (RTNS) and Radio Television Pristina (RTP), became part of Radio Television of Serbia, a centralized and closely-governed network, which was 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", the Serbian opposition.[9]

According to Danielle S. Sremac, contrary to the Croats and the Bosnians, Serbian public relations efforts were nonexistent, as the Milošević government held a disdain for the Western press.[10] However, Wise Communications in Washington represented Serbia's interests by a contract with the Serbian-owned oil company Jugopetrol until sanctions were imposed by the UN embargo on Serbia. Bill Wise, the president of the firm, stated, "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 Economic Community. It stopped working as well 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, a 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 World War II by the Croatian fascist Ustashe, which governed the Independent State of Croatia. The Croatians' desire for independence fed the flames of fear, especially in Serbian-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] Terms such as "genocidal", "fascistoid", "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".[14]

A propaganda poster celebrating the 1999 shootdown of the NATO F-117 Nighthawk during NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Milošević, before the Kosovo War, allowed independent print media to publish, but their distribution was limited. His methods of controlling the media included creating shortages of paper, interfering with or stopping supplies and equipment and confiscating newspapers for being printed without proper licenses or other reasons. For publicly-owned media, he could dismiss, promote, demote or publicly condemn journalists. In 1998, he adopted a media law that created a special misdemeanor court to try violations and 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 had referred to Albanians who had died in Kosovo as "people", rather than "terrorists".[15] 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 most of the population.[15] 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, as evidenced not only in massive demonstrations in Serbia in 1991 and 1996–97, both of which almost toppled the regime, but also in 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, "The Black Ribbon March", in solidarity with people in Sarajevo.[16][17] It is estimated that between 50,000 and 200,000 people deserted from the Yugoslav People's Army, and between 100,000 and 150,000 people emigrated from Serbia for refusing to participate in the war.[18][19]

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 a 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]

The ICTY judgement in the sentencing of Milan Babić, the first president of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, a self-proclaimed Serbian dominated entity within Croatia, declared:

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[20]

Željko Kopanja, the editor of the independent newspaper Nezavisne Novine, was seriously hurt by a car bomb after he had published 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.[21]

During the Pakrac clash, the Serbian newspaper "Večernje Novosti" reported that about 40 Serb civilians had been killed in Pakrac on 2 March 1991 by the Croatian forces. The story was widely accepted by the public and by some ministers in the Serbian government like Dragutin Zelenović. The report could not be confirmed in other media from all seven municipalities with the name "Pakrac" in the former Yugoslavia.[22]

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 prisoners-of-war and civilians were taken, said she believed the story of slaughtered babies was released intentionally to incite Serbian nationalists to execute Croats.[23]

A Yugoslav People's Army 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 co-operate with the Yugoslav People's Army against the Croats' "vampired fascism and Ustašism"

Before the Siege of Dubrovnik, Yugoslav officers (namely Pavle Strugar[24]) 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".[25] That propaganda was widely spread by the state-controlled media of Serbia and Montenegro.[26]

In reality, Croatian military forces at the area in September were virtually nonexistent.[27] 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, fighting for the Croats.[25]

During the Siege of Dubrovnik in 1991, the Yugoslav Army shelled the Croatian port town, and Radio Television of Serbia showed Dubrovnik with columns of smoke and claimed that the local people were burning automobile tires to simulate the destruction of the city.[28]

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 and accused them of plotting to impose "a Fourth Reich", and even the Vatican was blamed for "supporting secessionists".[29] As a consequence, in September 1991, the German and Vatican embassies were targets of Serbian protesters, who shouted, "Pope John Paul II supports neo-fascism in Croatia".[30]

During the notorious false-flag Operation Opera Orientalis, which was 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.[31][32]

The Serbian media emphasized that Croatian President Franjo Tuđman had started the war in Croatia. To corroborate that notion, the media repeatedly referenced his speech in Zagreb on 24 May 1992 and claimed that he had 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 to prove their innocence.[33]

However, the ICTY prosecutors obtained the integral tape of his speech, played it in its entirety during Martić's trial on 23 October 2006, and proved that Tuđman had never said that Croatia "wanted the war".[34] Upon playing that tape, Borislav Đukić was forced to admit that Tuđman had not said what had been claimed.[34] 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".[35]

Serbian propaganda during the Bosnian War portrayed the Bosnian Muslims as violent extremists and Islamic fundamentalists.[36] After a series of massacres of Bosniaks, a few hundred (between 300[37] and 1,500[37]) 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".[38] The Serb media, however, reported a much larger number of mujahideen and presented them as terrorists and a huge threat to European security to inflame anti-Muslim hatred among Serbs and other Christians.[39][40] No indictment was issued by the ICTY against any of the 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.[41][42][43][44] A 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, which had tortured, beheaded and mutilated captured Serb prisoners.[45]

Just before the Prijedor massacre of Bosniak and Croatian civilians, Serbian 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 Serbian women to make them incapable of conceiving male children, which in turn contributed to a reduction in the birth rate among Serbs. Also, 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.[39][46] 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 the journalist Rade Mutić regularly attended meetings of Serb politicians to get informed on the next steps of spreading propaganda.[39][40]

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.[47][48] Encouraged by the initial United Nations Protection Force report, Serbian media claimed that the Bosnian government had shelled its own civilians to get the Western powers to intervene against the Serbs.[49][50][51] However, in January 2003, the ICTY concluded that the massacre had been committed by Serbian forces around Sarajevo.[52] Although widely reported by the international media, the verdict was ignored in Serbia itself.[47][48][49]

During the Siege of Sarajevo, Serbian propaganda was trying to justify the siege at any cost. As the result of that effort, Serbian national television showed a report that stated, "Serb children being given as food for lions in Sarajevo Zoo called Pionirska Dolina by Muslim extremists".[12][53][54]

While the Srebrenica enclave was under siege by the Army of the Republika Srpska, its commander, Naser Orić, led several attacks around the nearby Serbian-held villages, many of which had been Bosnian prior to the war but were overtaken by Serbian forces during the first months of the siege. The operations resulted in many Serb casualties. Orić was later 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 that took part in the attacks to get food from Serbian villages.[55] Nonetheless, the attacks were described by some Serbian media as the main trigger for the Serbian attack on Srebrenica in 1995. A television presenter in Pale said that "Srebrenica was liberated from terrorists" and that "the offensive took place after the Muslim side attacked the Serb villages outside the Srebrenica protected zone".[56]

Two members of the Federal Security Service (KOG) testified for the prosecution in Milosevic's trial about their involvement in his 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 Čandić, one of four assistant chiefs of the KOG, described the use of technology to fabricate conversations to make it sound as if Croat authorities were telling Croats in Serbia to leave in order to create an ethnically-pure Croatia. The conversation was broadcast after a Serbian attack on Croatians living in Serbia forced them to flee. He testified to another instance of disinformation involving a television broadcast of corpses, described as Serbian civilians killed by Croats. Čandić testified that he believed they were in fact the bodies of Croats killed by Serbs, but that statement has not been verified. He also corroborated the existence of Operations Opera and Labrador.[12][57][58]

The building of Radio Television of Serbia was destroyed by NATO on 24 April 1999.

During the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the building of Radio Television of Serbia in Belgrade was destroyed by NATO[59][60] despite a controversy. France opposed the bombing, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned it as an attack on a civilian target.[61][62]

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

On 23 May 2011, RTS issued an official apology how its programming had been misused to spread propaganda and discredit political opponents in the 1990s and for its programming having "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".[63][64]

A number of independent Serbian media outlets resisted Milošević's influence and control and tried to counterbalance its nationalist rhetoric. They 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 described attacks on cultural heritage sites (by both Serb and non-Serb forces).[65] The most notable dissident voice, however, came from the daily Belgrade newspaper Borba.[65][66][67] A team of researchers from the University of Ljubljana studied Serbian and Croatian media during the war and found that Borba tried to "maintain a rational attitude" towards the war that included the publishing of comprehensive information and objective reporting on the Croatian government's reactions to individual events, which was lacking in the Croatian media.[68] It was the first newspaper to cover the destruction of five mosques in the city of Bijeljina in March 1993 during the Bosnian War.[65] In the Milošević-controlled press, the editors of Borba were singled out as "traitors".[67] The independent 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 framed the conflict in a way that amounted to demonizing not only Slobodan Milošević but also the Serbian people as a whole.[86][87][88][89][90][91] Others reject the idea that Western media was involved in anti-Serb propaganda. The historian Marko Attila Hoare disputed the claims, which he saw as coming from "left revisionists", and emphasized that "demonization of Serbs" actually represented a diversity of opinions on the war and that those on the "Western far left" making such arguments were among other things "cynical and hypocritical in [their] use of both facts and arguments".[92][93] 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."[94]

The journalist David Binder argues that US 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 the "unwritten doctrine was endorsed and spread by the mainstream media".[95] In 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.[96] The journalist Michel Collon wrote that if 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".[97] 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 in reporting on the Yugoslav Wars, the British media resorted to stereotypes of Serbians to report on the war.[98]

Sylvia Hale, commenting on the role of the media in legitimizing wars, stated that Ruder Finn established The Crisis Center, which prepared regular stream of articles and war narratives for American media outlets.[71] She claimed that Ruder Finn was focused only on Serbian prison camps, but Bosnian Muslims and Croats also set up camps for people whom they considered a threat to the territory that they controlled.[99] She also noted that vastly inflating numbers of casualties was another tactic in the mass media propaganda war.[99] According to Herbert N. Foerstel, Ruder Finn's main goal was "painting the Serbs as barbarians". In every communiqué with their contacts, the message was that "Serbs were responsible for all the carnage in the Balkans." The author Florence Levinsohn wrote that Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo sought to "win the hearts and minds of Americans" through Ruder Finn by advocating for an American intervention in the wars. To do this it was necessary that "Serbs be demonized, that the West sympathize with the plight of the former republics in their heroic struggle".[85]

The American journalist Peter Brook examined 1,500 articles published in 1992 by a number of Western medias and agencies. The ratio of articles that presented a positive image of Serbs to articles that presented an overwhelmingly negative image was 40:1.[100]

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.[101] They explained countries in NATO viewing the public support for their actions as "critical areas of vulnerability".[101] The strategy included daily special government press conferences and updates of websites.[86]

During the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration and NATO officials were accused of inflating the number of Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbs[102] to justify US involvement in the conflict.[103] US President Bill Clinton compared the events of Kosovo to The Holocaust and the persecution of Jews during World War II.[104] The administration repeatedly referred to the situation in Kosovo as a genocide.[105][106] On 16 May 1999, Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on CBS' Face the Nation and suggested that 100,000 men might have been murdered.[107] Postwar examinations revealed the genocide statements and casualty figures had been greatly exaggerated.[108][109][110][111] The 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 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters or supporters, as reported by an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) investigation.[112] Rudolf Scharping, the German Minister of Defence, described the killings as a massacre of civilians.[112]

Wolfgram stated that the Račak massacre was a proven war crime, but he claimed that there were many problematic parts with the story as reported and as manipulated by the Clinton administration, for example by uncritical ignoring of the fact that the KLA used Račak as base to attack Serbian targets.[112] After the massacre, the Clinton administration launched a "propaganda blitz" to convince the American people that intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary.[113] Public support for intervention among American citizens remained only at about 50%, even after the extensive media attention of Račak, which denoted that war against Yugoslavia would be significantly less popular than previous conflicts and interventions undertaken by the US in its recent history.[114] The accusations of mutilation through decapitation were false but had attracted a lot of media attention as alleged evidence of "Serbian barbarism".[112]

Wolfgram also criticized reporting on the alleged Operation Horseshoe and explained that it was clear that there was co-ordinated action by Milošević's forces, but NATO had tried to make it known that it was reacting to something that had been underway since November 1998.[112] Many scholars, including Sabrina P. Ramet, question the existence of the Operation Horseshoe.[115][116][117] 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.[118] Philip Hammond concluded that British media coverage of the NATO air campaign "encountered familiar problems of news management and propaganda" that were observed in post-Cold War conflict reporting.[98]

• 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 978-1-57607-820-4.
• Parenti, Michael (2002). To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-85984-366-6.
• 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".