Serbias state-run television RTS says sorry last week to the publics of the previous Yugoslavia for serving as a propaganda tool of wartime Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
This move is probably going to be followed by apologies from other state broadcasters in the nations of the previous Yugoslavia as all of them share responsibility for enflaming ethnic animosity, even though RTS perhaps more pointedly served the interests of glad-handers.
It’s a significant development on an ethical level, though it is not likely to finish in any major effects for journalism or any major enhancements in the field : no editors or newshounds were held answerable for their fake and biased reporting, and indeed many of them stay active and influential.
The apology is the 1st ever issued by Serbias state broadcaster, which was one of the symbols of Milosevics time marked by wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
The stations newly appointed handling board recounted its statement that during the sad events of the 1990s, RTS with its reporting on innumerable occasions hurt the feelings, moral integrity and dignity of the Serbian citizens, intellectuals, members of political opposition, journalists, ethnic and religious minorities, as well as certain neighboring peoples and states.
The statement further said the content of RTS programs at the time had been deliberately engineered to discredit the Serbian opposition and its leaders.
The apology will definitely represent a very positive step toward improved relations among the states of the Western Balkans “across the area media played a firm role in the violence. The big issue is whether the RTS apology “or the likely future apologies by state broadcasters in Croatia and Bosnia “is sufficient ; whether the key players in those media outlets should be tried for war crimes, as their rhetoric encouraged many murders.
When he came to power in the late 1980s, Milosevic appointed trusted associates to head the national broadcaster and turned it into his regimes tool all till two thousand when he was toppled. From the beginning of the conflicts in 1991, RTS management and hacks portrayed Serbs as the sufferers of ethnic attacks in the previous Yugoslavia. This rhetoric led many Serbs to volunteer for the frontline, looking for vengeance.
In 1991, while reporting from the Croatian frontlines, RTS correspondents fueled anti-Croatian hysteria by mentioning that Croatian fighters were cutting off Serb childrens fingers and making necklaces out of them. They also reported that Croats were suffocating Serb babies with plastic bags in a nursery in eastern Croatia. The reports were later proven to be fake, but the damage was done.
One witness, a Serb paramilitary volunteer, testified during the Vukovar war crimes trial that he had joined Serb paramilitary forces in Croatia after watching a news programme in Serbia. When Vukovar fell to the Serbs, paramilitaries grabbed captives, taking some 2 hundred of them to a pig farm in Ovcara where they were beaten, tortured and finished. Their bodies were later found in mass graves.
In 2009, Serbian prosecutors began inquiries against a couple of reporters and editors from pro-Milosevic media for inflaming reporting during the 1990s.
Serbias Special War Crimes Prosecutors Office has launched an initial inquiry into the task of journalists in inciting war crimes in the previous Yugoslavia in the 1990s, concentrating on reporting on atrocities in Vukovar in Croatia, and the Bosnian town of Zvornik. While prosecutors announced they would have initial results inside 2 months, in late 2009, the job proved harder than expected. The Serbian Prosecutors Office said the target wasn’t to persecute correspondents, but to establish whether there were components of criminal activity in reporting.
Of course, it wasn’t only RTS that made a contribution to the spreading of ethnic hate ; several media outlets such as daily newspapers Politika and Vecernje novosti, and the Tanjug reports agency served as the as mouthpieces of the Milosevic regime. They enjoyed all the privileges of the regime, including the exclusivity of reporting from war zones.
Neither was Serbian media alone in this practice.
Though no debate has been launched on this issue in Croatia and Bosnia, there’s no doubt that the wartime media outlets in both states will also need to answer some tricky questions. With the RTS apology out there, the international community will expect others to follow. Serbia is working hard to win ECU candidate standing this year and is under pressure to show it is heading away from the patriot impulses that drove those wars.
Most likely, ex-Yugoslavian media won’t face any war crimes probes at the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the previous Yugoslavia (ICTY), as media did in the case of the genocide in Rwanda. It would be tricky for prosecutors to establish firm links between wartime reporting and war crimes, and the issue of establishing that reporters intentionally incited atrocities in previous Yugoslavia will probably go unmet.
Most lately, a Bosnian investigative hack was sacked after footage was released on the internet of him reporting for the Bosnian Serb radio station from Srebrenica on the day the town was engulfed by the Bosnian Serb army. In the photos, Slobodan Vaskovic and his comrades were interviewing an old Bosnian Muslim captive, compelling him to say the Bosnian Serb army was liberating the town from the mujahideens and therefore the Bosniak armed forces had committed atrocities against Serbs in the towns surrounding Srebrenica.
It would be arbitrary to accuse Vaskovic and other correspondents for the Srebrenica massacre, but such reporting certainly could have influenced members of the Serb regular and paramilitary forces to seek revenge and escalate the conflict. Many of these wartime reporters and editors remain public figures, some working in media outlets as writers, columnists and trainers of a younger generation of reporters, while the others are professors and even ambassadors. The enquiry into the extent of their role in the conflicts definitely should be conducted in full , and the general public must be aware of who they are. This is very important as public broadcasters in all three states continue to supply biased, unsourced and highly discriminating reporting, particularly when it comes to issues of war crimes and their neighbors.
Excerpts from previous Yugoslav wartime media :
-”It appears 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 story by their Bosnian correspondent, Rada Djokic, in 1992 after a tipoff from Bosnian Serb infantrymen from the frontline.
-”Muslims are still in Makarska.” Bosnian Croat Smiljko Sagolj reported this for Croatian television after many Bosnians sought shelter in the Croatian resort town after the beginning 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 ) correspondent wrote this in the mag “Zmaj od Bosne,” which is connected with the primary Bosniak Party for Democratic Action (SDA).
-”Turk girls claim that we rape them, but just latterly in a refugee camp one of the rape victims gave birth to a black child.” Bosnian Serb anchor Risto Djogo related during a Bosnian Serb TV (SRT) reports broadcast as reported tagza.com.
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