Library:To kill a nation/Demonizing the Serbs

The media's demonization of the Serbs was not merely the product of sloppy reportage and pack journalism. As we have seen in the previous chapter, stories occasionally appeared in the mainstream press that took note of atrocities by non-Serbian combatants, but these were accorded little significance by policy makers and commentators.

Why were the Serbs targeted? They were the largest and most influential nationality in the former Yugoslavia, with a proportionately higher percentage of Communist party membership than other nationalities.' They were the only ones to have given up an independent nation-state in order to enter into a unified state. Serbia and Montenegro remained the two republics most supportive of the federation. (A large portion of Montenegrins identify themselves linguistically and ethnically as Serbs.) Moreover, in the 1989 US-imposed elections, Serbs and Montenegrins supported the former Communists over the US-backed "democrats" in their respective republics. No wonder the Serbs were targeted as the enemy. And once so designated, they had their national rights trampled upon by the West, dismissed as the only Yugoslav nationality without a legitimate interest in the fate of their country.

The propaganda campaign to demonize the Serbs began early in the decade. One of the Slovene government's first acts after declaring independence in 1991 was to create a well-equipped media center that would distribute vivid reports about nonexistent battles, exaggerated casualty figures, and alleged Yugoslav army (Serbian) atrocities. By depicting the brief and limited conflict in the bloodiest terms imaginable, and portraying themselves as pro-West democrats struggling against Yugoslav Communist aggressors, the Slovenes hoped to marshal international support for their cause. Not long after, the Croats and Muslims did the same by conjuring up images of a dehumanized Communist Serbian threat to Europe.

One of the earliest propaganda campaigns during the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina came in 1991-93 when the Serbs were accused of pursuing an officially sanctioned policy of mass rape. Bosnian Serb forces were said to have raped from 20,000 to 100,000 Muslim women; the reports varied widely. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military engagements. Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with some skepticism. Instead, they were eagerly embraced by Western leaders and their media acolytes.

"Go forth and rape," a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that widely circulated story could never be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far as we know, no such order was ever issued. The New York Times did belatedly run a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that "the existence of 'a systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to be proved."

Hearings held by the European Community's Committee on Women's Rights in February 1993 rejected the estimate of 20,000 Muslim rape victims because of the lack of evidence. At the hearings, representatives from the UN War Crimes Commission and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees concluded that not enough evidence could be found to sustain charges of a Serbian mass-rape campaign. At the same time, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross concurrently declared that all sides had committed atrocities and rapes.

A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that reports of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible support. Likewise, Nora Beloff, former chief correspondent of the London Observer, says she elicited "an admission from a senior German official that there is no direct evidence to support the wild figures of rape victims." The official in charge of the Bosnian desk in the German Foreign Affairs Ministry admitted that all such rape reports came partly from the Izetbegovic government and partly from Caritas, a Catholic charity—that is, entirely from Muslim and Croat sources, without any corroboration from independent investigators.

The media repeatedly referred to "rape camps" allegedly maintained by the Serbs as part of a campaign of "ethnic breeding." Thousands of captive Muslim women were reporteddy impregnated and forced to give birth to Serbian children. But after hostilities ceased and UN troops occupied all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the mass rape camps never materialized. The waves of pregnant victims supposedly treated at Bosnian hospitals, and the medical records of their treatment also never materialized. The handful of rape-produced births that actually came to light seemed to contradict the image of mass-rape pregnancies reported by Muslim authorities and Western journalists. An Agence France-Presse news item reported that in Sarajevo, "Bosnian investigators have learned of just one case of a woman who gave birth to a child after being raped." And Amnesty International "has never succeeded in speaking with any of the pregnant women."

It has been suggested that these women were so few in number because they were unwilling to come forward, given the stigmatization that their culture places upon rape victims. But provision was made by international aid agencies to render confidential assistance to them. The women were never asked to go public, only to be interviewed anonymously and receive medical care, as some did. In any case, if 20,000 or more rape victims so successfully kept their plight a secret, how did Bosnian and Croatian government officials and Western journalists know about them? What actual evidence did they have of mass rapes involving tens of thousands of women, and why did they never produce it?

This is not to say that no rapes occurred. Eight years after the mass-rape stories were circulated, an unidentified Muslim Bosnian woman testified before the International Criminal Tribunal that she and other women had been held captive by Serb paramiitaries and repeatedly raped for a number of weeks in the summer of 1992. Some fifty women were said to have been detained, but the trial testimony of no other woman was reported in the AP stories. The case was against two Bosnian Serb paramilitaries accused of running a "network of rape camps" southeast of Sarajevo."

Sometimes the press outdid itself in its tabloid concoctions, as when the BBC informed its millions of listeners that Serb snipers were paid 2,700 FF for every child they killed—or when the London Daily Mirror reported that a Bosnian woman died "after being forced to give birth to a dog." Variations on this bizarre and biologically incredible story were carried also in Germany's Bud am Sonntag and Italy's La Repubblica, with lurid accounts of how fiendish Serbian gynecologists implanted canine fetuses in the woman's womb. The dog story was also embraced by an obscure West German parliamentary deputy, Stefan Schwarz, who gained instant fame by telling gruesome tales in the Bundestag about Serbian burnings, castrations, the roasting of children in ovens, and the use of poison gas. In January 1993, Schwarz spoke of the "Serbian successors to Mengele" who planted dog embryos in Muslim women. He announced the arrival of a videotape that would corroborate his claim. Only a year later did he admit that no such tape existed. Nor did he produce any evidence to support his other horror stories. Nevertheless Schwarz's popularity with the press was undiminished. Lack of evidence was irrelevant against the images evoked of sadistic death-camp Serbo-Nazi medical experiments.

Along with the references to "rape camps" were the equally unsubstantiated stories about Serbian "death camps" in northern Bosnia. These tales were launched by reporter Roy Gutman, who invited comparisons to the extermination camps run by the Nazis during World War II. The first of these articles, appearing on the front page of Newsday under the large headline "Bosnian Death Camps," opened with: "The Serbian conquerors of northern Bosnia founded two concentration camps where more than a thousand civilians have been killed or died of hunger, and thousands are being kept until death follows...In one of the camps, over a thousand men are locked up in metal cages." Bodies were burned in cremation furnaces, then turned into animal feed. Gutman quotes someone described as an exprisoner who says: "I saw ten young men lying in a trench. Their throats were slit, their noses cut off and their genitals torn." Though seriously lacking in confirmed sources, Gutman's stories were eagerly picked up, causing an international outcry that helped mobilize world opinion against the Serbs. Similar reports soon appeared in British newspapers, along with charges that Bosnian Serbs had executed more than seventeen thousand Muslim and Croatian prisoners.

Gutman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his stories. But after gaining access to all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, UN forces failed to unearth any evidence to support the existence of these death camps, no sign of hundreds of metal cages, cremation furnaces, or mass graves of starved and mutilated corpses. Here was a remarkable nonappearance story that went conveniently unnoticed by the press—save for British journalist Joan Phillips who decided to retrace Gutman's steps. She discovered that he had visited the Serbian camps at Omarska and Tmopolje only after publishing the articles in which he had described them as death camps. She also discovered that Trnopolje was not a death camp and probably not entirely a detention camp. Many of its inmates entered of their own volition to escape the fighting in nearby villages. And Omarska was run by civil authorities as a kind of temporary holding center. Gutman's story about the Omarska camp, Phillips reports, rested on the testimony of one man who admitted that he had not witnessed any killings himself, but once saw "eight bodies covered with blankets."

Phillips also ascertained that Gutman's article on the camp at Brcko, where 1,350 people were supposedly slaughtered, hinged on the testimony of one individual who stated he had been imprisoned there, with "confirmation" only from a notoriously unreliable Muslim source within the Bosnian government. Gutman did journey to the detention site at Manjaca. He was allowed to tour the camp and interview the prisoners, who complained about the food. He mentioned no facts that could relate to torture or executions, and actually noted that the Serbian army seemed to be respecting the Geneva Convention." After investigating these sites herself, Phillips reports that the International Red Cross had access to Manjaca from the start, and many of the prisoners had not been involved in fighting but were being held for prisoner exchange, just as was happening to Serbs in Muslim and Croatian detention camps.

If these various sites really were death camps would the Serbs have left them open to inspection by the International Red Cross and Western media? To be sure, none of the camps qualified as luxury spas. Prisoners were crowded into incommodious quarters, sometimes poorly fed, and some were beaten or otherwise abused, as was also the case in the Muslim and Croatian camps (and in prisons throughout the world), the only difference being that the Muslim and Croatian sites went unnoticed by Western journalists.

In 1992, Western media gave top exposure to photographs purporting to be of maltreated Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian "concentration camps." Such photos were subsequently proven to be of dubious credibility. At Trnopolje's refugee camp, journalists and photographers deliberately placed themselves within a small barbed-wired enclosure that fenced in a utility shed, while the Muslim men stood outside the enclosure. Yet the impression left by the photographs was that the men were behind barbed wire. A severely emaciated man, subsequently identified as Fikret Alic, prominently displayed on the cover of Time and numerous other publications, evoked the awful image of a Nazi-type death camp. Left unmentioned was that Alic was not imprisoned behind barbed wire. Also left unnoticed were all the healthy well-fed individuals standing around him. Another emaciated man, purportedly a Muslim prisoner, appearing on the cover of Newsweek, was eventually identified as Slobodan Konjevic, a Serb arrested for looting. Konjevic had been suffering from tuberculosis for ten years.

The double standard was operative throughout the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts. Why were war-crime charges leveled against the president of Serbian Krajina, Milan Martic, with secret indictments against the entire government of Krajina, but not one charge for the Croatian rampage through Krajina? Where were the TV cameras when Muslims slaughtered hundreds of Serbs near Srebrenica? asked John Ranz, chair of a Holocaust survivors organization. The official line, faithfully parroted in the US media, was that Serbs committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.

Speaking of which, during the course of his special documentary, "Srebrenica," aired on PBS in 1999 and again in early 2000, Bill Moyers stated more than once that 7,414 Bosnian Muslims were executed by Bosnian Serb forces in the Srebrenica area. One might wonder how such a chaotic war could offer up such a precise figure. Moyers filmed several busloads of Muslim women and children who could not account for their men. The latter had been separated from their families by Bosnian Serb militia and reportedly walked up into the hills and shot. "Thousands of men and boys were killed," Moyers concludes. Thousands? "Hundreds were killed in a village nearby," he adds—though he gives no indication of having visited the nearby village nor does he offer an interview of anyone from that village. None of the Muslim women he filmed reported any rapes—or at least Moyers makes no mention of it.

In only one instance does Moyers allow the suggestion that atrocities might have been committed by Muslims as well as Serbs. This comes when he interviews a Muslim military leader who says, "Both sides respected the Geneva convention and both sides sometimes did not respect the Geneva convention." Toward the end of the hour-long program, Moyers makes a startling but quickly passing admission: "To date, physicians have identified just seventy bodies." To explain the vast discrepancy between seventy and 7,414, he asserts—as a statement of settled fact—that the Serbs reburied many bodies in secondary graves to conceal them. Moyers offers no details as to how, where, and when the Serbs could have buried and then again located, disinterred, and reburied the other 7,344 bodies in the midst of a difficult and chaotic military campaign—without being detected. Nor does he explain why the initial sites, showing evidence of many disinterred graves, could not be found, nor why secondary mass graves were so impossible to locate. When it came to hiding bodies, what did the Serbs know the second time that they kept forgetting to do the first time?

Moyers further claims that in Tuzia the Serbs stored "more than a thousand bodies in a mine." With the fighting long over, it would have been easy enough for him and his camera crew to go to Tuzia and get some footage of the thousand bodies stacked in the mine along with eyewitness testimony of what happened. To my knowledge, no evidence has ever been produced to support that story.

Two British correspondents noted some neglected earlier events relating to Srebrenica, specifically that the Serbian siege had been preceded by a large-scale Muslim attack which razed fifty Serbian villages in the neighboring communes of Srebrenica and Bratunac, and massacred more than 1,200 Serbian women, children and elderly people, with more than 3,000 left wounded. These events went unmentioned in Moyer's special report on Srebrenica, and in most other media.

A report that the Serbs used CS, a poison gas, appeared in Western news in September 1992. There was no evidence that the Serbs or anyone else did any such thing in Yugoslavia—no gas canisters, no contaminated sites or corpses, no suffering victims, no eyewitness reports. But this did not prevent the story from enjoying a brisk, albeit brief, circulation.

Among the public relations firms that played a crucial role in demonizing the Serbs was Ruder & Finn, a paid representative at one time or another for Croatia, Muslim Bosnia, and the Albanian parliamentary opposition in Kosovo. Ruder & Finn's director, James Harff, boasted of disseminating sensationalistic reports that caused a dramatic increase in public support for US intervention in Bosnia. As Harif told French journalist Jacques Merlino in April 1993, he was proudest of how his firm had manipulated Jewish public opinion. It was an achievement of some delicacy since Croatian president Franjo Tudjman "was very careless in his book, Wastelands of Historical Truth," for which "he could be found guilty of anti-Semitism." Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic also posed serious image problems because his book The Islamic Declaration, "revealed too much support for a Muslim fundamentalist state. Moreover, the pasts of Croatia and Bosnia were marked by real and cruel anti-Semitism," Harif admitted. "Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps, so there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile toward the Croats and the [Muslim] Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded masterfully." After Newsday published Roy Gutman's stories about the reputed Serbian death camps, Harif's people were able to mobilize several major Jewish organizations—the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress:

That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia...By a single move we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself...Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with high emotional content such as "ethnic cleansing" and "concentration camps," which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

When Merlino pointed out, "When you did this, you had no proof that what you said was true. All you had were two Newsday articles," Harif replied: "Our work is not to verify information...Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us...We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize."

Without wishing to diminish Harif's sense of achievement, I would point out that Ruder & Finn was so successful not primarily because of its "masterful" promotional ploys. It did what many public relations firms would do: manipulate images, bend information in serviceable ways, send out press releases, try to plant stories, target key groups, lobby Congress and the like. What made the firm's efforts so effective was the eager receptivity of Western media, who—taking their cues from officialdom—were themselves creating an anti-Serb climate of opinion many months before Ruder & Finn's PR campaign.

This nearly monopolistic communication tide was assisted by certain well-financed "humanitarian" groups like Doctors Without Borders, peace groups like Women In Black, and "human rights" groups like Human Rights Watch, along with the various Green Party organizations throughout Europe and North America, British Laborites, French socialists, German social democrats, and the inevitable sprinkling of well-infiltrated ultra-left grouplets that are forever settling scores with "Stalinism," with Milošević as the "last Stalinist." Also to be numbered among the supporters of humanitarian bombings of defenseless civilian populations were the various half-informed intellectuals and luminaries whose moralizing proclivities were activated in the quick-cooked crusade against Serbia. These included feminists, pacifists, and "left" anti-Communists such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Karl Popper, Vanessa Redgrave, Salman Rushdie, Catharine MacKinnon, Todd Gitlin, and of course Susan Sontag—so dedicated to fighting the ghost of Stalin or the ghost of Hitler that they unintentionally or by design end up serving a living, global imperialism.

Because of international sanctions, the Yugoslav government was unable to hire a public relations firm as did the Croat, Muslim, and Albanian separatists.22But even if they had, the Yugoslav side of the story would have been cold-shouldered by the corporate-owned international media for the same reason the Serb-hating side was so warmly championed. The charge of genocide was reiterated so relentlessly in regard to Bosnia that evidence became irrelevant. George Kenney, one of the framers of US policy in the Balkans under the Bush administration summed it up: "The US government doesn't have proof of any genocide and anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation."