Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Press Freedom

BALKANS: Media Could Be in the Dock Over War Crimes

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jul 17 2009 (IPS) - Journalists are in the dock now for their role in provoking the wars of the 1990s across former Yugoslavia that left more than 100,000 dead.

“We’re analysing the influence of certain Serbian media on war crimes committed in the 1991-95 wars,” Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the Special War Crimes Prosecutor in Belgrade told IPS. “The analysis deals with the atmosphere and ambience within the media at the time.”

Examination of the criminal responsibility of media began after some people were sentenced last year for the execution of close to 200 Croatian prisoners of war in Vukovar town in 1991.

“One of them clearly said he watched TV and then went to ‘give those (Croats) what they deserved’,” Vekaric said.

Serbian TV and print media had widely reported the disinformation that 40 Serb children had been slaughtered by Croats in one day. The execution of Croatian prisoners of war came only days after that news as the town fell into Serbian hands.

Vekaric says many people standing trial for war crimes, and dozens of witnesses, have been citing media reports as the source for their anger and their desire for revenge.

“Our aim is not to persecute journalists now, but to establish if there are elements for their criminal responsibility,” Vekaric said.

Last week the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS) presented evidence to the war crimes prosecutor’s office against four prominent Serbian media groups and their editors-in-chief of their “instigating inter-ethnic hatred, hate speech and warmongering that led to atrocities and war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia.”

The four are the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) in Belgrade, Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV) in Serbia’s second biggest city Novi Sad, the oldest Serbian daily Politika, and the largest circulated daily Vecernje Novosti.

Criminal allegations by NUNS carry no personal names, but have an attached archive of TV footage and copies of newspapers.

“We are talking about journalist-warmongers now not because we want to sentence, send to prison or otherwise harm colleagues,” head of NUNS Nadezda Gace told IPS. “This is an effort to revive the dignity of journalist profession and clear the murky image of the recent past among people in Serbia. Without that, there’s no clear vision of present and future.”

Many journalists and editors from the 1990s are still in these media outlets, which appear to have turned coats since 2000 when the regime of Slobodan Milosevic fell from power. Some were removed from their positions, but began to return to high posts in recent years.

Milosevic’s regime led Serbia into wars on the pretext of “defending national interests of Serbs outside Serbia”, that is, in Croatia and Bosnia, where many ethnic Serbs lived.

NUNS has its opponents within media. The head of the Association of Journalists of Serbia (UNS) Ljiljana Smajlovic says “it is not for the war crimes prosecutor’s office to establish the criteria of journalism.” Smajlovic says media has been its own watchdog, and that “eight journalists were expelled from UNS membership as it was found that they participated in turning the media into a propaganda machinery in the 1990s.”

The actions of the war crimes prosecution and the NUNS statement have “peculiar timing”, she says. “It’s unclear why they are acting now. It is also very hard to establish how they (the prosecution) are to prove that media items were the provoking factor for action.”

The differing opinions of the two associations of journalists reflect the deep division within Serbian society about the wars of the 1990s.

NUNS was set up in 1994 by independent professionals, most of them of anti-war orientation and strongly opposing Milosevic’s rule. UNS was the official association of journalists after World War II, mostly of pro-regime journalists from official or pro-government media such as the four named in the NUNS list.

Beyond Serbia, the International War Crimes Tribunal in Arusha (Tanzania) has sentenced three journalists for their role in the Rwanda massacres. After World War II the Nuremberg trials sentenced the founder of a Nazi Germany paper to death.

Serious abuses by the media were spoken of as a “weapon” in indictments against several top officials who faced war crimes accusations before the United Nations founded International Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Experts in international law, such as Vesna Rakic Vodinelic, say that the sentencing in Arusha provides “mechanisms and grounds” for prosecution of Serbian journalists who played the tune of propaganda that led to war crimes, and so became a part of criminal acts.