Propaganda during the Yugoslav Wars
During the Yugoslav Wars, propaganda was widely used in the media of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and, to a lesser extent, of Croatia and Bosnia.
Throughout the conflicts, all sides used propaganda as a tool. The media in the former Yugoslavia was divided along ethnic lines, and only a few independent voices countered the nationalist rhetoric.
Propaganda was prominently used by Slobodan Milošević and his regime in Serbia. He began his efforts to control the media in the late 1980s, and by 1991, he had successfully consolidated Radio Television of Serbia and the other Serbian media, which largely became a mouthpiece for his regime. Part of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's indictment against Milošević charged him with having used the media for propaganda purposes.
In Croatia, the media included the state's main public broadcaster, Croatian Radio and Television, and it largely came under the control of Franjo Tuđman and his party, the Croatian Democratic Union. The Croatian media engaged in propaganda during both the Croatian War of Independence and the Bosnian War.
Some analysts have also claimed that propaganda tactics were used by the Western media in covering of the wars, particularly in its negative portrayal of Serbs during the conflicts.
Background and analysis
During the Breakup of Yugoslavia, the media played a critical role in swaying public opinion on the conflict. Media controlled by state regimes helped foster an environment that made war possible by attacking civic principles, fueling fear of ethnic violence and engineering consent. Although all sides in the Yugoslav Wars used propaganda, the regime of Slobodan Milošević played a leading role in its dissemination. In 1987, Milošević began to use state television to portray the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as "anti-Serb", which prompted rival propaganda from Croatia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most media outlets were complicit in those tactics, succumbed to their respective ethnic and political parties and acted as tools for nationalist propaganda. The exceptions were a handful of independent media.There were a number of prominent media scandals in the 1980s, such as the Đorđe Martinović incident of 1985 and the Vojko i Savle affair of 1987. The SANU Memorandum gained prominence after it had been leaked in the mainstream media in 1986.
Long before the conflict in Croatia had broken out, both Serbian and Croatian media primed their audiences for violence and armed conflict by airing stories of World War II atrocities perpetrated by the other. Thus, in the Croatian media, Serbs represented Chetniks, and in the Serbian media, Croats were portrayed as Ustaše. Once the fighting began, those were the labels routinely used in media war reports from both sides; they instilled hatred and fear among the populace. The Serbian and Croatian propaganda campaigns also reinforced each other. The nationalist rhetoric put forth by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and other Croatian public figures before and after the 1990 Croatian parliamentary election helped Milošević. Likewise, Milošević's policies in Croatia provoked nationalist sentiment among Croats, which Tudjman used to his advantage. In 1990, the path to war began to be drummed up by Serbian and Croatian nationalists alike and later by Bosnian Muslims as well.
Both Milošević and Tudjman seized control of the media in their respective republics and used news reports from newspapers, radio and television to fan the flames of hatred. The journalist Maggie O'Kane noted how both leaders were aware of the importance of instigating propaganda campaigns "that would prepare the country of Tito's children – essentially an ethnically mixed country – for the division of the Yugoslav ideal". Regarding the state of the media in both Serbia and Croatia at the time, Kemal Kurspahić wrote:
In Bosnia, the media was also divided along ethnic lines, which helped prolong the Bosnian War and was an obstacle to achieving peace.
Various propaganda tactics were used by the warring sides in the Yugoslav Wars like exaggerated reports of war crimes. For instance, both the Bosnian Muslim and Serbian media reported that their babies were used as food to zoo animals. Victims of massacres were misrepresented as members of their own ethnic group or that the other side had killed its own people for propaganda purposes. All sides used documentaries and films to support their own agendas.
Serbian media
In the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, one of the indictments against Serbian President Slobodan Milošević was his use of the Serbian state-run mass media to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred in Yugoslavia's Orthodox Serbs by spreading "exaggerated and false messages of ethnically based attacks by Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats against the Serb people...".Milošević's reign and control of Serbian media
Milošević began his efforts to gain control over the media in 1986 to 1987, a process that had been completed by the summer of 1991. In 1992, Radio Television Belgrade, together with Radio Television Novi Sad and Radio Television Pristina, 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 was used to promote the "wise politics of Slobodan Milošević" and to attack "the servants of Western powers and the forces of chaos and despair", the Serbian opposition.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. 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.
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". 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 and Muslims. 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" 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".
File:Serbian poster "Sorry we didn't know it was invisible".jpg|thumb|200px|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. 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". 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.
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. 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. 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.
De la Brosse describes how RTS 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'".
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:
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.