Abstract
The Balkans has a long history of media manipulation in times of conflict. Former psychological warfare expert
For many centuries the Balkan region was the battleground for three empires, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman, and their respective faiths, Catholic, Orthodox and Islam. Until the end of the twentieth century, there was violent competition for power and influence, exacerbated by sometimes vicious rivalry between the large number of different ethnic groups. From the bloody struggles for independence from the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century to the Kosovo war of 1999, propaganda and self-censorship played a crucial role. After the wars for independence against the Ottomans, there were conflicts over territory among the states that emerged out of the Ottoman empire. In 1912, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece were victorious against Turkey, conquering multi-ethnic Macedonia. But in 1913, Bulgaria, extremely dissatisfied with its spoils from the war, attacked its former allies Serbia and Greece. To prevent the rise of an aggressive Great Bulgaria, Romanian armed forces crossed the Danube, annexing the south of Dobrodja, imposing a peace treaty on Sofia and settling the first round of the Balkan wars. But peace did not last long. Other national rivalries and antipathies grew in the hearts and minds of Balkan people – and were in part responsible for the alliances that played an important part in World War I and World War II.
As the Cold War ended, the geo-political conditions for the implosion of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which had been built and sustained by Josip Broz Tito, were set in motion. His death in 1980 posed a significant threat to the narrative of the republic that Tito had so successfully championed.
In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia fought and won new wars for independence against Serbia. But the international community was unable to stop the bloody civil Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995: Bosnians, Croats and Serbs bombed, tortured, raped and killed one another, each group supported by various foreign powers.
In each conflict, individual countries used propaganda to garner political, military and economic support from dominant international powers, the foreign policy of which was consistent with its own interest.
On the eve of World War I, Serbians and Romanians asked France, Bulgaria, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Greece and Germany to support their objectives. So all state media-led propaganda was aimed at the international community, and primarily targeted Western countries. As Bulgarian historian Ivan Ilcev noted in his book My Fatherland: Right or Not, which focused on Balkan propaganda aimed outside the former Yugoslavia, this continued a long-established practice dating back to the nineteenth century. In the run-up to World War I, many Balkan diplomats bribed Western journalists or officials to publish stories that supported and promoted their causes.
ABOVE: Serbian propaganda against Bulgaria following World War I
Credit: Le Petit Journal
In order to maintain his power, Milosevic imposed tough censorship on all Serbian media
In June 1913, a year before British, French and German generals prohibited Western war correspondents from having access to the frontline, Romanian journalists were among the regiments that were advancing towards the Bulgarian capital. There was no doubt about their enthusiastic and “patriotic” coverage. Self-censorship was adopted by a huge majority of the media (with the exception of some marginal socialist journals). For example, the Romanian media dared not report on the serious number of cholera casualties among the troops, as well as the fact that the wagon that carried bread to the frontline also brought the corpses back to the homeland. Across the region, journalists and politicians were united in their attempt to hide economic conditions, poverty, corruption, and shortfalls in education, obsessed with emphasising how thoroughly the country in question was a solid part of European civilisation.
During the wars of the 1990s across the former Yugoslavia, the Balkan states alliances changed to an extent, in line with new national interests: Russia, Belarus, China and Iraq gave political support to Milosevic against NATO and the US; Croatia and Slovenia were supported by Germany; while Romania and Bulgaria had begun the process of NATO admission. Meanwhile, public opinion among Orthodox Greeks was sympathetic towards the Serbs, and Muslim Turks backed Kosovo Albanians. These alliances partly explain the different trends in how Balkan propaganda treated foreign countries during the armed conflicts of the 1990s. But Balkan public opinion was not unanimously nationalistic any more. The political opposition had grown up considerably and state media outlets within Yugoslavia presented a wide variety of attitudes and positions.
In order to maintain his power, Milosevic imposed tough censorship on all Serbian media and sought to intimidate opposition journalists through threats of enormous fines or even murder. However, Milosevic’s information law, introduced on 20 October 1998, the year of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) uprising, was not the only repressive media law introduced in the region. In 1991 and 1992, during their fight for independence against the Yugoslav National Army (directed by Belgrade), the Croatian authorities imposed guidelines for state television, radio and newspapers, requiring journalists to adopt euphemistic language and coverage of any war-related issue that can only be described as propaganda, praising Croatian troops and demonising Serbian forces.
Here we come to a large common ground across the region: the demonisation of enemies and propaganda around atrocities, combined with an excess of nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric. When comparing the 1990s Balkan wars with the clashes of 1912-13, the same techniques re-appeared. In both cases, some media outlets essentially claimed that the enemy was not human, so to kill him without mercy was entirely justified and right.
The Bulgarian researcher Yura Konstantinova has written widely about the prevalence of stereotypes and prejudice in media coverage in the Balkans of 1913. The Ottoman empire was “Europe’s ulcer”, the Turks were cast as “Asiatic barbarians” and “a savage and uncultured tribe”. By contrast, the Ottoman press characterised Bulgarian activities during the war as “atrocities, compared to which the tortures of the Inquisitions would look like true charity”. Only a few months later, in 1913, the Serbs, the Greeks and the Romanians became the new Bulgarian enemies; these former allies were depicted by Mir, Sofia’s semi-official newspaper, as “perfidious”, “deceivers” and “allies-brigands” – meaning allies who then turned into thieves. For its part, the Romanian press labelled Bulgarians as “barbarians and conquerors”, “descendants of Asparuh”, referring to the Bulgarians in a pejorative way and essentially calling them uncivilised and savage. The media underlined the important duty the Romanian armed forces had to “impose civilisation” south of the Danube.
The same use of stereotypes can be traced throughout the Bosnian civil war. Peter Goff’s 1999 book The Kosovo News and Propaganda War reflects first-hand impressions and analysis from important international journalists around the world about Kosovo and propaganda. As Goff points out, the Serbian media cast NATO as a “Nazi terrorist organisation”; according to newspaper Politika Ekspres, President Bill Clinton was “a liar and sexually sick person” and “a mad saxophonist Adolf Clinton”, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was “Washington’s puppet”, and Madeleine Albright was “the witch of our time” and “a woman with sick complexes”; the Allied air strikes were referred to as “fascist aggression”.
In the run-up to World War I, many Balkan diplomats bribed Western journalists to publish stories that supported and promoted their causes
“News is the shock troops of propaganda,” said the British Minister of Information Sir John Reith, in 1940. This is still valid today. Not only had the Balkan media played an important role in the international propaganda machine during wartime, Western and American media also took part and, in my opinion, often from a biased position.
Philip Knightley’s book on the history of war correspondents, The First Casualty, acknowledges what most journalists know: that truth loses out in war. When it comes to war in the Balkans, whether it’s the 1912-13 war or the two major armed conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, the truth was not entirely and honestly reflected by the media, either domestically or on an international scale. Emotional and partisan coverage, combined with patriotic self-censorship on behalf of the Balkan media in 1913, was later replaced, during the three years of Bosnian civil war, with the cynical exploitation and manipulation of the international media led by individuals and groups with firm political agendas. As the award-winning BBC journalist Martin Bell acknowledged in his book In Harm’s Way: “No other war – not even the Gulf war, which took on the character of a made-for-television CNN special event – has been fought so much in public, under the eye of the camera.” A few years later, in spring 1999, another respected BBC correspondent John Simpson “became the direct target of the British government’s public relations machine”, because his reports from Belgrade under NATO bombing didn’t match with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s policy. It’s also true that during the 1999 war, Serbian national television and the main newspapers from Belgrade acted as a perfect propaganda machine, spreading lies, prejudice and populist materials, being entirely under the power of Milosevic’s guidelines and censors.
ABOVE: A man collects bricks in Sarajevo’s main library, which was destroyed by Bosnian Serb forces in 1992
Credit: Chris Helgren/Reuters
Propaganda still exists in Balkan society, and for those who report on it. All of the Balkan wars of the twentieth century were sometimes poorly reported, without respect for truth, moral limits or professional ethics. Political leaders used various forms of propaganda and censorship, leading to media rhetoric. To return to the moral aphorism observed by Richard Tait, editor-in-chief of ITN, at the end of the Balkan wars: “Reporting war is too serious to be left to propagandists”.
ABOVE: A Serbian Orthodox church bombed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, 1999. The author, Calin Hentea, is on the left
