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Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass:
Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization
by Diana Johnstone -- 10 August 1998
from COVERT ACTION QUARTERLY covertaction.org
No 65, Fall 1998
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Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative media
have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to impose
certain interpretations on international news. During the Cold War,
most world news for American consumption had to be framed as part of
the Soviet-U.S. contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames the
news. The way the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported
is the most stunning example.
I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though
I had a long-standing interest and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I
spent time there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory
and learning the language. In 1984, in a piece for In These Times [1],
I warned that extreme decentralization, conflicting economic interests
between the richer and poorer regions, austerity policies imposed by
the IMF and the decline of universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia
with "re-Balkanization" in the wake of Tito's death and
desanctification. "Local ethnic interests are reasserting themselves",
I wrote. "The danger is that these rival local interests may become
involved in the rivalries of outside powers. This is how the Balkans in
the past were a powder keg of world war." Writing this took no special
clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia's disintegration was quite
obvious to all serious observers well before Slobodan Milosevic arrived
on the scene.
As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to
keep up with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press
officer for the Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to
investigate the situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws
in the way media and politicians were reacting, I wrote an article
warning against combatting "nationalism" by taking sides for one
nationalism against another, and against judging a complex situation by
analogy with totally different times and places [2]. "Every nationalism
stimulates others", I noted. "Historical analogies should be drawn with
caution and never allowed to obscure the facts." However, there was no
stopping the tendency to judge the Balkans, about which most people
knew virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler's Germany, about which
people at least imagined they knew a lot, and which enabled analysis to
be rapidly abandoned in favor of moral certitude and righteous
indignation.
However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time
to my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception --
which is in large part self-deception.
I mention all this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty
of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The
history of the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts
and external influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda
distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now,
many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the
situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative
interpretations.
It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media
are "alternative" that they are free from the dominant interpretation
and the dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav
tragedy, the irony is that "alternative" or "left" activists and
writers have frequently taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the
people who most wanted to continue to live in multi-cultural
Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for military intervention
on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist movements [3] -- all
supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural Bosnia", a country which,
unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by outsiders.
The Serbs and Yugoslavia
Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs were
heavily taxed and denied ownership of property or political power
reserved for Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century,
Serb farmers led a revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long
struggle put an end to the Ottoman Empire.
The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire receded,
another should advance, and sought to gain control over the lands lost
to the Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to the Habsburgs in
earlier wars against the Turks, Serbia soon appeared to Vienna as the
main obstacle to its own expansion into the Balkans. By the end of the
nineteenth century, Vienna was seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited
lands to prevent what it named "Greater Serbia". The Austro Hungarian
Empire took control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and fostered the birth of
Albanian nationalism (as converts to Islam, Albanian feudal chieftains
enjoyed privileges under the Ottoman Empire and combatted the Christian
liberation movements).
Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens' rights under
the Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders
was relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were extremely receptive to
the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. While all the other
liberated Balkan nations imported German princelings as their new
kings, the Serbs promoted their own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of
whose members translated John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" into Serbian
during his student days. Nowhere in the Balkans did Western progressive
ideas exercise such attraction as in Serbia, no doubt due to the
historic circumstances of the country's emergence from four hundred
years of subjugation.
Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the Hungarian
nobility, initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural, and eventually
political, unification of the South Slav peoples, notably the Serbs and
Croats, separated by history and religion (the Serbs having been
converted to Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Croats
by the Roman Catholic Church) but united by language. The idea of
a "Southslavia" was largely inspired by the national unification of
neighboring Italy, occurring around the same time.
In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the
assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and
crush Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the world war
it had thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite
with Serbia in a single kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia
and Croatia to go from the losing to the winning side in World War I,
thereby avoiding war reparations and enlarging their territory, notably
on the Adriatic coast, at the expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was
renamed "Yugoslavia" in 1929. The conflicts between Croats and Serbs
that plagued what is called "the first Yugoslavia" were described by
Rebecca West in her celebrated book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first
published in 1941.
In April 1941, Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an accord
reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led to
Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent
fascist state of Croatia (including Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment
of much of the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of
Mussolini's Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide
against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater
Croatia", while the Germans raised SS divisions among the Muslims of
Bosnia and Albania.
In Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one hundred
Serbian hostages would be executed for each German killed by resistance
fighters. The threat was carried out. As a result, the royalist Serbian
resistance (the first guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in
Europe) led by Draza Mihailovic adopted a policy of holding off attacks
on the Germans in expectation of an Allied invasion. The Partisans, led
by Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito, adopted a more active strategy
of armed resistance, which made considerable gains in the predominantly
Serb border regions of Croatia and Bosnia and won support from
Churchill for its effectiveness. A civil war developed between the
Mihailovic's "Chetniks" and Tito's Partisans -- which was also a civil
war between Serbs, since Serbs were the most numerous among the
Partisans. These divisions between Serbs -- torn between Serbian and
Yugoslav identity -- have never been healed, and help explain the deep
confusion among Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to
build "brotherhood and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had
contributed equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was
executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned more about
the "fascist" nature of his Serbian nationalist "Chetniks" than they
did about Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who had volunteered for the SS,
or even about the killing of Serbs in the Jasenovac death camp run by
Ustashe in Western Bosnia.
After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership
emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy
of "self-management" supposed to lead by fairly rapid stages to
the "withering away of the State". Tito repeatedly revised the
Constitution to strengthen local authorities, while retaining final
decision-making power for himself. When he died in 1980, he thus left
behind a hopelessly complicated system that could not work without his
arbitration [4]. Serbia in particular was unable to enact vitally
necessary reforms because its territory had been divided up, with
two "autonomous provinces", Voivodina and Kosovo, able to veto measures
taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not intervene in their affairs.
In the 1980s, the rise in interest rates and unfavorable world trade
conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia (like
many "third world" countries) had been encouraged to run up thanks to
its standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the
Soviet bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures,
which could only be taken by a central government. The leaders of the
richer Republics -- Slovenia and Croatia -- did not want to pay for the
poorer ones. Moreover, in all former socialist countries, the big
political question is privatization of State and social property, and
local communist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a
greater share for themselves within the context of division of
Yugoslavia into separate little states [5].
A this stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia into
smaller States was not impossible. It would have entailed reaching
agreement on division of assets and liabilities, and numerous
adjustments to take into account conflicting interests. If pursued
openly, however, it might have encountered popular opposition -- after
all, very many people, perhaps a majority, enjoyed being citizens of a
large country with an enviable international reputation. What would
have been the result of a national referendum on the question of
preservation of Yugoslavia?
None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar
Yugoslavia were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia, but
separately by each Republic -- a method which in itself reinforced
separatist power elites. Sure of the active sympathy of Germany,
Austria and the Vatican, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia prepared the
fait accompli of unilateral, unnegotiated secession, proclaimed in
1991. Such secession was illegal, under Yugoslav and international law,
and was certain to precipitate civil war. The key role of German (and
Vatican) support was to provide rapid international recognition of the
new independent Republics, in order to transform Yugoslavia into
an "aggressor" on its own territory. [6]
Political Motives
The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda campaign
are obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in
Yugoslavia because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the
nationalist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little
statelets which, thanks to early and strong German support, could "jump
the queue" and get into the richmen's European club ahead of the rest
of Yugoslavia.
The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to
oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an
entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism
and the new role of NATO as occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of
a theoretical "international community".
Already in the 1980s, Croatian and ethnic Albanian separatist lobbies
had stepped up their efforts to win support abroad, notably in Germany
and the United States [7], by claiming to be oppressed by Serbs,
citing "evidence" that, insofar as it had any basis in truth, referred
to the 1920-1941 Yugoslav kingdom, not to the very different post-World
War II Yugoslavia.
The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a
virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the
influential conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ). In almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismüller
justified the freshly, and illegally, declared "independence" of
Slovenia and Croatia by describing "the Yugo-Serbs" as essentially
Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who have "no place in the European
Community". Nineteen months after German reunification, and for the
first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German media resounded with
condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of the pre-war
propaganda against the Jews [8].
This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had changed
seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad German peace
movement had stressed the need to put an end to "enemy stereotypes"
(Feindbilder). Yet the sudden ferocious emergence of the enemy
stereotype of "the Serbs" did not shock liberal or left Germans, who
were soon repeating it themselves. It might seem that the German peace
movement had completed its historic mission once its contribution to
altering the image of Germany had led Gorbachev to endorse
reunification. The least one can say is that the previous efforts at
reconciliation with peoples who suffered from Nazi invasion stopped
short when it came to the Serbs.
In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fischer pressed for
disavowal of "pacifism" in order to "combat Auschwitz", thereby
equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood of self-righteous
indignation, German politicians across the board joined in using
Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had been the
logic up until reunification, but on the contrary, for "bearing their
share of the military burden". In the name of human rights, the Federal
Republic of Germany abolished its ban on military operations outside
the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again be a "normal"
military power -- thanks to the "Serb threat".
The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the "enemy
stereotype" of the Serb had been dredged up from the most belligerent
German nationalism of the past. "Serbien muss sterbien" (a play on the
word sterben, to die), meaning "Serbia must die" was a famous popular
war cry of World War I [9]. Serbs had been singled out for slaughter
during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. One would have thought that
the younger generation of Germans, seemingly so sensitive to the
victims of Germany's aggressive past, would have at least urged
caution. Very few did.
On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass
transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the
Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection
which served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in
the face of the new "criminal" people, the Serbs. But the hate campaign
against Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop there. Elsewhere, the
willingness to single out one of the Yugoslav peoples as the villain
calls for other explanations.
Media Momentum
From the start, foreign reporters were better treated in Zagreb and in
Ljubljana, whose secessionist leaders understood the prime importance
of media images in gaining international support, than in Belgrade. The
Albanian secessionists in Kosovo or "Kosovars" [10], the Croatian
secessionists and the Bosnian Muslims hired an American public
relations firm, Ruder Finn, to advance their causes by demonizing the
Serbs [11]. Ruder Finn deliberately targeted certain publics, notably
the American Jewish community, with a campaign likening Serbs to Nazis.
Feminists were also clearly targeted by the Croatian nationalist
campaign directed out of Zagreb to brand Serbs as rapists [12].
The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the advantage
of being simple and available, and they provided an easy-to-use moral
compass by designating the bad guys.
As the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina got underway in mid-1992, American
journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of Serbian atrocities
could count on getting published, with a chance of a Pulitzer prize.
Indeed, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was shared
between the two authors of the most sensational "Serb atrocity stories"
of the year: Roy Gutman of Newsday and John Burns of The New York
Times. In both cases, the prize-winning articles were based on hearsay
evidence of dubious credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on
accounts by Muslim refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were
collected in a book rather misleadingly entitled A Witness to Genocide,
although in fact he had been a "witness" to nothing of the sort. His
allegations that Serbs were running "death camps" were picked up by
Ruder Finn and widely diffused, notably to Jewish organizations. Burns'
story was no more than an interview with a mentally deranged prisoner
in a Sarajevo jail, who confessed to crimes some of which have been
since proved never to have been committed [13].
On the other hand, there was no market for stories by a journalist who
discovered that reported Serbian "rape camps" did not exist (German TV
reporter Martin Lettmayer [14]), or who included information about
Muslim or Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian journalist Georges
Berghezan for one [15]). It became increasingly impossible to challenge
the dominant interpretation in major media. Editors naturally prefer to
keep the story simple: one villain, and as much blood as possible.
Moreover, after the German government forced the early recognition of
Slovenian and Croatian independence, other Western powers lined up
opportunistically with the anti-Serb position. The United States soon
moved aggressively into the game by picking its own client state --
Muslim Bosnia -- out of the ruins.
Foreign news has always been much easier to distort than domestic news.
Television coverage simply makes the distortion more convincing. TV
crews sent into strange places about which they know next to nothing,
send back images of violence that give millions of viewers the
impression that "everybody knows what is happening". Such an impression
is worse than plain ignorance.
Today, worldwide media such as CNN openly put pressure on governments
to respond to the "public opinion" which the media themselves create.
Christiane Amanpour tells the U.S. and European Union what they should
be doing in Bosnia; to what extent this is coordinated with U.S.
agencies is hard to tell. Indeed, the whole question of which tail wags
the dog is wide open. Do media manipulate government, does government
manipulate media, or are influential networks manipulating both?
Many officials of Western governments complain openly or privately of
being forced into unwise policy decisions by "the pressure of public
opinion", meaning the media. A particularly interesting testimony in
this regard is that of Otto von Habsburg, the extremely active and
influential octogenarian heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire,
today member of the European Parliament from Bavaria, who has taken a
great and one might say paternal interest in the cause of Croatian
independence. "If Germany recognized Slovenia and Croatia so rapidly,"
Habsburg told the Bonn correspondent of the French daily Figaro
[16], "even against the will of [then German foreign minister] Hans-
Dietrich Genscher who did not want to take that step, it's because the
Bonn government was subjected to an almost irresistible pressure of
public opinion. In this regard, the German press rendered a very great
service, in particular the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Carl
Gustav Ströhm, that great German journalist who works for Die Welt."
Still, the virtually universal acceptance of a one-sided view of
Yugoslavia's collapse cannot be attributed solely to political designs
or to sensationalist manipulation of the news by major media. It also
owes a great deal to the ideological uniformity prevailing among
educated liberals who have become the consensual moral conscience in
Northwestern Euro-American society since the end of the Cold War. |
