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BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
I. Independent
Serb Journalists Defend Their Work.
By Steven Erlanger
When a
Montenegrin journalist suggested that the independent
Serbian news media needed “de-Nazification” as
much as the Serbian people, two respected Serbian editors
had heard enough and stalked out of a Western-sponsored
conference in disgust.
Three weeks
later, Dragoljub Zarkovic, editor of the independent
weekly Vreme, is still disgusted.
“To accuse
the Serb people and the independent media of the worst
crime in history, and to draw an outrageous and
defamatory line of equality between a regime, a nation
and a media that has been waging a bloody battle against
the authorities for 10 years,” Mr. Zarkovic said,
“then I felt I had no option but to walk out.”
The conference,
sponsored by the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, was intended to allow Serbian,
Montenegrin and a few Albanian journalists to discuss
their coverage of NATO’s bombing war over Kosovo,
its causes and its aftermath.
Did the
independent media fail to challenge war censorship
sufficiently? Should they have suspended publication
instead? Did they support the Government of President
Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia or somehow collaborate
with it? Did they print enough about Kosovo and the
atrocities committed by Serbian forces there, and are
they printing enough now?
During the war
the Serbian news media operated under strict censorship,
and access to Kosovo was very restricted. In the
patriotic atmosphere, fueled by the media, Serbs nearly
universally opposed the bombing, even if they also
opposed Mr. Milosevic or denounced the expulsion of
ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.
The meeting, at a
resort in Montenegro—the only remaining Yugoslav
republic besides Serbia—created enormous acrimony, with
Serbian journalists complaining of moral arrogance,
sloppiness and hypocrisy.
“The
organizers wanted to waken our consciences and force us
to question ourselves about our conduct and
morality,” said Veselin Simonovic, the editor of
Blic, an independent tabloid, who returned to the
discussion after his walkout.
At the same time,
he said, “and this was put to us pretty directly,
they made it clear we should be proclaimed as accomplices
in crime, with ready-made slogans and cliches, and they
tried to force us to justify ourselves and say that we
weren’t quite as criminal as they said.”
“Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t play
along, and I felt sorry for my colleagues who did.”
The organizers had made a completely inadequate study of
the coverage, he said, making few distinctions between
state and independent news media or among them.
“The aim was
to raise concerns about their role and responsibility in
civic society,” said Gerard Stoudmann, chief
organizer of the conference. “There was enormous
defensiveness, which shows to what extent Serbian society
has become autistic and paranoid. But the main goal was
achieved, because real issues were addressed, and it
initiated a thinking process.”
But Mr.
Simonovic, whose paper takes no money from international
donors or governments, said the discussion had the
character of a “trial” by Western sponsors. One
of the organizers, Natasa Kandic, was explicit. At one
point she said, “They pay you and have the right to
question your conduct during the war.”
Ms. Kandic, the
director of Belgrade’s Humanitarian Law Center,
which gets Western aid, traveled to Kosovo on her own
during the war to investigate Serbian abuses.
In an interview,
she said the Serbian news media had failed in their
professional responsibilities during the war and were
failing now to open the question of collective Serbian
responsibility for crimes in Kosovo.
“I said we
have an obligation to donors to do our jobs, and to fight
for democracy in Serbia and not have that be empty
words,” she said.
Mr. Simonovic,
acknowledging that some of the criticism was valid,
countered that Kosovo remained “a taboo
subject” in Serbia.
“This is an
issue that must be opened for our own sake,” he
said, “not for international do-gooders, and the
media will open it. But now would really bring the
regime’s wrath down on us, and I believe the regime
would stop us from publishing it.”
That is one
reason, he said when pressed, that his reporters have not
dug very hard yet into the causes and tactics of the
Serbian war in Kosovo—answers that are to be had in
Belgrade, not in Kosovo, where it is no longer safe for
Serbian journalists to work.
“Our
priority now is to cover the regime and the opposition
effort to bring it down or change it,” he said.
But he and Mr.
Zarkovic noted that under censorship the independent
media did not indulge in the hysterical, jingoistic and
aggressive language of the state media. Independent
journalists drew a distinction between popular, patriotic
anger about NATO’s bombing campaign and support for
Mr. Milosevic, he said, and printed NATO statements and
Western reports about events in Kosovo, including stories
about mass graves and Western estimates of the number of
dead.
Both editors
argued that given wide access to foreign radio and
television stations and the Internet, few Serbs lacked
basic information about what had happened in Kosovo, and
they said it was ridiculous to expect the independent
media to support the bombing of their own country.
Instead, they and other Serbian journalists suggested
that the West was less interested in their professional
conduct than in finding scapegoats for NATO’s
failure to oust Mr. Milosevic or to protect Albanians in
Kosovo, and its failure since then to control Albanian
rage against Kosovo’s Serbs.
“People who
were on the receiving end of Western democracy grants are
now to feel Western wrath,” Mr. Simonovic said.
“The West failed to create a multiethnic Kosovo,
creating anti-American feeling in Serbia instead.
Westerners now need someone to blame: the civic sector,
the Serbs, the press—everyone, to them, is a
collaborator. In this rosy picture, they’re the only
blameless ones, their policies perfect.”
American
officials are scathing about how the Serbian news media
allowed themselves to be censored during the war, said
Mr. Zarkovic of the weekly Vreme, founded in 1990.
Ms. Kandic said
refusing to publish was the proper position to take. That
would be an abdication of responsibility, Mr. Zarkovic
said, and the Government threatened to close any paper
that did not appear. “It would have been a terrible
mistake to kill Vreme,” he said.
For the
Americans, the war against Mr. Milosevic continues. The
Clinton Administration has said it is creating a
“ring around Serbia” of sponsored media, much
of it radio or television, from Bosnia and Montenegro,
with more Serbian-language programs from Radio Free
Europe and Voice of America.
It is helping the
Vreme-like weekly magazine Reporter, published in Bosnia,
to enter the Serbian market at a discount price, and just
last week paid for two Serbian and four Montenegrin
journalists to travel to the United Nations to counter
state media assertions that the Foreign Minister was
making an impact there among nations unhappy with
American hegemony. But they arrived the day he left.
“The only
result that interests Americans is the fall of
Milosevic,” Mr. Zarkovic said. “The Americans
see the media as a political weapon to bring Milosevic
down. They don’t seem to care very much what will
happen the day after Milosevic. I can understand: the
Americans won’t live here. But I will, and I’ll
be putting out a paper then.” (The New York Times, 6
October 1999)
II.The High
Representative's Decisions on the Restructuring of the
Public Broadcasting System in BiH and on Freedom of
Information and Decriminalization of Libel and Defamation
(30 July 1999).
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