Serb Demonization as Propaganda Coup

by Edward S. Herman
Global Research, April 9, 2009 Foreign Policy in Focus

Slobodan MilosevicThe successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day.

The demonization flowed from the gullibility of Western interests and media (and intellectuals). With Yugoslavia no longer useful as an ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, and actually an obstacle as an independent state with a still social democratic bent, the NATO powers aimed at its dismantlement, and they actively supported the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Kosovo Albanians. That these were driven away by Serb actions and threats is untrue: they had their own nationalistic and economic motives for exit, stronger than those of the Serbs.

Milosevic’s famous speeches of 1987 and 1989 weren’t nationalistic - despite the lies to the contrary, both speeches called for tolerance of all “nations” within Yugoslavia. He also never sought a “Greater Serbia,” but rather tried to maintain a unifi ed Yugoslavia, and when this failed - with the active assistance of the NATO powers - he tried, only fitfully, to allow stranded Serb minorities to stay within Yugoslavia or join Serbia, a matter of obvious “selfdetermination” that NATO granted to Kosovo Albanians and everybody but Serbs (for documentation on these points, see this Monthly Review article I co-authored with David Peterson in October, 2007).

Biased Reporting

Many well-qualified observers of the Bosnia wars were appalled at the biased reporting and gullibility of mainstream journalists, who followed a party line and swallowed anything the Bosnian Muslim (and U.S.) offi cials told them. The remarkable infl ation of claims of Serb evil and violence (and playing down of NATO-clients’ violence), with fabricated “concentration camps,” “rape camps,” and similar Nazi- and Auschwitz-like analogies, caused the onetime head of the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, to state back in 1995 that America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam War. Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government.have been forged by a prolifi c propaganda machine. A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.

Numerous others made the same point: Cedric Thornberry, a high UN offi cial who investigated atrocities in Bosnia wrote in Foreign Policy in 1996 that

By early 1993 a consensus developed - especially in the United States, but also in some Western European countries and prominently in parts of the international liberal media - that the Serbs were the only villains. This view did not correspond to the perceptions of successive senior UN personnel in touch with daily events..[and one kindly soul at UN headquarters] warned me to take cover - the fix is on. The same point was made by Canadian General Lewis Mackenzie, who insisted that “it was not a black-and-white picture and that ‘bad’ buys had not killed ‘good’ guys. The situation was far more complex” (Globe & Mail, July 15, 2005).

The same was said by former NATO Deputy Commander Charles Boyd, former UNPROFOR Commander Satish Nambiar, UN offi cials Philip Corwin and Carlos Martins Branco, and former U.S. State Department official George Kenney. But anybody who parted from the party line was ignored or marginalized.

When George Kenney changed his mind from anti-Serb interventionist to critic, he was quickly dropped by the mainstream media. Journalist Peter Brock, who wrote “Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press,” in Foreign Policy’s Winter 1993-1994 issue, which documented systematic bias and errors, was viciously attacked and driven into multi-year silence. A reporter like David Binder of The New York Times who refused to adhere to the party-demonization line was soon taken off the beat.

An important part of the fi x was dishonest demonization, as with the famous August 1992 picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated prisoner behind barbed wire in a Serb “concentration camp.” But the UK journalists had pushed forward a man who was sick and quite unrepresentative: the barbed wire was around the journalists, not the camp, and it was a transit camp, not a concentration camp. Western journalists went berserk over these alleged camps, but failed to report the Red Cross fi nding that “Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all run detention camps and must share equal blame.” John Burns’ Pulitzer for 1993 was based heavily on his interview with an alleged Serb killer- rapist, Borislav Herak, who later confessed that after torture he had recited lines forced on him by his Bosnian Muslim captors.

The joint Pulitzer winner in 1993 was Roy Gutman, who specialized in hearsay evidence and handouts from Croatian and Bosnian Muslim propaganda sources. Gutman never got around to Croat and Muslim camps. His and other journalists’ claims about “an archipelago of [Serb] sex-enslavement camps” were spectacular and wrong - ultimately, there were more credible affi davits of Serb than Bosnian Muslim women rape victims. (For an excellent discussion of the wild news reports versus ascertainable facts, see Chapter Five of Peter Brock’s Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting [GM Books, 2005]). All these journalists portrayed the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovi? as a devotee of ethnic tolerance; none ever quoted his Islamic Declaration, which proclaimed that “there is neither peace nor coexistence between the ‘Islamic religion’ and non-Islamic social and political institutions.” For an extensive discussion of Izetbegovi?’s close relations with Iran and commitment to an Islamic state, see John Schindler’s Unholy Terror (Zenith Press, 2007), which I reviewed in Z Magazine.

Retaliation

Another part of the fix was the failure to pay any attention to crimes that preceded brutal Serb actions. This was frequent, although there certainly were cases where the Serbs (mainly paramilitary forces) struck fi rst. But the tit-for-tat was common and much of it, and many of the mutual fears, were traceable back to the mass murders - disproportionately of Serbs - of World War II, the Nazi occupation, and Croatian fascist Ustasha. This background of truly mass killing was blacked out in the mainstream propaganda system.

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