The International Relations and Security Network has a very interesting article about the role the media played in the Yugoslav wars of the 90s. From Balkans: Media and War Crimes / ISN:
Serbia’s Special War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office has launched a preliminary inquiry into the role of journalists in inciting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, focusing on reporting on atrocities committed in Vukovar, Croatia, and Zvornik, Bosnia.
The investigation should be complete within the next two months, after which a decision will be taken on whether there are grounds for a full-fledged investigation. The Prosecutor’s Office said the aim was not to persecute journalists, but to establish whether there were elements of criminal activity in reporting.
The probe was launched after Serbia’s war crimes court in March sentenced 13 former Serb paramilitaries for the 1991 massacre of 200 Croats at a pig farm near Croatia’s eastern town of Vukovar.
Last year, the court also sentenced three former Serb paramilitary members for their role in the 1992 killing of 25 Muslims from the eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik, which borders Serbia. According to the indictment, the three beat and tortured men for weeks, carving crosses on their foreheads, cut off their ears and testicles and forced them to eat them. In 1992, more than 900 Muslim civilians were killed in the Zvornik area.
Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the Prosecutor’s Office, told ISN Security watch that so far they had found some eight examples of instances in which the media could have provoked war crimes and that these could be used should the investigation reach the court. He said that the Prosecutor’s Office had taken the wartime archives from Serbian national television, RTS.
Vekaric said his team had “several examples” of reporting in which “lies” could be linked to strong reactions among people that led to killing someone “just because they saw on television or read in the newspaper something that has nothing to do with reality.”
One of those examples is false reporting by government-controlled media on the murder of Serb civilians in Croatia in 1991. Just days before Vukovar killings, Serbian media broadcast news that Croatian forces had murdered 41 Serb children, aged four to seven, in a primary school in Borovo Selo, near Vukovar.
The story was first reported by Reuters correspondent Vjekoslav Radovic, who claimed that he had seen the bodies of at least 40 small children in the school’s basement. The news rapidly spread among Serbian media, while RTS aired an all-night program on the issue, hosting witnesses claiming that they too had seen the bodies. An RTS journalist even questioned a Croat teenager held by Serb paramilitary forces, pressuring him to admit to the murders.
Though RTS later conceded that the information was false and all witnesses changed their statements to say that they had only seen a dozen closed body bags, which could have contained the bodies of Croats, and Reuters fired Radovic, it was too late. The information had done its damage and was absorbed by Serbs willing to join paramilitary groups in a campaign of revenge.
When Vukovar fell to the Serbs, paramilitaries seized the prisoners, taking some 200 of them to a pig farm in Ovcara, where they were beaten, tortured and killed. Their bodies were later found in mass graves.
Vekaric said that the prosecution was also analyzing statements given by some of those accused and convicted of war crimes. One witness, a Serb paramilitary volunteer, testified during the Vukovar trial that he had joined Serb paramilitary forces in Croatia after watching a news program in Serbia.
He confessed to having participated in the murder of 200 people in Ovcara after seeing stories in Serbian media about crimes committed by Croatian forces against Serb civilians. “I watched the program, and then I went out [to join paramilitary units] and gave them [Croats] what they deserved,” he testified.
This fascinating story should be read in its entirety.
