State Of Michigan asbestos Program
A Victory Of Sorts For Journalism Ethics In The Previous Yugoslavia.
Serbias government run television RTS says sorry last week to the publics of the previous Yugoslavia for serving as a propaganda tool of wartime Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
This move is probably going to be followed by apologies from other state broadcasters in the states of the previous Yugoslavia as all of them share responsibility for enflaming ethnic animosity, although RTS maybe more pointedly served the interests of glad-handers.
It is a significant development on an ethical level, though it is not likely to finish in any major consequences for journalism or any major enhancements in the field : no editors or newshounds were held accountable for their fake and biased reporting, and indeed a lot of them keep active and influential.
The apology is the first ever issued by Serbias state broadcaster, which was one of the symbols of Milosevics time marked by wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
The stations newly appointed managing board recounted its statement that in the sad events of the 1990s, RTS with its reporting on numerous occasions hurt the feelings, moral integrity and dignity of the Serbian voters, intellectuals, members of political opposition, hacks, ethnic and spiritual minorities, as well as certain near by peoples and states.
The statement also said that the content of RTS programs at the time had been purposively engineered to discredit the Serbian opposition and its leaders.
The apology will certainly represent a positive step toward improved relations among the countries of the Western Balkans "across the region media played a decisive role in the violence. The big issue is whether the RTS apology "or the possible future apologies by state broadcasters in Croatia and Bosnia "is sufficient ; whether the big names in those media outlets should be tried for war crimes, as their indoctrination inspired many murders.
When he attained power in the latter 1980s, Milosevic allocated trusted associates to head the nation's broadcaster and turned it into his systems tool all till 2000 when he was toppled. From the start of the conflicts in 1991, RTS management and hacks portrayed Serbs as the victims of ethnic attacks in the previous Yugoslavia. This rhetoric led many Serbs to volunteer for the frontline, looking for revenge.
In 1991, while reporting from the Croatian frontlines, RTS journalists fueled anti-Croatian hysteria by mentioning that Croatian wrestlers were cutting off Serb childrens fingers and making necklaces out of them. They also claimed that Croats were suffocating Serb babies with plastic bags in a nursery in eastern Croatia. The reports were later proven to be fake, but the damage was done.
One witness, a Serb paramilitary volunteer, gave evidence in the Vukovar war crimes trial that he had joined Serb paramilitary forces in Croatia after watching a newscast in Serbia. When Vukovar slipped to the Serbs, paramilitaries grabbed captives, taking some 2 hundred of them to a pig farm in Ovcara where they were beaten, tortured and finished. Their bodies were later found in mass graves.
In 2009, Serbian prosecutors began investigations against a couple of journalists and editors from pro-Milosevic media for inflaming reporting in the 1990s.
Serbias Special War Crimes Prosecutors Office has launched a preliminary investigation into the role of reporters in inciting war crimes in the previous Yugoslavia in the 1990s, concentrating on reporting on atrocities in Vukovar in Croatia, and the Bosnian city of Zvornik. While prosecutors announced they might have initial results within two months, in late 2009, the job proved more difficult than forecasted. The Serbian Prosecutors Office declared the aim wasn't to persecute reporters, but to establish whether there were elements of illegal activity in reporting.
Naturally, it wasn't only RTS that contributed to the spreading of ethnic hate ; a number of other media outlets like daily papers Politika and Vecernje novosti, and the Tanjug news agency served as the as mouthpieces of the Milosevic regime. They enjoyed all the entitlements of the regime, including the exclusivity of reporting from war sections.
Neither was Serbian media alone in this practice.
Though no debate has been launched on this issue in Croatia and Bosnia, there is no doubt the wartime media outlets in both countries will also have to answer some hard questions. With the RTS apology out there, the international community will expect others to follow. Serbia is working conscientiously to win EU applicant status this year and is under pressure to show that it is heading away from the jingoist impulses that drove those wars.
Most likely, ex-Yugoslavian media won't face any war crimes probes at the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the previous Yugoslavia (ICTY), as media did in the case of the genocide in Rwanda. It might be complicated for prosecutors to build firm links between wartime reporting and war crimes, and the problem of establishing that journalists intentionally incited atrocities in previous Yugoslavia will probably go unmet.
Most lately, a Bosnian investigative newshound was sacked after photographs was released on the web of him reporting for the Bosnian Serb radio station from Srebrenica on the day the city was engulfed by the Bosnian Serb military. In the pictures, Slobodan Vaskovic and his comrades were interviewing an aged Bosnian Muslim captive, forcing him to say that the Bosnian Serb armed forces was liberating the town from the mujahideens and therefore the Bosniak military had committed atrocities against Serbs in the hamlets surrounding Srebrenica.
It would be arbitrary to accuse Vaskovic and other correspondents for the Srebrenica massacre, but such reporting certainly might have influenced members of the Serb regular and paramilitary forces to seek revenge and escalate the conflict. Many of these wartime writers and editors remain public figures, some working in media outlets as writers, columnists and trainers of a younger generation of writers, while the others are professors and even ambassadors. The inquiry into the extent of their role in the conflicts certainly should be conducted totally and the general public should be aware of who they may be. This is vital as public broadcasters in all 3 countries continue to produce biased, unsourced and highly picky reporting, especially when it comes to issues of war crimes and their neighbors.
Excerpts from previous Yugoslav wartime media :
-"It appears that Muslim extremists invented the most terrifying crime in the world. Last night they fed Serb youngsters to the lion at the Sarajevo Zoo." RTS broadcasted this story by their Bosnian correspondent, Rada Djokic, in 1992 after a tipoff from Bosnian Serb infantrymen from the frontline.
-"Muslims are still in Makarska." Bosnian Croat Smiljko Sagolj reported this for Croatian television after many Bosnians sought sanctuary in the Croatian resort city after the start of the Bosniak-Croat war. One day after the story was broadcast, a bomb exploded in a Bosnian refugee camp near Makarska.
-"Every Muslim should pick a Serb to kill when the time comes." A Bosniak ( Bosnian Muslim ) reporter wrote this in the mag "Zmaj od Bosne," which is connected with the key Bosniak Party for Democratic Action (SDA).
-"Turk ladies claim that we rape them, but just recently in a refugee camp one of the rape victims gave birth to a black child." Bosnian Serb anchor Risto Djogo related in a Bosnian Serb TV (SRT) news broadcast as reported tagza.com.
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