News media helped make, break Milosevic

The Media and Political Change: Europe

By Rod Sandeen
freedomforum.org

07.01.01

Printer-friendly page

Deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt

ZAGREB, Croatia — The news media helped make and then break former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

In recent months, news reports of war crimes in the Serbian media played an important role in the transfer of Milosevic to The Hague on June 28 to face charges for atrocities committed during the 1998-99 expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo and ultimately for crimes committed during the 1991-95 war in the Balkans, deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt said.

"Who could forget the siege of Dubrovnik?" or the images of detention camps or of atrocities committed against individuals, Blewitt said.

Those images, he said, were provided by journalists who believed it important to bring the facts into the open. The shift in Serbian public opinion against Milosevic started when the press began reporting that the former president and his cronies were covering up war crimes, Blewitt said. "People have to be told the truth," he said.

But during the war, truth often was a casualty. Many journalists in Serbia, according to Petar Lukovic, a magazine editor and columnist who has been covering Milosevic since 1987, reported the war the way the government wanted it reported.

"They are not journalists," he said. "They are guilty of helping and justifying war crimes. If you support war crimes, you cannot be a journalist."

Blewitt is the deputy prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which consisted of six republics in southern Europe. He was in Zagreb to participate in The Freedom Forum's Europe Media Forum on the media and political change in Europe. He was en route June 28 to Zagreb from the Netherlands when the news of Milosevic's transfer broke. Blewitt said he was incommunicado and unaware of the news until he arrived and was informed by a Freedom Forum staffer.

The next day, Blewitt said in remarks to a roomful of about 150 journalists from the former Yugoslavia that the search for the truth began when the news media brought the crimes to the world's attention. He singled out those journalists who broke news about crimes committed in the name of the state. It is dangerous, he said, for journalists to report such news because they can become targets of the government.

"We hold such journalists in great admiration at the tribunal," he said.

Blewitt said the tribunal had been expecting Milosevic's transfer since last week. An investigator from The Hague was in Belgrade waiting to serve a warrant. When the Serbian government overruled a Constitutional Court ruling, the way was cleared for the warrant to be served. Milosevic then was flown to Tuzla in Bosnia and on to The Hague.

Milosevic was arrested on April 1 after being indicted for war crimes in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. Two additional indictments are being prepared, Blewitt said, one for crimes committed in Bosnia and one for crimes committed in Croatia. He said prosecutors plan to roll the three indictments into one so that only one trial needs to be held for Milosevic.

In response to a question, Blewitt said there were no current investigations by the tribunal concerning the acts of journalists during the war. "There will be no indictments against journalists," he said.

Petar Lukovic thinks there should be.

Journalist Petar Lukovic

Serbian journalists portrayed Serbs as the chosen race, creating an atmosphere in which genocide and other war crimes were justified as acts of the state, Lukovic said. "People who did terrible things with their writing were no different than those who gave the order to shoot," he said.

Blewitt said the tribunal was aware of what was being reported in the Serbian media. The tribunal was founded in 1993, two years after the war started on June 27, 1991, in Slovenia. It soon spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. NATO bombing of Serbia began in March 1999 after the Serbs began driving the Albanian minority from Kosovo.

Lukovic said nationalistic journalists in Bosnia and Croatia also supported their government lines. He called the flawed journalism a "moral virus."

He said he had repeatedly criticized the reporting by his fellow journalists in print, and that his criticism had run "everywhere," though he did not specify where. His background includes editorships at XZ and Tajne magazines. He also is a columnist for the weekly Feral Tribune in Croatia and has written for several other publications in the former Yugoslavia.

Lukovic said the majority of journalists working in Serbian media now were the same journalists who fanned the flames of nationalism during the Milosevic years. His track record covering Milosevic "gives me a moral right" to criticize the journalists who supported Milosevic, he said.

"They were not journalists. They were propagandists. A lot of war crimes couldn't have been possible" without those journalists, he said.

He said those same journalists today supported the democratic policies of new Yugoslav president Vojislav Kostunica, who defeated Milosevic in last year's election. They changed politics "in five minutes," he said, on Oct. 5, 2000, the day Milosevic conceded the results of the Sept. 24 election.

Lukovic wants those journalists to stand trial. He said he is not going to give up. "We cannot start a new phase until we deal with the past," he said.

A media studies researcher in Belgrade, Serbia, disagreed with Lukovic's characterization of rank-and-file Serbian journalists as abettors of war crimes. Jovanka Matic, a former journalist who now works for the Institute of Social Services, said the top journalists in the state-controlled media were appointed by the Milosevic government. Those editors set the tone for the coverage and the reporting staff followed their orders, Matic said.

She said the Milosevic government changed policies several times and each time the top people in the state-run media were replaced. The staff, she maintained, tried to do as professional a job as possible under the circumstances.

"It was very difficult to be an independent journalist in Serbia. It required personal courage," Matic said. "Petar became a symbol of independent journalism."

Dragutin Lucic, director of the Croatian Journalists Association, acknowledged a similar journalistic environment in his country. He said his organization was drafting standards for journalists that will separate the propagandists from the professionals.

Blewitt suggested the media had more work to do on the issue of war crimes. Roy Gutman, Newsweek correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Balkan war when he worked for Long Island, N.Y., Newsday, asked if Western governments that ignored the reports of unfolding atrocities should be held responsible for war crimes. Blewitt said journalists should ask those governments that question until they get the right answers.

But, he said, those governments cannot be held criminally responsible. The tribunal is not in the business of prosecuting moral or political actions, he said.

Related

2001 Europe Media Forum
Coverage of 2001 Europe Media Forum  07.01.01

Serb media haven't fared well since fall of Milosevic, report says
Yugoslavian broadcasters' association finds little good news in the current climate of change.  10.08.01