Propaganda in the War on Yugoslavia

Propaganda in the War on Yugoslavia (SPR)

Updated: February 2024
Published: December 2019
Languages: German, English

A review of Western war propaganda during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

Contents

1) Introduction 2) The Serbian “Death Camp” 3) The Sarajevo “Marketplace Massacres” 4) The “Srebrenica Genocide” 5) Kosovo: The “Racak Massacre” 6) Annex: The “Broader Truth”

Introduction

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are generally seen as regional and ethnic conflicts, but from a geo­po­litical perspective, they were about restructuring South­east Europe after the end of the Cold War.

The overall American goal was to break up Yugoslavia and to drive back the influence of Serbia – a historical ally of Russia – in favor of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Slovenians, and Kosovo Albanians. To this end, the US prevented diplomatic solutions and even secretly deployed Islamist combatants, with whom it had previously fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and whom it would later call “Al Qaeda”.

The political and media propaganda concerning the war on Yugoslavia has been well researched and documented by now. Interestingly, however, many commentators are still trying to uphold the official propaganda narrative of the time, in notable contrast to the later war on Iraq, for example.

There may be various reasons for this tenacity. On the one hand, the propaganda in question dates back to the early days of the Internet and is therefore generally less well known to the public. On the other hand, the implications, especially for Europe, are particularly far-reaching in this case.

From today’s perspective, it is a rather trivial statement that most Western media outlets supported the US/NATO war on Yugoslavia, but at the time even critics believed in a “media failure”, especially because the influence of foreign policy groups on media reporting was not yet broadly known.

The following sections provide an overview of propaganda in the war on Yugoslavia as well as references to further literature and documentation. Please note that the analysis does not call into question regional aspects of the conflict or any actual war crimes on any side of the conflict.

1. The Serbian “Death Camp” (1992)

One of the most notorious cases of propaganda concerns the alleged Serbian “death camp” of Trnopolje in Bosnia. The story began in August 1992, when three British TV journalists visited a refugee camp whose inmates emphasized that they were being treated very well (see video below).

The journalists, however, went inside a fenced-in storage area right next to the refugee camp and filmed the men on the outside through a barbed wire fence, making it appear as if the men were imprisoned, which in fact they were not (see site map below). The journalists then asked a Muslim man who looked emaciated due to chronic tuberculosis to take off his T-shirt.

The resulting photograph – carefully cut to size – landed on the front pages of most Western media as “proof” of Serbian “death camps”, which in turn served as justification for NATO’s subsequent intervention in Bosnia, starting with a no-fly zone.

The Trnopolje death camp deception was exposed by a German journalist in 1997. A British magazine republished his article but got sued for libel by the three British TV journalists. The British magazine eventually lost the case and had to file for bankruptcy because it couldn’t prove their intent.

The head of an American PR agency that helped spread the false death camp reports later explained: “We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to be moral.”

An American Newsweek journalist who spread the “Serbian death camp” story and other such deceptions received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and later became an honorary citizen of Sarajevo.

In 2003, shortly before his death, even former Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegociv, admitted in an interview: “I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. () I tried, but the assertion was false. Whatever the horror of these places may have been, there were no extermination camps.”

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Video: The “Serbian death camp” deception (2 min., JBS, 2003)

Images: British film crew, TV screenshot, newspapers, site map

British film crew
Bosnia: Serbian “death camp” deception (1992)
Front pages about Trnopolje
Site map of Trnopolje camp (fenced off storage area at the bottom)

2. The Sarajevo “Marketplace Massacres” (1992-1995)

Another well-known case of propaganda were the so-called “marketplace massacres” during the four-year siege of Sarajevo, in particular the so-called “bread line massacre” of May 1992 and the two so-called “Markale massacres” of February 1994 and August 1995.

These “massacres” were allegedly caused by Bosnian Serb mortar fire and happened shortly before important political consultations at the UN or EU. They ultimately led to a direct military intervention by NATO – the first in its history – and thus to a turnaround in the Bosnian war.

In the cases mentioned above as well as some others, investigations by officers of the UN protection mission came to the conclusion that these attacks had probably been “staged” by the Bosnian Muslim side itself as “propaganda ploys” to “win world sympathy and military intervention”.

The relevant UN reports, however, were kept under wraps. Instead, American media – most notably CNN – and the US government usually claimed without delay that the attacks were real and had probably been carried out by the Bosnian Serb side (see video below).

Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, commander of the UN forces in Sarajevo, wrote about the 1992 incident: “Our people told us there were a number of things that didn’t fit. The street had been blocked off just before the incident. Once the crowd was let in and had lined up, the media appeared but kept their distance. The attack took place, and the media were immediately on the scene.”

About the 1994 incident, a BBC journalist noted with surprise how “television crews were on the scene, filming within seconds of the blast”, while UN officers and even doctors were prevented from entering the site, and all of the alleged 197 victims were carried away within 25 minutes. Others pointed out that the market was in fact closed at the time of the incident (see video below).

Regarding the 1995 incident, the London Sunday Times later revealed that British and French UN ammunition experts had concluded the Serbian side was “not guilty”, but they were then “overruled by a senior American officer”, and NATO air strikes began within less than 48 hours.

US professor Yossef Bodansky, the longtime director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, later described these incidents as “expertly-staged spectacle of gore” that included the use of “corpses of Bosnian troops recently killed in action”.

Twenty years later, the staged Bosnian “marketplace massacres” of 1994/95 were recalled when alleged poison gas attacks during the Syrian war turned out to be of a dubious nature and the results of UN and OPCW investigations were again suppressed to justify military strikes by NATO states.

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Videos (18+)

Images (18+): The staged “marketplace massacres” (1994/95)

Markale I (1994)
Markale I (1994)
Markale I (1994)
Markale I (1994)
Markale I (1994)
Markale I (1994)
Markale II (1995)
Markale II (1995)
Markale II (1995)
Markale II (1995)
Christiane Amanpour (CNN)
Markale II (1995)

Video: The staged “marketplace massacre” of 1994 (BBC, 1 minute)

3. The “Srebrenica Genocide” (July 1995)

The alleged “Srebrenica genocide” in July 1995 is regarded as the sad climax of the Bosnian war. According to the official Western version, backed by the “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” (ICTY) in The Hague, more than 8000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

But according to Phillip Corwin, the highest-ranking UN civilian official in Bosnia during the war, the Western account of events in Srebrenica is part of a “disinformation campaign”. Late US political scientist Edward Herman called it a “gigantic fraud”, and former CIA officer Robert Baer, who was operating in Yugoslavia during the war, spoke of a “manipulation” and “political marketing”.

Indeed, several independent investigations have since contradicted the official Western account.

During the Bosnia war, the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, close to the Serbian border, was a supposedly demilitarized “safe area” protected by UN forces. In reality, Bosnian Muslim forces, led by commander Naser Oric, remained active in Srebrenica and committed dozens of massacres in nearby Bosnian Serb villages, killing about 1,500 civilians between 1992 and 1995. Moreover, the US military chartered so-called “black flights” to secretly supply Bosnian Muslim forces with arms.

Yet in early July 1995, Bosnian Muslim forces and males of military age (16-60), about 12,000 men in total, suddenly left Srebrenica – leaving behind only women, children, and the elderly – and tried to escape, through 80 kilometers of Serb-controlled territory, to the Muslim-controlled city of Tuzla.

In response, Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic, entered Srebrenica, took control of the town and safely evacuated the remaining Muslim families, about 20,000 people, to nearby UN refugee camps, as AP journalists documented and as several supervising UN officers later confirmed.

However, during their 80 kilometer breakout from Srebrenica to Tuzla, the armed Bosnian Muslim column was repeatedly ambushed and attacked by Bosnian Serb forces and lost about 2,000 men. In addition, US aerial photographs show that Bosnian Serb forces took several hundred members of the Muslim column captive, about two hundred of whom were later exchanged for Bosnian Serb captives.

A 2021 study by Israeli historian Gideon Greif confirmed that no genocide and not even a massacre took place in the town of Srebrenica and that most Muslims died in battles during the 80 kilometer march from Srebrenica to Tuzla. The study suggested that about 2,000 Bosnian Muslim captives of the Tuzla column may have been killed elsewhere by Bosnian Serb forces, but even this hypothesis could not be substantiated by comprehensive forensic investigations that took place after the war.

In fact, there are only two confirmed cases in which Muslim captives were killed, and in both cases the circumstances did not correspond to the initial allegations. In Kravica, 10 kilometers north of Srebrenica, 1,000 Muslim prisoners were allegedly executed. In reality, an armed prisoner uprising occurred during which around two dozen Muslims were killed, as can be seen in video recordings.

At the Branjevo farm near Pilica, 50 kilometers north of Srebrenica, it was claimed that Bosnian Serb forces had executed over 1,000 Muslims, but forensic investigators found only 150 bodies and trials showed the executions had been committed not by Serb forces, but by a foreign mercenary group.

One of the members of this mercenary group, the Croat Drazen Erdemovic, later served as the “crown witness” for the prosecution at The Hague, while the other members were never arrested. According to some reports, this rogue mercenary group was paid and controlled by Western intelligence services and was later involved in a coup attempt against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Already in late July 1995, a Dutch UN military officer stationed in Bratunac – a town 10 kilometers north of Srebrenica where executions were said to have taken place – told a Dutch newspaper:

“Everybody is parroting everybody, but nobody shows hard evidence. I notice that in the Nether­lands people want to prove at all costs that genocide has been committed. (…) If exe­cu­tions have taken place, the Serbs have been hiding it damn well. I don’t believe any of it. The day after the collapse of Srebrenica, July 13, I arrived in Bratunac and stayed there for eight days. I was able to go wherever I wanted to. I was granted all possible assistance; nowhere was I stopped.”

Although some spontaneous “reprisal killings” may have taken place in response to previous massacres committed by Naser Oric’s Bosnian Muslim troops, the ICTY trials at The Hague found no evidence of any execution order given at any command level of the Bosnian Serb forces, and no Bosnian Serb soldier or commander was ever convicted of direct involvement in any executions.

Instead, the former Srebrenica chief of police and other Muslim officials revealed that Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic had privately informed them in 1995 that the unexpected evacuation and “sacrifice” of Srebrenica was part of a deal with US President Bill Clinton. According to these testimonies by Muslim officials, Clinton told Izetbegovic that a NATO military intervention was only possible if the Bosnian Serbs could be accused of having killed at least 5,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.

Ultimately, the Srebrenica story was used to achieve three strategic goals. First, to launch a NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that led to the US-imposed Dayton agreement; second, to divert attention from the US-backed massacres committed by Naser Oric’s Muslim forces against Serb civilians; and third, to justify US-supported operations by the Croatian Army that displaced a quarter million Serbs from Croatia – the largest ethnic expulsion in Europe since World War II.

The “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” in The Hague, largely funded and staffed by the United States, later tried to enshrine the official Western version of events concerning Srebrenica and the Yugoslav wars while mostly disregarding any contradicting evidence. In some countries, there were even lawsuits against researchers questioning the official Srebrenica story.

In a 2014 talk on “The Criminalisation of International Justice”, Canadian ICTY defense attorney Christopher Black noted: “The point of these tribunals, why they were set up, is basically propaganda. The propaganda is meant to demonize the government which is being overthrown and to cover up the real role of the United States and its allies. That is the only role these tribunals really have.”

If Bosnian Serb forces did not commit any large-scale massacres at Srebrenica, how was the official figure of 8,000 deaths arrived at? According to independent investigators, this was achieved by exaggerating deaths at Kravica and Pilica and by adding combat deaths and even survivors of the Tuzla column as well as combat deaths at nearby places that occurred throughout the entire war.

Clearly, even events with a high number of reported victims should always be examined critically. This was already shown in 1989 by the supposed “Timisoara massacre” with 4630 reported deaths, which later turned out to have been a “psychological operation” to help launch the Romanian revolution.

The NATO intervention in Bosnia was the first so-called “humanitarian intervention” and led to the so-called “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine that has since been used to justify additional NATO wars against Libya and several other Arab and African countries.

While Serb troops did not massacre Muslim civilians in Srebrenica, US-backed Muslim troops under Naser Oric and international jihadists carried out numerous serious massacres of Bosnian Serb civilians. This was the real genocide of the Bosnian war, but it was largely ignored by Western media.

Documentaries

Video Footage

War Crimes (18+)

Articles and Books

Images

Srebrenica, Bosnia, Serbia
Breakout of the Bosnian Muslim column
Time Magazine, September 1995
Albright at the UN (August 1995)
Clinton, Albright, Izetbegovic (1997)
Senator Joe Biden in Sarajevo (1993)
Bill Clinton at a Srebrenica memorial event
Bosnia: “Srebrenica genocide” deception (1995)
Serbian refugees from Croatia (1995)

Documentary: Srebrenica – A Town Betrayed (60 min., 2010)

4. Kosovo: The “Racak massacre” and more (1999)

After the separation of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia from Yugoslavia, the US and NATO started another war in 1999 against the remainder of Yugoslavia to additionally separate the province of Kosovo from Serbia. This war, without a UN mandate, again had to be justified by propaganda and disinformation.

In particular, Western politicians and media discussed alleged Serbian ethnic cleansing plans and atrocities in Kosovo that later turned out to have been fabricated or staged. Important examples included the alleged Serbian “Operation Horseshoe” and the supposed Serbian “Racak massacre”.

In the case of the supposed “Racak massacre”, Finnish forensic experts later concluded that the bodies of Albanian KLA fighters killed in action had been moved, reclothed, and passed off as civilian victims of an execution. The place of the supposed massacre was then visited by an OSCE delegation led by controversial US diplomat William Walker who quickly blamed the Serbian forces.

In the case of “Operation Horseshoe” – a supposed Serbian plan to expel Albanians from Kosovo – retired German brigadier general Heinz Loquai later found it had been fabricated by the German Ministry of Defense. In fact, Kosovo Albanians started fleeing only in response to NATO airstrikes.

After the war, the head of American PR firm Ruder Finn, which had produced or amplified many of these dubious stories about the situation in Kosovo, stated in an interview for a Dutch TV documentary: “To be honest, when NATO finally attacked in 1999, we opened a bottle of champagne.”

Moreover, a Kosovo Albanian negotiator later acknowledged in a BBC documentary: “There was this foreign diplomat who once told me, ‘Look, unless you pass the quota of five thousand (Albanian) deaths you’ll never have anybody permanently present in Kosovo from foreign diplomacy.'”

Prior to the war, the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) was recognized as an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group involved in heroin trafficking by both Britain and the United States. Yet one year after the war, British media revealed that KLA fighters had been secretly trained and equipped by the CIA and British special forces. In 2011, an investigation by the Council of Europe found that former KLA commanders, including Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, were involved in organ trafficking.

During the 78-day attack against Serbia and its capital Belgrade, led by US General Wesley Clark, the US used toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium ammunition, bombed the Chinese embassy, the headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia, a passenger train, civilian infrastructure and several power plants and chemical plants, causing widespread environmental contamination and health hazards.

As a result of the NATO war against Serbia, Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo and NATO troops (KFOR) moved in. The United States established Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest US foreign military bases, in Kosovo. Over half of the Serbian population was expelled from Kosovo. In 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence as a country and was swiftly recognized by most NATO states. Nevertheless, today about half of all Kosovo Albanians state that they want to leave the country.

In 2000, the President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, was overthrown by a US-sponsored “color revolution” led by the “Otpor movement”. In 2001, Milosevic was arrested and extradited to the US-initiated “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” in The Hague. The five-year trial ended without a verdict when Milosevic died of a heart attack in his prison cell in 2006.

Documentaries

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Images (18+)

William Walker (USA/OSCE) visiting the “Racak massacre”
The staged “Racak massacre”
Rudolf Scharping, German Minister of Defense
Radio Television Serbia Bombing
Grdelica train bombing
Bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
Novi Sad bridge bombing
Camp Bondsteel (2000)
A statue of Bill Clinton in Pristina, Kosovo

Video: “Moral Combat: NATO at War” (BBC, 45 minutes, 2000)

Annex: The “Broader Truth”

In 2018, former Guardian journalist Melanie Phillips explained how The Guardian had published lies as truth because they contributed to the “broader truth”, that is, the official narrative. (2 min.)

Additional References

Media Coverage

Some of the media reports about this investigation.

See also

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