Posted on 09/27/2001 8:38:14 AM PDT by Voronin
REGIONAL REPORT: Media Crimes
Will Balkan journalists suspected of encouraging war crimes escape prosecution?
By Amra Kebo in Sarajevo (TU No. 236, September 17-22, 2001)
The Hague tribunal is being urged to start prosecuting journalists who incited ethnic hatred and genocide in the former Yugoslavia.
So far prosecutors have shown no enthusiasm for hauling journalists before the tribunal, insisting there's not enough evidence to do so.
The matter, though, is being taken seriously by sections of the general public and press associations in the Balkans, and was prominently aired at a round-table conference examining the role of media in the conflict, in Mostar, on September 6.
Organised by the Sarajevo Media Centre and The Hague Tribunal Outreach Programme, the meeting drew large numbers of journalists from Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Croatia along with eminent local intellectuals.
Most of the participants agreed it was necessary to establish a journalistic code of ethics to prevent media incitement in the future. No decisive steps were promised but there was a general wish to see The Hague act against journalists suspected of crimes. Many considered the media just as responsible for the Balkan conflict as the politicians and their military commanders.
One of the worst cases of media incitement was a Bosnian Serb TV programme about victims of the 1994 massacre at the Sarajevo Markale market, where a120mm shell fired from hilltops surrounding the city killed 66 people and wounded 140.
The programme's late editor, Risto Djogo, first said the victims were Serbs, then claimed the bodies shown on TV at the time were actually mannequins, placed there to discredit Serbs besieging Sarajevo. He subsequently brought mannequins into the studio to demonstrate his theory.
Cases of media-inspired hatred still arise today. This month the Serbian Oslobodjenje published an article which the OSCE and the Office of the High Representative said was "filled with paranoid anti-Semitic phrases unworthy of any media in Europe". Unlike the electronic media in Bosnia, which is supervised by the Communication Regulatory Agency, there are as yet no penalties for print media misconduct.
Legal experts argue there's no legal impediment to The Hague prosecuting journalists. They point out that editors of radio stations and newspapers stood trial at the Rwanda tribunal for violations of humanitarian law. The entire media structure in that country was held responsible for incitement to massacre.
Participants at the Mostar meeting agreed the media in former Yugoslavia were also an instrument for the dissemination of ethnic hatred. Mehmed Halilovic, an ombudsman for the media in the Bosnian Federation, later told IWPR, "Without them (the journalists) the politicians could not do what they did. Journalists carried out half the task, the soldiers did the rest. They led poorly educated people to commit crimes and encouraged them to behave like criminals."
The journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic believes The Hague should prosecute those suspected of carrying out such a policy, as a means of preventing inflammatory wartime propaganda in future.
Tribunal spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said, however, that the court's official position is that "direct indictments against journalists in former Yugoslavia have not been envisaged because there is a big difference between a direct call for killing and the dissemination of hatred."
But Mirko Klarin, editor of the SENSE news agency, is optimistic that journalists guilty of crimes will ultimately be brought to justice. "The fact that they still have not been summoned to The Hague, does not mean that they have been given an amnesty," he said. "I am sure tribunal prosecutors are investigating those cases, and we have to rely on their assessment that they do not have sufficient evidence at the moment."
More doubtful observers, however, believe the tribunal already has its hands full in prosecuting men like Slobodan Milosevic and will have to relegate any consideration of pursuing journalists to the back burner.
Amra Kebo is an IWPR assistant editor in Bosnia, and a member of IWPR's war crimes reporting network. She is also editor with the Sarajevo daily, Oslobodjenje.
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If you couldn`t read my reply because of my spellllllling,I am sending you all the letters and punctuation marks that I missed so that you can fill in the missing parts!
The idea was to make YOU laugh!!!
And I did it!
My pleasure!
But,I am still waiting for a reply from Ustasha and Bluesheeter,regarding this article.
What do you make of it after reading my posts and facts about (deliberate) propaganda in it?
When I read articles of this kind I always remember a dialogue from the movie "Deep Impact"(have you seen it?) between a young jurnalist and some senator in the marina.He told her,as far as I remember:"Young lady,before you print anything try to remember that,before you became a journalist you were a PERSON!"Or something like that!How true.
I think that I will send an e-mail to IWPR and Amira Kebo and ask her couple of questions!Just for fun.
OK,let me clarify for you,which I shouldn`t because you are not stupid.
Amira Kebo accuses "Serbian Oslobodjenje"for war mongering but,"Oslobodjenje" is Bosnian pro-government daily,owned by Bosnian Government ang Germans!Read my previous posts!And,Amira works for "Oslobodjenje"!
I found it almost impossible that there is another(Serbian) daily with the same name in Bosnia!Do you have any information about it?
If we discard a printing mistake,what is an intention of the author in publishing such lies??
Nationality is irrelevant Bluester,lies are not!Read the article again and my previous posts and than make your own conclusions.
Partly for our dear and esteemed members of Freerepublic, mostly for the tens of thousands who are 'lurkers' who would never otherwise see this info. The war is over, now the propaganda needs to be dissected and laid bare for everyone to see. Why the hell should I and others wait 20 years for a historian to write a real account of what happened? The people must know how they are lied to and manipulated.
VRN
See my post #75.
VRN
Plus, I noticed a common point about weak brains: they all wave are hight about their superior intellect.
I was talking about the views of people presented here, from various countries. I don't think you really understood me.
Now, as to mujahadeen....funny you should ask. I just spoke with a man this afternoon...he was a widower with 2 teenaged sons when he arrived and now after 3 years he has met a very nice American woman and they are getting married. They are both artists...that is how they met...at a community art show, while exhibiting of their paintings. She is converting to Orthodoxy and I was just invited to the wedding.
While I was speaking to him I asked him about his town in Bosnia...Sanki Most.
He said it was under seige from the Mujahadeen and Bosnian regulars. He called them all "DEVILS"!!
He has many, many Bosnian Muslim friends here who were NOT with the Izbegavitch forces....they were something like, loyalists to Yugoslavia....Fetric's(spelling??) troops."
Against a quote from the article I posted #78 on this thread:
We entered Sana, you Vlah mutherfuckers! [Vlah is a derogatory term for Serbs; it has racist connotations and implies non-Slav origin, lack of education, bad manners, laziness etc.], is the headline of Kljucanin's exclusive report about the liberation of Sanski Most published in Bosnjak on October 31 1995. The article is introduced with the following paragraph: "I've been driving, driving, driving. I've been driving through the Sanski Most region. I have been dreaming about the day when I would be able to drive through the BOSNIAK Sana [Sanski Most region]. Through a cleansed Bosniak town, without a single Serb. And I've lived to see that day. Ignoring captured Serbs, who are, already, under guard, cleaning the streets of Sanski Most, there are no more Serbs in the town.(...) But, I am consoling myself, there is a lot of garbage in Sanski Most, there will be plenty of work for many more Vlahs."
However, Kljucanin never wrote in Bosnjak anything that would compare with the Ljiljan editorial from February 23 1994: "There are 500 Serb orphans in Ugljevik. Praised be God! The Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina has so far sent to hell about 50,000 Chetniks. Praise the Lord! Serb mothers will in the future, as Ibrishim would say, give birth to ice cubes instead of children. Praised be God!(..) A Serb starts resembling a human being only after his death. Or in captivity." There is only one problem: this article was also signed by Zilhad Kljucanin!
Maybe Kljucanin spurred on the "DEVILS" surrounding Sanski Most. Kljucanin's vile writings are equally as bad as what Hitler said about the Jews. If journalists have to go to the Hague for promoting genocide, this guy damned himself thoroughly.
Role of Islam in Applied Cannibalism
It is interesting that Ljiljan and Zmaj never had good relations, although they consistently had very similar editorial policies. True, in the first issues of Ljiljan it is difficult to find anything similar to the infamous articles by A.T. Only the editorial material indicated the path taken by this Bosniak magazine published in Ljubljana.
However, Kljucanin never wrote in Bosnjak anything that would compare with the Ljiljan editorial from February 23 1994: "There are 500 Serb orphans in Ugljevik. Praised be God! The Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina has so far sent to hell about 50,000 Chetniks. Praise the Lord! Serb mothers will in the future, as Ibrishim would say, give birth to ice cubes instead of children. Praised be God!(..) A Serb starts resembling a human being only after his death. Or in captivity." There is only one problem: this article was also signed by Zilhad Kljucanin!
The worst concequence of the recent bombing is that free speach is now under attack now in the US. The terrorists are getting what they want.
When jounalists intentionally fabricate evedence in order to decieve that is another issue. In the US , market forces punish and therefore prevent that to a large extent. That's not necessarily true in Bosnia however.
Their missinformation was partially responsible for murder torcher and rape. So , should they to be held partially responsible for their speach even if they didn't participate directly ? That's a touph one.
Even in free societies inciting to riot in illegal even if what the inciters say is true. If it's not true , are they even more responsible. I think , yes.
This quote by bluester was a good one.
"You know what's really troubling me Pericles? Every single case of Serb attrocities (Racak, Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Trnpolje....) has been denied here, its almost become a practice to deny, justify, minimize anything that leads to Serb crimes comitted against others, while having no problem accpeting whatever is brought up from the Serb side. And if it's not denied, then it's supposed to be self-bombing attacks, the nationality of the victims is questioned, together with claims that children that were killed were simply KLA soldiers (in case of Kosovo) or Mujahadeen soldiers in Bosnia?!? "
That is a very good point. This attitude of constent denial makes the arguments by those people that practice this much less effective. We ( the US ) are not naturally allied to the Muslims but the Serbs. The Serbs screwed up big time and payed dearly. Now they need to move on and start froming freindships again with the powers that can help them , like the Germans after WWII , instead of desperately trying to deny the obvious. That only hurts them.
2: Re: Bluester, 1 or two people may completely deny that the Serbs did any wrong at all but if you think that represents all of us, then I can only say that you have not read very many posts here on Freerepublic. Most of us agree that it was a civil war and nasty things happen in civil war, on all sides. What we reject is that the Serbs were any worse than the others. There has been throughout the 90s, a clear media campaign running from the US to demonize the Serbs (I can post quotes from the head of Hill and Knowleton etc. etc.) and deliberatly exaggerate the crimes that happened.
I have posted numerous sources (on other threads too) on the Bosnian Moslem strategies - a number of military personel/politicians etc. have written that Izetbegovic killed his own civilians etc. Re: Srebrenica, I can give the Clinton quote from '93 that he needed the Serbs to murder 7000 Moslems to intervene. How many have been found (~3.5k), who are they? How did they die? etc. etc.
If you are so convinced, then why do you bother here? I know it is much easier to not as questions. As our Brit Tony Cavanagh said, 'it was a dirty war'. What do you think that means???
VRN
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