The Cruel Touching Up of the Bloody War

Misha Glenny, BBC

It is the general conclusion of every analysis of the civil war in Yugoslavia that the domestic press played a malignant role in feeding the flames of war. Foreign journalists always ardently agree on this and, as a rule, they comment, with repugnance, on what their "aboriginal" colleagues had done, occasionally expressing respect for certain exceptions. The Yugoslav press, they say, incited the Yugoslav nations against one another. However, if one day American planes bomb Belgrade, will western journalists, following the same logic, take this to be their responsibility? Just like domestic journalists before them, when coming to the battlefront, many foreign reporters took sides in the conflict and started calling on their governments to take to weapons. This led someone in the BBC to think, after which Roland Keating made a short television film which clearly showed how certain leading reporters in the most influential media in the west hope out loud that American planes would come to "finish off the job". It was only Phil Davison of the London INDEPENDENT who said those few ordinary, coherent sentences that we were told were the golden rules of independent and professional journalism: "It is very important in a conflict such as this one that emotions be controlled, since the emotions of those who are fighting have totally gotten out of control. If we journalists let them draw us into that, we will just aggravate the situation. This happened on several occasions in the Bosnian conflict: for instance, when the journalists who do not fully understand the problem, gave, according to my opinion, one-sided versions of the events. This is why there are so many calls for the bombardment of Belgrade and so on. I consider these to be unjustified emotional reactions".

The problem, of course, does not lie in the fact that journalists, who react to blood and tears just like all human beings, have their private favorites. The problem is that these "reactions from the stomach" are recognizable in every line that is published in the media that are considered to be the shrines of unbiased and balanced reporting, in which every fact "is turned over twice" before it is published and where every evaluation should be "looked straight into the eye". One of the few who has not succumbed to that temptation, Misha Glenny of the BBC radio, has given an accurate diagnosis of the anxiety foreign journalists feel in Sarajevo: "The problem in Sarajevo is the fact that it is the Serbs who are constantly shooting at you: the anti-Serbian paranoia can find fertile ground nowhere like in Sarajevo."

The emotional and political favoritism of journalists, which is, in principle, undesirable in this business, has contributed to this conflict being extremely unequal from the very beginning. One of the sides had almost all the weaponry, while the other had all the favour of the big powers. The side that threw loads on grenades on Sarajevo was also commanded by hated "red generals". All the sympathy turned to the victim. However, western journalists did not become blind to the fine nuances of the Yugoslav conflict only because of their "soft heart". The BBC's leading television foreign affairs reporter, Kate Adie, pinpointed the very essence of the problem, with disappointing sincerity and insight, in her agency's poll concerning the moral dilemmas when reporting from Yugoslavia: "At home, viewers like to identify with one of the sides in the conflict. Where are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? And when you try to report on something like Yugoslavia, where everyone is against everyone, where no one is totally good, and no one totally bad, you lose viewers. I do not want to say that viewers like simplification, the thing is that in observing any complex problem, people want to know who is good and who is evil, what is right and what is wrong. And when this isn't clear, people start losing sympathy and interest".

No one wants to lose viewers, especially not a celebrated BBC television reporter. For this reason, perhaps, her reporting from Sarajevo fitted so well into the concept she herself set out. This brings to mind one of her more successful reports, broadcast last September. A baby was born in a French hospital, but there was not even enough water for the child to be bathed. A BBC camera found itself there and recorded the several dramatic moments until someone, by some miracle, brought a plastic bottle with water for the baby to be bathed. The viewers who "like to identify with one of the sides in the conflict" had no objections. Those who like full information and who are also more familiar with the then state of affairs in Sarajevo than the ordinary British viewer of the evening news, did. They were a bit annoyed because Kate Adie ignored the fact that, at that same time, there was plenty of water at the Holiday Inn hotel, only a five minute walk from the French hospital. Foreign journalists, and they were not the only ones, because, at the time, the local football team, along with the players' wives and children were staying at the Holiday Inn, had approximately a bath every second day. And when there was no water, UNPROFOR supplied the hotel with water cisterns.

For this reason, the question being asked is: in the terrible misfortune that has befallen the citizens of Sarajevo, can someone be allowed to "stage" events for the needs of the evening news in London, even under the pretext of wanting to help those people? Is that professional and moral? Isn't there enough original misery at hand? Will the hell of the city ever be hellish enough for the taste of journalists so that there would be no need for "retouching"? The same question should be posed to the GUARDIAN's reporter Maggie O'Kane, in whose reports all the "chetniks" are "beer drinkers" in the best of cases, while the defenders of Sarajevo are naturally gifted. Her typical interviewee among the defenders is "a young man who speaks well English and German. He used to be a taxi driver and he was lovely, handsome, young and strong on May 22nd 1992, and in the text headlined "Save Sarajevo, Mr.Major" Maggie O'Kane doesn't seem to believe that her readers will know how to make a difference between good and evil if the good doesn't look nice, strong and beautiful, and if the bad isn't physically ugly. She is afraid, it seems, that a deeply moving description of the sufferings of a Muslim family forced to leave its home in Kozarac and to flee to Czechoslovakia will not be enough for the readers to realize who the victim in the conflict is, and who the villain, so she adds at the end: "Hitler was an amateur" (GUARDIAN July 29th last year). With all due respect for the undoubtable sincerity and dedication of Maggie O'Kane to the side she opted for, her reader must wonder: isn't she, in her diligence, forging the past? Or the present events? Or both?

That Hitler was no amateur is clear to many of her colleagues who have dealt with the Yugoslav civil war with somewhat less passion and a more unbiased approach (the article by Robert Fisk in the INDEPENDENT on August 15th last year). The fact is, however, that the reputable world press has shown double standards in its editorial policy concerning the Balkans: the Anglo-Saxon criteria in journalism are, it seems, strictly applied only when reporting from the Anglo-saxon soil. Superficiality of the kind that would not even be tolerated from a local community in London, is tolerated from the Balkans.

In the case of the Yugoslav civil war, something that experts call "the consensus of the media" has been reached. "Consensus in journalism" is a frequent phenomenon in the case of wars. People from the western media like to think (and to think they remember) that in the case of the war in Vietnam, for instance, there was a consensus of the liberal intellectuals against the war, including the media. This is what "liberal intellectuals" mention when they explain to both themselves and to others their own calls for a western military intervention in Bosnia. The problem is in the fact that the press, along with liberal intellectuals, supported, for full five years, America's engagement in Vietnam (which was always called an "engagement" and never an "aggression" - the term "aggressor" in the liberal western press was at the time reserved for the Viet Cong, whose fighters were the South Vietnamese who fought on their own soil). In time, most of the journalists became bothered by the fact that the war was being waged ineffectively and that the Americans were losing it, and it was only in the last years of the war that the famous American liberal consensus against the war was reached. (See the book of the winner of the Pulitzer award, David Halberstam "The Powers That Be - the Empire of the Media".) Today there exists a consensus of the western media in favor of western intervention in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. The question is how long that consensus would last if intervention would not be carried out with "surgical precision", and especially as effectively as many imagine. Since the very beginning, the Belgian press was a great advocate of the idea about the West protecting the interests of Zagreb and Sarajevo in the Balkans. When a Belgian observer was killed in Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina), a leading Belgian daily published a full-page article entitled "Should a Belgian Die for Bosnia?"