Can any more horrifying and more loathsome war crime be imagined? Serbian snipers are offered a reward of some 2,500 krunas (the equivalent of 300 pounds) for every child they shoot? This story was launched at the beginning of summer 1992, when the Serbo-Croatian war was already in full swing in Bosnia, and Western media were already over-saturated with reports on barbarian atrocities. The source was a volunteer aid worker, Steve Watt, who was interviewed in a BBC news service programme one Sunday morning. Serbs "target the children," said Watt, "because of the money and because they are easier to kill". I le asserted that some 400 children were shot dead, while 11,000 were injured, as a result of the Serbs' cynical rewards.

A Good Story

As most editorial boards would say, this was one good story. The following day it was transmitted on the BBC World Service news programme, which can be heard worldwide by 300 million listeners in English-speaking regions. British journalist Karl Waldron tried to investigate the story. It turned out that Watt had heard it from some Croats he had met during his journey with a humanitarian aid convoy.

This was a well-known story to the Croatian public. First appearing in an article written by Irce Zortic, it gained credence when it was cited in almost all the Croatian media and was transmitted by Radio Croatia, the national (state) radio station.

Waldron got in touch with Irce Zortic who stood firmly to his story, but admitted that it had been given to him by the Croatian Ministry of Information. He did not try to check it out, because "you can't expect us to ring the Serbs and then believe them when they say this information isn't true". This, however, was not the end of the investigation. Waldron established that the story had already been circulating in close diplomatic circles at the time it was "delivered" to Zortic.

And it had found its way to those circles owing to a fax machine in an office on M Street in Washington, D.C.. This fax machine which - as reported by an increasingly large number of sources - played a central role in the media war about former Yugoslavia, is located in the PR of fices of Ruder & Finn, which receives US $ 18,000 a month from the govemments of Croatia and Bosnia to take care of their image in the international public.

This firm receives a flood of information from these two clients. Its employees then select strategically suitable stories - such as this "Cash for a Corpse" story, and transmit them by fax to pivotal creators of public opinion worldwide. "It's not our job to check the accuracy of the infommation. Neither do we have the resources to do so", Waldron was told by Rhoda Paget. In addition she said that the Serbian government has a similar arrangement with a British PR office, Ian Greers Associates. These firms are jointly making efforts to show the intemational public the background of the debate about the Balkan war.

The Media Are a Front

"Truth is the first victim of any war." That famous saying by American senator Hiram Johnson has been well used over time. This Balkan war has offered the strongest proof so far that the electronic media and information technology have changed the public to such an extent that the above saying should be worded more sharply: The media have become the leading partisans of nationalism. The media have become irreplaceable both in preparing and waging wars. In the beginning it was difficult to substantiate this mechanism, because the editorial boards of all the media enterprises were running after "good stories", at least one new story a day. Now, however, with the war going on for more then three years, a number of critical joumalists are slowly managing to shed light on a different picture.

One of them is Dubravka Ugresic, a Croat. At the beginning of the summer, in the Index on Censorship magazine she published an interesting story about how a "culture of falsehood" was functioning in her country. In 1981, the citizens of Duga Resa, a town in Croatia, planted a small forest, recounts Mrs. Ugresic. "The 88 trees were a birthday present for Tito." Today this forest has been cut down by the citizens of the town: they said they had removed "the last remnants of the communist regime". Those who cut down the forest were the same men who had planted it. How could it come to this? By a systematic modification of the national collective memory, asserts Ugresic. Namely, with the war as a backdrop, now there is no place left for any individual memories. Each story is fit into the "young nation's struggle against the Serbian war of extermination". Through terror, one falsehood about a nation is removed from the collective memory, only to be replaced by a new, quite similar falsehood. "Some ten years ago the ethnic groups of former Yugoslavia were weeping at the funeral of their aged father-figure, Tito," writes Ugresic. "Those same ethnic groups now unanimously claim that they were living under the heel of 'a communist dictator'. The most extreme elements are reacting by using plaster figures of Tito's head for trapshooting. "In this way, they have started to cast out the demons of their own communism with considerable delay (10 years later)", notes Ugresic. The fact that there was almost no intellectual opposition to the Yugoslav regime is completely disregarded today.

How else could those surviving the war face the future without being ashamed? Now they all remember that they were living an oppressed life in the "dungeon of ethnic groups". Ugresic cites a number of examples of writers whose work was regularly published in Tito's time, and who now state that (before) they were never given the floor. She is quite convinced that she knows where to place the responsibility: with the media. Already several years before the outbreak of the war, Serbian and Croatian press - orchestrated by the govemments from Belgrade and Zagreb - started with the systematic creation of an image of their own people as a victim, and an image of the opposite side as the eternal aggressor.

Even the smallest events were interpreted in that light, contributing to the spread of fear and paranoia in both camps. "Slander is a more powerful weapon than a gun, tank or warplane", says the chairman of the Croatian Alliance Against Slander. This organization intervenes when writers, such as Ugresic, try to shade the truth. Such dissidents are collectively proclaimed "enemies of the people". This is often worked out with well-organized support from television and the press, from other writers - even from the members of the Croatian PEN, says Ugresic.

A Discharge of Words

With the continuing war, the nationalistic regimes' are tightening their control over the media. Having the greatest possible number of journalists defining themselves as partisans keeps this system live. Maja Sever, 22, from Zagreb stated to theReportingEurope magazine (published by the students of the European Correspondence School of Journalism): "When the war started, I wondered how I could make my contribution. Since I didn't know to handle a gun I made up my mind to become a journalist. I wanted to serve my country in that way." Today, such an attitude toward this profession is a rule throughout former Yugoslavia.

At the beginning of the summer, the "International Center Against Censorship Article 19" (unofficially referring to the Article on freedom of speech in the Charter on Human Rights) published comprehensive documentation on the role of the media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This 270-page report was published under the title "Forging War". Pedantically systematic, this report covers all the major media in the three republics. It offers abundant proof that the Serbian and Croatian press were systematically enhancing the creation of nationalistically hostile pictures and crushing the people's last resistance to ethnic cleansing. In January 1992, the Serbs and Croats signed a cease-fire after the first war, waged in the regions populated by the Serbs in Croatia. "According to Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, chairman of the Croatian Helsinki Committee on Human Rights, about 15,000 homes owned by Serbs in Croatia were destroyed to a greater or lesser extent during the first 15 months atter the cease-fire", writes Article 19. This ethnic persecution, "obviously tolerated by the government, went on practically unnoticed by the Croatian media, which were increasingly focusing their efforts on depicting the Serbs as mortal enemies of the Croats".

The Media War Crime

The cultural editor of the Helsingborgs Dagblad (Sweden) Soren Sommelious states: "One cannot understand what happened and what is still happening in the former Yugoslavia without knowing the role of the media. A military war would not be possible without a preparatory media war. One day when this all ends, and when it comes to shedding light on the trsth and placing responsibility, joarnalists will also be standing among the accused. A new term is already being used: media war criminals. "