Our media are being blamed for creating a one-sided picture on the war in Bosnia. Daily resentment is instilling hatred towards a new enemy - the Serbs.
We know that on February 5, 1994, a shell exploded on a Sarajevo market-place causing the massacre of people in a bread queue. The UN did not want to take a definitive stand, as it was not clear who had fired the shell. Based on an unofficial UN report, Michel Wolker from the French TF 1 television station asserts that this shell was fired from a position held by the Bosnian Muslims. A correspondent from the Danish Information daily claims that not a single shell was fired that day, i.e. that there was no military activity at all. A Turkish doctor expressed her amazement at the type of injuries - exclusively to the lower parts of the body, untypical for mortar or artillery fire. An American doctor stated for CNN that the injuries of the patients she had treated had not been fresh. Immediately after the explosion, the Bosnian Muslim authorities closed up the market-place, and members of the UN mission were denied entrance. Serbs from Bosnia claimed that some of the victims loaded on trucks happened to be dummies.
Although the information was unreliable, the Western media unanimously ascribed this massacre to the Serbs. ARD and ZDF reported about a "Serbian" mortar attack, in Der Spiegel they knew "from experience" who had fired. Responding to public pressure, NATO delivered its first ultimatum to the Serbs. The people killed at the market-place were well-suited to the myth about the enemy which had already been created for some time.
Back in the thirties, in his book "Brave New World" which criticizes modern civilization, far-sighted Aldous Huxley had a premonition: "What is repeated 60,000 times becomes the truth." About the same time, Walter Benjamin defined the structural deficiency of the relatively young electronic media: they primarily cared for shock and sensation. By the mid-seventies, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard concluded that it was no longer necessary to form one's own opinion, "what's more, everyone must have an opinion that goes along with public opinion".
In the media of the nineties - both electronic and traditional - reality, fiction, and simulation are tightly interwoven. News sequences, stimulated by a sensation, simulate objectivity through a mass of pictures and statements, and by the identical interpretation of events suggest competence in the interpretation of reality. It is not unusual, however, for these interpretations to be only an endless line of highly subjective prejudices.
The reality of "Bosnia", naturally, does not differ much from that shown by the media. Battles are waged, people are senselessly being killed. However, it does not help the search for truth when the ARD-correspondent in Sarajevo, Friedhelm Brebeck, attributes the shells to only one side; as they generally do not have the address of the sender written on them, this is how he solves the problem. And, as illustrated by the Sarajevo market-place, the shells are always Serbian, while victims are the peace-loving Muslims.
But this town is most certainly the residence of not only Muslims, but also Serbs. In their parts of the town, many of them have their own casualties whose killers should presumably be sought on the opposite side. The experts at news fireworks use a specific mixture of reality, shock and politically correct views. In the first place, the world of information no longer cares about states, not even for political interests. It is no longer a question of America, Russia, France or England - and particularly not of FRG. Peace and its enemies are in question. Pretensions to a specific sort of heavenly morality has promoted the media to the rank of a singular Great Power.
The press, television and representatives of the post-political public - such as French philosophers Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy, or Germany's Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who stigmatize Serbian crimes - are aspiring to a super-morality, which raises them high above political baseness. Those who rely pragmatically on negotiations - such as the UN mediators for Bosnia, Lord Peter Alexander Carrington and Lord David Owen, or the UN commissioner for Bosnia Yasushi Akashi - are bound to face sharp criticism.
Ever since Hitler, we have all known where striving to settle a situation leads. Super-moralist Cohn-Bendit recommends: Drop bombs on Pale!
Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia - Second-Class Citizens?
During the Cold War, owing to the ultimate destructive military potential, the notion prevailed that war did not provide the means to solve conflicts. Yet, now when the media as a singular Great Power advocate the imposition of one universal morality, it is conceivable to employ military means in solving conflicts. As a continuation of morality using other means.
The public, which has flinched for forty years at even the mention of the word "war", because each armed conflict could also be the ultimate one, now indifferently accepts the sharp words of the commentators, columnists and their journalistic followers. There is still no reason for their immediate concern. Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Korea - in the informative-technical sense are only one second apart, in the geographical respect they are too far away to jeopardize the peaceful daily routine at home. Intervention and war are meant exclusively for someone else, and one's own state territory and habitat are guarded against the consequences of uncompromising requests. Bitterness is constantly reheated, words and pictures are becoming offensive weapons. the media as a moral Great Power are acting as a party to the war, representing practical-political conflicts as moral conflicts. The deionization of one's opponents through dehumanization justifies first the bitterness - and eventually the actions .
Stefan Schwarz, a member of CDU's political youth, recounted that the Serbs had used 'gas" - tear-gas was in question, but he did not bother about such trifles. He allegedly knew about the case of the Serbs who had baked children in an oven, as well as the diabolical doctors who had been implanting dog embryos into Muslim women's uteruses. Before rendering the promised proof for his claims - which he has never done - young Mr. Schwarz appeared in all the possible contact-programmes and for some time was quite popular. It was with indignation that he walked out of the SAT.1 "Einspruch" broadcast, because the Serbian participants in the discussion ventured to oppose his claims. Tilman Zulch, chairman of the "Society for Endangered Peoples", immediately joined him, leaving the studio in a hurry. Morality turned its face away from its enemies.
Unverified statements and hear-say were also the basis for stories about the Serbian concentration camps in which Muslim womenn were allegedly mass raped and forced to give birth to thus conceived children. With this story Alexandra Stiglmayer, a journalist, made her name. The Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt published her stories, as well as the ZurichDie Weltwoche, which afterwards dissociated itself from them, while Stern dedicated its cover page to this horror story. According to assertions by her colleagues on-the-spot, Mrs. Stiglmayer had considerable difficulties in finding witnesses for her claims. However, she must have managed it surprisingly quickly in the end. They were to be found elsewhere as well: Suddeutsche Zeitung and Mona Lisa wrote about the fate of a certain Aziza who had been raped in front of 1,500 people at the stadium at Manjaca. Except that Manjaca does not have a stadium.
Rumors were becoming facts, news items - eternal truths, fear was creating morality and the unrestrained will to act. In the editorial boards, far away from the shooting, it was very well known that the Serbs were responding to one thing only: to a firm hand. Admittedly, the Serbs themselves offered to play the role of villains. The myth of the victim-nation and Greater Serbia, whose champions were Serbian leaders, such as Slobodan Milosevic, made them look suspicious in advance. At the same time, the Western media primarily overlooked the Croats' and Muslims' show of power. The proportions assumed by the conflict between thc Croats and Bosnian Muslims are best shown by the battle over Mostar.
The secession of Croatia and Bosnia - and before that Slovenia - was estimated as the rightful aspiration to national sovereignty. Thus the secessionists who provoked the dismemberment of the Yugoslav state were turned into scapegoats who were denied their right to sovereignty by the Serbs. On the other hand, the Serbs were labeled gendarmes in the Yugoslav "dungeon of nations" and aggressors. the new governments in Zagreb and Sarajevo, however, imposed on the Serbs in their territory the status of second-class citizens; in Croatia this was regulated by a new Constitution and in Bosnia it was openly included in March, 1994, in the requests by president Alija Izetbegovic. The Serbs in Bosnia comprise 33% of the total population (Muslims 44% Croats 17%). In Croatia, the Serbian part of population, concentrated in Krajina, comprises 11.3% of the total population (data from 1990). Endeavors to make the Serbs second-class citizens inevitably lead to conflict.
The Media are Waging Their Own War for New Policy by the Great Powers
The media, taking the role of warmongers, glaringly missed their originally designated task and neglected their professional ethical obligation to be objective. The media super-morality becomes ultimately problematic when it raises itself over sober pragmatism, which this is the only way to solve conflicts such as the civil war in Bosnia.
The media as one of the parties to the war can credit themselves with their decisive stand which made the international community finally accept their responsibility in Bosnia and curb Serbian actions. However, while the creators of headline news, commentators, organizations for the protection of human rights and solidarity committees sounded the call for morality and humanity during the Gulf War, UN maneuvers in Somalia and now the civil war in Bosnia, the cards were reshuffled for the old political game. Intervention, not approved by the UN Charter, is again considered to be a respectable political instrument. Through small-scale military involvement, NATO, which is defined as a regional defense alliance, has achieved an important political aim and is on the way to becoming a supra-regional power. However, it only intervenes in situations that suit its political interests and where it is militarily opportune - Rwanda is not lucky in that respect.
So, consciously or unconsciously, the media as a GreatPower are in fact fighting a war for the return to the classical policy of the Great Powers, in which morality, as we know, is frequently neglected.