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Guest Column

The Television War

A central pillar of the Yugoslav regime's power has been shaken, and the battle over public information now claims many victims.

from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting

April 29, 1999

Five weeks of air strikes have changed the media order in a country where, for ten years, the state has held the sovereign right to control television truth. Now the struggle over television in Yugoslavia has become synonymous with the fight for the survival of the regime.

After repeated attacks against Radio Television Serbia (RTS), the majority of Serbia's population is unable to watch RTS channels. The destruction of the RTS building in the center of Belgrade, which may have claimed more than 20 victims and wounded many more, and the bombing a few days earlier of the 20-plus-story office building in New Belgrade where transmitters of other television channels close to the regime were situated, has forced Belgrade to take urgent steps to ensure that the government and its message stay on the air.

On Monday, April 26, Minister for Information Aleksandar Vucic, a member of the Serbian Radical Party of Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj, called an urgent meeting of the editors in chief of private television stations and asked them to take over the broadcast of RTS programs -- in particular, the vital news shows "Dnevnik 2" and "Dnevnik 3." Studio B, a television station effectively owned by former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement, also had to comply with this request.

This meeting took place only a day after Draskovic's controversial interview on Studio B. A central part of Draskovic's remarks was his criticism of state television for hiding the truth about the current military situation, as well as for the viciousness of the vocabulary it used towards the West. He also supported international troops in Kosovo. In short, he said everything that normal Serbs are apt to say once they are in the privacy of their own homes. And that was the real danger.

Even though Draskovic himself had parroted the party line throughout the bombing campaign, it seems he could no longer support the insupportable. The clampdown on all major independent media, along with the imposition of wartime censorship on the rest, has ensured full state control of the flow of information. The bulk of the Serbian population has not seen a single picture of Albanian refugees nor any news about atrocities in Kosovo.

In recent days, the vocabulary of RTS has become even more radical, using terms such as "bloodsuckers," "fascists," "pedophiles," "imbeciles," "idiots," "morons," and "retards" to describe North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders. According to RTS news, NATO is crushed, Serbia's peace-loving politics have won, America will pay, and Europe is on her knees. Serbia is defending the planet from fascists and has saved its people from Western criminals--and cloned sheep (the current epithet for U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright). The Yugoslavian people must show their gratitude towards Milosevic for taking them into the new millennium.

To break with this propaganda is to break with the regime. As the Draskovic interview became the key story--Ministry of Information censors banned Danas daily from running it, while Studio B ran it five times--the regime took over the broadcasts of private TV stations. Currently, the information programs of RTS are retransmitted by TV Palma, TV BK, TV Art, TV Politika, and TV Studio B. With Draskovic's sacking, the moderate course has firmly lost the internal war in Serbia, and it can be expected that Studio B will be taken over fully by the government.

The ever-more ruthless propaganda suggests that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is prepared to accept numerous civilian casualties in order to prove himself to be the absolute ruler of Serbia. Unofficial sources in Belgrade suggest that the government decided to make sure that lives were directly put at risk over the struggle for the media.

Reports have circulated that workers at the RTS building were blackmailed and threatened with sacking if they refused to work night shifts. In the days preceding the NATO bombing, it was evident that the building in Aberdareva Street was a NATO target, and there seemed little doubt that it was going to be hit. If these speculations are true, the implication is that the regime is compliant in these deaths.

A week before the bombing, all of RTS' employees had gathered on the street and formed a human chain around the RTS building. One of the people in the chain was the Serbian minister of culture, Zeljko Simic. Three days before the attack, the CNN crew moved out of the building and resumed working from the Hyatt Hotel. Twelve hours before the attack, members of the state media union were protesting in front of the building with banners declaring, "Long live RTS."

The rally marked the first public demonstration in support of Radio Television Serbia--the heart of the regime which, for a decade, has advertised ethnic cleansing and extreme nationalism, and has orchestrated hate campaigns against Slovene, Croats, Muslims, and finally, Albanians. Now, after the attack, the regime stresses that the people in the building were mobilized at a time of war and were doing their patriotic duty. The killings, Belgrade argues, demonstrate the evil of NATO.

"Criminal NATO aircraft targeted the building of Radio Television Serbia at 2.06 AM on Friday April 23, while a news program was being broadcast, trying to kill the truth about their monstrous bombardments of our country," RTS declared several hours later, when it returned on air via other transmitters. "NATO is naïve to think it can destroy the truth by bombing," the editor of Vecernje Novosti, Serbia's biggest selling daily, wrote shortly afterwards.

A special weekend edition of the pro-regime newspaper Politika declared, "Stupidly identifying the state TV as a source of political power, the criminals in Brussels at the NATO headquarters thought they could destroy our political leadership." Yet a central pillar of the regime's power has been shaken, and the battle over public information has begun to claim many victims.

The contributors to this report are independent journalists from Belgrade.

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