MCCM
RESILIENCE
OUR MEDIA
By Zeljko Veljkovic and Natasa Vasic
Coverage of the UN’s resolution on Srebrenica was unbalanced across the region, with Serbian government-influenced outlets the worst offenders.
This spring, officials in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia reacted in a variety of ways to the UN’s adoption of a resolution designating an annual “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.” Media in both countries mostly reported these reactions without any critical hindsight.
Legislation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) makes denial of the genocide in Srebrenica a criminal offense, while in Serbia denial has been the dominant narrative for years, apparently at the behest of top leadership. These differences in the understanding of history arose long before the UN resolution, but they have been highlighted in the media both before and after its adoption.
Serbian media under the control of President Aleksandar Vucic pushed the negative narrative the most forcefully. They were the first to report that a resolution was being prepared, but the media from Republika Srpska (RS), under the patronage of the president of that entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, were not far behind either. Before the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution on 23 May, these media (Novosti, Politika, Blic, RTRS, ATV, and others) speculated that it would mark the Serbian people as genocidal. After the decision, the same media rejoiced over the large number of abstentions and votes against, and presented the events in the UN as a victory, rather than a defeat, despite earlier, cataclysmic warnings to the Serbian people that the adoption of the resolution must be prevented.
The first Serbian report appeared in Novosti on 7 March. The paper announced: “A resolution on Srebrenica is being secretly prepared at the UN, Novosti has learned. The ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina [BiH] is working on the text of the resolution, which will be presented in April, without the knowledge of the BiH presidency.” The document aims to “demonize Republika Srpska in order to abolish it.”
Coverage in Serbia and Republika Srpska went downhill from there. Some outlets began spreading disinformation about the resolution after Vucic’s press conference on 29 March.
Gulf Between Serbian and Bosnian Media
According to Milijana Rogac, a journalist and researcher for Serbian news outlet Istinomer, deep-seated manipulation regularly accompanies the public discourse on the Srebrenica massacres. So it is not surprising that Serbian media and officials tried to convince the public that the resolution was extremely harmful to the Serbian people.
“Like an orchestra, similar statements by politicians and headlines in the media were repeated day in and day out, and for more than two months, this was the main topic of conversation among the Serbian public,” Rogac recalls.
Slobodan Georgiev, the news director of Belgrade’s TV Nova, also mentions the unanimity of media coverage in Serbia on this topic and believes that the instructions for this came from the president’s cabinet.
“This was a message of self-victimization: ‘We are not a genocidal nation and genocide was committed against us; you will have to admit that.’ On the other, smaller side, some media are not under the control of the government and are attempting to do their job as journalists – reporting on events as they are and giving context that should help all peoples in the region understand the phenomena of the past so that they do not lead to new conflicts,” Georgiev said.
Dinko Gruhonjic, a professor in the media studies department at the University of Novi Sad, also sees the possibility that the media is preparing the groundwork for new conflicts.
“This kind of reporting should be taken seriously because the fact that the reporting reproduced stereotypes and prejudices, without much connection to reality, made the media a part of the propaganda – the so-called black propaganda, characteristic of military conflicts,” Gruhonjic said.
As noted above, Serbian media reporting has differed depending on whether the outlet is under the control of the regime or is one of the few remaining independent Serbian media sources.
Rasid Krupalija, an editor at Raskrinkavanje in Sarajevo, said the media in BiH also have reported on the adoption of the resolution in an unbalanced way.
“Media reports in the RS mostly had a negative and critical tone, including statements by officials who largely denied the qualification of the crimes committed in 1995 [as genocide]. Most reports downplayed the number of victims and contested the authority of the UN General Assembly,” he said, while national media mainly followed the events surrounding the adoption of the resolution.
A journalist with years of experience and president of the BH Journalists Association board of directors, Marko Divkovic, also commented on the complete polarization of the media.
“The leader of media disinformation and manipulation is undoubtedly RTRS [the public broadcaster in RS], because, according to its reporting, ‘some evil UN people want to portray the entire Serbian ethnic group as genocidal,’ ” Divkovic said.
By contrast, in the Federation, the country’s other entity, some media displayed “an irrational sense of jubilation at the announcement of the resolution. This reaction was driven by speculation about potential lawsuits for war reparations and the possibility of revising the lawsuit against Serbia, all while sidestepping legal considerations,” Divkovic said.
Krupalija commented that the choice of sources also contributed to the unbalanced tone of the coverage. Most sources either denied that the massacres at Srebrenica amounted to genocide or endorsed disinformation, including false claims about the “goal” of the resolution being to abolish Republika Srpska. This was not a typical situation “where ‘two sides’ present equally valid opinions,” he said.
Before and After the UN Vote
At one point, Bosniak officials [in the Federation entity] published a draft of the resolution, which clearly showed that it did not accuse the Serbs of collective responsibility nor state the intention to abolish the RS entity. This failed to stop media both in RS and Serbia from repeating their claims.
Even after the draft text was published, “some media reported that the resolution was politically motivated and aimed at demonizing the Serbian people and accusing the nation of being genocidal,” said Almasa Smajlovic, spokeswoman for the Srebrenica Memorial Center.
On the other hand, media in the Federation and some outlets in the RS presented the final adoption of the resolution as a victory.
For some countries, it did mark a triumph of BiH diplomacy that will lead to the world commemorating a day of remembrance for the victims of genocide. Serbian media, however, presented the outcome of the vote (84 in favor, 68 abstentions, and 19 against) as if the majority in the UN were against the resolution.
For Krupalija, there is no difference in the tone of the media coverage before and after the adoption of the resolution because “almost no one changed their position.”
“Overall, I believe that the majority of the media I followed reflected a deep-seated division over how suffering during the war – its causes, character, and consequences – were presented,” he said.
Istinomer’s Rogac comments that Serbian media introduced the controversy over the resolution into coverage of local election campaigns.
“Analyzing the statements of [ruling-party] SNS officials during that period, it is clear that the resolution on Srebrenica was used as the main topic, even at party rallies. After the resolution was adopted, the tabloids celebrated it as a ‘triumph’ and a ‘moral victory for Serbia’ ” and a defeat for the West, “whose ‘plan to brand us as a genocidal nation failed,’ ” Rogac said.
Media Ethics in Crisis
Differing views on history are not new, but it is unacceptable for the media to agree to participate, as well as to build and spread narratives that distort, hide, or create a “new” truth, critics say.
Sociologist Smiljana Vovna said there are very few media that can objectively convey some piece of news without inserting some bias – based on the politics of the part of the country from which they come.
“Some media outlets went so far as to frame the vote on the resolution in Srebrenica as a victory for a particular policy and regime, disregarding the actual facts about the number of votes. Serbian state-controlled media portrayed the entire process of adopting and voting on the resolution as an entertainment spectacle marked by fan euphoria,” Vovna said. She warns that relativizing genocide and counting victims, regardless of which side, is not a humane act.
“Every criminal has their own name and surname. Generalizing an entire nation based on the actions of criminals from that nation is not good and does not bring anything good,” Vovna said.
Rade Radovanovic, a journalist and writer from Belgrade, argues that the media under the Vucic’s control wrote what he “directed.” These media treated the resolution according to the narratives of the government, he said, without dealing with its actual substance.
“The general narrative was the glorification of Vucic’s genius and his struggle in New York to protect us from the resolution by which the West tried to declare us a genocidal nation. In Politika, but also in Novosti, which are the official newspapers of the Vucic regime, those characterizations were terrifying. We see the representation and defense of something that is ultimately aligned with the idea of Greater Serbia,” Radovanovic said.
There are opposition media that have maintained journalistic integrity in Serbia and the RS, but many things indicate that citizens have fallen for the main narrative.
“The audience in Serbia is no longer able to consume real news. The story of the resolution on Srebrenica was distorted, twisted by complete manipulations so that the public is convinced of this irrational message that someone wants to declare Serbs a genocidal nation and that only Vucic can save us from that,” said activist Aida Corovic.
“The most worrying thing is that these same news organizations are state media that are used as tools of state politics and their megaphones, instructed from one center,” Gruhonjic, the media studies professor, said, observing that many media “broadcast identical texts, which even have the same spelling mistakes.”
What should the job of a journalist look like, and what should the role of the media be in reporting on a topic that politicians have used to deepen divisions and polarization of society?
Gruhonjic offers a solution that every journalist should be familiar with: “The media should just remember one old and simple truth: that the politicians need us, not us them, and that they should be afraid of us, and we should never be afraid of them.”
Natasa Vasic is a journalist with the Bosnian news outlet Klix. Zeljko Veljkovic works for the Serbian cable TV station Nova. This article was originally published in longer form in Klix (Bosnia) and Danas (Serbia). Transitions has edited the text for clarity. Translated by Tijana Dmitrovic.
