Covering Carnage in the Balkans   

Reporters, caught in a crossfire of bullets and propaganda, strive to sort out levels of evil.

As the August 2 Newsday story headlined "Death Camps; Survivors tell of captivity, mass slaughters in Bosnia" inched out of the fax machine at the Foreign Press Bureau in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, the staff gathered around to read the horrifying details. Until then, much of the reporting on the Balkan war had produced carefully balanced accounts. The Newsday story was different: Sickeningly familiar words such as "concentration camps" and "systematic slaughter" leapt from the pages. It was the first article in a major American newspaper to detail the locations of Serbian "death camps," and report eyewitness accounts of torture, starved and beaten prisoners, and massacres in Bosnian towns.

"Finally, someone is telling the whole truth," said a young Croatian-American volunteer at the privately sponsored press bureau, which functions as an information depot for reporters covering the war.

This time, "the whole truth" wasn't propaganda cranked out by Muslim, Croatian or Serbian loyalists. The story was written by Roy Gutman, a veteran foreign correspondent, and was a culmination of months of reporting. Painstakingly documented, it sent shockwaves all the way to the White House. Some speculate it prompted a reluctant Bush administration to push for a United Nations War Crimes Commission to investigate charges of torture, rape, murder and forced deportation. Most of the charges are against the Serbs.

Gutman is one of a band of reporters committed to covering the most destructive European conflict since World War II. Those correspondents who venture to the former Yugoslavia brave sniper fire, mortar shells and roadblocks manned by gun-toting masked thugs. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 26 journalists, among them ABC producer David Kaplan, have been killed and dozens more wounded.

Besides ducking bullets, reporters have struggled over how to cover this hate-filled conflict, in which truth is difficult to discern and balance difficult to maintain. Reporters have had to sift through a crossfire of propaganda – from Croatians, Serbs and Muslims – a fierce duel of words and images, fueling fear, hatred and hysteria.

Some believe attempts by reporters to remain objective in the early stages of the conflict may have distorted the increasingly lopsided reality of the war: The conflict has been characterized by vicious and unrelenting Serbian aggression against largely unarmed civilian populations. Now, some are calling the war one of the biggest stories of 1992 and wonder aloud if America's media didn't botch coverage – first by ignoring it, then by downplaying it as a primitive, tribal conflict.

If the media was slow to respond to the war, government and international reaction has been even slower. In recent months the constant media barrage of horrifying images – limbless children, emaciated prisoners and smoldering villages – not government and political pressure, has driven international attention.

Without the press, Gutman maintains, "tens of thousands more might be dead. Western governments have ducked all responsibility," he says. "[Because] governments were way behind the curve on this one, the press is playing a very unusual role."

That "unusual role" could signal the beginning of a period of greater responsibility – and greater power – for the media. "If member governments of the U.N. won't do anything until they are shocked or embarrassed into it, the media has an obligation to tell them what's going on. Someone has to carry the ball," says CNN's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Peter Arnett, who has covered 17 wars during his 30-year career. "What we see happening in Yugoslavia is going to be the war of the future. The press is entering a new era."

The Propaganda Maze

The ethnic tangle that made up the former Yugoslavia is a demographer's nightmare: Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Albanians and Hungarians are a few of the ethnic and religious factions of the region. Before the war, the Balkan nation contained six republics and two autonomous provinces. There has been long-standing mistrust between Serbs and Croatians, who make up 36 percent and 20 percent of the country's population, dating back to World War II, when a pro-Nazi faction of Croatia slaughtered tens of thousands of anti-Nazi Serbs. In retaliation, a pro-Serb group killed Croatians. Poorly armed Muslims, caught in between the warring factions, fought against the Nazis with Communist Party leader Josip Broz Tito, who founded and became president of postwar Yugoslavia.

When Tito died in 1980, after almost 30 years of heavy-handed rule, the long-simmering ethnic tensions that he had kept in check began to surface. The collapse of communist Eastern Europe in 1989 had a destabilizing effect on the country, and in June 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Almost immediately, the Serb-dominated army led a resistance for economic and geopolitical reasons, as well as, many believe, to avenge past atrocities by Croats. The Serbian army withdrew after a 10-day stand-off with Slovenia. Fighting with Croatia soon followed with massacres and forced relocations by the Serbs. In March, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence and, like Croatia and Slovenia, was recognized by the United Nations. Soon after, the Serbs began their attacks on Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities.

Since the beginning of the fighting, a thick smokescreen of lies has emanated from the region. Marco Altherr, the head of the International Red Cross in Yugoslavia, told one reporter, "It's the first time I've seen strong and effective propaganda from [all] sides. When you're talking to either side, they're absolutely convinced they'll be slaughtered by the other side."

Reporters in the United States and on the scene have been bombarded with faxes, press releases and government statements from each side, accusing the others of systematic atrocities. "There was a predominant pattern. Each side exaggerated the misdeeds of the other and ignored the misdeeds of their own people," says George Rodrigue, Berlin bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News.

Some of that propaganda has been particularly insidious. In August, for example, Muslims in Bosnia accused Serbs of firing on a bus of orphans trying to flee the area. The story captured international attention, but U.N. officials later suggested that the attack may have come from Muslims attempting to stir world sympathy. The Croatians have shown journalists photographs of mutilated bodies in support of their accusations against Serbs – photographs that, as is often the case, are impossible to verify.

While there appears to be a consensus among journalists covering the conflict that all sides are guilty of lies and distortions, most also agree that the Serbs are the worst offenders. After the Serbs destroyed the Croatian city of Vukovar following a bloody three-month siege, they took journalists – who had been barred from the city for days – on a tour, pointing out Croatian atrocities and Serbian fatalities. Reporters say it was not an unusual tactic. "There tended to be far more [distortions] on the Serbian side," says Rodrigue.

The Serbs have been one step ahead of their adversaries in the propaganda war. Even before the fighting started, the government-controlled Serbian media was setting the stage. "From the beginning, this has been an orchestrated, well-planned campaign of aggression, and the Serbs are willing to tell bald-faced lies to carry it out," says Carol Williams, Eastern European bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. Williams has been covering the Yugoslav breakup for the past three years, and has been denounced as an "anti-Serb agitator."

"There has been a brainwashing in Serbia for the last three to five years," she says. "The Serbian media, in particular, have demonized their ethnic enemies the same way Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, demonized the Jews in World War II. The propaganda lowered the victims, the Muslims and Croats, to something subhuman so it was no longer a crime to rub them out."

Rodrigue reported in May that sources within the Serbian media admitted to distorting the news on orders from Communist Party bosses. Citing diplomats, Serbian journalists and Belgrade intellectuals, he wrote that the Serbian communist regime "spent years preparing Serbians for civil war. Now, those observers lament, three years of faked pictures and deliberate lies have inflicted a dangerous national delusion upon the Serbians, making any peaceful settlement extremely difficult."

National Public Radio European Editor Julie McCarthy notes that two of her reporters, operating out of Belgrade, were surprised that newscasts in the Serbian capital failed to carry pictures of the carnage in Sarajevo. "The people in Serbia were deliberately being left in the dark about the war being waged in an effort to create Greater Serbia," McCarthy says.

"The Serbs are masters of 'psy ops' – psychological operations," says Newsday's Gutman. "The big lie is their speciality. They have it down to a science and that is a tremendous problem for reporters."

In an International Press Institute report released in February, author Ian Traynor criticized both Croatia and Serbia for waging a brutal "television war." He called Balkan television "a key element" in encouraging violence by broadcasting a daily diet of "twisted corpses, mutilated children or old peasants, charred limbs and faces with bloody holes where the eyes used to be."

The Croatian media distort the truth, agrees Gutman, but compared with the Serbs "it tends to be more subtle, such as omissions, shading of the news and self-censorship, the more traditional practices that occur in wartime."

To penetrate the lies, Gutman says, reporters have had to go back to traditional reporting methods, such as developing a network of credible sources and documenting events, without relying on information from governments. Even what they see with their own eyes, Gutman says, must be investigated.

"I recently was told there had been a massacre of Serbs by Muslims outside the city of Banja Luka. But after we spent time there, my interpreter, the photgrapher traveling with me, all of us came away scratching our heads and figuring that something was wrong with the whole scene," he recalls. "It just didn't look like a real massacre with all the tension that usually surrounds that type of thing. We're working on the theory [now] that it was staged – that it might have been done by Serbs to punish Serbs" who had fallen out of line.

Fighting for Space

In the beginning of the Balkan conflict, few U.S. newspapers called for action against Serbian aggression, and news reports were limited.

"Stories that might have prepared people and educated them about this conflict early on didn't get the space," says Williams of the L.A. Times. "If the world had gotten the picture earlier that what happened in Croatia was a one-sided war of aggression, action might have been taken to prevent the spread to Bosnia." A year ago she watched the destruction of the Croatian town of Vukovar by Serbian artillery during a three-month siege. It foreshadowed what is occurring in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo today: a city, ringed by artillery, being pounded to rubble while poorly armed defenders return fire and a civilian population is left in ruin.

Many observers believe that Kosovo, a province within Serbia populated by 2 million Albanian Muslims, could be the next site of the Serbs' brutal "ethnic cleansing," according to recent news reports.

"Down the road we could be wringing our hands and saying, 'If we'd done something six months ago 2 million people in Kosovo wouldn't be dead,' " Williams says. "Unfortunately, this is not a situation where you feel good saying, 'I told you so.' "

But many label the early stages of the 1991 war in Croatia "complicated," particularly for journalists with no background in the region's complex politics. That may have led to the "he said, she said, all-sides-are-guilty" media mentality in covering the Balkan war.

"The Croats and Serbs fed off each other's insecurities and aggression to the point where it is irresolvable. It's different in Bosnia where you have a more obvious perpetrator and victim," Williams says. "In the beginning, reporters saw the Croatian leadership taking all the wrong steps and antagonizing Serbian nationalism. It made them less of a sympathetic victim, when, in fact, they were victimized."

Gutman also says the U.S. press coverage of the Croatian war was inadequate. "Reporters tended to view it as Serbs repaying their ancient grievances for what Croats did in World War II. That was a totally fallacious approach," says Gutman, who from 1973 to 1975 reported from the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade.

"In fairness, I don't believe my colleagues were able to get much about Croatia into print after November 1991," he says. "It wasn't a story people wanted, and reporters tended to over-complicate it. I learned for myself that it was very, very simple. Croatians were being forced out of their homes for no good reason. Civilians were being killed; villages leveled."

Yet the bulk of the reporting reflected the U.S. government's position that this was an "ethnic conflict," and reporters repeated Serbian government-generated euphemisms such as "ethnic cleansing," he says. "What we're really talking about here is terror, murder, rape and torture. What does that have to do with 'ethnic cleansing?' That's the wrong term and the American government bought into it."

Some reporters were committed very early, however, to get beyond that antiseptic description, and began to lay foundations for readers and listeners even before the breakup occurred.

•National Public Radio had reporters there before the split. "Yugoslavia was a microcosm of the potential disintegration for all of Europe and certainly the Soviet Union, as ethnic rivalries bubbled to the surface," says editor McCarthy. "We knew we had to bring our listeners along and make them interested and help them understand why they should care about what was happening in the Balkans."

•Dallas Morning News reporter Gayle Reaves spent a month in the region in 1989 to take a close look at Serbian President Milosevic. "He was a new guy on the landscape and was threatening to build a Greater Serbia," says International Editor Jim Landers. "He was doing things Croats and Slovenes were wary of, and we wanted to know what was going on in Kosovo. All human rights were vanishing there. We wanted to get a handle on the story."

• This past January, Blaine Harden of the Washington Post reported that an investigation by foreign observers found that Serbian forces had been waging a "systematic campaign of violence, intimidation and looting designed to force Croats to flee their homes." The observers reported that both sides had been responsible for atrocities but that the preponderance of the violations had been committed by Serbs.

Harden also reported that videotapes showed bodies of Croats whose noses, ears and eyes had been cut out and whose throats had been slashed.

Eight months later, similar grisly reports surfaced in Bosnia, only this time Muslims were being targeted along with Croatians, and there were added atrocities, such as concentration camps and gang rapes.

Eugene Roberts, former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says that kind of early reporting is now paying off. "It's important to have strong commitment from the reporter and the news organization instead of running in and acting like firemen. Reporters get enough experience on the scene to know whether they're being told the truth."

Still, some journalists complained that anything other than breaking news was a tough sell to editors back home. "I had a hard time getting my newspaper interested in this story," says Rodrigue at the Dallas Morning News.

"I know from..talking to editors at other papers, this story has been a hard sell," says Landers. "At first, people didn't realize how bad it was going to get."

Slow editorial reaction also may have been the result of the scant attention being paid by world leaders, and the fact that, unlike oil interests in the Persian Gulf, there simply wasn't enough at stake for the United States. Editors might have been influenced, too, by Croatian and Serbian lobbies on the home front. The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post were picketed by Serbian-Americans who complained of biased coverage.

Despite sluggish government and editorial response, some reporters have stuck it out. By October, there were 2.5 million Croatian and Muslim refugees and tens of thousands had been killed. Humanitarian groups predict hundreds of thousands more will freeze or starve to death as winter sets in.

Taking Sides

The new challenges in reporting from the former Yugoslavia call into question the basic tenets of objectivity and balance, traditionally defined as emotionally detached, factual reporting. Can reporters fulfill their responsibilities, as Arnett suggests, if they remain aloof and neutral?

Reporters, especially early in the conflict, often were content to stand behind the pillar of neutrality or echo the U.S. government's view of the conflict.

Pavao Novosel, director of journalism studies at Zagreb University, calls it "mirror reporting." "Journalists have a tendency to mirror the political stance of their governments," he says. "From the beginning, the German press defined [the conflict] as Serbian aggression; reporters from the U.S. and the United Kingdom tended to label it an ethnic conflict. They used objectivity as an excuse, but it's illogical to say that everybody is to blame."

Some say the U.S. government has taken a passive role in conflicts such as the one in the Balkans because the former Soviet Union is no longer a superpower. As a result, the press also waited longer to make the Balkan conflict front page news.

"I think we do know enough to call it genocide," George Kenney, the former acting Yugoslav desk officer for the State Department, told Newsday. Kenney resigned in August in protest of the Bush administration's hands-off policy. Kenney told reporters that the administration minimized or ignored dozens of reports of Serbian atrocities in order to avoid public pressure for U.S. military action against the Serbs.

In late September, for example, the State Department confirmed that Serbian forces had massacred 3,000 Bosnian Muslims. There were grisly details of bodies cremated in an animal fat-rendering plant or thrown in the Sava River. A State Department spokesperson said these were the first eyewitness accounts the U.S. government had received.

Yet Gutman and other journalists had been quoting eyewitnesses about the mass killing nearly two months before. Gutman even named a survivor, Alija Lujinovic, in his August 2 story. Lujinovic was brought to Washington in mid-August to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee; transcripts of his testimony were sent to the CIA, the State Department and the White House.

Additional Newsday stories also were among the first to document mass rapes of Muslim and Croat women by Serbian forces and the destruction of Muslim culture in Bosnia: More than half the mosques, historical monuments and libraries that comprise a six-century-old religious and cultural heritage have been wiped out.

In his book, "The Experience of Nothingness," Michael Novak, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, noted: "Reporters and newscasters know that if they aim at objectivity, at presenting 'the facts' without editorializing, they run the risk of giving dignity to nonsense, drivel, and outright lies... Events are not events until they are interpreted by human beings."

Gutman appeared to be following that philosophy in his story on August 2, when he took readers inside the horror chamber of a camp in Brcko, an improvised prison for Muslims and Croatians, in a warehouse on the bank of the Sava River. At Omarska, a former iron-mining complex, prisoners were held in metal cages without sanitation or food.

"We've gone from a polar world to a world of no poles at all," Gutman said in a phone interview from a Zagreb hotel. "It's taking governments a while to create new rules. In the meantime, an entire European population is being exterminated."

The Language of War

Commitment and firsthand observations may have led some journalists to target Serbs as the worst perpetrators, using words such as "genocide" and "extermination." But the debate over the use of such terms continues, as was recently demonstrated on CNN's roundtable discussion program, "Reliable Sources."

On the show, CNN's Bernard Kalb counted "death camp" among the most inflammatory phrases of modern times. "What happened..50 years ago has ricocheted traumatically through the last half century," he said. "And when those two words exploded before your eyes, reinforced by the pictures we've seen this week, it is difficult to back away from what, in fact, is the quintessential portrait of 20th century horror."

By placing those words in front of political leaders, Kalb asked, is the media shaping policy by prodding a reluctant administration to take action?

Thom Shanker, senior European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, was in the Balkans when Gutman's death camp story broke. The Tribune decided on a more cautious route, exploring the use of the death camp term in its stories.

James O'Shea, associate managing editor for foreign and national news, explains, " 'Death camp' conjures up the image of a facility that exists to exterminate people in a systematic way, similar to Auschwitz. In any war you're going to have detention camps and refugee camps where terrible things happen, but let's not jump to the conclusion that they're death camps."

Nonetheless, reporter Shanker says, he avoids the "knee-jerk drive" for objectivity. "Fairness drives you to cover ethnic cleansing done by Serbs or Croatians or Muslims," he continues. "At the same time, fairness does not keep us from analyzing information and determining that Serbs are more responsible for ethnic cleansing and operate worse prison camps than the other sides." Shanker likes to quote Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who says the failure to differentiate among varying degrees of evil is an evil in itself.

"There are no angels in this war," says Shanker. "But that doesn't mean we can paint everybody in the same shade of black.

"[Gutman's] stories were important because they helped set an accurate agenda. His reporting made everybody else in the western media focus on the issue," he adds.

Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation, is one who advises caution in pointing fingers. Falling into a "bad guy" syndrome can distort reality, he warns. " 'Bad guy' reporting makes it easier to avoid more complicated, less demonstrable aspects of the story that help readers understand not just what's happening, but why it's happening and where it may be headed," says Kovach. "Because Serbs have acted so badly in so many cases, there's a tendency when something terrible happens to say 'The Serbs did it.' I have difficulty believing it can be so one-sided."

Gutman and his editor stand by their decision to use the death camp label and to point a direct finger of blame. "We clearly knew we were going out on the limb," says Jeff Sommer, the paper's foreign editor. "The only justifiable reason for using the label 'death camp' was that we had evidence. People were being killed; towns were being destroyed. We felt it was worth cutting through the bullshit and getting the truth out."

"To me, a death camp is a place where people are taken and most end up dead. That is a logical description," says Gutman. "I found a witness in Brcko who reported that 90 percent of the people who entered the camp with him were killed. If that isn't a death camp, what is?" l