From a geopolitical perspective, the war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s was about restructuring Southeast Europe after the end of the Cold War. To this end, the US even deployed the combatants with which it had previously fought the USSR in Afghanistan and which it would later call „Al Qaeda“ [...]
From a geopolitical perspective, the war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s was about restructuring Southeast Europe after the end of the Cold War. To this end, the US even deployed the combatants with which it had previously fought the USSR in Afghanistan and which it would later call „Al Qaeda“.
The political and media propaganda regarding the war on Yugoslavia has been well researched by now. Interestingly, however, many media outlets and commentators are still trying to uphold the official narrative of the time, in contrast to the later war in Iraq, for example.
There may be various reasons for this. On the one hand, the propaganda in question dates back to the early days of the Internet and is therefore generally less well known to the public. On the other hand, the implications, notably for Europe, are particularly far-reaching in this case.
From today’s perspective, it is a rather trivial statement that most Western media outlets supported NATO’s war on Yugoslavia, but at the time even critics believed in a media „failure“, especially because the influence of foreign policy groups on media reporting was not yet broadly known.
The following sections provide an overview of propaganda in the war on Yugoslavia as well as references to further literature and documentation. Please note that the analysis does not call into question regional aspects of the conflict or any actual war crimes on any side of the conflict.
1. The Serbian »Death Camp« (1992)
One of the most notorious cases of propaganda concerns the alleged Serbian „death camp“ of Trnopolje in Bosnia. The story began in August 1992, when three British journalists visited a refugee camp whose inmates stressed that they were being treated very well (see video below).
The journalists, however, went to a fenced off storage area right next to the refugee camp and filmed the men through a barbed wire fence, making it appear as if the men were imprisoned, which in fact they were not (see site map below). The journalists then asked a man emaciated from illness or war-related malnutrition to take off his T-shirt.
The resulting photograph – carefully cut to size – landed on the front pages of most Western media as „proof“ of Serbian „death camps“, which in turn served as justification for NATO’s subsequent intervention in Bosnia, starting with a no-fly zone.
The Trnopolje death camp deception was exposed by a German journalist in 1997. A British magazine that republished his article got sued by the three British journalists for libel and eventually lost the case because it couldn’t prove their intent.
The head of an American PR agency that had spread the false death camp reports later explained:
„We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to be moral.“
The German captions explain how the men were standing outside of the barbed wire fence and what type of questions the British journalists were asking them.
2. The Sarajevo Marketplace Massacres (1992-1995)
Another well-known case of propaganda concerns the so-called marketplace massacres during the four-year siege of Sarajevo, in particular the so-called bread line massacre of May 1992 and the two so-called Markale massacres of February 1994 and August 1995.
These incidents allegedly took place by mortar fire from outside of the city and often happened shortly before important political consultations at the UN or EU. They ultimately led to a direct military intervention by NATO – the first in its history – and thus to a turnaround in the Bosnian war.
In the cases mentioned above as well as some others, investigations by officers of the UN protection mission came to the conclusion that these incidents may have been carried out by the Bosnian side itself, perhaps to influence Western public opinion (so-called false flag attacks).
The relevant UN reports, however, were kept secret. Instead, American media — notably CNN — and the US government usually claimed without delay that the respective attack had probably been carried out by the Serbian side (see video below).
Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, commander of the UN forces in Sarajevo, wrote about the 1992 incident:
„Our people told us there were a number of things that didn’t fit. The street had been blocked off just before the incident. Once the crowd was let in and had lined up, the media appeared but kept their distance. The attack took place, and the media were immediately on the scene.“
About the 1994 incident, a BBC journalist noted with surprise how „television crews were on the scene, filming within seconds of the blast“, while UN officers and even doctors were prevented from entering the site, and all of the alleged 197 victims were carried away within 25 minutes. Others pointed out that the market was in fact closed at the time of the incident (see video below).
Regarding the 1995 incident, the London Sunday Times later reported that British and French ammunition experts had concluded that the Serbian side was „not guilty“, but that they were „overruled by a senior American officer“. NATO air attacks began within less than 48 hours.
US professor Yossef Bodansky, the longtime director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, later described these incidents as „expertly-staged spectacle of gore“ that included the use of „corpses of Bosnian troops recently killed in action“.
In the following you will find the most important articles from that time by journalists who were able to study the unpublished UN reports or talk to officials involved in writing them.
Twenty years later, the Bosnian Markale massacres of 1994/95 were recalled when poison gas attacks during the Syrian war turned out to be questionable and the results of UN and OPCW investigations were again suppressed to justify military strikes by NATO countries.
3. The »Genocide of Srebrenica« (1995)
The „Genocide of Srebrenica“ in July 1995 is regarded as the sad climax of the Bosnian war. According to Western accounts originally based on a report by the US government, more than 8000 Bosnian civilians may have been killed.
In this case too, however, the actual evidence points to a more complex situation and a somewhat different context. This was emphasized by Phillip Corwin, the highest ranking UN civilian official in Bosnia during the war, who called the Western account of events in Srebrenica a „distortion“.
The late political scientist Edward S. Herman and the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who was operating in Yugoslavia during the war, even spoke of a „fraud“ in this regard.
For further details, please refer to the following articles and documentaries:
In general, even events with very high reported victim numbers must sometimes be critically examined. This was shown, for example, by the „Timisoara Massacre“ of 1989 with allegedly 4630 dead, which later turned out to be a psychological operation to launch the Romanian revolution.
4. Kosovo: »Operation Horseshoe«, »Račak massacre«, and more (1999)
After the separation of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia from Yugoslavia, the US and NATO started another war in 1999 against the remainder of Yugoslavia to additionally separate the province of Kosovo from Serbia. This war again had to be justified by propaganda and disinformation.
In particular, politicians and the media discussed alleged expulsion plans, concentration camps and massacres, which later turned out to be fabricated or questionable. Examples include the alleged „Operation Horseshoe“ (to expulse Albanians) and the alleged „Račak massacre“.
In the case of Račak, for instance, Finnish forensic experts concluded that the bodies of KLA figthers killed in action had been moved, redressed, and presented as civilian victims of an execution.
After the war, the head of an American public relations agency that had spread such dubious stories about the situation in Kosovo stated in an interview:
„To be honest, when NATO finally attacked in 1999, we opened a bottle of champagne.“
For further details, the German documentary „It Began with a Lie“ from 2001 will be shown below (English subtitles available). The documentary shows how Western politicians and military men deliberately published false information in order to legitimize the war.
See also:
Meet Mr. Massacre (Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, The Exile, 2000, archived)
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Brzezinski’s death at 89 years of age has generated a load of propaganda and disinformation, all of which serves one interest group or another or the myths that people find satisfying. I am not an expert on Brzezinski, and this is not an apology for him. He was a Cold Warrior, as essentially was everyone in Washington during the Soviet era.For 12 years Brzezinski was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part of Georgetown University. ...
For decades former Nazis and German war criminals served at the highest echelons of NATO.Most of them were highly decorated Nazis, who later served in top positions in the Western German army, and were later promoted to serve as Commander and Chief of all NATO forces in Europe.This was not a unique event, but a very common phenomenon in post-WW2 Western Europe and especially in Western Germany.Nazi war criminals and people who supported and helped Hitler to carry out the holocaust and other war crimes, genocides, and crimes against Humanity were almost never put on trial for their crimes against ...
Part IPart II The policy of language and political parties until the prohibition of the Illyrian name (1843)During the years of 1832–1836 the Hungarian assembly (Dieta) hold several sessions in Pozsony (Bratislava/Pressburg), where Croatia-Slavonia’s deputies, particularly count J. Drašković, fought for the introduction of the national (Croat) language in Croatia-Slavonia instead of the Latin or Hungarian, as well as for the Croatian state-historical rights (the so-called Croatian pravice) as they were claimed as such by the Croat political leadership. At the same time, in 1834 Ljudevit Gaj obtained a permission from the Habsburg Emperor Francis I (1806–1835) to publish the first ...
Following the death of President Tito in 1980 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia slid towards chaos. In the 1990s the plunge accelerated into civil war and one of the regions most affected was Kosovo from which Serbia withdrew after a NATO bomb and rocket offensive from 24 March to 11 June 1999. That blitz involved over 1,000 mainly American aircraft conducting some 38,000 airstrikes on Yugoslavia that killed approximately 500 civilians and destroyed much of the economic and social infrastructure of the region.NATO said its air bombardment was essential to halt repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and justified the ...
On Friday, October 5th, the U.S. Secretary of State – John Kerry calls for war crimes investigation of Russia’s and Assad governments for the destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo. The western corporate mass media was a very quick, like, for instance, The New York Times, immediately and clearly to accuse the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of alleged war crimes in Syria – the same cliché used by the same propaganda machinery against the Serbs (Srebrenica case from 1995 or Kosovo War from 1999) during the bloody destruction of ex-Yugoslavia (by the U.S. ...
The armed conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serbian forces started in 1992 with the KLA attacks on Serbian police officers, non-Albanians that lived in Kosovo and Albanians loyal to Serbia (Johnstone, 2002; Kozyris, 1999). This low level conflict escalated in 1996 with the KLA attacking refugee camps as well as other civilians and policemen resulting in dozens of innocent deaths (Johnstone, 2002; Kozyris, 1999). At this point of time and all up to late 1998, the KLA was regarded as a terrorist organisation (Gelbard, cited in Parenti, 2000:99; Jatras, 2002; Johnstone, 2002; Kepruner, 2003; Rubin, cited in ...
Armenians and others around the world this month are marking the centennial of the genocide that left hundreds of thousands of Armenians dead early in the last century. The date April 24 is typically picked as the centennial day since it was on that day in 1915 that Turkish authorities rounded up Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Constantinople and murdered them.It was the first step in a much broader slaughter. The Armenian centennial is getting the attention it deserves from sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Kim Kardashian. The Pope courageously used the word “genocide” in a mass this ...
John Pilger is the kind of well-informed, hard-hitting journalist with gobs of integrity that no longer exists in the Western mainstream media. He has the most distinguished career of all in the business.In the article below he brings stunning information to one of my own themes–the creation by Washington and its NATO vassals of an artificial reality consisting entirely of propaganda into which Washington has placed the entire Western world and all outside who inspire to be part of it. Westerners live in The Matrix, and the presstitutes keep them there. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and ...
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949 on the pretext of “containing Soviet influence”, has almost doubled in size within the past two decades alone. In 1998, NATO comprised 16 member states, but with repeated expansions up to Russia’s very borders, it now contains almost 30 countries.Though seldom mentioned in mainstream discourse, NATO is a US-dominated organization, whose orders are issued from Washington and customarily obeyed. The US is by far the largest contributor to the alliance, spending more than all other member nations put together.One of the critical reasons behind NATO’s formation almost 70 years ago, was ...
Here we go again. In yet another Pentagon precision strike, a residential building in Achin district of Nangarhar province was hit as a crowd welcomed home a tribal leader returning from the Hajj.At least 13 civilians were turned into «collateral damage». The Pentagon of course does not «discuss the details of counter-terror operations», but it’s «currently reviewing all materials related to this strike».Nothing obviously will come out of it – adding the civilian dead to the non-stop mounting toll of Operation Enduring Freedom (Forever).Someone that actually is bound to endure his freedom in full splendor is former warlord, head of ...
The full extent of the damage to international peace and security caused by the US-led Syrian strikes will take some time to become clear. But its impact on the very concept of legality in international affairs is already evident.Simply put, the most powerful county in the world and its chief satellites, the UK and France, have thrown the rule of law into the trash can. The only "law" now is the law of the jungle. There is no going back.Ironically, the attack itself was claimed by its perpetrators as enforcement of legality, not of its obliteration. For example, NATO Secretary-General ...
In a remarkable book, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley describes how, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union repeatedly tried, but finally failed, to conclude a pact of mutual security, in other words a defensive alliance, with Britain and France. This proposed arrangement was intended to counter Nazi Germany, which, under Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, had been behaving more and more aggressively, and it was likely to involve some other countries, including Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had reason to fear German ambitions. The protagonist of this ...
One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.”This violent, lawless Pan-European colonial/capitalist project continues today under the hegemony of the U.S. empire. This then begs the ...
Of the 22 Nazi concentration camps operating in the clerical fascist state of Croatia during World War II, nearly half were under the command of Roman Catholic priests.They were responsible for the grisly slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Serbs, Roma, and Jews were specifically targeted for extermination.Catholic clergy was especially keen to eradicate the Serbian Orthodox Church. This led to the murder of Christian Serbian Priests, forced conversions of Serbian Christians, and the destruction of 450 Christian Orthodox Churches during World War II.“Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and ...
Although my grandfather, Josip Broz Tito, “gave” the name “Macedonia” to one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia, it is obvious that this act did not aim to create irredentist claims with its neighbors, with which Yugoslavia developed friendly relations and fruitful cooperation.For many years Skopje’s authorities had been presenting maps of “Greater Macedonia,” extending “the geographical and ethnic border of Macedonia” into Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia and Greece. Is that the model of regional cooperation that our friends in Skopje preach to follow?The European Union, the United Nations and the international community have invested considerable political and economic capital ...
For centuries, the strategic Balkan Peninsula has featured as a slice of Europe over which wars have been fought, treaties made and broken. It became a vital pawn in the carve-up of nations after World War i, had the boundaries of its ethnic enclaves confused under Tito’s regime, then its various nationalist feelings taken advantage of and played against each other in the latest push for its colonization by the EU.In this latest process, one nation has been demonized in the mind of the public: Serbia.In the words of British political economist Rodney Atkinson, “The grossest calumny in the continuing ...
I travel frequently to the countries which once made up the now defunct Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, satisfying a passion of mine that stems back to my childhood days. For me, the Balkans’ history, its people and its cultures are both enigmatic and magnetic, as they have been, too, for countless others, of many nationalities, over centuries gone by. Accounting for the enchantment of the Balkans, its captivating allure, is a challenge to put into writing. Because no words can truly embellish what is one of the most absorbing parts of the world. To understand and feel what it is ...
A National traumaA national trauma which the Serbs after the fall of the Serbian national state and the Ottoman occupation experienced after June 20th, 1459[i] can be compared with that felt by Judea’s Jews after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.[ii] Since Serbia soon found herself well within the Ottoman Sultanate and the European Christian states were on defense from the victorious Muslim Ottoman Turks, no light at the end of the historical tunnel was seen and the whole nation sank into deep despair for the next four centuries. In a sense, the ...
No city in Iraq is more symbolic of the criminal consequences of the US invasion of Iraq than Fallujah. Prior to 2003, the 300,000-strong, prosperous, predominantly Sunni Muslim community on the Euphrates River, one of humanity’s oldest continuous urban settlements, was known as the “city of mosques.” After 13 years of destruction at the hands of the US military and its client state in Baghdad, it is today a labyrinth of ruins, a city of the dead.Following weeks of air strikes by US, British and Australian bombers, a combination of Iraqi government forces and Shiite militias is reportedly on the ...
Originally, the Bush Doctrine was a political phrase with the aim to describe the US foreign policy goals during the 43rd US President George W. Bush (Bush Junior), 2001−2009. The doctrine had four basic standpoints. All of them were centered around American military superiority after the Cold War 1.0 as the US being the only global hyperpower in international relations.The Bush Doctrine's fundamental standpoints The fundamental standpoints of the Bush Doctrine are: 1) Unilateralism; 2) A logic of “either with us or with the terrorists”; 3) Pre-emption; and 4) Regime change.It must be noted that the Bush Junior administration turned ...
