Regional Media in Conflict
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Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:53 pm Page 1 Regional Media In Conflict Case studies in local war reporting June 2001 institute for war and peace reporting Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:53 pm Page 2 AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments IWPR would like to thank the United States Institute for Peace in Washington and John Owen, European Director of the Freedom Forum in London, for their financial support of this project. We would also like to thank Dan de Luce and Chris Bennett for their help in preparing these texts. Finally, our thanks go out to our team of four conflict researchers without whom this study would not have been possible: Dr Jannie Botes in South Africa; Khuy Sokhoeun in Cambodia; Giorgi Topouria in Georgia and Ahmed Buric in Bosnia. Edited by Alan Davis Design and layout Frank Fisher Print Thanet Press Ltd Published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting Copyright ©2001 Institute for War and Peace Reporting, all rights reserved ISBN 1-902811-03-8 Printed in the United Kingdom IWPR Charity Registration Number 1027201 33 Islington High St UK Company Registration Number: London N1 9LH UK 2744185 Tel: (4420) 7713 7130 This volume is simultaneously Fax: (4420) 7713 7140 published as an electronic book on Email: [email protected] IWPR’s website. Web: www.iwpr.net 2 iwpr Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:53 pm Page 3 ContentsContents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2 INTRODUCTION 4 Regional Media in Conflict By Alan Davis GEORGIA 12 Media and Civil Conflicts in Georgia By Giorgi Topouria CAMBODIA 42 The Media as Political Pawns in the Fight For Cambodia By Khuy Sokhoeun BOSNIA 64 The Media War and Peace in Bosnia By Ahmed Buric SOUTH AFRICA 100 Media in the New South Africa By Dr Jannie Botes regional media in conflict 3 Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:53 pm Page 4 Regional Media in Conflict Introduction he idea behind this book and the studies it By contains can be traced back to events in Alan Davis Tearly September 1991, beginning in a bar on the outskirts of Bac Palanka, 60 miles north-west of Belgrade in the Former Yugoslavia. Close by, a handful of Yugoslav Federal Army (JNA) soldiers were bivouacked on the road leading to a long single span bridge that crossed the Danube. On this side, the Serbian side, two T54 tanks sat with their guns pointing into what was then an independent but as yet unrecognised Croatia. Despite there having already been killings committed by militia groups on both sides, the war between Serbia and Croatia was barely lukewarm. A bus service of sorts still ran between Bac Palanka and Illok, a Croatian village just across the river – its driver merely changed down two gears when he drove by the tanks. The bar looked new and its clientele was young and affluent. A colleague and I were looking to talk to the town’s young people about the growing tensions in this part of Yugoslavia. But that evening, instead of MTV playing on the hi-tech video system, we found a dozen youngsters trans- fixed by World War II footage of the Jasenovac death camp being liberated by Partisan forces. Thousands of Serbs, along with Jews and Roma, were killed in Jasenovac by the Croatian fascist Ustashe government allied to the Nazis. The 4 iwpr Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:53 pm Page 5 documentary was broadcast by Radio Television Srpska (RTS) in Belgrade and you could almost sense the spittle of the narrator as he spat out the words accom- panying film of the captured Croatian guards. You didn’t need Serbo-Croatian to know this was a none-too-subtle lesson in hate. Footage from the end of one war was being used to precipitate the start of another. Screened at such a time and narrated with such vehemence, it no doubt had an effect on the people who lived and drank there, as it did on the JNA soldiers camped outside. If the soldiers hadn’t seen that particular documentary, they all appeared to have watched or read something very similar. They were not against Croatia or Croatians, they told us, but they were frightened of a resurgence of Ustashe fascism. What would happen to those unprotected Serbs who happened to live across the river, they asked? With Croatia declaring independence and being supported once again by a strong and united Germany, what would happen to them? One week later in Croatian-held Vukovar, with dozens of road blocks, check- points and tank traps having been thrown up across Eastern Slavonia, the raw emotive power of the media was being harnessed just as effectively by the Croatian authorities. Vukovar, which had boasted a substantial Serb minority before the shooting started, was already cut off from the rest of Croatia. The only way in or out was to creep through the cornfields at night, or walk up to and past the federal tanks, hoping that neither they nor the Croatian militia further up the road would open fire. From the basement of the Hotel Dunaev which was being hit by shellfire, we watched HTV, the state-owned television station in Zagreb, broadcast news and well-crafted patriotic spots every hour. In their way, these slots, which included images of burning houses and young Croatian volunteers crawling through the fields, to the strains of “Brothers In Arms,” were as power- ful as the RTS broadcasts I’d seen back in Bac Palanka. While the dubbing of a Dire Straits song over frontline footage does not fully qualify as hate speech, given the context, it was certainly understood by all who saw it as a direct call to arms. rom 1998 until the start of the air strikes on Yugoslavia, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London, a media development and Ftraining charity, had been running an extensive in-country media-moni- toring project that analysed hate-speech and journalistic professionalism within the Yugoslav media. Examining and assessing the coverage of the Kosovo conflict was, from the start, by far the biggest component of the work. Until regional media in conflict 5 Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:53 pm Page 6 March 1999, when the start of the air campaign sent our people underground or overseas, our team of 17 local monitors, analysts and editors digested the news as put out by the country’s media outlets. In so doing, we were able to document the excesses of the media as well as record instances of fair and objective report- ing. As expected, there were far more cases of the former. The information war fought between the official Serbian media and the Albanian press proved as vicious as the one fought between Belgrade and Zagreb eight years earlier. Hate- speech broadcast from Belgrade during the Kosovo crisis was used by Western leaders to justify the air strikes launched against the RTS building, transmitters and the relay stations. As with any big story, the reporting of it eventually becomes a news item in itself. So it has been that a small but significant part of the international media’s reporting on the Balkans – up to and including the conflict in Kosovo – has 6 iwpr Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:54 pm Page 7 focused on the style and manner of the reporting. As in Vietnam, this debate was launched by the ...while the journalists on the ground. Debate over the Balkan coverage quickly widened into a broad-church dubbing of a discussion on the nature of Western media coverage Dire Straits song of conflicts in the age of the rolling news show, over frontline when complex issues have to be swiftly packaged into three-minute spots. footage does Martin Bell MP, formerly of the BBC, Tom not fully qualify Geltjen of National Public Radio and Nik Gowing, as hate speech, now of BBC World Television, are just three former front line reporters from the Balkans who have given the subsequently initiated their own studies into exam- context, it ining the role and impact of the international news was certainly media in conflict zones. understood But while it was trumpeted as being something of a new development in the media, in coining the by all who term “journalism of attachment,” Martin Bell was saw it... criticised for promoting a style of journalism that has in fact long been in existence – and best exem- plified by the likes of Martha Gellhorn, Wilfred Burchett, James Cameron, John Pilger and others. These are reporters who have been accused of straying off the beaten track of objectivity into the land of the polemical and partisan. Others have praised them for being far more interested in the victims of war than in the mere mechanics of waging it. Their defenders have argued that the convention that Western journalists have to remain clinically neutral as if they were reporting a football match, is wrong. There, they say, is neither reason nor merit in trying to provide a balanced view on what is invariably a chaotic situation. And they might conclude by asking whether such artifice does not become immoral in wars where ethnic cleansing is deployed? While interesting in its own right, the debate regional media in conflict 7 Peace Reporting 1/7/01 12:54 pm Page 8 becomes much more relevant when it focuses upon regional media and on the local journalists. This was the starting point of a study IWPR undertook a few years ago. Quite obviously, neither the visiting “fireman” nor even the resident foreign correspondent will have the same level of understanding as the local reporter.