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When Media Directs Policy: the Bosnia Case by V. Miles Raguz The international community's remedies toward Bosnia and Herzegovina have been largely based on public pressure. The major powers say they have no vital interests in the area. So almost everything they have attempted has been done in order to placate public pressure; remedies in the form of humanitarian aid. Public pressure has come mostly through or because of media attention to the horrifying violations of human rights in the region. For example, it has been reported that, when President Clinton was in Tokyo last year, he watched CNN reports about the worsening humanitarian situation in Sarajevo. The President was disturbed and, according to news reports, he telephoned Washington and ordered a review of policy options on Sarajevo. Note, Sarajevo, not Bosnia and Herzegovina. Another example is from the United Kingdom also last year. British television reported on the tragic situation of a dear little girl, Irma Hadzimuratovic, in Sarajevo. Reportedly, Prime Minister Major quickly appeared on television and spoke about policy options on Bosnia. "Operation Irma" was the favored option. Britain would make 50 beds available for the critically wounded from Sarajevo and fly them to London. Media crews going along for the ride to pick up the wounded outnumbered the wounded. No one worried much about Bosnia until August of 1992 when the West first saw picture of emaciated prisoners in the Omarska camp. But the Bosnia tragedy and the atrocities were well known to many governments much earlier. Yet no one cared to take appropriate action. Some government officials resigned in protest. Nothing much happened, however, until television screens exposed the shame. In the spring of 1993, the Bosnian conflict entered a new stage: fighting between Muslims and Croats. In this new phase of the war, the Bosnian Croat community may have become the most victimized of the three communities in Bosnia. But media reports hardly hint that this may be the case. The September 12, 1993 article by David Ottaway in The Washington Post may have been the first report in the United States about this situation. According to Bosnian Croat authorities, 44 percent of the Bosnian Croat population had become refugees or displaced persons and 1.5 percent had been killed through August 1993. The Bosnia and Herzegovina Army, which is in a reality a Muslim army, has overtaken close to four thousand square kilometers of the territory previously defended from the Serbs by the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), the army of the Bosnian Croats. While Bosnian Croats defended this territory from Serb aggression and genocide, Muslims organized their army there. This territory was the only place in the world where Bosnian Muslims were protected. Everywhere else, they were either under siege and on the run, or refugees in a foreign country. Now, the Bosnian Muslim army, stationed in cities behind the HVO lines against the Serbs, has expelled some 120,000 Bosnian Croats from their homes. The Archbishop of Sarajevo, in the August 11, 1993 letter to the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the former Yugoslavia, wrote that his archdiocese of about 500,000 Catholics, almost all Croats, was "on the brink of extinction," first due to Serb aggression and then due to Muslim attacks. Nearly 70 percent of his archdiocese is destroyed: 46 percent by the Serb army and 23 percent by the Muslim army. This latest Bosnian tragedy continued with little attention from the responsible bodies of the international community. The Security Council, which has passed more than 80 resolutions and statements on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has kept a stony silence with regard to the plight of the Bosnian Croat Catholics. Could it be because the media has not reported the problem? Probably so. It has become quite apparent that in dealing with Bosnia and Herzegovina, due to the lack of resources, the international organizations focus on those problems and areas that get media attention. A survey of New York Times reporting on the war during May- December 1993, the time period of major Muslim-Croat fighting, showed that Muslim sources were referred to or quoted almost three times as often as Croat sources [439 vs. 176]. Given what has been happening to Bosnian Croats in central Bosnia and northern Herzegovina since April, the lack of media attention to their plight was disturbing. Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovine bishops hold a similar opinion. Following the October 15, 1993 Synod in Split, they issued a sharply worded statement regarding the media reporting from the region: "Yet we must note with regret and decisively protest against all perfunctory, unconfirmed and unfounded reports from various media - even Catholic - which appear closer to the work of subjective propaganda than to the work of truth and fairness. Consequently, many are led to wrong ideas and conclusions about the situation in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina." The leadership of the Catholic Church may have only once before reacted with such sharp-worded criticism, when it criticized the Bosnian Croat army for violations of international humanitarian law. Jeri Laber, executive director of Helsinki Watch (op-ed, The New York Times, October 11, 1993), has also noted that "U.N. personnel and the news media have reported mainly on Croat abuses in central Bosnia." About 150,000 Bosnian Croats have been surrounded by the Bosnian Muslim Army in the heart of Bosnia, in three territorial pockets centered on Zepce, Vitez and Kiseljak, with hardly any humanitarian assistance in months. The lack of media coverage of this stage of the war explains the silence of the international community with respect to the suffering of Croats in central Bosnia. The media has taken on a larger role than usual in Bosnia: it directs international policy. Because of the impact it has on policy with respect to Bosnia, the media has assumed an even greater responsibility to report accurately and fairly. The Bosnian Muslims are victims of genocide because of Serb aggression, but Bosnian Croats have also suffered greatly, and need similar consideration from the media, in order to obtain comparable consideration from the international community. Sve obavijesti oknjigama mozete dobiti putem
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