ROUND TABLE

Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure and an honour to be asked to be here and I wish to begin by thanking Mr Ante Beljo not only for inviting me here but also for being instrumental in the formation in Croatia of the Foreign Press Bureau which has helped foreign journalists in covering the events in this country since the early days of the Croatian-Serb war of 1991.

Many of the members of this organisation have worked tirelessly and with little thought for financial rewards. Many risked their lives to take journalists to front-line positions to enable them to see with their own eyes what was happening. I’m proud to say that some of them have become good friends and I hope we shall continue to keep contact even after the conclusion of the horrible events that introduced us to one another in the first place.

My talk will address the role of the international press in events in the former Yugoslavia. But I’m not an academic and rather than being a thorough, scholarly investigation these are some personal observations formed through contact with many of the press corps covering the conflict in Croatia and Bosnia.

Let me first tell you a bit about myself. I have covered the conflict in former Yugoslavia for “The European” newspaper mainly from the Croatian and Bosnian side while a colleague based in Belgrade has covered it from the Serb side. But I have also covered it from the perspective of a first generation British Ukrainian. I was born in England but my parents were Ukrainian refugees and from the beginning of Croatia’s fight for independence I recognised parallels with Ukraine’s struggle for freedom.

I felt keenly the hopes and pains, the tragedies, the heroism and the fortitude of Croatian people during the war that broke out in 1991. And once, after a car that I was driving in the company of two British women journalists was attacked and destroyed by Serb soldiers and we were being taken to safety by some Croatian fighters, I heard their commander, who did not realise that I understood some Croatian, tell his men to walk around us in such a fashion that if the Serbs shot at us the Croatian soldiers would get hit by the first bullets.

He was telling them to shield three strangers with their own bodies. That, as you can imagine, made a great impression on me. And so from early on I was not an impartial observer but that did not preclude me from being a truthful and accurate reporter of events there.

And what events they were. I saw the fighting in towns and villages all over Croatia. Some of the names are well known now - the tragic episode of Vukovar where a city was levelled in barbaric fashion after a heroic defence whilst the western world shamefully looked on and did nothing. The attacks on Dubrovnik, Osijek, Zadar, Karlovac and Sibenik.

I was in Vinkovci on the first day of a so-called cease-fire when the JNA airforce bombed for several hours killing and wounding many civilians. I was incidentally surprised the next day when European Community peace monitors insisted that there had been no breaches of the cease-fire, a cynical distortion of the truth that was to become a regular occurrence on the part of the international bodies present in Croatia and subsequently in Bosnia too.

I went to many smaller places whose names are not so well known where brave man and women were fighting with anything they could lay their hands on against one of the mightiest armies in Europe. It was a privilege to make friends with people who despite having little food themselves would be completely generous with the little they did have.

It was both sad and uplifting to go to the town of Pakrac, being attacked by Serb forces, where a mental hospital full of patients was shelled daily while only a handful of courageous staff - Croatians, Serbs and Muslims - remained to help and the only food, loaves of bread, was brought each day by two young Croat volunteers who had to run across fields dodging sniper fire every day. I remember lots of towns and villages increasingly damaged as time went on. People I had met on previous visits now dead. Tales of suffering and grief but always of hope.

I know that many Croatians are convinced that the international press is anti-Croatian and that western media have somehow co-operated with their governments - many of whom have adopted a position hostile to Croatia. But with a few exceptions I believe that most of the foreign press have conducted themselves honourably and honestly. They may have got it wrong sometimes but for the most part I don’t believe that journalists have been corrupt or deliberately tried to distort the situation. Around 80 journalists have died covering the war in former Yugoslavia and many of them have been from the foreign media.

Just because for instance the British press reports that our defence secretary, Michael Portillo, condemned the Croatian liberation of the so-called Republika Srpska Krajina does not mean that the media reporting his outrageous statement share this sentiments.

Journalists know they are doing something right if people get angry at them. I knew we were getting something right when the former British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, last year bitterly complained that if it wasn’t for the interference of journalists - what he meant was the work of the honest majority who were describing what was happening in Croatia and Bosnia and making it impossible for him and some of his counterparts in other European capitals to distort the truth - then the conflict in former Yugoslavia could have been solved a long time before. I shudder to think what kind of solution would have been imposed.

But what has happened to foster the perception that the international press is hostile to Croatia? And it is undeniable that there has been a lot printed and broadcast that has been unsympathetic to Croatia recently.

At the root of the problem, I believe, lie ignorance and prejudice, which is a product of ignorance, rather than some malicious conspiracy. For the most part Croatia received very favourable treatment by the media during Croatia’s fight for survival against Greater Serb imperialism in the summer of 1991.

I believe that the Foreign Press Bureau was instrumental in winning what one would call the propaganda war against the Serbs and thereby securing popular support around the world for Croatia. It won it not because the FPB concocted stories or spun deceptions. It didn’t need to because it was clear to an objective observer that the conflict was a brutal war of aggression being waged by Serb chauvinists against a Croatia that was defending its right to existence as an independent country.

Many of those that covered the war Croatia in those first months have remained good friends of Croatia ever since. I had the advantage that because of my background I already knew something of Croatia’s history but many of my colleagues had not even heard of such a country as Croatia in the same way that they had not heard of Ukraine or the Baltic states until the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

That’s all right because you can always learn about something if you make the effort and many of them did. But the danger came from those who knew just a little and constructed arguments or stories through the prism of ignorance and prejudice. Those were the people who would smugly talk about the Ustase as if it was the only place of Croatian history that mattered.

They wouldn’t make the effort to explore Croatia’s history and her oppression by Serbia in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. They would omit to mention that Croatians for a long time were the chief source of recruits to the partisans and that Croatia provided a far friendlier base for partisan operations then Serbia had done.

For some though the pressure in a highly competitive industry that is the media meant that the search for a different kind of story that supposedly shed new light on events outweighed considerations of accuracy or plain honesty. Western politicians who wanted to portray Croatia as some neo-fascist state just waiting to happen didn’t have to bribe or otherwise induce some journalists to write shameful articles or produce nonsensical broadcasts. They weren’t working for western or Serb intelligence services, these journalists, they were doing it to build a reputation for cleverly seeing things that most other, in their view inferior, journalists had missed.

I know of one senior correspondent for a large western television corporation who infuriates his colleagues, who have spent much more time here and in Bosnia because he will go to Pale and produce pieces that seek to explain Karadzic’s position favourably and to show how that war criminal is just a cruelly misunderstood individual. This journalist does this not because he is being bribed or has some great attraction for Serb chauvinism he does it because he knows he will get plenty of air time by producing a so-called “controversial” piece.

Other journalists have never been to Croatia or Bosnia at all but rely on briefings from the foreign or defence or other ministries of their countries. The briefings are not a forum for downright lies but they are being given by people who have a vested interest in portraying events in a certain light. They are representatives of governments whom I still don’t believe are pro-Serb but have displayed bungling ineptness and moral cowardice in the face of the evil and wickedness of Greater Serb ambitions.

Now they are embarrassed that they could not handle the problem themselves and once again are being baffled out by America. They are trying to cover their tracks and have produced a rupture in the democratic process by ignoring the reports and descriptions of journalists on the ground in Croatia and Bosnia who have witnessed the vile things that this Serb extremism has produced and they have ignored the outrage and demands for action of the people of their countries.

So at these briefings and other opportunities to influence journalists much of the distortion is created by omission or emphasis. Mass murders and other atrocities by Serbs might not be mentioned or the fight be downplayed while isolated crimes committed by Croats or Muslims could be emphasised. Or, as with some notorious examples from the UN, false Serb claims of massacres or other atrocities would be repeated before any attempt had been made to investigate them. Those journalists who have been in Croatia or Bosnia would be able to assess these briefings in a different way to those who had never been here and were relying totally on the briefings.

And there is the pressure of time, deadlines of a newspaper or programme that has to be produced that night and whose space has to be filled. There is also the desire not to upset the government or political contacts because you may not be invited to some vital briefing or they may give a good story to a rival. So you see the possibilities for manipulating journalists or their reports are many and are much more subtle than handing over an envelope filled with used 100 dollar notes.

In a climate where many people still know little of the history and aspirations of the Croatian people it is easy to distort the truth. When conflict erupted in Bosnia between Croatians and Muslims the Croatians were painted as the bad guys. Some western leaders who had been less than happy about Croatia’s independence eagerly jumped on the bandwagon that said “see I told you so the Croatians are just as barbaric as the Serbs.”

That conflict was indeed a terrible and tragic one but to compare it to the Serb invasion of Croatia or Bosnia was dishonest. It was precisely because the Serbs had launched a murderous invasion of Bosnia and expelled through “ethnic cleansing” so many Muslims that tensions grew in the one third of Bosnia not under their control and now containing two thirds of the population.

Croatians were panicked by the influx of so many newcomers into their territory and wondered where they were going to live. Many Muslims, who had lost everything and saw little chance of regaining their homes and land through fighting the Serbs thought about staying permanently where fate had pitched them up. The Serbs worked assiduously to sow ill-feeling between Croatians and Muslims. They were aided in this by some misguided boat and Croat and Muslim leaders as well as by others who saw conflict as a means to win local power of make quick profits.

But they were also helped by the passive posture of western powers who made it clear they would not intervene against the Serbs and sent the dreadful signal that principles of international law were irrelevant and what one got by the gun one kept. Many journalists did understand this and tried to explain that massacres like the terrible events at Ahmici, contemptible though they were, were not some kind of proof of inherent Croatian evil but the direct consequence of Serb aggression.

But those who were still trapped by their prejudices and ignorance saw the Croat Muslim war as a further proof that Croatia was harbouring some monster, that President Tudjman had come to a sinister deal with Milosevic to partition Bosnia and that Croatians were finally revealing their black true nature. That is why after Croatia’s operations to recover first western Slavonia then territories occupied by the Serbs in Krajina some governments and, for reasons that I have described, some journalists condemned Croatia for liberating its own lands and immediately gave credence to Serb claims of mass atrocities.

I have said that I believe that most journalists do their work honestly and the impression that the press is anti-Croatian is increased by the fact that Croats generally hear about unfavourable foreign reports rather than sympathetic ones. Perhaps the apologists for Serb fascism will criticise Croatia again after eastern Slavonia including Vukovar is liberated - and I have no doubt it will be soon.

But those critics in the end mean very little. The truth has a way of surviving and in the end claiming victory. I’m sure that the truth represented by the heroes who fought and died in Vukovar and elsewhere in Croatia is the one that will survive.

The sacrifice and suffering of the tens of thousands of ordinary men, women and young people who thought it was worth risking everything to defend democracy, culture, human rights and the right of their homeland, Croatia, to exist is, I’m certain, the truth that will survive.

Ante Beljo: Thank you Mr. Askold Krushelnycky. I would now ask Mr. Aleksander Ravlic from Banjaluka to share some of his ideas with us. He spent all of his working life in Banjaluka mainly as a journalist for the Zagreb paper, “Vjesnik”. He is going to speak to us about the Serb arrogation of Banjaluka and the facts which challenge their right to this arrogation.

Aleksandar Ravlic