Role of the media in the Yugoslav wars

During the Yugoslav Wars, propaganda was widely used in the media of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Croatia, and in Bosnian media.

In the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), one of the indictments against Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was his use of the Serbian state-run mass media to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred among Yugoslavia's Orthodox Serbs by spreading "exaggerated and false messages of ethnically based attacks by Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats against the Serb people..."

Slobodan Milošević began his efforts to gain control over the media in 1986-87, a process which was complete by the summer of 1991. In 1992 Radio Television Belgrade, together with Radio Television Novi Sad (RTNS) and Radio Television Pristina (RTP) became a part of Radio Television of Serbia, a centralized and closely governed network intended to be a loudspeaker for Milošević's policies. During the 1990s, Dnevnik (Daily news) was used to glorify the "wise politics of Slobodan Milošević" and to attack "the servants of Western powers and the forces of chaos and despair", i.e., the Serbian opposition.

According to Professor Renaud De la Brosse, Senior Lecturer at the University of Reims, a witness called by the ICTY's Office of the Prosecutor, Serbian authorities used media as a weapon in their military campaign. "In Serbia specifically, the use of media for nationalist ends and objectives formed part of a well thought through plan - itself part of a strategy of conquest and affirmation of identity." According to de la Bosse, nationalist ideology defined the Serbs partly according to a historical myth, based on the defeat of Serbia by the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and partly on the genocide committed against Serbs during the Second World War at the hands of the Croatian extremists that were governing the Independent State of Croatia. The Croatian will for independence fed the flames of fear, especially in Serb majority regions of Croatia. According to de la Bosse, the new Serbian identity became one in opposition to the "others" - Croats (collapsed into Ustashe) and Muslims (collapsed into ). Even Croatian democracy was dismissed since ‘Hitler came to power in Germany within the framework of a multi-party mechanism but subsequently became a great dictator, aggressor and criminal’

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