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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Serbia's culture is in massive flux, and nowhere is that awkward change more pronounced than in the media. As the wrenching documentary aired by Studio B testifies, Serbia's arts and media are playing a new role in the process, exposing the Serbian public to information that, under Milosevic, many people already knew but only a small group of progressive people discussed.
Certain independent journalists, artists, actors, filmmakers, theater directors and cultural leaders battled the hate speech, lying and mass hysteria that overtook Serbia in the late 1980s. They resisted in the past few years as that propaganda morphed into a cruel, lynch-mob mentality against pro-democracy groups and opposition politicians here.
But many others from Serbia's professional media and arts world chose to participate in promoting Milosevic's program over the past decade, first for a Greater Serbia, and later in an increasingly vicious war of words between the Milosevic regime and its internal Serbian pro-democratic foes. Today, Serbia's arts and media world faces as much confusion and factionalization as the larger society it aims to reach.
Radio Television Serbia (RTS), the bloated national broadcasting company with 6,000 employees, was the most far-reaching and destructive offender on behalf of Milosevic's propaganda front.
During the Bosnian war, when Sarajevans were under siege -- starving, without heat or water, shelled and sniped at by Bosnian Serb troops supplied and reinforced by Belgrade -- RTS broadcast reports showing a still photo from Sarajevo in the 1980s, untouched, in the sunlight. As if the war itself, and Belgrade's direct link with the shelling and siege of Sarajevo, were a complete fiction that could be willed away.
"During the siege of Sarajevo, it was shocking how in Belgrade, people here knew, but didn't want to know," says Gordana Susa. Once a prominent RTS journalist, Susa, now 52, quit when Milosevic came to power, and started an independent television production company called Video Independent News (VIN) in 1993. Its first act was to send reporters with cameras into besieged Sarajevo, a subject that got almost no coverage on state TV. Susa says, "That's the reason I started VIN. RTS didn't mention the Bosnian war at all until 1993," a full year after it started, and some two years after the war in Croatia started.
And when RTS did cover the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, it so distorted the facts on the ground as to make Serbs seem the main victims, denying their role in perpetrating atrocities.
During the Kosovo war last year, RTS never showed the 800,000 Kosovar Albanians expelled by Serb police and paramilitaries, except when a convoy of fleeing Kosovars was killed by NATO bombs. Yugoslav Information Minister Goran Matic even ranted on RTS last year that the hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Macedonia and Albania were actors, paid to walk in a circle.
Serbia now seeks an exit from this system of entrenched misinformation and denial -- but, for the moment, a remarkably soft one.
For now Serbian media, like most Serbian institutions, exist in a strange cohabitation with Milosevic's old guard. The federal parliament, the army, police, ministries -- all face the unresolved question of "who has to go."
