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Mediaefforts
topromoteantiSerbianism
ByJohnBosnitch,
BureauChief,
TheInterMediaCenterNewsAgency,
Tokyo.

PostedonTheNewYorkTimeswebforum
"USInterests,USAchievements"
July12,1996

Forfairuseonly
Published under the provision of
U.S. Code, Title 17, section 107.

Dear Moderator Bernard Gwertzman,

I am a Tokyo-based Canadian journalist. I have reported from

my paternal ancestral homeland of Bosnia for various
international media on assignments that have brought me into
contact with presidents, ambassadors, so-called warlords,
conscripts and non-combatants. I have posed questions of
former Special Representative for the Former Yugoslavia
Yasushi Akashi, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros
Ghali, International Civilian Coordinator for Bosnia Carl Bildt
and a host of Western generals, aid workers, and international
political leaders. One of my reports can be seen at the site of an
English-language Tokyo journal, TheWeekender.

This forum set up by the New York Times seems to have

focused on the various conflicting versions of the history of the
South Slav region. While valuable, that focus may have led
some participants to overlook this unique chance to bring your
newspaper to account for its coverage of the conflict.

In the same way as Jews recognize anti-Semitism behind what

less-persecuted observers might call meaningless banter, Serbs
also know the difference between honest, fair comment and
discriminatory remarks made to look like unbiased
observations. Our shared sensitivity to such things comes from
common historical experience -- Jews and Serbs shared the
experience of awaiting death side-by-side in real, unimagined,
concentration camps for having failed to respond immediately
to what others might still today consider to be merely paranoid
delusions.

After spending the better part of this decade analyzing media

coverage of Yugoslavia, and after holding my tongue for the
first years of the conflict to be sure I had checked, double-
checked and triple-checked my sources, I have since risked my
journalistic career in Japan and my personal status in my
native Canada to put forward the case that mediacoverage
oftheYugoslavcivilwarsisnotonlyunfairand
biased,butisalsotheproductofbroadlycoordinated
effortstopromoteantiSerbianismthroughthe
media.

Your claim in an earlier posting, Mr. Gwertzman, that New

York Times reporters have tried to be fair and to report the
viewpoints of the different parties in a way that conveys the
different points of view, is not consistent with my personal
experience in Bosnia.

The New York Times' stubborn objection to referring to

Radovan Karadzic as the President of Republika Srpska,
instead calling him only the Bosnian Serb leader, is just one
example of the News-Speak that pervades your pages. The
incessant quoting of figures for dead or missing, without either
citing the Muslim information ministry as your source or
citing Serb counter-claims, cannot be attributed to mere
oversights.

Even if your reporters were not guilty of wittingly participating

in anti-Serbianism, they would still deserve to be condemned
for being extremely uninformed and for being woefully lacking
in the natural curiosity needed to debunk wartime
propaganda.
Our host here at this forum site, Ambassador Albright, has at
least an alibi in this dirty information business -- she can
always say she was only following orders. The job of an
ambassador has long been known as that of an honest man
sent abroad to lie on behalf of his country.

But journalists who have let themselves be used to sustain the

pressure and thereby the war on the Serbs cannot cite the
same job-related excuse for their activities. Such journalists
precede all others in guilt, by having created the essential
conditions without which the snipers, rapists and torturers
would never have existed. Likewise, it is only with the aid of
such journalists that the U.S. military could be in Bosnia
today.

All this having been said, let's turn the lens toward the New
York Times itself. I have been waiting for editorial balance to
be restored in your paper for more than five years. I still have a
copy of the August, 1992, op-ed commentary in which
Margaret Thatcher passed your paper the anti-Serbianist
baton and you responded with a lead editorial blaming Serbs
for ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and genocidal
aggression -- making explicit comparisons to the Nazis, along
with other historical and geographical misrepresentations.

Inappropriate comparisons to Nazis that have now again, four

years later, appeared in this forum site, the ad hominem
attacks, the resort to obviously unfactual statements and other
similar offenses which you, Mr. Gwertzman, have deplored in
your letters as Moderator, all post-date yourown
newspaper'sglaringlyunprofessionalandmost
uncivileditorials.

Therefore, I would like to ask you, Mr. Gwertzman, to share

some information about your paper's policies with this forum's
participants. In case you are not empowered to answer the
following questions, could you please most kindly forward
them to the responsible New York Times officials and bring us
back their responses...

WhyhavetwotoplevelNewYorkTimes
journalists,EditorAbeRosenthalandWashington
BureauChiefDavidBinder,beeneffectivelysilenced
onthesubjectofBosnia?

Note: David Binder told my non-Serb mother at a conference

on Bosnia (sorry Mr. Binder, if I offend you before we even
meet) that his request to go to Bosnia to report was refused by
the Times because younger reporters were handling the
matter.

Binder has since gone to the lengths of writing for other

publications to air findings that the Sarajevo mortar-bomb
massacre that led to the United States' entry into this war was
never proven to have been fired by the Serbs and could well
have been fired by the Muslims.

Abe Rosenthal, when he gets the chance to write on Bosnia,

has used the taboo term Muslim-Serbs instead of the head-
office-approved term Bosnians to drive home the fact that
most of the Muslims are ethnically Serb and that this is mainly
a civil war between ethnic Serbs of different religions.

Rosenthal's comments lay bare your reporters' misleading use

of the News-Speak term "ethnic cleansing" to describe how
religion-divided descendants of the same family expel each
other from contested territory. My own family is a case in
point: there are Serb (Orthodox), Muslim (Islamist) and Croat
(Catholic) descendants of the ancient Bosnitch (Bosnic) family.
Yet, we are still one family of shared blood.

Havingtoldusthatyourreportersfaced
difficultyoperatingonBosnianSerbterritory,can
youclearupthepersistentstories(whichIhavenot
researched)thatyourmainreporterinthefieldatthe
startoftheconflict,ChuckSudetic,wasofCroatian
descentandcouldbeeasilyidentifiedassuch?

Note: My father is of Serb descent and I accepted from the

start of my reporting in Bosnia that my background precluded
me from being treated as a regular correspondent on all sides
of the lines.

HowcanthetensofthousandsofSerbian
Americanswhoreadyourpaperarriveatseeinga
commentaryfromRadovanKaradzicpublishedin
youropedsection?

Note: During five years of conflict, your editors have not seen
fit to print op-ed commentaries either by Bosnian Serb leading
figures or their open supporters. But the vast majority of your
readers have no other avenue of hearing the opposing Bosnian
Serb view. Surely, acknowledging your readers' right to know -
- even if only by printing a single comment from the other side
-- would not unravel years of guided debate among self-
declared experts who are all non-Bosnian Serb.

Incaseswhereyouhaveallowedfullpage
coverageofallegationsagainsttheBosnianSerbs,are
youpreparedtograntasmallopedrebuttalandprint
yourownbriefeditorialcommentifthosestories
subsequentlyprovetohavebeenfalse?

Note: Your reporter John Burns won the Pulitzer Prize for
International Reporting at least in part for his coverage of
Borislav Herak, the self-declared Serb war criminal you
featured in 1992 in a full-page spread and innumerable
subsequent articles.

Despite the suspicious lack of any physical evidence, and the

fact that the man inexplicably confessed his crimes voluntarily,
refused to make a courtroom defense, had Croat ethnic roots,
actively solicited numerous interviews by Western journalists
before his trial and has been described as mentally
unbalanced, his claims of having participated in a Bosnian
Serb master plan of genocide and mass rape were uncritically
presented by your paper as believable.

Either your editors or Mr. Burns even omitted Herak's one

allegation against anyone other than the Serbs: his allegation
(printed in other media) that UNPROFOR commander,
Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie had joined in the carnage
by raping and presumably murdering several Muslim women
he took from a Serb rape camp. Without that deletion, Herak's
other accusations against the Serbs would of course have been
rendered equally absurd.

I tracked theHerakstory for months, until Boutros Ghali

visited Japan and I surprised him at his main Tokyo press
conference with a question about his UNPROFOR commander
being party to Serb rape camp activities. I taped Boutros
Ghali's response as: "It is a lie. It is one of our difficulties...
disinformation." My story appeared on the front page of the
English edition of the world's largest newspaper, TheYomiuri
Shimbun.

Soon after, Time magazine published a laudatory full-page

feature about your reporter John Burns, strategically timing it
to appear one week before the Pulitzer awards were to be
granted. In the article, Burns answered a question about what
Time called his obvious sympathy for the Muslim side. He
responded by saying that "Those people who allege that we've
taken sides are advocating a policy of equivalent guilt, which is
the policy of inaction." "If your stories don't convey some of
the outrage you feel, you're just a stenographer." This
statement appears to be at odds with your claims of a fair
handling of the news, Moderator Gwertzman.

Somewhat later, both the Reuters and Associated Press news

wires reported that the New York Times had pressured the
Pulitzer Awards committee to give Burns the award. The wire
services said your paper had demanded that the committee
change its yet unannounced intention to give the prize to
Newsday's Roy Gutman (who generated the first rape camp
and death camp stories) and to instead award it jointly to
Burns and Gutman, perhaps as a symbol of their joint efforts.
The New York Times' will was done.

I waited more than three years, until March 22, 1996, to see
the the CBS Evening News ever so briefly show Herak finally
admitting that histestimonywasfabricated and that he
had lied. The TV program did not advise its viewers of the
seminal importance of Herak's case, nor did its openly pro-
Muslim anchorman Dan Rather draw any relevant
conclusions.

President Karadzic and General Mladic are at this very

moment having arrest warrants issued against them as a result
of Hague testimony by another self-declared Serb war criminal
named Drazen Erdemovic. Despite the suspicious lack of any
physical evidence, and the fact that the man inexplicably
confessed his crimes voluntarily, refused to make a courtroom
defense, is of Croat origin, actively solicited numerous
interviews by Western journalists before his trial and has been
described as mentally unbalanced, his claims of having
participated in a Bosnian Serb master plan of genocide and
mass rape have been uncritically presented by your paper as
believable... deja vu?

It is unlikely that Serbs will ever be able to give up the sword

when faced with the threat of the New York Times' pen.

Doallofyoureditors(includingsportsand
entertainment)participateineditorialdiscussionson
howtodealwithparallelsbeingdrawnbetween
articlesonrelatedsubjectsthathavepotential
politicalimplicationswithrespecttoU.S.policyin
Yugoslavia?

Note: I ask this question because of what appears to be a

consistent double-standard applied where Yugoslav-related
links may be drawn from an article...

Salman Rushdie, who was raised as a Muslim, is often featured

positively by the New York Times for having maintained his
independent views as an artist despite death threats from
Islamists.

However, two-time Cannes Palm D'Or prize-winning film

director Emir Kusturica, who was raised in Sarajevo as a
Muslim, appeared only ever so briefly in your entertainment
section as someone of unclear status because, although he has
also maintained his independent views as an artist despite
death threats from Bosnian Islamists, he has rejected being
called a Bosnian and has been quoted as saying his allegiance
is to a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

The 83-year-old French Catholic priest Abbe Pierre known as

an activist for the homeless recently fled to an Italian
monastery to escape a hostile press (including the New York
Times) after he said it was of little importance whether 5, 6, or
7 million Jews died in the Holocaust. He also mentioned
biblical references to a genocide committed by Jews and
criticized the Zionist movement. As a result he has been
excluded from the International League Against Racism and
Anti-Semitism.

However, the New York Times duteously covered the Alice-in-

Wonderland event of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman
sharing the podium with an astoundingly uncritical Elie Wiesel
at the official opening of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, despite Tudjman's having said that it was of little
importance whether 3, 4, or 5 million Jews died in the
Holocaust. President Tudjman has also mentioned biblical
references to a genocide committed by Jews and criticized the
Zionist movement.

I have not seen Tudjman identified by the New York Times as

Europe's highest-elected public official to hold Holocaust
revisionist views in any of your frequent articles about the
 dangers of revisionist politicians such as France's Jean-Marie
Le Pen, Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovski and Austria's Joerg
Haider attaining office.

There are numerous other examples.

George Orwell's book NineteenEightyFour contains a

fictional excerpt from a text called TheTheoryandPracticeof
OligarchicalCollectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein in which
the following passage can be found:

"The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which

can be taught even to young children, is called, in
Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty
of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the
power of not grasping analogies, of failing to
perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the
simplest arguments if they are inimical to... IFOR
(my substitution for Orwell's Ingsoc), and of being
bored or repelled by any train of thought which is
capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protectivestupidity."

IFOR is the acronym for the Implementation Force for Bosnia.

I believe Orwell's observation can stand otherwise unaltered
except for a correction in the spelling of the word News-Speak
when used in reference to the New York Times.

The New York Times has been in the eye of this storm from
day one.

I look forward to your replies to my five numbered questions,

Moderator Gwertzman, and to any other comments from you
or my fellow participants.

It is indeed a pleasure to have joined your discussions after

having only stumbled into them because of a computer error.

John Bosnitch

End quote.

No Replies

NOTE: For years the New York Times editors felt free to lie about any
aspect of the Balkan crisis. They lied about history, geography, current
events, anything and everything. They could do it easily. Countless
thousands of letters of complaints sent to NYT by the readers were
simply thrown to the trash bin. The journal could continue its racist anti-
Serb "reporting" indefinitely. That was not enough for them. In the
summer of 1996 the New York Times wanted to spread its anti-Serb
campaign to electronic media. They formed a discussion forum on
Bosnia which was divided into 12 sub-forums. Each of the sub-forums
was lead by hand-picked anti-Serb racist. These included Serb-bigot
Madeleine Albright, CNN's Serb-basher Christiane Amanpour and top
"Balkan experts" (actually intellectual prostitutes) who proved their raw
anti-Serb racism like Dr. Michael Sells and Dr. Andras Riedlmayer.

What could go wrong?

Unluckily for NYT a half a dozen Serbs and a dozen of Serb sympathisers
stumbled on the forum. Electronic media is democratic by its nature. The
forum was the first outlet where the facts could be exposed - and people
used the occasion. How the New York Times still tried to battle the truth,
how they tried to censor it - is a story in itself. We hope to post parts of it
on this web site one day. Suffice to say that the New York Times
DELETED the entire forum content after the first three months of its
existence only to restart it a few weeks later. The second time they gave
option to their "moderators" to DELETE pro-Serb posts. That failed too.

Very little is left on the internet of this gigantic battle. On this link you
will find some-one's pro-NYT hand picked remnants of the forums. Not
even 1% is presented. Almost all pro-Serb posts are deleted. The
surviving ones are modified.

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