Words of War: Journalism in the Former Yugoslavia

Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace, by Kemal Kurspahic. (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2003). 288 pp. $20.

Elected editor-in-chief of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje (Liberation) in 1988, Kemal Kurspahic emerged from the prolonged wars in the former Yugoslavia as one of independent and investigative journalism's most unyielding defenders, as well as a champion of a non-nationalist alternative to the pervasive nationalist hysteria that engulfed Yugoslavia, and especially his native Bosnia, in the late 1980s and the 1990s. In Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace, Kurspahic discusses the principal political events and actors in the wars of Yugoslav succession and richly develops a theme that is often alluded to in the literature on the conflict but has thus far received little treatment in its own right: the active role of the media as both accomplice and instigator of virulent nationalism and fear. That the media served as the tool of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, and others in their campaigns to rally populations around one-dimensional, mutually exclusive definitions of patriotism is well understood, but Kurspahic's book adds color to the picture, naming names and exposing the ways in which Milosevic and later Tudjman seized control of the lion's share of the media (especially electronic media) in an unraveling socialist society. Nuance and truth were the first victims in these media hijackings, accompanied by those journalists and editors who refused to surrender to nationalist journalism and quickly found themselves unemployed, under suspicion, or even under attack.

While Kurspahic's book is an indignant assault on journalists who fought wars not with bullets but with words, it is also an impassioned defense of independent Yugoslav journalism, which dates back to some journalists' awakening from state servitude in the 1950s and 1960s. Though under assault, this tradition survived through the wars of the 1990s, exemplified by the indefatigable, multiethnic staff at Oslobodjenje, which published a daily from a fallout shelter after its Sarajevo headquarters had been destroyed. Although this book is an indictment of unprofessional journalists, Kurspahic reminds us that some independent voices persisted even in the 1990s authoritarian democracies. A case in point is the mirthful editors and writers at Croatia's Feral Tribune, who overcame draconian fines, indictment, and charges of being enemies of the state to expose the truth and absurdity of Tudjman's nationalist Croatia. Regularly accused of national betrayal under the government of Tudjman's Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Feral Tribune editor Victor Ivancic remarked, "I really am an enemy of such a state. Why shouldn't I be?" ¹

Kurspahic's book is at its finest when he discusses the peculiarities of the Yugoslav media system and journalistic culture that enabled, if not made likely, the swift exchange of allegiances of Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian editors and journalists from one dominant political leadership to the next. That this happened may seem surprising at first. While open and liberal compared to the media in other Eastern European socialist states, the Yugoslav media nevertheless faced limits, expectations, and obligations foreign to the media in Western Europe. As part of Yugoslavia's effort to differentiate itself from the Soviet bloc, Yugoslav media was self-consciously open, but hardly free. Publications that broached controversial subjects or advanced unconventional views were subject to confiscation, and the journalists who worked on these stories faced the prospect of interrogation and persecution. Journalistic freedom on domestic political issues was particularly constricted. Until 1974, newspapers were required to convey the official line of the League of Communists (LCY), Yugoslavia's Communist party. This changed little following the promulgation of the 1974 constitution that decentralized Yugoslavia. The center of the media world was relocated from the federal capital to those of the individual republics. However, decentralization did not produce a democratization of the media, Kurspahic insists. Rather it was "only a changing of the guard, and...