Media efforts
to promote anti-Serbianism

For fair use only
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, The Weekender.

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 media coverage of the Yugoslav civil wars is not only unfair and biased, but is also the product of broadly coordinated efforts to promote anti-Serbianism through the 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 your own newspaper's glaringly unprofessional and most uncivil editorials.

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...

   Why have two top-level New York Times journalists, Editor Abe Rosenthal and Washington Bureau Chief David Binder, been effectively silenced on the subject of Bosnia?

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.

   Having told us that your reporters faced difficulty operating on Bosnian Serb territory, can you clear up the persistent stories (which I have not researched) that your main reporter in the field at the start of the conflict, Chuck Sudetic, was of Croatian descent and could be easily identified as such?

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.

   How can the tens of thousands of Serbian-Americans who read your paper arrive at seeing a commentary from Radovan Karadzic published in your op-ed section?

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.

   In cases where you have allowed full-page coverage of allegations against the Bosnian Serbs, are you prepared to grant a small op-ed rebuttal and print your own brief editorial comment if those stories subsequently prove to have been false?

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 the Herak story 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, The Yomiuri 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 his testimony was fabricated 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.

   Do all of your editors (including sports and entertainment) participate in editorial discussions on how to deal with parallels being drawn between articles on related subjects that have potential political implications with respect to U.S. policy in 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 Nineteen-Eighty-Four contains a fictional excerpt from a text called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism 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 protective stupidity."

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

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.