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The idea behind this book and the studies it contains can be traced back to events in early September 1991, beginning in a bar on the outskirts of Bac Palanka, 60 miles north-west of Belgrade in the Former Yugoslavia. Close by, a handful of Yugoslav Federal Army (JNA) soldiers were bivouacked on the road leading to a long single span bridge that crossed the Danube. On this side, the Serbian side, two T54 tanks sat with their guns pointing into what was then an independent but as yet unrecognised Croatia. Despite there having already been killings committed by militia groups on both sides, the war between Serbia and Croatia was barely lukewarm. A bus service of sorts still ran between Bac Palanka and Illok, a Croatian village just across the river – its driver merely changed down two gears when he drove by the tanks.
The bar looked new and its clientele was young and affluent. A colleague and I were looking to talk to the town’s young people about the growing tensions in this part of Yugoslavia. But that evening, instead of MTV playing on the hi-tech video system, we found a dozen youngsters trans- fixed by World War II footage of the Jasenovac death camp being liberated by Partisan forces.
Thousands of Serbs, along with Jews and Roma, were killed in Jasenovac by the Croatian fascist Ustashe government allied to the Nazis. The documentary was broadcast by Radio Television Srpska (RTS) in Belgrade and you could almost sense the spittle of the narrator as he spat out the words accom- panying film of the captured Croatian guards. You didn’t need Serbo-Croatian to know this was a none-too-subtle lesson in hate. Footage from the end of one war was being used to precipitate the start of another.
Screened at such a time and narrated with such vehemence, it no doubt had an effect on the people who lived and drank there, as it did on the JNA soldiers camped outside. If the soldiers hadn’t seen that particular documentary, they all appeared to have watched or read something very similar. They were not against Croatia or Croatians, they told us, but they were frightened of a resurgence of Ustashe fascism. What would happen to those unprotected Serbs who happened to live across the river, they asked? With Croatia declaring independence and being supported once again by a strong and united Germany, what would happen to them?
One week later in Croatian-held Vukovar, with dozens of road blocks, check- points and tank traps having been thrown up across Eastern Slavonia, the raw emotive power of the media was being harnessed just as effectively by the Croatian authorities. Vukovar, which had boasted a substantial Serb minority before the shooting started, was already cut off from the rest of Croatia. The only way in or out was to creep through the cornfields at night, or walk up to and past the federal tanks, hoping that neither they nor the Croatian militia further up the road would open fire. From the basement of the Hotel Dunaev which was being hit by shellfire, we watched HTV, the state-owned television station in Zagreb, broadcast news and well-crafted patriotic spots every hour. In their way, these slots, which included images of burning houses and young Croatian volunteers crawling through the fields, to the strains of “Brothers In Arms,” were as power- ful as the RTS broadcasts I’d seen back in Bac Palanka. While the dubbing of a Dire Straits song over frontline footage does not fully qualify as hate speech, given the context, it was certainly understood by all who saw it as a direct call to arms.
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