Journalists Being Partisan Advocates in Foreign Wars is Nothing New

Sarajevo under siege || Lt. Stacey Wyzkowski/U.S. Department of Defense

In the year since the hideous pogrom of 7 October 2023, as Israel has waged war against the various nodes of the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran—HAMAS in Gaza and now Hizballah in Lebanon—the distorted coverage of the conflict has been a running theme of this newsletter. Western journalists—and the broader ecosystem of academics, “human rights” NGOs, “humanitarian” activists, the custodians of “international law”, the United Nations and its satellites—have in the main abandoned any pretence to objectivity. Ethical norms around practices as basic as sourcing have been set aside, notoriously in their willingness to circulate HAMAS’s discredited statistics for Palestinian casualties, to tell a story so cartoonishly one-sided that even where it includes factual information it is functionally a lie. Instead of journalism, what we have seen is partisan advocacy for a political narrative.

This kind of political activism masquerading as journalism, or “advocacy journalism”, is a subversion of journalism’s purpose, and it always causes serious real-world harm. I was reminded of a case in point this week going over some old files after the death of Fethullah Gülen, the imam behind the coup attempt against Turkey’s ruler Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.¹

2016 was the sanguinary conclusion of a feud that began in 2013, but for a decade before that there had been close collaboration. After Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2003, the latest incarnation of an Islamist trend battered by decades of repression, the educated and unravaged Gülenists provided the human capital for the State administration, becoming especially dominant in the police and the judiciary. With Erdogan’s endorsement, the Gülenists took apart the military-bureaucratic Kemalist elite, the guardians of the secular order since the Republic nominally transitioned to democracy in 1950, using a pair of “legal” cases, initiated in 2008 and 2010, accusing cabals of conspirators, the Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer), of plotting to overthrow the government. Hundreds of people were imprisoned as these show trials rumbled on for years.

To read Dani Rodrik’s documentation of particularly how Balyoz—the “trial” that directly targeted and ultimately destroyed the army leadership—played out is to see what an actual “Deep State” looks like in operation. It is also to be aware that Balyoz could not have succeeded without the media. The Gülenists were waging political warfare: by its nature, this could not be restricted to court rooms, and it was not only the Gülenist newspapers implicated in spreading the Balyoz disinformation to the population. Select pieces of the fabricated “evidence” used against the Generals were passed by the Gülenists to respected outlets, notably Taraf, from which much of the Turkish intelligentsia took its cues, and the liberal journalists there—in common with many observers abroad—were so sure that the army was the main enemy of democracy, they neglected to ask the most rudimentary questions before printing political messaging as if it was news. When Rodrik raised “issues” about the evidence, he was personally attacked.² Once it was clear something was amiss, ostensible journalists and democrats retreated to the argument that Balyoz might be wrong in specifics but it was right in general.

Turkey’s liberal journalists had picked their side, were convinced of the purity of their motives, and threw overboard their own stated principles to advocate for their righteous cause. Those who had based their opposition to the military in no small part on its violations of due process and the Rule of Law now defended violations of both on a vast scale. Rough justice was better than no justice, the liberals insisted; the end justified the means. When it was all over, and the Balyoz detainees had been freed after Erdogan publicly claimed to have been “deceived” by a parallel structure “within the State institutions, with strong media support”, there was remarkably little introspection from Turkey’s journalists about the ends that had in fact been achieved by their unethical means. Few spoke up to atone when it might have made a difference. What they enabled set in train subsequent developments, the carnage of 15 July 2016 and Turkey’s descent into a “harder” authoritarianism, and now they cannot speak.

Rather than Turkey serving as a lesson in the dangers of advocacy journalism, however, more and more this seems to be standard practice in the West. The list of mainstream reporting disasters on politically charged issues is near-endless, and all the “errors” are in the same direction because they all have the same root cause: journalists tried to fit the facts around a political narrative.³ The United States and the broader West are—for the moment—shielded from internal effects as dramatic as those that have overtaken Turkey. But the deleterious impact on smaller countries can be profound. Israel is the obvious case at the present time, its security and potentially its viability held hostage by a political craze in Western knowledge centres. Several decades ago the victim was Bosnia, in some ways the testing ground for Western advocacy journalism.

THE PATH TO WAR IN BOSNIA

The death in May 1980 of Josip Broz Tito, or whoever he was, was the beginning of the end for Jugoslavija. By the mid-1980s, the nationalist sentiments so long repressed under Communism were visibly surfacing, and by the end of the decade, in the wake of the liberation of the Captive Nations in 1989, Jugoslavija was crumbling. Reasonably free elections were held in the constituent parts of the federation throughout 1990 and, in January 1991, the League of Communists—the ruling Party since 1945—was dissolved.

Jugoslavija was at a crossroads: these polities could either seek independence or remain federated. Serbia, the most powerful single State, inherited much of the federal infrastructure, including the Jugoslav National Army (JNA), which for various reasons was disproportionately Serb in its rank-and-file, and was determined to keep the Union together. Montenegro stood with Serbia, Macedonia was allowed to leave, and Slovenia had geography on its side in repelling Belgrade’s attempt to keep it in Jugoslavija.

Croatia formally declared independence in June 1991, and by November had thrown back the JNA’s attempt to forcibly rescind this, but one-third of Croatian territory was occupied by Croatian Serbs, who, with Belgrade’s help, proclaimed a “Republic of Serbian Krajina” that would last four years.

The remaining question was Bosnia, where the collapse of the Jugoslav paradigm had set off a struggle between the main elements of a mixed population of Muslims or Bošniaks (43%), Serbs (31%), and Croats (17%) to assert their religio-nationalist interests. The November 1990 elections had—after some wrangling—put the formal government in Sarajevo in the hands of a Muslim, Alija Izetbegović, but this kind of demographic democracy did nothing to solve the fundamental issue: the fear every community had of being ruled by any of the others. Izetbegović wanted independence from Belgrade to institute his own project. The Bosnian Serbs wanted to retain Belgrade’s protection, and since Serbia bordered Bosnia this was logistically feasible.

Izetbegović had been a leader in the 1940s of the Young Muslims, a conspiratorial Islamist cadre that sided with the Nazis during the occupation, as significant numbers of Muslims in the Balkans had, joining the Handschar Division, raised by the SS with help from the Palestine Mufti Muhammad Amin al-Husayni. Imprisoned for collaboration after the war, Izetbegović faded from view for decades, but he was well-known by 1990 because he and a dozen comrades had been arrested in 1983 after the secret police detected them making contact with the then-new revolutionary Islamist government in Iran and put them on public trial for subversion.

For Bosnians, the 1983 trial “seemed like a time warp”: nobody could quite believe the Young Muslims still existed.⁴ But it did, and Izetbegović was now a household name: notorious to his enemies and increasingly a venerated martyr to Balkan Muslims as their religio-ethnic identity hardened, alongside everybody else’s, in the latter 1980s.⁵ After Izetbegović and the other Young Muslims were amnestied in 1988, they formed the core of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the vehicle through which Izetbegović would rule Bosnia. In-keeping with the habits of a lifetime, the Young Muslims operatives stayed in the shadows,⁶ and the Islamist convictions of the SDA’s actual leaders were carefully hidden behind generic Muslim-nationalist public messaging.⁷

There had been one important breach in the wall of dissimulation: Izetbegović’s tract, The Islamic Declaration (1970), which had been presented as key evidence in the 1983 trial.⁸ In it, Izetbegović set out his objective quite plainly: to use democratic methods to acquire power for the Young Muslims and, once conditions allowed, institute an Islamic State that reduced Christians and other non-Muslims to subordinate status.⁹ This was understandably alarming for the Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats. In May 1991, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, asked that Izetbegović “renounce his Islamic Declaration in public”.¹⁰ Izetbegović not only refused, he took a trip to Iran later that month, obtaining public assurances of support from the clerical regime,¹¹ and went to Turkey in July 1991, where he pointedly refused to visit the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the secular Turkish Republic,¹² while asking that an independent Bosnia be accepted into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). This prompted Karadžić’s despairing response that “even our gloomiest forecasts, which say that Izetbegović wants Bosnia-Hercegovina to become an Islamic Republic, are being fulfilled.”

Izetbegović had created an Islamist paramilitary squad, the Patriotic League, in March 1991, under the effective leadership of Hasan Čengić, an imam arrested in 1983, who used his close connections to the Iranian Revolution and Pakistan to arm the militia.¹³ Belgrade’s well-informed intelligence services interpreted it as a sign Izetbegović intended war. But Izetbegović subsequently seemed to change course. In July 1991, Izetbegović agreed to a power-sharing agreement with the Bosnian Serbs and indirectly their backer in Belgrade, Slobodan Milošević, the Red functionary reinvented as nationalist bannerman, to keep Bosnia as part of a significantly devolved federation with Serbia, Montenegro, and the Krajina region of Croatia. To everyone’s bafflement, Izetbegović repudiated the agreement on live television as his own negotiators were making the public announcement.¹⁴ Izetbegović’s pathological untrustworthiness was to be a factor right through the Balkan War to come.

At Izetbegović’s instructions, Bosnia’s parliament declared the country sovereign in October 1991 and in November the Serbs—who were beginning to form their own State within a State that would come to be called the Republika Srpska—voted to reject this and remain part of Jugoslavija. Between these events, Izetbegović organised an independence referendum in the Sandžak region of southwestern Serbia and eastern Montenegro, a Muslim counterpart to Krajina and Republika Srpska, which the July deal would have made into an autonomous zone largely under SDA control. The SDA attempting to fragment other States while simultaneously insisting on Bosnia’s territorial integrity can seem contradictory. But that is only if the SDA’s public statements are taken at face-value. In truth, “the SDA’s nationalism is … a Muslim rather than a Bosnian one”, and Sandžak was an integral component of the SDA’s “Greater Muslim” project.¹⁵ It was Muslim sovereignty that Izetbegović wanted, not Bosnia’s,¹⁶ and he was quite willing to accept “revisions” of the Jugoslav borders to achieve it.¹⁷ The devil proved to be in the details, but in principle this made Izetbegović’s vision compatible with Milošević’s, and the two had correspondingly cordial relations up to the summer of 1991.¹⁸

In mid-December 1991, Izetbegović intimated to Belgrade he would declare independence, something he knew would be a declaration of war—and then backed away from it. It was classic Izetbegović: a provocation that inflamed the situation, followed by a semi-retraction, with different messages sent to different audiences, leaving everyone confused on all points, except that they could not trust Izetbegović.¹⁹

The Europeans’ last-ditch effort to find a compromise seemed to succeed. The Lisbon Agreement was signed on 18 March 1992 by Izetbegović, Karadžić, and the Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban: Bosnia would become formally independent and in effect “softly” partitioned, with the three main communities granted extensive autonomy. Then on 28 March, perhaps with unintentional encouragement from the Americans, Izetbegović repudiated the Agreement, declaring that there would be no power-sharing divisions within Bosnia.²⁰

Whatever Izetbegović’s reasoning, the Bosnian Serbs saw this as one deception too many. The Serbs believed war was already being waged against them: they see the murder of the father of the groom and the injury of an Orthodox priest at a Serb wedding in Baščaršija on 1 March as the beginning of the war, and the massacre of fifty Serbs by Muslims and Croats in Sijekovac on 26 March as confirmation of the plans to destroy them. When Serbs took up arms over the next two weeks, they would claim it was in self-defence. Hours after the Europeans recognised Bosnia’s independence on 6 April 1992, the Republika Srpska declared its independence from Bosnia. Muslims see the killing of fifty Muslims and “disloyal” Serbs in Bijeljina on 1 April by the “Tigers”, the paramilitary gang led by the mobster Željko Ražnatović (“Arkan”), as the beginning of hostilities, and the war “proper” beginning with the carnage the Serbs inflicted on Zvornik on 8 April.²¹ As in any war between nationalist factions, each side saw itself as a blameless victim of the other’s aggression.

THE MEDIA AND BOSNIA

States do not generally accept the legitimacy of secessionism. Accordingly, the SDA government, whatever the private thoughts of its leadership, officially regarded the Republika Srpska as illegal—even as it rejected Belgrade’s view that the independence declarations from Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia were illegal. “Where you stand depends on where you sit” is a cliché for a reason, and so much of the 1990s Balkan War was like that.

Take the fear of Serb minorities contemplating living under Croat or Muslim regimes. As the competing nationalisms came to the fore in the 1980s, the main subject was the war in the 1940s that had been frozen, not resolved, by the (Western-assisted) Communist takeover of Jugoslavija.²² The dominant theme was a victimhood contest, which was especially acute in Serbia for the simple reason that they had objectively suffered worse. At the Jasenovac camp and elsewhere, the Nazi-installed Croat Ustaše regime, with plenty of Muslim help, exterminated perhaps half-a-million Serbs, 30,000 Jews, and a similar number of Romani in ways that even the Nazis found excessive. The 1990s war was seen by many—on all sides, but especially by the Serbs—as a continuation of the 1940s civil war. Croatia’s president, Franjo Tuđman, was something of a cooperative target in Belgrade’s efforts to associate him with the Ustaše past. Bosnian Serbs needed no convincing about Izetbegović: a direct link to the Nazi occupation period, he was inherently frightening; the Islamic Declaration and his behaviour in 1990-91 compounded this.

This psychological narrative framework is important to keep in mind when looking at Milošević’s Operation RAM (FRAME), begun in August 1991, to arm the Bosnian Serb paramilitaries. In conception, RAM was a contingency plan—this was when it still seemed realistic to hope there would be no war—to at best keep Bosnia in a rump federation, and in the worst-case scenario to bring the Serb areas under Belgrade’s protection to prevent a repeat of the Croat-Muslim genocide against the Serbs.²³ (In practice, RAM was a shambles, but that is another story.) For Bosnian and Croat Serbs, RAM allayed their fears about living as minorities. From Zagreb and Sarajevo, of course, this looked like an irredentist scheme for a “Greater Serbia”—and, in a way, it was.²⁴ But, again, to it architects it was formulated as a defensive fall-back option, not a program of aggressive ideological imperialism.²⁵

Thus, a fundamental issue of the war was ultimately a matter of perspective. Some outsiders will have personal values that incline them one way or the other, for instance if they strongly believe in a State’s right to resist separatism, or in the right of nationalist rebels to go their own way. Similarly, some will have such profound moral objections to the way one side is behaving that any theoretical justice to their cause becomes irrelevant. Informed judgements, however, cannot be made if journalists present only one combatant’s point-of-view, and systematically conceal the war crimes and other misbehaviour of that combatant.

Western chroniclers of the ethno-religious conflicts in the Balkans have long had a tendency towards partisanship. After a trip through Jugoslavija in 1937, British journalist Rebecca West noted:

[P]ersons … of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.²⁶

So it was to be in the 1990s. Bosnians—especially secularists and other Muslim critics of the SDA—called the sojourns by Western journalists “Balkan safaris”,²⁷ and the most well-worn game trail was the “Sarajevo safari”, where the SDA line was inculcated in a vast herd of independent minds.²⁸

Rather than a multi-sided civil war where every religio-nationalist actor was seeking its own interests, frequently in nasty ways, the SDA spun and the media relayed a simplistic, one-sided morality tale wherein “Bosnia” (meaning the SDA zone) was a multicultural democracy assailed by fascist Serb and Croat hordes.²⁹ The term “ethnic cleansing” got its international debut in the early months of the war to describe Serb conduct,³⁰ and the word “genocide” soon followed, coupled with vastly inflated SDA-derived casualty counts being uncritically circulated in the press.³¹ The strategic purpose of these narratives from the SDA was to foster political pressure within the West leading to a NATO intervention against its foes.³² The SDA invested in public relations (PR) firms and cultivated State Department officials,³³ but the international media was the central pillar of the strategy of managing and manipulating the narrative of the war, and the SDA could hardly have asked for more.³⁴

Shortly after NATO had intervened to end the war, The Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy, perhaps best known for reporting on the Serb-run Omarska and Trnopolje camps in August 1992, explained how he had approached reporting in Bosnia:

You cannot expect people [i.e., journalists] not to take sides … If the professional ethics say I can’t take sides, screw the ethics. … This notion of neutrality is ridiculous. You have to engage. … We have to take sides.³⁵

Bosnia was the first protracted war of the 24/7 television news era,³⁶ and CNN led the way, with its main foreign correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, becoming an international superstar, one of the first journalists to become a brand unto herself, gaining the trust of countless millions. From right there on the front-lines of crisis spots across the world, Amanpour seemed to bring the facts nobody else could, and emotively explained them in a British accent (when used on Americans, it lets us get away with murder). Amanpour was the face and voice of the Bosnian war, and the ratings success of her decision to focus on Bosnia, over the objections of CNN higher-ups, induced the other networks to concentrate on Bosnia.

Perturbing, then, that in a July 1996 interview—to The Guardian, as it happens—Amanpour said:

It drives me crazy when this neutrality thing comes up. Objectivity, that great journalistic buzz-word, means giving all sides a fair hearing—not treating all sides the same—particularly when all sides are not the same. When you’re neutral in a situation like Bosnia, you are an accomplice—an accomplice to genocide.

Amanpour—the winner of an Emmy, Peabody Award, and George Polk Award (rarely given to TV reporters) for her Bosnia coverage—was the most visible and impactful example of the problems with the behaviour of the Western press over Bosnia, and some recognised it in real-time. One prominent journalist, probably at The New York Times, said in very-definitely-unattributable remarks in mid-1993, “I despair for my profession, and I despair for my newspaper”,³⁷ and in late 1994 the Times gave public space to those expressing unease at Amanpour blurring the lines between reportage and activism.³⁸ Such sceptics were the decided minority, though. Most were with Roy Gutman: “I do not believe the fairness doctrine applies equally to victims and perpetrators”.³⁹

WHAT GOT LEFT OUT

The Bosnian Serbs’ massacre of 7,000 or so Muslim men at Srebrenica in July 1995 sealed their fate. Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić had ignored the consistent advice from Belgrade since early 1993 to quit while they were ahead, to withdraw from the siege of Sarajevo and accept the internationally-mediated peace deal—two more would follow—that de facto recognised the Republika Srpska.⁴⁰ The media narrative depicting Serbs as genocidal barbarians who could only be stopped by a U.S.-led military intervention was entrenched by 1995, in the public mind and large parts of the U.S. government bureaucracy. The Srebrenica Massacre was confirmation, and even the cautious President Clinton could not resist the groundswell. Karadžić and Mladić might as well have laid down in a chalk outline. In the end, militarily and in terms of the politics within Bosnia, the NATO intervention of August-September 1995 and the subsequent U.S.-led Dayton Accords were not terrible for the Bosnian Serbs. In broader political terms, though, Srebrenica, especially after it was formally ruled an act of genocide in 2003, cemented the SDA line over Bosnia and put a black mark against the “Serb nation” that will not be removed for decades, if ever.⁴¹

Critical coverage leading to a negative image of the Bosnian Serbs’ regime and militias is not the issue and never was; they earned that. The problem was the lack of balance: the failure to cover the other parties to the civil war, especially the SDA, with the same thoroughness and adversarial eye. Printing stories about Serbs massacring Muslims based on rumours and hearsay, while ignoring better-sourced reports of Muslims massacring Serbs, was a problem. Reporting widely via an SDA source that Muslims under Serb siege had been reduced to cannibalism and then disregarding U.N. officials on the scene saying there is no famine was a problem. Relaying uncritically Sarajevo’s claims 50,000 Muslim women had been raped by Serbs and ignoring the detailed list of female Serb civilians raped by Muslims sent to the U.N.: problem.⁴² It does not take long for the accumulation of omissions, exaggerations, and selective scepticism to present a “big picture” that is functionally false, which is worse than outright lies: half-truths are more difficult to detect and correct.

Take the issue of foreign support to the warring factions in Bosnia. Nobody doubted the Bosnian Croats and Serbs were supported from outside.⁴³ This was, quite correctly, an integral feature of the media coverage. What received almost no coverage was the foreign involvement on the SDA’s side. Iran virtually captured the security sector of the SDA government, both the official State branches, where agents of the Ettela’at (Iranian Intelligence Ministry) held most of the senior posts, and the SDA’s parallel structures, where the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was particularly strong. Izetbegović formed separate Islamist military units, using funds from a network of radical foreign donors,⁴⁴ the prime example being the Seventh Muslim Brigade, which were then overseen by the Third Corps of the regular army, and much of the training—military and ideological—was handled by the Iranians.

The bulk of the perhaps 6,000 foreign jihadists who arrived in Bosnia—the SDA’s other major source of foreign support—were spread through Izetbegović’s largely homegrown ideological units, but some were organised into foreign-dominated units, such as Odred el-Mudžahid (The Holy Warrior Detachment) based around Zenica and Travnik. The IRGC was responsible for handling the mujahideen file, and among the jihadists the Iranians trained and led were Al-Qaeda,⁴⁵ the first road-test of the alliance Iran and Al-Qaeda formed in 1992. Usama bin Laden visited Bosnia at least once and met with Izetbegović,⁴⁶ and Bin Laden’s deputy and successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, acting as Al-Qaeda’s roving ambassador in those years and a long-time favourite of Tehran’s, cycled in and out of Bosnia many times, inter alia assessing the progress of the Iran-Qaeda alliance.⁴⁷ The assistance Iran gave Bin Laden’s men in Bosnia was part of the “groundwork for [Al-Qaeda becoming] a true global terrorist network”.⁴⁸

If journalists had looked at the Iran-mujahideen dimension of the war, it would have opened their eyes—and those of their readers and viewers—to many other ignored aspects of the conflict.

Muslim war crimes, for example, virtually unheard of in the coverage in the early 1990s, were so numerous and grotesque from the jihadists that even the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) eventually noticed.⁴⁹ One excuse might be that the jihadists tended to be in the hard-to-reach provinces, but the Ševe (Larks) secret police squad Iran created and largely operated for Izetbegović—the operational leader was Nedžad Ugljen, an Ettela’at agent—carried out its “dirty war” behind the lines in Sarajevo, where all the journalists were.

A lot of Ševe’s focus was on the secular Muslim “fifth column” that obsessed Izetbegović, but some of its “wetwork” focused on SDA officials who showed doubts about the old man. The Bosnian chief of the General Staff, Sefer Halilović, the man more responsible than any other for saving Sarajevo in early 1992, had grown weary of the SDA by late 1993, especially its replacement of his competent officers with Islamist party hacks. Ševe placed a bomb in Halilović’s apartment; he escaped but his wife and brother-in-law were killed.⁵⁰ It is little-known even among those well-read on the Third Balkan War that Izetbegović tried to assassinate the head of his own army, a measure of the problem.

The attempt on Halilović was officially blamed on a Serbian shell and any follow-up on this could have illuminated one of the darkest aspects of the Bosnian war: the SDA, as part of its political warfare, staging attacks in Sarajevo when dignitaries and TV cameras were around, including against Muslim civilians, and blaming them on the Serbs. After the war, Serb defendants like Karadžić would claim that essentially all incidents of shelling and sniping in Sarajevo were actually SDA false-flags. This is ridiculous, but the ICTY—which cannot be accused of being pro-Serb—was satisfied from physical evidence and eyewitness testimony that “there were some incidents where [the] Bosnian Muslim side targeted its own territory … for political purposes”.⁵¹ The other complication in Sarajevo was that Serb shellfire was not-infrequently retaliatory,⁵² and some of the damage to civilian infrastructure could be explained by the Muslim troops’ habit of embedding artillery and other heavy weapons in hospitals (notably Koševo Hospital) and schools, and moving weapons around in ambulances.⁵³

To have followed the Ševe thread a little further, it might have been discovered that the SDA-Iran criminality was spilling across borders. Ševe struck down Jusuf Prazina in Belgium in December 1993, for instance, and to pull on that thread, to ask who “Juka” was, would be to discover the way the SDA largely deputised mafiosos to administer—and rob and terrorise—Sarajevans under siege.⁵⁴ Prazina, an unsubtle gangster in the “Arkan” mould, was officially head of the SDA’s Special Forces, and the activities of his gang-cum-militia, “Juka’s Wolves”, were not difficult to detect if one were in Sarajevo. The U.N. noticed—the Wolves stole the aid the U.N. tried to distribute, among other things. And the press did not completely ignore Prazina, nor his comrades and successors, many of whom met sticky ends.⁵⁵ The issue was context: the “gangs” issue was reported, but it tended to be in isolation. The mafiaisation of Sarajevo rarely framed the general coverage, and even in the stories about Prazina there tended to be a slant that diminished his significance.⁵⁶

The airbrushing of thuggish SDA commanders went beyond Sarajevo. Naser Orić, the SDA supremo in the area around Srebrenica, ran a fiefdom with that admixture of terror and chaos that prevailed in so much of Bosnia: open dissent often resulted in murder, but the population was otherwise neglected, without running water or much food, while Orić and his men lived lavishly on the proceeds of stolen international aid sold on the black market.⁵⁷ Orić entertained two separate journalists with videos of his exploits in murdering captives, some of them gruesomely with small knives, but one would look in vain for mainstream press descriptions of Orić as a “war criminal”.

The massacres and expulsions by Orić’s troops of Serbian Orthodox civilians in Kravica and the other villages of the Drina Valley had “cleansed” swathes of this most strategically placed region. The media coverage of this was minimal, minimising, and strongly implied the Serbs deserved it—a common pattern when “ethnic cleansing” against the Serbs made the news at all. That was the tone when there was coverage of Croatia’s Operation STORM, which dismantled the “Krajina Republic” in August 1995, leading to the flight of 200,000 Serbs, the largest single instance of “ethnic cleansing” in the Third Balkan War. And when Sarajevo was emptied of its Serbs—the predations of the SDA and its gangs drove out about 90,000 during the war and the fearful exodus of 60,000 more after Dayton left just 10,000 Serbs in the city.⁵⁸

To discard the SDA’s version of the Bosnian civil war is not to take the Serbs’ part; that would be the same mistake in reverse. It is to keep in mind Rebecca West’s admonition. The three main combatants in Bosnia were religio-nationalists with visions for the endgame that rejected harbouring minorities, and rejected living as a minority, necessarily entailing “ethnic cleansing”, and in large measure they all succeeded. There was no pleasant way to accomplish this, even if any of them had been minded to, and none of them were.⁵⁹

A HORROR STORY

To conclude, I thought it would be instructive to look at one case study of the media coverage in Bosnia in detail.

On 27 November 1992, The New York Times published an article, “A Killer’s Tale – A Special Report: A Serbian Fighter’s Path of Brutality”, by John Burns, an experienced and respected foreign correspondent.⁶⁰

Burns opened his article by introducing Borislav Herak, a Serb militiaman sitting in a cell at the SDA’s Viktor Buban military prison:

[In June 1992, Herak] and two companions gunned down 10 members of a Muslim family … “We told them not to be afraid, we wouldn’t do anything to them, they should just stand in front of the wall,” said Mr. Herak, who is 21 years old. “But it was taken for granted among us that they should be killed. So when somebody said, ‘Shoot,’ I swung around and pulled the trigger, three times, on automatic fire. I remember the little girl with the red dress hiding behind her granny.”

Herak, “a primary school graduate who pushed a handcart for a living at a Sarajevo textile company”, had fled the capital in May 1992 and sought out the “Serbian volunteers”. Herak told Burns that soon after being recruited in June 1992, he had been to being taken to “a small farm outside Vogošća”, about five miles north-west of Sarajevo, where a 65-year-old Serbian volunteer, Risto Pustivuk, taught him “this skill”—slitting throats—by having Herak and three other young Serb “volunteers” “wrestle pigs to the ground, hold their heads back with their ears, and cut their throats”. Herak says he put this into practice by using “a six-inch hunting knife to cut the throats of three captured Muslim men who were Bosnian soldiers”.

Given the time for travelling and training, the massacre described above was practically the first thing Herak saw during his service with the Bosnian Serb forces. Herak only served in the field for four months—he was captured in October 1992—but the indictment drawn up from his testimony “lists 29 murders between June and October, including eight rape-murders of Muslim women … The indictment also covers the killings of at least 220 other Muslim civilians in which Mr. Herak has confessed to being a witness or a participant. Many of these dead were women and children.” In what was set to be the first trial of its kind, Herak was facing the highly symbolic charge of genocide, the penalty for which was death by firing squad.

Burns goes on:

In addition to the Ahatovići incident [of 14 June 1992]—in which four children under 12, two elderly women and four men were killed—Mr. Herak described two mass murders of Muslims by Serbian forces in the Sarajevo area.

In the first, in early June, Mr. Herak said, he watched a Serbian unit called the “special investigation group” machine-gunning 120 men, women and children in a field outside Vogošća. Mr. Herak said dump trucks had been used to transport the bodies to scrub land beside a railway yard at Rajlovac, near Sarajevo, where the bodies were piled in an open pit, doused with gasoline and set afire. …

In … July, Mr. Herak said, he saw 30 men from Donja Bioča, a Muslim village three miles northwest of Vogošća, shot and incinerated in a furnace at a steel plant at Ilijas, a town north of Vogošća. Some of the men were alive when they were thrown in to the furnace, he said.

Mr. Herak also described seeing the bodies of 60 Muslim men who he said had been used by Serbian forces as a “human shield” when Bosnian forces were trying in August to drive Serbian forces off Žuč Mountain, a 3,000-foot height outside Vogošća.

The echoes of civilians thrown into a “furnace” or crematorium were too obvious to need elaboration.

At least as horrifying was Herak’s extended description of his personal involvement in the Serbs’ organised process for raping captive Muslim women:

Often Mr. Herak’s account ran back to the Sonja cafe, a motel and restaurant complex outside Vogošća … Mr. Herak said the “commander” of the prison for Muslim women established in the motel was a Serbian fighter named Miro Vuković, who was a loyalist of a ultranationalist Serbian paramilitary group headed by Vojislav Šešelj, a leading politician in Serbia.

He said Mr. Vukovic had established “a system” for the Serbian fighters raping and killing the women. “It was always the same,” Mr. Herak said, describing how he and his companions were encouraged to go to the motel by Serbian commanders who told them that raping Muslim women was “good for raising the fighters’ morale. …

Mr. Herak identified the women he had attacked—Emina, Sabina, Amela, and Fatima, among others, the youngest of them teenagers, the oldest about 35—and said Mr. Vukovic, the “prison commander,” had told them: “You can do with the women what you like. You can take them away from here—we don’t have enough food for them anyway—and don’t bring them back.” Mr. Herak said this was understood to mean that the women should be killed.

He described how he and a companion had attacked Fatima, whom he described as “a nice woman, about 30 years old,” in a room at the motel, and then taken her at gunpoint in their car to Žuč Mountain. “We stopped by a small bridge, and I told her to get out. She walked about three meters away from the car, with her back to me, and I just shot her, I think in the upper back or the back of the head,” he said, showing how he fired from the hip, once more without taking aim. “I went to her, just to be sure that she was dead.” …

He said that he went to the motel once every three or four days, and that although Serbian fighters routinely took the women they raped away and killed them, there were always more women arriving.

Burns reported that Herak had been captured on the edge of Sarajevo after he “took the wrong road” and ran into an SDA checkpoint. “Almost immediately, Mr. Herak began telling investigators of his gruesome experiences”. Herak was arrested alongside Sretko Damjanović, and Damjanović’s wife, Nada. Damjanović, who was said to have collaborated with Herak in most of his crimes, angrily rejected the accusation: “Is that what he said? If you put me in a cell with him, I’ll kill him.”

The significance of Burns’s article was, as he put it: “In effect, Mr. Herak’s story was the first account given by a perpetrator to outsiders of how the Serbian nationalist forces have carried out ‘ethnic cleansing’.” This seemed to be the hard evidence of the Serbs’ criminal enterprise, which had, to this point, proven surprisingly elusive. Journalists had written of the Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing” campaign. The “human rights” groups had expressed “concerns” about “reports” of Serb atrocities, and were investigating “allegations” of mass-rape, a story that really took off in early 1993.⁶¹ But the principal evidence was inferential, from the flow of Muslim refugees, and much of the rest came from journalistic observations within besieged Sarajevo. When reporters tried to summon up Holocaust-like images of what Serbs were doing to Bošniaks, the sources were often State Department officials in Washington. There was also the problem that several of the most sensational stories of Serb crimes, documented with photographs, transpired to show Serb victims.⁶²

In March 1993, Herak and Damjanović went on trial, and were swiftly convicted on all counts, receiving death sentences.

When the Pulitzer Prize committee gave out its awards in April 1993, they in effect gave two awards for Bosnia reportage, one to Burns for “his courageous and thorough coverage of the destruction of Sarajevo and the barbarous killings in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina”, specifically citing (it is still on their website) the above article at the top of the list, and the other to Roy Gutman of Newsday, whose views on the fairness doctrine we encountered earlier.⁶³

RED FLAGS

Even within Burns’s article, there were signs that everything was not quite as it appeared.

Burns fulfilled his basic ethical obligations by asking the obvious question: Was Herak being coerced? Burns says he asked Herak “repeatedly if he had been put under pressure to talk, or promised a lighter sentence or relief from harsh treatment for confessing,” and Herak had denied it. “At one point, when this reporter asked to see [Herak’s] upper body, he pulled up his shirt to show that he had not been bruised”, Burns writes, and Burns went to the prison governor to get “assurances” Herak would not be harmed once Burns left.

The most obvious red flag is that, in Burns’s words, “a tape-recorded confession by [Herak] played on Sarajevo television on Tuesday night [24 November 1992]”. This is alluded to twice, the second time Burns spells out: “Mr. Herak’s account of the rapes was among the tape-recorded sequences shown on Sarajevo television”. In other words, Burns was quite well aware that the SDA regime was using Herak for political warfare purposes. But the implications of this are wholly unremarked upon in the article.⁶⁴

Burns noted that “Herak’s experiences were limited to a 10-mile stretch of territory immediately north of Sarajevo”, and like “most” of the towns and villages where anti-civilian massacres have been reported, “there have been no independent witnesses”, but rather than this causing doubts, Burns says Herak’s “account offered new insights into the ways that tens of thousands of civilian victims of the war have died”. Herak made frequent use of the Serbo-Croat word “čišćenje” (cleansing), so that seemed to be that.

Burns caught that Herak “appeared deeply frightened” when asked if he had been beaten, that in general he looked “pallid”, and remarked on the “rambling story” Herak told over seven hours: a more suspicious mind might have drawn these pieces together. Likewise, Burns pointed out that Herak’s story “was given partly in the presence of prison officials”—but since it was also “partly [given] with nobody from the Bosnian Government or Army present”, that seemed to assuage concerns.

THE STORY FALLS APART

After the war was over, The New York Times returned to Herak in January 1996, still in prison and now appealing his death sentence. As the Times noted, Herak and Damjanović cases “transfixed Bosnia and horrified the world … as both men became symbols of a Serb-orchestrated genocide against Muslims”.

So, it was a little awkward that Herak now said:

I was forced to speak against myself and my comrades in the Serb republic. But I didn’t do anything. … I was tortured, forced to confess. I was given 60 pages to learn by heart and recite. I was afraid for my father, afraid they might kill him because of me. I said what I did to survive, otherwise he and I would have been dead in a day. But I talked and here I am still alive.”

Far from being an eye-witness to, and participant in, the mass-rapes that the SDA made such a central part of the Bosnia war narrative, Herak said [italics added]: “I heard of Serb soldiers raping. But I didn’t do anything.”

In looking for a Serb to read the SDA script, Herak was chosen not merely because he broke under torture, but because he is “slightly retarded”, the Times noted, in terms it would no longer use. Confirming its verdict, however, Herak believed the end of the war meant the “we have democracy” in the SDA’s Bosnia and this meant his case would be heard fairly.

Damjanović, while having nothing positive to say about Herak, mirrored his story. Damjanović retracted his confession, saying he had been beaten and even stabbed to force him to make it before the trial: “I never hurt anybody in my life. I want them to send me to The Hague to prove it.”

The prison warden cautiously conceded “that it was possible the two were mistreated in the moments following their capture”, as the Times summarised, but insisted “they have received the utmost courtesy while incarcerated.” Amid the warden’s claims that Herak was a “psychopath”, he admitted Herak was on “medication” during the trial, a detail that would, in an ideal world, have been given greater salience in 1992-93.

A telling detail from the Times: “The Bosnian Government has no witnesses to the killings [claimed in either man’s case] and has recovered no bodies.”

A partial explanation for this was given by the Times reporting in March 1997: two Muslim men Damjanović had supposedly murdered—the brothers Kasim and Asim Blekić—were found alive. And internal State documents showed that a third man Damjanović was convicted of murdering, Krso Ramiz, who does at least appear to be dead, was believed by the SDA government to have been murdered by three other named Serbs, all of them already charged with the crime.

The main “evidence” against Damjanović was his confession and the testimony of Herak, who said he had seen Damjanović kill the Blekić brothers, Ramiz, and three other Muslim men. Herak’s word was clearly worthless, since he had claimed to see the murder of two living men, and “the court doctor confirmed at the trial that Mr. Damjanović had four knife wounds and a broken rib that appeared to have been inflicted while in police custody”, the Times documented, injuries consistent with the specific claims Damjanović made about the torture he had been subjected to by the SDA to make him sign the “confession”.

The U.N. tribunals were significantly relying on evidence passed to them from Sarajevo, and the risks of that were now plain. The U.N. did not seem to much care: Kasim Blekić was briefly visited by U.N. representatives in the summer of 1996, and never heard from them again.

Damjanović was ultimately acquitted in a retrial. Herak’s sentence was commuted but not overturned. Herak remained in prison until 2012 and is officially the first person since Nuremberg to be convicted of genocide. The SDA government’s position that Herak had an obvious incentive to lie in claiming innocence in 1996 is clearly true. The issue is that the reverse is also true: Herak’s incentive to lie in the other direction in 1992-93 is equally obvious. More to the point, the only evidence against Herak was and remains his own word, and that is where the assessment becomes somewhat easier.

Burns’s November 1992 story left out a key detail: Herak had claimed Lewis MacKenzie, the first head of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Sarajevo, had attended one of the Serb concentration camp brothels on the outskirts of the city, taken away four young Muslim girls, and raped and murdered them. And the reason why this detail was left out is plain: it cast doubt on the rest of Herak’s testimony. But it was worse than that.

MacKenzie went to Herak’s cell—while Burns was still there—and pressed Herak on the specifics. They were all wrong: Herak placed the event in mid-August 1992, when MacKenzie had departed Sarajevo in July; Herak’s claims about MacKenzie’s uniform and rank badges matched a description of the Scandinavian junior officers; and Herak said MacKenzie had driven a Jeep, which he never did. Hearing this, MacKenzie wrote later, “caused John [Burns] to turn to the Bosnian government’s keeper and advise him that his government should not go public with the accusations against me because they would destroy the credibility of the rest of the story he was writing on Herak”.⁶⁵ On its own, this is a scandalous breach of ethics: it would mean Burns wrote the original story in the full knowledge that the testimony he was relaying was from an at best unreliable, and probably a mentally unstable, witness. It would also have meant Burns advised the SDA regime on how best to present what he understood to be propaganda. But it was even worse than that.

Herak targeting MacKenzie was clear evidence that Herak was reading from an SDA script. MacKenzie’s refusal to adhere to the SDA narrative about the war had made him a hate figure in the Sarajevo government, and some SDA-friendly journalists would assist in an attack on MacKenzie’s reputation.⁶⁶ What angered the SDA so much was that MacKenzie had been even-handed on-the-ground in trying to enforce the ceasefires, had been openly critical of the SDA’s record on this front, and the United Nations during Mackenzie’s time (and obviously relying on his reports) had publicly leaked its assessment that the SDA was engaged in dirty tricks in Sarajevo. Burns was well-enough informed that he must have understood this dynamic between the SDA and MacKenzie, which means he was aware that Herak was fabricating his story under duress—and instead of axing the story, he had advised the captive’s tormentors on how best to present their lies.

This was the rare story that was so high-profile the follow-up could not be avoided, and so we can see in detail how it unravelled. How often this happened with stories that got much less scrutiny, and what effect this had on the broad media presentation of the Bosnian war, readers can imagine for themselves.

Post has been updated

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REFERENCES

1. Gülen’s Hizmet (Service) movement began in 1969 as one Islamic brotherhood—what Turks call a Cemaat (Community)—among many. By 2000, the Hizmet was a multinational enterprise. The network of quality private schools that had made Gülen famous in Turkey, and given him access to the rising generation of elites, stretched from Latin America to Central Asia, cultivating the elites in those countries, too.

As the interfaith-industrial complex took off, Westerners often found the Muslim “community representative” they dealt with was a Gülenist, pointing to these educational establishments as proof of their modernist and scientific project to harmonise Islam and democracy. The only non-Turk I ever heard voice any misgivings about the Gülenists before the coup attempt was a European diplomat, whose doubts, ironically, were provoked by the Gülenist answers on all the thorny social and integration issues being “too good to be true”.

The kindly light around the Gülenists meant that the proliferation of their newspapers—and what would otherwise have been called entryism into established media outlets—was interpreted as progress for Turkish free expression, rather than the bridgehead of an organisation that looked suspiciously like a cult.

The imam stepped out of the lime light, taking up residence in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania, but the structure of the Cemaat remained: any important decision was made by him alone.

2. Rodrik is married to Pınar Doğan, whose father, Çetin Doğan, was accused of being at the centre of the Balyoz conspiracy, which in the narrative of the fabricated evidence was formulated in 2003 when General Doğan was Commander of the First Army.

3. The University of Virginia (UVA) gang rape hoax in Rolling Stone is an infamous case. The debacle with the Covington Catholic highschoolers and the Native American. The Jussie Smollett … thing. The Steele “dossier” and several other stories about Trump’s relationship with the Russian government (needless fiascos one and all given that the reality is bad enough). Basically anything related to the transgender issue. Everyone will have their favourite example. And it is no use pointing out that Fox News and the “alternative media” sphere are worse: that’s a given and many of these outlets are channels are self-advertised partisans. The issue is the spread of activism into mainstream journalism, which is not only happening in practice, but is being publicly lobbied for under the banner of “moral clarity” and other euphemisms.

4. John R. Schindler (2007), Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, p. 45.

5. Xavier Bougarel (1999), ‘Bosnian Islam since 1990: Cultural Identity or Political Ideology?’, Convention annuelle de l’Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). Available here.

6. The old Young Muslims operatives controlling the SDA did not—with the exception of Izetbegović—run for public office on the Party’s platform, nor did the former regime’s security elites who joined their vanguard, such as Fikret Muslimović, whose turn from Communism to Islamic militancy was as abrupt as it was total. The lack of clarity about how Muslimović went from a warrior against the “Islamic factor” for the Titoist Counterintelligence Service (KOS) to the guardian of the SDA regime’s “Islamic security” has led to doubts about his sincerity. Whatever was in Muslimović’s heart, however, no other individual (again, except Izetbegović) is more responsible for the steps towards Islamising the Bosnian army and security services, with the attendant purges and ideological instruction needed to rid these institutions of secular holdovers. See: Unholy Terror, pp. 58-59, 156-57.

7. The SDA believed itself to be the sole legitimate voice of Muslims and drew in enough members from Bosnia’s Muslim mosaic to legitimate the claim, while the tight-knit circle of Islamists around Izetbegović retained control of all the Party-State’s levers of power, steering the course of the “national affirmation” and Muslim religious revival that was inevitable once the reign of the militant godless had ended, not least through the mosques, where anti-SDA imams were assiduously (if quietly) removed. The SDA’s use of generic Islamic symbolism secured the passive acquiescence of most non-Party Muslims and the Young Muslims “were careful not to [publicly] put forward their own understanding of Islam”, denying the opposition an affront around which they could mobilise collective action. See: Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Islam since 1990’.

8. The Islamic Declaration: A Programme for the Islamization of Muslims and the Muslim Peoples, to give it its full title, was published in Arabic, English, German, and Turkish in the 1980s and 1990s. It was first published officially in Serbo-Croat in 1990, shortly after Izetbegović became Bosnia’s president. Interestingly, an edition of the Islamic Declaration was put out by a publishing house owned by Vojislav Šešelj, one of the most radical of the radical Serbs. Bosnia is a small place and there were many connections, social and political, between anti-Communist forces of all stripes in Titoist times, especially on the harder-line fringe where Izetbegović and Šešelj dwelled. In the early post-Communist days, this tacit alignment continued. Once it broke down, Šešelj became associated with the “White Eagles” paramilitary and ultimately ended up as Milošević’s Deputy Prime Minister in Serbia “proper”. See: Sharif H. Banna (2022), Alija Izetbegovic: A Short Biography, p. 36; and, Unholy Terror, p. 63.

9. Leslie S. Lebl (2014), ‘Islamism and Security in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, U.S. Army War College. Available here.

10. Unholy Terror, pp. 64-65.

11. Lebl, ‘Islamism and Security in Bosnia-Herzegovina’.

12. Atatürk is despised by Islamists and those nostalgic for the Ottoman past. In the Islamic Declaration (p. 6), Izetbegović wrote acidly that “Turkey as an Islamic country ruled the world. Turkey as an imitation of Europe is now a third-rate country.”.

13. The Patriotic League, created to circumvent the nascent Bosnian army that Izetbegović did not trust, was ultimately “merged” with the army once the officer core had been denuded of enough independent figures that the leadership could not resist the elimination of the remaining non-Islamists. In area after area, the same pattern repeated: the SDA created parallel structures that held all real power to work around the formal State institutions, and when the formal institutions were sufficiently hollowed out, the SDA’s networks were moved in. See: Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Islam since 1990’. This model of an Islamist cadre monopolising State power is so strikingly similar to that of the Islamic Revolution that captured Iran in 1979 and spread to Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere, and Tehran’s involvement in Bosnia was so deep, it is difficult to believe the likeness is a coincidence.

14. Unholy Terror, pp. 70-71.

15. Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Islam since 1990’.

16. Izetbegović never actually mentioned Bosnia in the Islamic Declaration, and later this would be used—by Izetbegović and apologetic biographers—to claim that the Declaration was a purely theoretical work, wrongly interpreted as a programmatic action-plan by the paranoid Jugoslav Communists in 1983 and the no-less paranoid Serbs in the early 1990s. The reality is that Izetbegović, as a pan-Islamist, simply had no attachment to Bosnia per se, even as taking control of Bosnia offered him the best chance to implement his project. Nationalism is roundly denounced in the Declaration (pp. 60-67). “[N]ationalist ideas in the Muslim world are of un-Islamic origin”, Izetbegović writes, and proponents of nationalism in Islamdom are adherents to this foreign concept who even “speak in the language of the previous occupiers (!)” The “principle of spiritual community is superior to that of nation”, Izetbegović goes on, setting out a vision for “a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia”. “Those who … support the present factionalism [i.e., division of Muslims into numerous States], are to all intents and purposes on the side of the enemy”, Izetbegović concluded. Thus, when Izetbegović spoke of “the nation”, he meant the umma, the worldwide Muslim community. In this, Izetbegović was like his idol, Ayatollah Khomeini, who barely ever spoke of Iran—and when he did, it was to dismiss its importance.

Adnan Jahić, the SDA president in Tuzla, the second-largest Muslim city in Bosnia, spelled things out even more clearly in September 1993 in the “Virtuous Muslim State” (Krijeposna Muslimanska Drzava), a sort of Party manifesto. Jahić said that Izetbegović remained committed to his “old dream” of the “establishment of a Muslim State in Bosnia-Hercegovina”, and this had been confirmed to him “in a private conversation” by Mustafa Cerić, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia (r. 1993-2012), who acted as an ambassador to Muslim countries for Izetbegović during the war to channel money from Islamist donors through the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) and other “charities” to Sarajevo. “The territory controlled by the Bosnian Army after the war will be a Muslim State”, wrote Jahić, and this will be “the national State of Bošniaks, or Muslims”—note the definition of the State by the religious character of its people, not its territory. “The Muslim State will have an Islamic ideology … People who prove to be true Muslims, aware nationalists and good believers, will naturally have higher social privileges than those who persist in their opposition”, Jahić explained. “The Islamic ideology will aim to gradually abolish the duality between sacred and secular, religious and political, which has been imposed on us by secularized Christian Europe against our will.” See: Unholy Terror, pp. 93-94.

17. Izetbegović was emphatic in the Islamic Declaration, “There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political systems” (p. 30), and equally clear, “The Islamic order can only be established in countries where Muslims represent the majority of the population”, because it needs to be rooted in “an Islamic society”, not “mere power” (pp. 49-50). Consequently, ensuring the SDA ruled a Muslim-majority polity was Izetbegović’s central strategic aim, which in practical terms meant Izetbegović was—except for Sarajevo and parts of Muslim-dominated central Bosnia—quite flexible about where the borders of his dominion would be, and was determined to reduce the Christian population in these core areas, a process that came to be called (at least when the Serbs did it in the east) “ethnic cleansing”.

18. Unholy Terror, p. 63.

19. Unholy Terror, pp. 66-67.

20. Kenneth Morrison (2016), Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn on the Frontline of Politics and War, p. 99.

21. Unholy Terror, pp. 78-79.

22. Robert D. Kaplan (1993), Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, p. 5.

23. Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić (“The Karadžić Verdict”), 24 March 2016, p. 1,238. Available here.

24. Unholy Terror, pp. 66-67.

25. Marko Prelec, ‘Body of Evidence: The Prosecution’s Construction of Milošević’, in, Timothy William Waters [ed.] (2013), The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy.

26. Rebecca West (1937 [2007]), Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, p. 20.

27. Unholy Terror, p. 88.

28. To give a flavour of this coverage, one can look at the September 1992 report by the late Christopher Hitchens. After finding all ethno-religious groups present in the SDA’s army and seeing some of the old Jugoslav “inter-faith” posters still in government buildings, Hitchens announced: “Bosnia, and Sarajevo especially, is not so much the most intense and bitter version of the wider conflict, as the heroic exception to it.” Bosnia represented “the values of multi-cultural … cohabitation” and was under attack from “fanatics”, Hitchens concluded. This was a near-perfect enunciation of the SDA line.

Hitchens’s legendary scepticism abandoned him in the case of Izetbegović personally, too. Hitchens described Izetbegović as “a practising Muslim, which makes him the exception rather than the rule among his countrymen”, which is, as they say, one view. In selecting a book of Izetbegović’s, Hitchens skipped over the Islamic Declaration and chose Islam between East and West, finding “a vaguely eccentric work which shows an almost pedantic fidelity to ideas of symbiosis between the three monotheisms and to the humanist tradition of social reform”. When meeting Izetbegović personally and asking his thoughts on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Hitchens was satisfied when “[h]e gave the reply of the moderate Muslim, saying that he did not like and had not read the book but could not agree to violence against the author”.

29. Western journalists’ experiences of Bosnia being largely limited to Sarajevo made the SDA’s multicultural narrative easier to sell. In the city, there was a record of reasonably harmonious inter-confessional relations, and there was a strong secular current, at least at the elite level, among the urbanites of all communities—the people journalists spoke to and socialised with. But Sarajevo was not Bosnia. Out in the villages that journalists rarely ventured into (certainly not without SDA minders or “fixers”), where the influence of Communism and its Jugoslavist missionaries had been faint, deep religious devotion and sectarian animosities remained.

This urban-rural dimension that slanted mainstream Western coverage of the Bosnian civil war was reinforced, so to speak, from the other side. If the natural homophilia of the (mostly secular and liberal) Western journalists inclined them to sympathise with the Muslim urbanites in Sarajevo, it simultaneously induced contempt for the Serbs, who in their majority lived in the countryside and visibly held to their religious traditions. The Serbs and their militias were not comprised of the “beautiful people” and their tendency to display Orthodox symbols and relics and sing folk songs made them alien and unsettling—if not outright repulsive—to many of the liberal Western reporters. Karadžić would loom as a demonic figure after Srebrenica, but before that he was, to progressive Westerners and the Sarajevo intelligentsia (and Milošević, come to that), a ludicrous rube, a superstitious provincial remembered for his effort to improve the Sarajevo football team via group hypnosis. (Karadžić, spoken of dismissively by Milošević as “the crazy doctor”, was arrested in 2008 after spending his decade and more underground as a practitioner of “alternative medicine”.)

See: Balkan Ghosts, p. 22; and, Unholy Terror, p. 62.

30. While the term “ethnic cleansing” gained wide currency in the early 1990s and became synonymous with Serb depredations against Muslims in Bosnia, the origins of the term in English seem date from a decade earlier as a description of the campaign waged by some Albanian Muslim nationalists to expel Serbs from Kosovo as a prelude to uniting the province with Albania to create a “Greater Albania”.

31. The SDA claim that 250,000 people—or 350,000 people—had been killed during the war would calcify into dogma well beyond Bosnia in the years after the war. One of the few to question the casualty figures as they circulated throughout the war was George Kenney, initially an SDA-line observer—he resigned from the State Department in the summer of 1992 in protest at the George H.W. Bush administration not doing more to help the SDA government—who became increasingly sceptical the closer he looked at what was happening. Kenney was cautious in his approach, suggesting in April 1995 an estimate of no more than 60,000 fatalities, but he freely admitted that beyond ‘much smaller than the SDA is claiming’, there was not much certainty. The main issue, Kenney noted, was that the press had so credulously disseminated what were obviously politically-generated numbers. Kenney was quite correct about this and one can go further.

War death tolls should all be doubted, even for those long over, never mind those—ongoing or recently ended—where the political imperatives to massage the figures remain in force. That caveat in place, in the 2000s, Mirsad Tokača (a Muslim, for what that matters) of the Research and Documentation Centre investigated the war deaths and found there had been 97,000 people killed. Tokača did attempt to break this down, and concluded 57,500 (59%) soldiers and 39,500 civilians (41%) had perished, with the clear majority of dead civilians being Muslims, but this came with two important qualifiers of uncertainty: because of the way the war was fought, significantly by ununiformed militias on all sides, separating civilians and combatants was complicated; and the payment system set in place by the SDA government for civilian “martyrs” meant the families of Muslim soldiers and militiamen had every incentive to identify their deceased loved one as a civilian.

See: Lara J. Nettelfield, ‘Research and Repercussions of Death Tolls: The Case of the Bosnian Book of the Dead’, in Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill [eds.] (2010), Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, pp. 175-76.

32. As Martin Bell of the BBC confessed at a public lecture in October 1993, “all the reporters who work regularly on the Bosnian beat are, at least privately, interventionist.”

A case in point was Samantha Power, a think tank researcher in her early 20s in 1993, who abandoned that post to become a war correspondent in Bosnia. In the wake of that experience, Power would write A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), which won a Pulitzer and put her on the radar of Barrack Obama, whom she would serve in office as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights and subsequently U.N. ambassador.

In her 2019 memoir, The Education of an Idealist (pp. 10-11), Power wrote quite forthrightly that she went to Bosnia with an agenda. Power believed “the only way President Clinton would intervene” on the side of the SDA government was if “he felt domestic pressure to do so. As a journalist, therefore, I believed I had a critical role to play.” She confirms Bell’s assessment of the press corps: “Many journalists in Bosnia brought a similar focus to their work. … [W]e wanted our articles to matter and our governments’ actions to change.” Power acknowledges being “aware that this aspiration was more reminiscent of an editorial writer’s ambition than that of a traditional reporter, whose job was to document what she saw”, but she felt the cause justified it.

Power writes of her disappointment by the summer of 1995, because her work and that of her journalistic colleagues had heretofore failed to “move President Clinton to stage a rescue mission”. Tellingly, she writes that this had soured relations with Muslim Sarajevans, who “had once thought of Western journalists as messengers on their behalf”. Though the long-desired intervention would ultimately come months later, it was Power’s frustration at the struggle to “sway Western decision-makers” from the outside, as a journalist, that enticed her to government work: “when I reported on a diplomatic gathering …, I noted in my journal: ‘I would like to be one of them.’ … I wanted to ‘be on the other side of the microphone,’ in a position to make or change US policy.”

33. John E. Sray (1995), ‘Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware’, U.S. Defense Department Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). Available here.

34. Peter Brock (Winter 1993-94), ‘Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press’, Foreign Policy. Available here.

35. Unholy Terror, p. 90.

36. The first war of the 24/7 news era was DESERT STORM, the operation to evict Saddam Husayn’s Iraq from Kuwait in January-February 1991, but that was over in six weeks and the ground phase lasted just in 100 hours.

37. Brock, ‘Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press’.

38. The October 1994 New York Times article was by Stephen Kinzer, later a perpetrator of the exact same journalistic malpractice he had identified in Amanpour over Syria. The piece, entitled, ‘Where There’s War There’s Amanpour’, quoted a CNN “insider” saying: “I have winced at some of what [Amanpour’s] done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism”. The source gave a telling example: “She was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened [in February 1994], and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that. She was assuming an omniscience which no journalist has.” A moment where even some of Amanpour’s backers had some doubts was in May 1994, when she intervened, “live from Sarajevo”, of course, to accost President Bill Clinton over the “constant flip-flops” of his Bosnia policy at a town hall-style “global forum”. Clinton was visibly angry and many Americans were quite shocked by the tone she took with the Commander-in-Chief. For anyone looking at why this had happened, the clear answer was that Amanpour had shifted from reporting on Bosnia to forwarding the Bosnian (SDA) cause.

39. Unholy Terror, pp. 90-91.

40. See, for example: The Karadžić Verdict, pp. 1,240-45, and, Prelec, ‘Body of Evidence: The Prosecution’s Construction of Milošević’.

41. The SDA government brought a separate case against the State of Serbia, accusing it of responsibility for the Srebrenica genocide, which was rejected in 2007. Sarajevo was disappointed, but the ruling had little impact on the Serbs’ political standing and image. Serbia being cleared of genocide against Croatia—and vice versa—in 2015 likewise did little to change the atmospherics, locally or internationally.

42. The Associated Press report in February 1993, sourced to an SDA official, of cannibalism breaking out in eastern Bosnia because Muslims were under such a hellacious Serb siege received wide coverage; the U.N. visit the next day that confirmed there was no famine, let alone cannibalism, barely registered in the media. See: Brock, ‘Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press’.

43. The evidence gathered at the ICTY showed Belgrade had much less control over the Bosnian Serbs than was commonly believed, and Zagreb much more control over the Bosnian Croats—Karadžić repeatedly defied Milošević in ways that would have been inconceivable from Tuđman’s proxies. See: The Karadžić Verdict, pp. 1,238-45, 1,975-76, 1,980, 1,303.

44. Evan Kohlmann (2004), Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, pp. 91-92, 128, 162-64.

45. Kohlmann’s Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe is a pathbreaking study of Al-Qaeda’s involvement in the Bosnian civil war and the roots the organisation established in the Balkans, enabling its growth into a global terrorist threat through the 1990s, and Schindler’s Unholy Terror is the most complete single volume on the role jihadists of all stripes—including Iran’s Shi’a variant—played in Bosnia. While there have been efforts to downplay and deny what the authors found, including a concerted campaign of personal attacks on their motives to try to discredit them—there is a very active core of SDA-aligned propagandists who try to punish any deviation from their narrative—you can read about Al-Qaeda’s role in Bosnia and its importance to the network’s development in the memoirs of the participants in the Bosnian jihad, such as Aimen Dean (Nine Lives: My Time As MI6’s Top Spy Inside al-Qaeda) [reviewed here] and Omar Nasiri (Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda). In counter-terrorism circles, the significance of the Bosnian jihad is uncontroversial, and when scholars have set out to write about particular aspects of the history of jihadist terrorism, they are ineluctably drawn into a discussion of Bosnia because it is an unavoidable part of the story. See, for example, chapter 14 of Ronen Bergman’s The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power (2008), and Aaron Zelin’s Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad (2020) [reviewed here], which has a section devoted to the Bosnian jihad on pages 49 to 51, but it is a thread that runs through the book.

46. Renate Flottau of Der Spiegel said she met—and spoke with—Bin Laden in the anteroom outside Izetbegović’s office in November 1994. This account was confirmed at the Milošević trial by Eve-Ann Prentice of The Times, who was also present. The claims that Bin Laden visited Bosnia three times are unverified. Slobodna Bosna, the Sarajevo news magazine known for investigating the corruption and extremism of the SDA government, reported in 1999 that Bin Laden had been given a Bosnian passport during the war. Sarajevo obviously denied this, especially after 9/11, and who knows. Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, the architect of the 9/11 massacre, did receive Bosnian citizenship [Richard Miniter (2011), Mastermind: The Many Faces of the 9/11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, chapter three]. Given that Izetbegović naturalised the foreign jihadists who wanted to stay rather than comply with NATO’s demand to expel them after the war [Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, pp. 162-63], and maybe 12,000 Bosnian passports “went missing” during the war—many of them later found in the hands of Al-Qaeda’s jihadists captured or killed in the War on Terror—one is inclined to agree with Slobodna Bosna’s editor-in-chief, Senad Avdić: “If Bin Laden doesn’t have a Bosnian passport, then he has only himself to blame” [Unholy Terror, p. 282].

47. Al-Zawahiri, whose public admiration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was requited by the mullahs, liaised closely with Imad Mughniyeh, the IRGC officer in charge of Hizballah, the Lebanon-based IRGC unit, which had hundreds of jihadists in Bosnia to fight for Izetbegović’s government and train the Sunni mujahideen. See also: Matthew Levitt (2013), Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, p. 149.

48. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 58. Available here.

49. Izetbegović’s government covered up terrorist attacks and war crimes by Al-Qaeda and the other mujahideen as far as possible, not only out of ideological sympathy, but because trials would highlight the jihadist presence SDA strategic messaging was trying to conceal and it could have diplomatic ramifications, too, since so many of the jihadists were connected to entities either funded by or directly representing the Saudi government, such as the Saudi High Commission for Relief, and embarrassing the Saudis could jeopardise the funds for reconstruction that Sarajevo was hoping to acquire from Riyadh. See: Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, pp. 111-12.

50. Unholy Terror, pp. 173-74.

51. The eyewitnesses, who testified for both the defence and the prosecution, included multiple U.N. officials and military officers, former Ševe operative Edin Garaplija, and combatants from all sides. See: The Karadžić Verdict, pp. 1,821-28.

The UNPROFOR commander from 1992-93, Philippe Morillon, testified at the Milošević trial that it was “quite certain” the SDA troops in Sarajevo had shelled his peacekeepers on at least one occasion, and while physical proof was unavailable, the UN mission was convinced “there were cases” of shellfire and sharpshooting directed at Muslim civilians in Sarajevo “coming from Bošniak [i.e., SDA] lines”.

U.N. officers in Sarajevo were aware of the SDA’s dirty tricks from early on in the conflict. A reasonably well-attested case is the apparent “mortar shell” fired at British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd just as he was meeting with Izetbegović in Sarajevo in July 1992. The damage was pretty obviously not from a mortar and the Bosnian guard of honour taking cover before the explosion added to the suspicion something untoward had happened. David Kaplan, the producer for the U.S.’s ABC News was killed in August 1992: this was blamed on a Serb sniper, but the bullet had been fired at ground level.

The British head of UNPROFOR said that the mortar shell responsible for the first Markale (Market) massacre in Sarajevo in February 1994—an incident that provoked particular outrage against the Serbs—had come from an SDA position.

France concluded after an investigation that Eric Hardoin, a French UNPROFOR officer initially believed to have been shot by the Serbs in April 1995, had been killed by the SDA, and in the months afterward French Marines undertook an aggressive effort to suppress Muslim sniping in Sarajevo.

52. Cees Wiebes (2003), ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995: The Role of the Intelligence and Security Services’, Nederlands instituut voor oorlogsdocumentatie (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation), p. 57. Available here.

53. Lewis MacKenzie, the commander of the U.N. peacekeepers in Sarajevo until October 1992, told The Guardian on 22 July 1992: “Mortars are set up beside hospitals, artillery beside schools, mortars and other weapons are carried in ambulances. I’ve never seen the Red Cross abused like that, on both sides.” See: Brock, ‘Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press’.

MacKenzie’s superior, the overall head of the U.N. force in Bosnia, Philippe Morillon, said the same: “We saw a mortar there [at the Koševo Hospital] ready to provoke a reaction from the Serbs. They [the SDA troops] did that all the time. I know that some UN observers saw that mortar at Koševo. Very frequently they used mortars at Koševo for provocation purposes.”

54. Timothy Donais (2004), The Political Economy of Peacebuilding in Post-Dayton Bosnia, p. 68.

55. Six weeks before Prazina’s demise, another of the mafia bosses in Sarajevo—and simultaneously an army officer—who had recently become a political irritant to Izetbegović, Mušan Topalović (“Caco”), had been arrested and killed while trying to escape, according to the official account.

Ramiz Delalić (“Ćelo”) was something like primus inter pares among the SDA-approved crime syndicates in Sarajevo in the last two years of the war. It was an open secret that Delalić was responsible for the murder of Nikola Gardović at the “Bloody Wedding” in Baščaršija in March 1992, the incident that Serbs believe started the war, but Delalić remained on good terms with Izetbegović, so neither the law, nor the apparent intermittent “crackdowns” on the gangs, troubled him.

In 2004, Delalić was finally indicted for Gardović’s murder: the case had become an embarrassment to Sarajevo, and with Izetbegović dying a year earlier, Delalić had no protector. Before the trial could complete—and Delalić could give too many answers that were awkward for the SDA—Delalić was shot to death on his doorstep. The lines of inquiry have pointed at a mob rival, someone safely distant from the SDA; it could even be true.

56. Prazina would be presented with as much distance as possible put between him and the SDA government, and sometimes the descriptions made him sound like Robin Hood.

57. Unholy Terror, p. 229.

58. Charles G. Boyd (Sept.-Oct. 1995), ‘Making Peace with the Guilty: The Truth About Bosnia’, Foreign Affairs. Available here.

59. U.S. intelligence and security agencies consistently reported throughout the conflict in Bosnia “that all warring factions were guilty of atrocities, and that there were no ‘good guys’. All the parties did unspeakably brutal things to all the other parties and this was the collective view of US military analysts throughout Europe. … The American services felt that … ‘US policy statements do not portray a balanced view of events in Bosnia’. The State Department and President Clinton, according to these services, were consistently pro-Muslim and anti-Serb, and the political statements on the situation in Bosnia were ‘generally distortions of the truth which portray the Serbs in a very negative way compared to the other factions. This was generally accomplished by failing to note undesirable activities on the parts of the Croats and Muslims’.” See: Wiebes, ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995’, p. 57.

60. Burns, a British subject, had been one of the few foreign reporters—for a Canadian outlet at the time—in China during the Cultural Revolution (in 1971), and since joining the New York Times in 1975 he had been bureau chief in the Soviet Union and Peking, where he was briefly imprisoned on fabricated espionage charges. After his work in Bosnia, Burns would become bureau chief in India, covering Afghanistan and Burma through the 1990s, and in the 2000s his work in post-Saddam Iraq would cement his reputation as perhaps the best foreign correspondent in the English-speaking world.

61. Newsweek published a story on 4 January 1993, sourced to SDA officials, which claimed 50,000 Muslim women had been raped by the Serbs. A U.N. investigation began: when it reported six weeks later, 119 rape victims were documented, and an unofficial estimate of 2,400 total victims was reached, including Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. See: Brock, ‘Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press’.

62. Time magazine had a cover image on 17 August 1992 of a “skeletal man who was described as being among the ‘Muslim prisoners in a Serbian detention camp’. In fact, the man was a Serb [named] Slobodan Konjević, 37”. An earlier BBC video report in 1992, of an elderly “Bosnian Muslim prisoner-of-war in a Serb concentration camp”, turned out to be Branko Veleć, a Bosnian Serb and retired JNA officer. This would continue. For example, in March and May 1993, CNN aired footage of massacre sites containing Muslim bodies; when the slain were shown to be Serbs, there was no correction. See: Brock, ‘Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press’.

63. Gutman’s Pulitzer cited his “courageous and persistent reporting that disclosed atrocities and other human rights violations in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Gutman was the first to report on the Serb-run prison camps (Trnopolje and Manjača) on 2 August 1992, though the testimony of apparent survivors on which the story relied left a lot of people with the impression these were death camps. Four days later, Vulliamy visited Omarska and Trnopolje, and Britain’s International Television News (ITN) broadcast the first pictures of the camps.

64. Curiously, on the few occasions The New York Times mentioned these reality-television-style “confessions” being used on State television in post-Saddam Iraq, the “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” series, none of the articles were under Burns’s byline. Perhaps a lesson learned.

65. Lewis MacKenzie (2008), Soldiers Made Me Look Good: A Life in the Shadow of War, p. 147.

66. The story of MacKenzie raping Muslim women at a Serb concentration camp was picked up in the Arab world, Croatia, Italy, and Germany, though initially kept out of the American press. The story did appear eventually in the Washington Post on 1 November 1993, in an article written by Roy Gutman. Gutman had already written stories painting MacKenzie as “pro-Serb”. Gutman found that a speech MacKenzie had given to the Heritage Foundation was partly funded by Serbnet, a Serbian-American advocacy group. MacKenzie says he neither knew of the group’s involvement nor knew of their existence—and he donated all the proceeds to Canadian Foundation For AIDS Research (CANFAR) [Soldiers Made Me Look Good, p. 149]. But it was enough grounding for a narrative that was already well-advanced by then. And the circulation by a major American outlet of the obscene SDA lies, put in the mouth of a tortured prisoner, that MacKenzie was a “rapist”, helped that narrative take root, too. Three and more decades later, the SDA’s supporters and front-groups—often constituted as genocide remembrance organisations—freely call MacKenzie a Serb collaborator and rapist as if it is something established and undisputed.