In Kosovo War, VOA and Other International Broadcasters Played a Key Behind-the-Scenes Role

By Alan Heil

“In Serbia, the press is being gagged and its freedom abolished as a last obstacle to full dictatorship. 1998-1999 will witness a decisive battle for political democracy, human and civil rights, and freedom in Serbia.”

—Milos Vasic, President, Independent Association of Journalists, Serbia

“We cannot be part of the world as long as Milosevic is there. Everyone is telling us, the business of opposition is to change him...He must leave.”

—Former Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic, briefing reporters after meeting the U. N. Security Council, June 17, 1999

“Opinions are stronger than armies.”

—Lord Palmerston

Accurate, solid news and information, widely disseminated in Yugoslavia and neighboring countries, may be even more important in peace than it was in war. Even after the 78-day NATO bombing campaign forced President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his armed forces from Kosovo, the Yugoslav leader continues to impose an information blackout on Serbian independent media. This is taking place at a time when people’s appetite for information about reconstruction, reform and rebuilding their shattered lives reaches a new peak after a decade of Balkan wars.

According to ANEM, the Association of Independent Media in Serbia: “After each international agreement accepted by the Yugoslav regime, repression within the country increases, especially repression of the independent media. That pattern is now repeating itself.” ANEM cites continuing police raids, seizure of radio and TV transmission equipment, and imposition of heavy fees and fines against print and electronic media under a draconian Serbian media law passed last October but kept in place after the Kosovo conflict ended.

Milosevic is using state-controlled media to block or distort the truth about his own significant reverses and the current occupation of Kosovo by 50,000 soldiers of the NATO alliance he vowed for weeks would never stand on a single centimeter of Yugoslav soil. The Yugoslav leader’s claims of “victory” dominated Serbian media even after the Serb pullout from Kosovo began. No mention was made on state-controlled media of the horrific group killings, mass gravesites, destruction of hundreds of towns and villages, and forced expulsions of Kosovar Albanians by Serb troops and paramilitaries in the province.

As early as seven months before NATO troops entered Kosovo, Western international broadcasters anticipated a crisis in the making. They increased airtime and extended their reach in the Balkans. They pulled out all the stops, moving well beyond their traditional shortwave transmissions:

They leased more time on medium wave transmitters, and organized or expanded Internet text, audio and video delivery services and e-mail exchanges in Serbian and Albanian to reach the estimated half-million personal computers in the former Yugoslavia.
They began construction of several FM stations in countries neighboring Serbia. In this, the Voice of America (VOA), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Deutsche Welle of Germany (DW) and Radio France International (RFI) launched an unprecedented joint project during an international crisis—two 24-hour-a-day satellite feeds of their individual programs to the stations. Both around-the-clock streams were tailored for Balkan audiences, but one was dominated by Serbian, the other Albanian-language transmissions.
They expanded downlinks of TV (VOA’s Serbian and Bosnian simulcasts, available in successive half-hour programs each weekday evening from 11 to midnight, local time) via Astra satellites. These programs reached direct to homes, independent of terrestrial in-country TV stations on which President Milosevic had banned foreign relays.
At full throttle, the Western international broadcasters provided vital news and information to listeners in the Balkans around the clock for nearly 250 hours a week. Even under the information blackout and crackdown against universities, their programming reaches remote corners of the former Yugoslavia. Unlike CNN, their words are borne on electronic wings in the languages of the people at or near the center of the conflict: in Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Serbian.

The broadcasts are the climax of an extensive, little-reported electronic cat-and-mouse game between Serbian authorities and the allies. Milosevic closed down all independent media in Serbia, the larger of Yugoslavia’s remainingrepublics, and attempted with limited success to muzzle electronic media in the smaller sister republic of Montenegro. He succeeded for a few weeks last December in blocking in-country university access to independent Serbian Web sites such as that mounted by the courageous B-92 radio in Belgrade.

Piercing the Balkan Darkness

How well did the Western broadcasters succeed in piercing the Balkan darkness? As the air war entered its final weeks, and even afterward, there were signs that the accurate, objective and comprehensive news and information and public service programming they provided was making a difference:

In NATO’s daily briefing May 20 (carried live by VOA), spokesman Jamie Shea reported that two battalions of Serbia’s 7th armored brigade had deserted their posts in Kosovo. More than a thousand soldiers simply left their battle stations and headed home after hearing reports on RFE that Serbian police were using water cannons to disperse anti-war demonstrators, women and children, in their hometown of Krusevac. “It is interesting,” Shea said, “that despite media restrictions in Yugoslavia, soldiers in the field seem to prefer to listen to Western radio stations, which I find encouraging.”
The state-controlled newspaper Politika Ekspress in Belgrade in late May branded local VOA, RFE, and BBC reporters in the capital city “traitors.” But The Washington Post reported from the Kosovo town of Kosovoska Mitrovica on June 26 that Serbs remaining there after the arrival of NATO forces “listen, out of curiosity and a thirst for information, to the Voice of America.”
VOA’s Serbian Service began receiving hate mail and calls as early as late March, following up on an earlier fax from three families in southeastern Serbia calling for the removal of President Milosevic.
The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army ordered the independent Montenegrin electronic media to stop relaying Western broadcasts, but at least five FM radio stations there defied the order for weeks.

But nowhere in the Balkans, perhaps, was the news more eagerly sought than in the packed Kosovar Albanian refugee camps and towns on the Albanian and Macedonian borders where refugees had settled in with local families.

From Kukes, Albania, the Ottawa Citizen reported: “Transistor radios are in great demand, and scores of booths in the main market sell dozens a day. ‘We’re buying radios to hear the news from the BBC and VOA,’ said Kosovar refugee Betullah Elmazi, 20...Radios are the way we have to learn what’s happening in Kosovo, and what NATO and Yugoslavia are doing.’”

Studies by the United States Information Agency and Intermedia Survey of Washington, DC showed just how widespread listening to VOA was during the height of the refugee crisis. On-site polling took place in Albania and Macedonia in May and June. In Albania, more than 83 percent of refugee adults listened at least once a week to VOA’s Albanian, Serbian and English services; in Macedonia, about two-thirds listened. VOA, by a large margin, was the leading international broadcast source of information among refugees in both countries.

VOA and the BBC attracted huge audiences among these refugees by creating in April family reunification message services. In cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Albanian services of the two largest international broadcasters recorded brief messages from refugees separated by ethnic cleansing and war from their relatives. They set aside programming time each day to beam these messages back to the region, with the idea of reuniting some families.

Isabelle Lazzarini of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva had high praise for the VOA Albanian family reunification hotline. As early as May, Ms. Lazzarini said, the ICRC had collected the names of more than 14,000 lost or displaced persons seeking help, including more than 1,200 children. She added: “The experience has shown that radio broadcasting is an efficient way to trace lost family members. Some families have already been reunited after the parents had been informed that their children were alive and located.”

Meanwhile, the Voice, the BBC, and other publicly-funded international networks reached far beyond the Balkans in telling the world about the Kosovo war and the reactions and diplomacy surrounding it. VOA reported about the model refugee camp established in Albania by the United Arab Emirates. Its Arabic Service interviewed Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Siladjic, who urged a Kosovo solution “either by military or diplomatic means.” The BBC Web site soared to a record worldwide 11,255,000 hits a week, an increase of 48 percent over prewar traffic.

Former Kazakh Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, while not expressing support for the NATO airstrikes, did tell VOA’s Russian Service that the world community has to stand up in defense of victims, in this case, the Kosovar Albanians. VOA’s Turkish Service, in one of its biweekly call-in programs in May, focused on humanitarian aspects of the Kosovo crisis.

And a VOA Mandarin Chinese reporter, William Chien, was assigned with a video camera to the refugee camps to simultaneously record and interpret the vivid testimony of those who watched executions of family members and torching of their homes and schools in Kosovo. Their words were broadcast back to China both on satellite-fed video streams and on VOA’s Chinese radio service during the many weeks the Chinese government media totally ignored the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. When NATO accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Chien filed minutes later. It was the first of 70 reports from all over the world aired by VOA’s Chinese Service during the first week after the bombing.

Once again, this reportage filled an information vacuum, because it included not only condemnation of the bombing (as did Chinese press and radio) but apologies from NATO, U.S. and British officials at a time when these still were kept off the airwaves by state-controlled Chinese media. This seemed to validate the wisdom of the pledge made in the first VOA broadcast in 1942: “The news may be good. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”

Alan Heil is a former VOA deputy director, who retired last year after 36 years as a broadcast journalist.

SIDEBAR 1

A Balkan Bargain as Peace Takes Hold

Reports from Belgrade and Pristina speak of a fragile peace. The Kosovo Liberation Army is moving quickly to fill a vacuum in civilian administration in the province, due to the slowness of the United Nations in organizing one. There are vengeance killings by Kosovar Albanians of Kosovar Serbs there. There also are indications of growing unrest in Serbia and reconstitution of the democratic opposition there, much of this masked to the local population in the Serbian media blackout. The United States government has no time to lose in providing emergency funding to the international broadcasters, VOA and RFE. Both networks have exhausted reserves in dealing with a crisis which has lasted 18 months since the first strife between the KLA and Serbian forces in Kosovo.

Would an additional $2,400,000 for U.S. information to the Balkans be cost-effective? If there is to be regional stability, getting straight news and comment to the people there is vital and urgent—from northern Serbia to southern Albania, from eastern Macedonia to western Bosnia, from Slovenia to Bulgaria and Greece. Clean information matters, in democracy-building and in reconstruction. It offers alternatives to state-run media in the region. It presents essential additional voices, and its public service component saves lives. It is minuscule, as part of reconstruction which may total five to ten billion dollars. The amount proposed is a one-tenth of one percent of the cost of a single B-2 Stealth bomber.—A.H.

SIDEBAR 2

Two Generations of Refugees Seek Help on the Airwaves

“I’m Kasem Bajrami from the village of Korotice, Drenica. I lost my four-year-old daughter. I am now in the Stankovic camp, Macedonia. If anyone has any information, please call my brother Ejup in Switzerland at this number...My daughter’s name is Drenusha Bajrami.”

“I’m Alban Fani, eight years old, from the Rugova village of Has. I am looking for my father in Kosova.”

—Messages received and rebroadcast by VOA’s Albanian Service.