THE HAGUE/ZAGREB, May 19 (Hina) - The trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic started at the Hague-based U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Monday after a ten-day adjournment with the testimony of a French
propaganda expert, Renaud de la Brosse.
THE HAGUE/ZAGREB, May 19 (Hina) - The trial of former Yugoslav
president Slobodan Milosevic started at the Hague-based U.N. war
crimes tribunal in The Hague on Monday after a ten-day adjournment
with the testimony of a French propaganda expert, Renaud de la
Brosse. #L#
The French expert, a senior lecturer at Reims University, drafted
for the prosecution an exhaustive report on years of propaganda in
the ex-Yugoslavia. His report is based on interviews with
reporters, intellectuals and university professors, and backed
with numerous examples from the media.
The focus of the report is on Serb propaganda, which, according to
him, was used to denote the enemy and prepare the ground for war,
with the essential message of creating a state for all Serbs.
The four main motifs of the Serb propaganda were: genocide against
Serbs in Kosovo, the danger over Croatian Serbs, the economic
exploitation of Serbia, and the Serbs' inferior position due to
Serbia's limited sovereignty, said de la Brosse.
The chief levers of the propaganda were Television Belgrade and the
Politika and Politika ekspres dailies, of which nationalists led by
Milosevic took control in the late 1980s, he said.
The French expert also pointed to the method of "historical
amalgam" used in the mobilisation of Croatian Serbs for the war.
Late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's government was often
compared to the 1941-5 Independent State of Croatia (NDH)
government and said to have represented the continuation of the
World War Two fascist government, de la Brosse said.
Croatian Serbs were persuaded they were in the same situation as
Serbs in 1941 and an air of fear and danger was spread among them, he
said.
As an example of the "historical amalgam", he mentioned the speech
of Serb Jovan Raskovic in 1991 in which he linked genocide in NDH
with the genocide which "allegedly has already begun".
The expert presented Raskovic as the author of the theory of the
genocidal character of the Croatian people.
The trial chamber heard tapes of speeches by Dobrica Cosic, one of
the architects of the Serb Academy of Arts and Sciences Memorandum
which called "against the oblivion of the Ustasha crime" and other
examples of propaganda aimed at stigmatising the Croatian people
and fomenting hatred towards Croats.
De la Brosse will continue testifying on Tuesday.
Before the French expert, Fadil Banjanovic ended his testimony.
Banjanovic spoke about the deportation of 1,822 residents of the
Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) village of Kozluk near Zvornik in east
Bosnia in May 1992. His fellow villagers were deported to Hungary
and Austria via Serbia.
Milosevic has been indicted of the deportation of 15,463 residents
of Zvornik municipality, among other counts.
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