by Emir IMAMOVIC
"Turk women claim that we rape them, but just recently in a refugee camp one of the rape victims gave birth to a black child."(Risto Djogo)
"Muslims are still in [the town of] Makarska!?"(Smiljko Sagolj)
"Every Muslim should pick a Serb that he would kill when the time comes."(Zilhad Kljucanin)
Zilhad Kljucanin is until this day active in culture. He is a writer, and a copy of his latest novel Shehid [martyr for Islam] was presented last year, perhaps because of his good performance, to a member of the Bosnian soccer team, Sergej Barbarez. Smijlko Sagolj is still working as a journalist in Mostar, and appears only in those places he still considers worthy of his presence: for example at the promotion of the book Crimes of Muslim units against Croats. Apparently, his health has deteriorated lately. Risto Djogo reached hell a long time ago, via Zvornicko lake. Georges Ruggiu is in prison! He has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity.
In the trial finished in June 1 2000, in front of the International War Crimes Tribunal for crimes committed in Rwanda, based in Arusha (Tanzania), it was said that Ruggiu between January and July 1994, editing program of radio RTLM in Kigali directed his Hutu listeners to exterminate the minority Tutsi tribe. This Belgian, just like his recently arrested colleague Valerie Bemeriki, was in absolute service of genocidal project of cleansing of Rwanda's Tutsis, turning his radio program into a command center where the jingle Clean Your Home was played too often. Once he also uttered the sentence that was crucial for the verdict in his case: "Some Tutsi in the village of Gitwe are still alive." After that the Hutu army killed 70 Tutsi families in this little-known village. It is still not known whether soldiers followed the "advice" of "journalist" Bemeriki, spoken in the program of radio RTLM: Don't waste bullets on those pests, dismember them with machetes."
Therefore, the Tribunal in Arusha is preparing another trial against a journalist who incited to extermination. In the meantime, the local lawyers will have to consider a possible appeal of the prosecutor in the trial of Ruggiu. Her name is Carla del Ponte and in her final remarks she demanded 20 year prison sentence for the Belgian among Hutus!
Words of Support for Murderers
Another War Crimes Tribunal, for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, in which the chief prosecutor is also Swiss judge Carla del Ponte, has been putting those responsible for thousands of deaths behind bars. However, there are no journalists there. The Tribunal in the Hague is holding trials of soldiers, politicians, policemen, among whom, to tell the truth, there are unsuccessful journalists (Dario Kordic), but none of them during the aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina wrote anything apart from brief orders. Therefore, one has to wonder whether that means that journalists in Bosnia-Hercegovina were always better professionals than patriots? Can that Kljucanin's sentence about murderous duty of every Muslim, published in the magazine of Tuzla SDA Zmaj od Bosne on June 17 1993 in the article entitled There must be no more Partisans, and signed with pen name Ale Trnavac, be justified by the fact that the author belongs to the people against which genocide has been carried out and that his brother was in Chetnik captivity at the time?
In the interest of human and divine justice, Scheveningen prison should first open its gates, if journalists are ever taken there with handcuffs rather than with press passes, to the team of journalists from Belgrade, Pale and Banja Luka, that cared about professionalism as much as Mladic cared about the Geneva convention. That group would include many strange characters, some of them perhaps more bloodthirsty and dangerous than (of course not all) soldiers scattered on Bosnian peaks where they "defended" whatever Milosevic's genius for propaganda Milorad Vucelic defined in the media, and was then dutifully executed by forgotten Milijana Baletic, late Ilija Guzina and Risto Djogo, present day diplomat Dragan Bozanic, and somewhere lost Dragan Aloric or Marica Lalovic and similar, although less camera friendly, journalists of Politika, Vecernje Novosti, Borba, Duga, Ekspres, Javnost, Serb Oslobodjenje, Prst...
The other side, to the west from Bosnia, also has its candidates for extradition. Of course, Sagolj would be the leading candidate, since after his sentence about Muslims in Makarska, said in a feature about "Muslim aggression on Croatian territories", a bomb exploded in a Bosniak refugee camp between Split and Makarska. Fortunately, no one was hurt in that explosion. He would be followed by some other journalists and especially columnists of high circulation Croatian publications "enriched" by provincial aesthetics; thus, editor of the cult Split weekly Feral Tribune Viktor Ivancic said for Zagreb weekly Globus that such journalists provided logistical support to concentration camps in Hercegovina. They were fighters deployed in the war against Bosniaks, Serbs, Jews, as well as internal enemies whose number, as is also being repeated in Bosnia, increased as the power of external danger grew weaker.
And here, at home, a candidate for Bosniak Ruggiu is the author of the book Yes, I despise Serbs, a journalist of Zmaj od Bosne and in the end, the editor-in-chief of the national weekly Bosnjak, Zilhad Kljucanin, born in Trnova near Sanski Most. Everywhere he wrote, in Zmaj where his pen name became a trademark, in Ljiljan while Dzemaludin Latic and other journalists more inclined to analytical than investigative journalism were dissecting the origin of the war or advised Bosnian negotiating teams, in Bosnjak where fake names were reserved for other journalists, Kljucanin advocated only one thing: open hatred. True, he never tried to elevate that hatred to a higher intellectual plane.
We entered Sana, you Vlah mutherfuckers! [Vlah is a derogatory term for Serbs; it has racist connotations and implies non-Slav origin, lack of education, bad manners, laziness etc.], is the headline of Kljucanin's exclusive report about the liberation of Sanski Most published in Bosnjak on October 31 1995. The article is introduced with the following paragraph: "I've been driving, driving, driving. I've been driving through the Sanski Most region. I have been dreaming about the day when I would be able to drive through the BOSNIAK Sana [Sanski Most region]. Through a cleansed Bosniak town, without a single Serb. And I've lived to see that day. Ignoring captured Serbs, who are, already, under guard, cleaning the streets of Sanski Most, there are no more Serbs in the town.(...) But, I am consoling myself, there is a lot of garbage in Sanski Most, there will be plenty of work for many more Vlahs."
However, Kljucanin never wrote in Bosnjak anything that would compare with the Ljiljan editorial from February 23 1994: "There are 500 Serb orphans in Ugljevik. Praised be God! The Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina has so far sent to hell about 50,000 Chetniks. Praise the Lord! Serb mothers will in the future, as Ibrishim would say, give birth to ice cubes instead of children. Praised be God!(..) A Serb starts resembling a human being only after his death. Or in captivity." There is only one problem: this article was also signed by Zilhad Kljucanin!
Another two journalists from Bosnjak used its editor-in-chief as a role model. The first one is certain Dzemal Sefer, whose article about the liberation of Donji Vakuf - although this can be blamed on his editor - bears the headline We've smashed the southern border of the Vlah republic! However, he was never as explicit as Kljucanin, although he frequently used Kljucanin's vocabulary, as for example in the article published in Bosnjak on July 11 1995: "Every day hundreds of Vlah women are crying for Milun, Lazar, Trivun, Gojko, Spasan... Every day howling of Vlah women can be heard. Every day there are less stinking Chetniks and swine. With every day the air above Bosniak heads in cleaner."
The other one from the duet of diluted copies signed his articles with the name Hasan Dervisevic and was Bosnjak's correspondent from Tuzla. However, there is no journalist with such name and surname in Tuzla. A photograph indicates who might be hiding behind the mentioned name: the photo is from the Brcko front, it was published in Bosnjak and identified by the infamous "our journalist in..." And on the photo we can see the current Bosnjak's correspondent and former editor-in-chief of Zmaj od Bosne Rifat Haskovic. Regardless of who Dervis may be, he wrote an article about captured aggressor soldiers kept in Tuzla prison: "The General Staff of the Second Corps of the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina has allowed vamilies ["Vlahs" can't spell] to visit their litters.(...) Bosnjak's journalist has recently visited a pen with greased up Serbs and convinced himself for the umpteenth time that Chetniks have never lived better than in our prisons.(...) They admit, though, that they can't stand regular showers. But that is not surprising: pigs miss their excrement on their pillows."
Although, at least because its influence during wartime and reactions it provoked, the national weekly Ljiljan is equal to Bosnjak or should be right behind it, its position is endangered by Zmaj od Bosne. This weekly never bothered to hide its ideological profile ("We are the publication of the greatest political party of the Bosniak people, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA). We articulate SDA views, sometimes going further than the official party line," Vedad Spahic, September 8 1994). Between reports from the front, amateurish political essays by Adnan Jahic (Supplement to our political program: SDA - synthesis of religious and national) and articles with interesting headlines (Qur'an and Einstein's theory), it had enough space for articles of Ruggiu's sort. "The Serbs who remain living on the free territory under the control of the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina, an overwhelming majority of them, do that either because until this day they had no chance to go to 'their territory', or because they are carrying out certain tasks for their superiors. There is no third reason," wrote the current spokesperson of SDA, Adnan Jahic.
That weekly was probably the first one to draw attention of the International officials to "Bosniak propaganda" and its possible consequences. Allegedly Tadeus Mazowiecki himself used the article of Zmaj's journalist Vedad Spahic as an example of racial hatred spread through the media. Although no one actually every proved that Mazowiecki was really using Spahic's oeuvre for these purposes, an article about the lack of "analytical intellectual power" in children from mixed marriages, given a clumsy name Noy more "nina, nana...", managed to overshadow some, actually much more dangerous articles from this local party publication. One of these is, for example, the article of another Ale Trnavac which says: "I despise Serb-Croat neighbors. I want to greet every inhabitant of Bosnia with 'merhaba', and to hear around myself only sweet sounding names, such as Meho, Hamo, Hamce, Umka..."
"(...)Consequently it is not surprising that they gave birth to even worse servants, monsters of mass-media, nationalist butchers such as Djogo, Bozanic, Aloric, Golubovic, Ceremidzic, Bjelica, Milanovic, Todorovic, Kojovic, Lovrenovic, Vranjes, Njagul, Ljubojevic, Rako, Puljic, Lalovic, Cosovic, Tepacevic, Andjelic... Only good fortune sent this fascist scum away from our lives.(...) The city is getting cleaner, coffee smells better all the time, freedom cannot be far away." This was written by the current secretary general of the Association of Journalists of Bosnia-Hercegovina Enver Causevic in Ljiljan, on February 9 1994. Causevic failed to explain whether for example he was referring to Aleksandar or Pedja Kojovic (cameraperson of TV Reuters), to which Lovrenovic he was referring to if not to Ivan (columnist of Dani and Feral Tribune, one of the signatories of the open letter to Franjo Tudman in which he demands recognition of Bosnian sovereignty), and whether the mentioned Puljic is actually Ivica (founder of the Voice of America program in Bosnian), and Andjelic actually Neven (former journalist of the Youth program of Radio Sarajevo, and now a CNN journalist).
In a war such as the Bosnian war and in attempts to survive slaughter such as the one that has befallen Bosniaks, it was senseless to even try to stick to the dry theory and cool head and respect rules of war reporting established in some far away institutes. The more killed aggressor soldiers (in battle) and the more liberated territory by the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina the bigger military success and additional hope in survival. On the other hand, pictures of massacred civilians (mostly Bosniaks), cries of a girl from Srebrenica to whom physicians in Tuzla were trying to clean an infected wound on a half amputated leg, shifted professional limits and actually suspended any story apart from the one about good and cosmic evil. To live every day with a war and immeasurable amount of human suffering necessarily pushed one to cross the borders of journalistic ethics and only a minority managed to avoid the risk of wading into propaganda. However, wallowing in such a position and use of profession for propaganda of a new, instead of recording of the existing horror, was a certain path to the wrong side of history. For Serb, Croat and Bosniak Ruggius. For a hellish and still deniable argument about identical murderers with different firepower and journalistic talent.
They Dreamt They Were Gone
The comparison with Ruggiu, courts and warriors leads us, or actually brings back home, to the third side and what turned from a testimony about evil into very propaganda of evil which, fortunately, never quite took root in accordance with the rule described by Bruce J. Allyn and Steven Wilkinson in their article Journalistic Rules for Reporting on Ethnic Conflicts: "Comparative study of ethnic conflicts indicates that the perception of other groups as compact or threatening with respect to the perception of ones own group as weak, persecuted, has a very important role in preparation of the population for an ethnic conflict. If members of a certain ethnic group believe that they are threatened, they are much more likely to believe rumors and will be inclined to take preemptive actions against the opponent."Role of Islam in Applied Cannibalism
It is interesting that Ljiljan and Zmaj never had good relations, although they consistently had very similar editorial policies. True, in the first issues of Ljiljan it is difficult to find anything similar to the infamous articles by A.T. Only the editorial material indicated the path taken by this Bosniak magazine published in Ljubljana. For example, the headline of Nedzad Latic's article about the necessity for Serbs to give up crime and condemn executors in their ranks, is so vague that it is actually close to a dangerous call for a superficial reader: How to live with Serbs? Exterminate evil (Ljiljan/Muslimanski Glas, September 7 1992). The division of work in that magazine was very simple. Guest intellectuals (such as for example Enes Karic) had the task to interpret Serb fascism from the academic plane; full-time employed thinkers (Dzemaludin Latic, Mustafa Spahic) took upon themselves the role of educators. Hate speech was passed in long headlines (Serb teachers taught us lies, in order to behead us more easily - Ljiljan, September 7 1994; If we were not Muslims, we would turn into cannibals - Ljiljan, May 25 1994), and respectable journalists from Sarajevo were used for showdowns with the internal enemy. They drew ambiguous parallels between distinguished non-Bosniak Bosnians and loudspeakers for propaganda from Pale.
Translated on June 29, 2000