Bosnia Serb Hard-Liners Sneak Back on TV

In brazen defiance of the United States and its allies, Bosnian Serb hard-liners circumvented NATO on Thursday and sneaked onto the airwaves with a night of television broadcasts attacking the West’s efforts to silence them.

It was the first time Bosnian Serbs loyal to indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic had managed to retake the airwaves since NATO troops on Oct. 1 seized transmitters and turned television and radio over to Western-backed Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic.

The West had accused Karadzic-controlled television of “poisonous” rhetoric that incited violence against NATO and foreign officials and undermined the U.S.-led peace process in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

International officials who monitor the media were at a loss Thursday night to explain how supporters of Karadzic were able to transmit their programming, which blasted the Western “evil empire” for its “undemocratic” policies. Soldiers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were searching for the source of the transmission.

The hard-liners may have used small transmitters scattered around Pale, their headquarters village nine miles southeast of the capital, Sarajevo, in a guerrilla-style broadcasting operation that knocked Plavsic’s signal off the air in many parts of the Bosnian Serb half of the country, an international official said.

“It was a very clever . . . elaborate operation,” said the official, vowing that NATO would eliminate the broadcasts today.

The Bosnian Serbs in Pale, locked in a power struggle with Plavsic, her supporters and the West, were triumphant.

“Real Serb TV is back on the air!” gloated Jovan Zametica, a senior advisor to Karadzic. “It is back to business as usual. We cannot allow just one voice, the voice of Biljana Plavsic.”

The stunning operation came as the world’s major powers, which compose the so-called Contact Group on Bosnian peacemaking, gathered in Rome precisely to discuss media. How to control Pale’s broadcasts, and to transform those of the Plavsic faction into professional journalism, are issues that have consumed international mediators and caused often bitter debate.

Some European and other officials have been reluctant to accept the heavy-handed approach of capturing television transmitters and knocking factions off the air, as advocated by Washington. But for U.S. officials, support for Plavsic--as a way to isolate her nemesis, Karadzic, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs--has become a cornerstone of policy in the Balkans.

Seizing the transmitters on Oct. 1 had deprived Karadzic and his allies of their chief propaganda tool in a country where most information is imparted through television. U.S. officials had vowed that the Pale clique would not return to the air until after Nov. 23 parliamentary elections--if then.

To bolster the alternative television network, the United States has delivered $700,000 in new equipment and will provide training to reporters at the station in Plavsic’s headquarters city, Banja Luka.

Thursday’s guerrilla broadcast saw Karadzic and his supporters taking back their propaganda instrument. The news show concentrated on activities by Karadzic proxy Momcilo Krajisnik, the Serbian member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency, and on explaining why the hard-liners’ voice had been off the air. A parade of officials from Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party accused the United States of taking away Serbs’ right to free speech and said journalists supportive of Plavsic had sold their “souls to the devil.”

One report featured a writers association demanding justice for Karadzic, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague for alleged crimes committed during Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war, which ended in December 1995.

That report was followed by a panel talk show featuring three of the region’s most strident Serbian nationalists, who called on Bosnian Serbs to remain united and promised that the “evil empire will collapse.”

The program signed off as Srpska Radio Television Studio Serb Sarajevo, a previously unheard-of studio but clearly the product of the Pale hard-liners.

The night’s broadcast ended with a pirated showing of a Mel Gibson movie, “Ransom.”