Serb Propaganda Machine Cranking Over Kosovo

Spewing nationalism and anti-U.S. vitriol, the government propaganda machine is working overtime to scare Serbs into a united front against foreign mediation in Serbia’s rebellious Kosovo province.

In a referendum to be held today, the people of Serbia will vote on whether to accept international referees in the violent dispute with ethnic Albanians who dominate Kosovo and who want independence from Serbia.

But rather than debate the issue intelligently, the government is whipping up emotions and fear. Anyone who does not side with the regime’s rejection of foreign meddling is branded a traitor. Mediation is portrayed as capitulation to a West bent on punishing the Serbian people.

As the country braces for a new round of economic sanctions, the nightly television news fires a relentless barrage. Artists, doctors, writers and average citizens are paraded onto the broadcasts to parrot unanimously the party line: Serbia is ours--we will never give up a single inch! Say “no” to the foreigners!

It is a crude, Communist-style propaganda campaign. But it is apparently effective in a country with no tradition of democracy and where people are hopeless, apathetic and battered by economic and political failure.

“It is the same sort of brainwashing we saw in 1991,” the year war began to engulf a disintegrating Yugoslav federation, said Sonia Biserko, executive director of the Helsinki Committee human rights organization in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and the rump Yugoslavia. “Most people hear it and repeat it and have no real insight. I think this last cycle of propaganda has damaged any chances for reconciliation or peaceful solution” to the Kosovo crisis.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its regional autonomy nine years ago. He now maintains that the intractable problems of Kosovo are an internal matter, while the Kosovo Albanians, distrustful of the Serbian regime, are demanding international supervision of any peace talks. The two sides hold to a stubborn and tense impasse after Serbian police killed more than 80 ethnic Albanians in a fierce crackdown on Albanian separatists last month.

An overwhelming “no” vote today is a foregone conclusion. It comes as Western powers threaten to impose new sanctions, possibly including the freezing of Yugoslav assets, because of the Kosovo violence. The five-nation Contact Group, led by the United States, will decide next week what steps to take. The governments are demanding that Milosevic withdraw his special police from Kosovo and open a meaningful dialogue with ethnic Albanian activists.

Analysts say Milosevic is using the referendum to buy time so that he can transfer blame for imminent sanctions from himself to the people, who, after all, will have voted to resist the West’s pressure.

“Sanctions, isolation and overall collapse await Serbia,” said opposition legislator Nenad Canak, one of the few to speak out against the vote. “Milosevic cannot solve any problem, but he can always displace one problem with a bigger one.”

After hours of speeches tinged with hate and racism, Serbian legislators approved Milosevic’s request earlier this month to hold the referendum, changing the law to do so. The vote was 193 to 4.

Accepting mediation, they argued, would be to accept the destruction of Serbia because of the West’s favorable treatment of the Albanian cause. Washington and most of its European allies say they oppose independence for Kosovo but support an enhanced autonomy. But most Serbian leaders believe that autonomy would be the first step toward Kosovo’s secession.

The tone of the debate that day in parliament left little room for reason. “There is no issue to discuss,” parliament Speaker Dragan Tomic, a close ally of Milosevic, said during the session. “Either you are free, or not. Either you are a boss in your house, or not. And when you are not a boss in your house, you can expect to see the neighbor in bed with your wife.”

Vuk Draskovic, once a leader of the opposition to Milosevic and now his ally, said, “Justice, God and all the facts are on the side of Serbs and Serbia.”

And ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, an extreme radical and former paramilitary commander whom Milosevic recently named deputy prime minister, observed: “The referendum is important because it makes the foreign powers angry. And if the foreign powers are angry, then you know it’s good for the Serbs.”

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was singled out for criticism. She was described by one pro-Milosevic politician as having “circled the globe sowing hatred” toward Serbs.

The referendum campaign is cast in terms of saying a “historic no” to foreign oppressors and deliberately made to echo similar campaigns in 1941--when Serbs said “no” to Adolf Hitler by resisting Nazi occupation--and 1948, when they said “no” to Josef Stalin by refusing to join the Soviet Bloc.