Yugoslav Media Give NATO Mistakes Big Play

In the war of words that parallels NATO’s bombing of targets in Serbia, the feelings of victimization and defiance projected by the Belgrade media are growing stronger by the day.

NATO missteps this week have eased the task of those seeking to portray the Western alliance as the aggressor and the people of Serbia as the innocent victims of a wildly unjust bombing campaign.

Especially damaging to NATO’s effort to convince the Yugoslav people that it is attacking military targets, not civilians, were Wednesday’s bombing of a column of ethnic Albanian refugees in Kosovo and Monday’s bombing of a train as it crossed a bridge.

“NATO Shelled Refugee Line, 70 People Killed,” screamed a front-page headline Thursday in the Belgrade-based independent daily Blic. The newspaper also carried an article quoting an investigator estimating that 30 to 50 people may have been killed in Monday’s train attack, with 14 confirmed dead. Many bodies may have fallen into the river below the bridge, the report said.

Belgrade television stations have also reported heavily about the bombings of the refugees and the train.

It is not easy even for outside observers to sort out what is truth and what is fiction in reports out of Belgrade--and identifying falsehoods is even harder for Belgrade residents with little access to other viewpoints. But in these two incidents, there are plenty of facts that cast NATO in a bad light, even if details remain unclear and may be exaggerated in Belgrade reports.

This all rebounds to the benefit of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who still talks more like a man who is winning than like someone who is facing a bruising defeat.

“For us it is the greatest honor to resist attacks of such a powerful enemy,” Milosevic said in an interview given to Zavtra, a Russian weekly, excerpts of which were published Thursday in the independent Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti. “Occupation is being imposed on us, but we are resisting it.

“The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia can be occupied only if defeated. But Yugoslavia is unbeatable. Our army is fighting for freedom, not for money. We’re protecting our country, our history . . . our free future. Yugoslavia has been attacked by the greatest and most vicious military machinery in the world.

“Our strength is that we are fighting on our territory against an enemy that came from far away. We will be destroying them on the doorsteps of our homes. The enemy will be taken apart and beaten. NATO is bombing mainly civilians. Cities are being shelled--civilian objects, hospitals, power plants, bridges, cars with civilian passengers, trains of ordinary citizens.”

In an interview with another Russian paper, Krasnaya Zvezda, also quoted in Thursday’s Glas Javnosti, Milosevic claimed that his forces have shot down 36 NATO planes and 119 cruise missiles. The figure of 36 planes shot down, even if it includes pilotless drones, is far higher than anything NATO has reported--a difference that Milosevic acknowledged.

“The West is covering up its losses using propaganda and disinformation,” Milosevic declared.

A major propaganda coup for Belgrade came Tuesday when NATO released a video of the Monday bombing of a passenger train on a bridge at Grdelicka Klisura. The bomb-attack video--taken by a camera attached to the bomb that relays images to the pilot--shows only the bridge, which NATO says was the intended target, until the very last possible moment, when suddenly the train moves into the picture. A NATO spokesman said at a televised briefing in Brussels that the video shows clearly that the pilot had not intended to hit the train.

But the Belgrade-based daily Glas Javnosti on Wednesday ran a large page-one photograph taken from the very end of the video, with the train dead-on in the bomb’s targeting. The photograph seems to speak for itself, giving a completely different impression from the video.

“This is a crime, and the killing of innocent people,” the newspaper said in its report.

The mood of angry resistance was also reflected Thursday in the front-page headlines of Vecernje Novosti, a popular Belgrade daily.

“Huge Destruction After Yesterday’s NATO Alliance Attacks. Five Missiles on Krusik,” said one of the Vecernje Novosti headlines, on a report about bombing of the Krusik metal-working plant near Veljevo, in western Serbia.

“Serbs: The Unconquerable People,” another headline said over an interview with a Russian colonel identified as a brigade commander with the multinational peacekeeping force in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“NATO in Yugoslavia is at a dead end,” the Russian officer was quoted as saying.