BALKANS: Hate Speech Deepens Old Divisions

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jun 28 2006 (IPS) - Hate speech has returned to the Balkans, bringing back memories of the 1990s when such talk against the ethnicity of others was routine.

It exploded in Serbia last week when ethnic Croat Ivana Dulic Markovic (45) from the small G17 Plus Party of the ruling coalition was elected the first woman deputy prime minister.

Zoran Krasic from the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) opposed her for being an “Ustashi”. That word was used often to describe Croats in the Serb-Croat war in the 1990s. The Ustashi was the fascist Croatian regime in World War II that engaged in the extermination of Serbs, Roma and Jews.

Dulic Markovic was elected despite such protests. But she said later that “hate speech is in high spin again.”

She could be right. Belgrade paper Glas Javnosti (Voice of the Public) recently carried an ad asking people not to shop at the newly opened Idea centre “as it belongs to those who slaughtered Serbs.” Idea is a Croatian firm, and the ad was published by a group of Croatian Serbs who fled to Serbia during the 1991-95 war.

Another local paper Kurir (Courier) carried a report on ‘Witches that Kill Serbia’. It was about three women human rights activists calling for punishment for war criminals and for reconciliation in the region.

“These are only the latest in a series of hate speech incidents,” professor of law Vesna Rakic Vodinelic told IPS. “The laws that ban ethnic hatred and intolerance remain on paper only.”

Vodinelic pointed to articles in the Serbian press where Roma, a minority believed to have migrated to Europe from Asia since the 14th century, are regularly described as prone to crime or negligent towards children, and unreliable in general. Homosexuals are rarely referred to in media, but then described pejoratively.

“Once something like hate speech, one of the pillars of inter-ethnic conflict of the 1990s, is introduced, it takes a double effort to erase it,” psychology professor Zarko Korac told IPS. Few ex-Yugoslav nations have taken such steps, Korac said.

Media could be feeding prejudice. The Igman Initiative, a union of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from former Yugoslavia working for reconciliation in the region, has released a study ‘Media Reporting on Neighbouring Countries’. The study analysed more than 1,000 items from seven prominent newspapers, five weeklies and three public radio and TV services in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia in April and May this year.

The study says neighbouring countries are mostly dealt with in a negative and superficial manner, and editorial policy remains “under the strong impression of the logic and philosophy of disintegration of former Yugoslavia.” Only, the style is more sophisticated than simple wartime hate speech, the report says.

Serbian media are for example mostly interested in the Bosnian Serb republic, and disregard developments in the Muslim-Croat Federation. The two regions have formed Bosnia-Herzegovina since the end of the war in 1995.

Croatian media, on their part, deal with Bosnian Croat issues. They describe Bosnian Croats simply as Croats, without mentioning that they live in another country.

“There is no hint of a joint future through European integration in regional media,” the study says, though all countries in the region want European Union membership.

“There are almost no analytical items, interviews, research stories or features that would familiarise the public with the reality in neighbouring countries. Everything remains at the level of sensationalism, crime chronicles, one-sidedness,” the study says.

“This amounts to mutual isolation of countries formed after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia,” Serbian coordinator of the Igman Initiative Aleksandar Popov told independent Belgrade media.

“As media in the region, in general, tend not to provide quality and correct information, they only additionally enlarge the social, cultural, political and information gap between people in the region. That can hardly help bridging differences or overcoming traumatic experiences from the war,” Popov said.