There are two parallel institutions, among others, that operate to bring the events of an emergency to our attention: the news media and the intelligence agencies. The latter's work is almost exclusively confined to alerting public officials, but the former, though they deal with the mass of the public, are no less powerful in moving official opinion, partly because officials must cope with public opinion shaped by the news media. Furthermore, there is some interplay between the intelligence product and the stories reported by journalists: intelligence reports can be leaked, or tailored to give a distorted picture to the press for political reasons.
American officials appear to have been well served by their intelligence agencies in having the looming crisis in Yugoslavia brought to their attention early on, and we may assume that the agencies of other states were also monitoring the situation. In 1990 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) correctly predicted the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia; at the beginning of 1992, with diplomatic attention focused on negotiations to achieve a cease-fire in the Second Yugoslav War (in Croatia), the CIA foresaw that the Third Yugoslav War (the war in Bosnia) 13 was about to begin. Moreover, the CIA also predicted that recognition of Bosnia might serve as a pretext for war against that state, absent some larger effort at containing or deterring the aggressive JNA and the Serbs. Finally, according to several former officials, the State Department was aware of the existence of Serbian detention centers for Bosnian Muslims as early as April of 1992, and by June had confirmed reports of torture and concentration camps.14
The American public and the publics of other concerned countries did not have access to these reports, of course, but they were nevertheless kept informed of events in Bosnia by televised and print journalism. There really can be no doubt that Cable News Network (CNN) was an influential factor in bringing the crisis to the attention of the public. This has also been the case in other emergencies: the spectacles of starvation in Somalia and mass slaughter in Rwanda are two recent examples of events that simply would not have been noticed in earlier periods. The “CNN Effect”— the jolt to public opinion given by televised attention to foreign crises—is now beyond question.* One can see this in the preoccupation of the public with events in Somalia, but not in the Sudan, in Haiti but not in Liberia, in Chechnya but not in Nagorno-Karabakh. In the first of each pair, the public was made to notice that something unusual and dramatic was happening; in the second, owing to the difficulty of getting televised coverage of events there, the public was not provided the same riveting and anguishing images, with the result that a great number of people simply never “noticed” those events.
In Bosnia this can be well illustrated by the televised accounts of three separate bombings of Sarajevo. In the course of the siege, more than 600,000 shells fell on a civilian capital with no significant military production. But it was three bombings of marketplaces that somehow stirred the public imagination.15 In 1992 one such bombing led directly to U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. In February 1994 a market bombing, which killed sixty-nine, prompted NATO to issue an ultimatum for Serbs to withdraw their heavy artillery. Finally, in August 1995, it was the bombing of a Sarajevo market by Serb mortars, which killed thirty-seven and wounded eighty-four, to which NATO responded with the bombing and artillery campaign that broke the siege of the city. One can only speculate about the reasons for such a reaction. After all, libraries, mosques, hospitals, and schools in Sarajevo had all been targeted and hit by the Serbs; what was it about the bombing of a market that seemed to hit a nerve in public opinion? Perhaps it had to do with the televised images such bombing provided. Unlike the scenes of bombed-out buildings, the photos of the market, with colorful clothes strewn among the vegetables and fruit stalls, the paving stones still wet and vivid with blood, provided disturbing yet compelling images. It was possible to televise such an atrocity only moments after it had occurred, with the shock still visible on the faces of the victims, and the wounded and dying bodies in disarray in what was otherwise a familiar and domestic setting. Shopping in an open-air market is so innocent and pleasant an act, so tied to bringing home food for a family, that its violent disruption is bound to capture our attention and shake our complacency.
While the effect of televised images is hard to overstate, I am inclined to believe that it was the print media that were most effective at bringing the public to a recognition that events in Bosnia demanded their attention. This was done in three ways: first, by deepening the significance of the televised images through the evocative writing of journalists pointing out the cultural and historic importance of ethnic cleansing; second, by exposing governments in acts that were designed to obscure public notice of these events; third, by casting doubt on the role of other media, especially the Milosevic-controlled Serb media organs.
On September 22, 1991, during the war in Croatia, the New York Times wrote in an editorial:
Destruction on this scale has no precedent in Europe since Nazi Germany's vengeful “Baedeker” raids on English cathedral cities in 1942, and the Allied firebombing of Dresden… The loss of life in Yugoslavia is tragic. It piles horror upon horror to engage as well in cultural extermination.16
The Washington Post picked up this theme when the war in Bosnia began, publishing on October 16, 1992, this passage:
The atrocity of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is apparently an even more thorough business than the evidence of widespread murder, deportations and brutality would indicate… Serbian attacks… have purposely and successfully targeted national libraries, museums and archives… a kind of “ethnic cleansing” that adds a chilling new dimension to the atrocities that now dominate the news.17
Articles of this kind added depth to the CNN reporting by asking the public to notice a dimension of the emergency that is hard to picture on television, the cultural aspect of the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian campaigns.
The New York Times was also willing to expose efforts by the U.S. government to avoid notice. On August 27, 1992, the Times* charged that the State Department had purposefully not tried to confirm reports of Serbian ethnic cleansing for fear of triggering the Genocide Convention. On December 20, 1992, the Times reported that, having received reports in the spring of concentration camps where Muslims were tortured and murdered, “Washington did not press for immediate investigation of the camps. Instead, it tried to keep the reports from becoming public.” It was not until the summer of 1992 that a reporter was able to visit the camps and publish testimony of murders and atrocities. Even then, “the U.S. [merely] expressed concern and insisted that the Red Cross be allowed into the camps. It said nothing about freeing those imprisoned or punishing the perpetrators.” Le Monde reported that the United Nations had attempted to suppress its own report for more than a year showing that “Serbs alone have pursued ethnic cleansing as a planned and systematic government policy.”18
Finally, print media called attention to the role of the media itself in creating Serbian fanaticism and in attempting to prevent the world from noticing the crisis. The Times in an editorial published November 7, 1992, pointed out that when the JNA began the siege of Sarajevo one of the first targets of their bombardment was the television tower that allowed Bosnia's independent, multiethnic TV station to broadcast. Milosevic's media campaigns were widely noted, including the observation by the Times that “a climate of hate did not exist throughout Yugoslavia before warmongers created it, partly by manipulating the news.”
At first, intelligence reporting and official reaction seemed to be in synch. As early as September 1991—three months after the outbreak of the First Yugoslav War (in Slovenia)—Secretary of State James Baker denounced the JNA for “actively supporting local Serbian forces… causing the deaths of citizens it is constitutionally supposed to protect” and went before the U.N. Security Council to say that “the Serbian leadership” and the JNA were “working in tandem [to] create a ‘small Yugoslavia' or ‘greater Serbia.’” But it simply wasn't clear that events in Yugoslavia, which had successfully been brought to the attention of world leaders and their publics, constituted a real emergency—a systematically organized mass killing—and should be understood that way. Instead, for a long time it appeared that preserving the Yugoslav state in its entirety could stave off a true emergency. As a result, some eight months after Slovenia made its first formal move toward secession, the United States and the E.C. member states, as well as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), were still voicing continued support for a unified state under Belgrade. Baker asserted that the United States would not recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia “under any circumstances.” When independence was declared by the two republics, “[b]oth the Bush administration, through the personal visit to Belgrade… of Secretary of State James Baker, and the members of the European Community… warned Slovenia and Croatia that they will find neither diplomatic recognition nor economic assistance following a unilateral decision on their part to quit the Yugoslav system and declare themselves independent.”19
Thus it was obviously not enough to merely notice, as Baker clearly did. There also had to be a recognition of emergency, and this required an understanding of the situation that, for a long time, eluded the United States and its European allies.