Word: yugoslavia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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During the questioning period, one audience member received scattered applause upon asking whether U.S. attacks on targets in Yugoslavia and Sudan were themselves a form of terrorism...
...which do you believe? Most of us would pick the American media. Yugoslavia was ranked among the most repressive countries in the world for journalists by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, along with Fidel Castro of Cuba and Jiang Zemin of China, tops a list of enemies of the free press released by the committee Monday. Milosevic has been notoriously intolerant of independent journalists, both foreign and Yugoslavian. As for Tanjug, it operates out of something called the Ministry of Information, whose sinister, Orwellian name doesn't inspire much confidence in its objectivity...
Internet access may not be as widespread in Yugoslavia as it is here, but it is the most formidable obstacle any propagandist has ever faced. Tanjug's news stories, thinly veiled propaganda bulletins, now have to compete with the real thing from independent news sources--or at the very least with the NATO version of events...
During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe tried to fill the same role as the Internet is playing now, and NATO has set up a similar radio station to broadcast to Yugoslavia. But winning the war--and this is a war, despite the semantic contortions of NATO and the Clinton administration--will take more than that. Suppression of the independent media is a crucial element of Milosevic's grip on power, and as long as Serb citizens are unaware of what their army is doing in Kosovo, there is little chance they will stop supporting Milosevic...
...Internet poses a real threat to Milosevic. It would be naive to think that if the free press returned to Yugoslavia, the Serbian people would suddenly turn against their president and his genocidal campaign in Kosovo; the situation is far more complicated than that. But especially in a war that NATO has made clear it wants to end not with a military victory but with a negotiated settlement, free access to independent media might be part of the solution...