The Power of Propaganda

Mostar after the war

The first few seconds of the documentary “Unfinished Business: War in Mostar”, which was broadcast on the BBC in 1993, are very powerful.

 

Images of the devastated city are set against a tannoy system emitting a ghostly female voice, interrupted by gunfire before the presenter takes over. He describes what we have just heard: “Croatian propaganda echoing over the front line in Mostar, the most vicious theatre of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

This sets the tone for the rest of the documentary, which portrays the devastation the Croats inflicted on besieged Muslim-held East Mostar, the expulsion of elderly Muslims from Croat-held West Mostar and the desperate attempts of the Muslims to fight back. It does deliver some balance when it shows the Bosnian Army forcing captured Croat soldiers to dig trenches on the front line in contravention to the Geneva Convention, but taken as a whole, there is little doubt at which side this film points the finger. 

It contains much interesting and harrowing detail about the horrendous conditions in East Mostar, but what about this propaganda the Croats were relaying over loudspeakers? The presenter of the documentary, Jeremy Bowen, who dramatically reminds us about it again eight minutes into the film, fails to provide any kind of description. 

All that can be heard is the voice listing international dialling codes for Croatia and Slovenia: “Republiku Hrvatsku 385, Republiku Sloveniju 386”. The viewer can only imagine what kind of Orwellian poison spews out of these tannoys once the speaker has finished listing telephone numbers.

Mr Bowen was given the opportunity to shed further light on the nature of the propaganda when he appeared in 2007 as a witness in the ongoing trial of Jadranko Prlic et al, Bosnian Croat political and military leaders who are accused of war crimes against Muslims in Mostar and elsewhere. He was quizzed about the documentary by the defence team.

Mr Bowen insisted that although the audible part of the speech from the tannoy is not propaganda, “that broadcast went on for many hours a day and we listened to it a lot and I listened to it with our translator who described to me what was being said ...  [the tannoys] were there for a purpose, and that purpose was to try to get over the political propaganda points of one side.”

He concedes that the documentary makers “should have chosen a better piece of sound for that section of the picture, because it is a bit confusing” but adds, “I'm telling you there was propaganda coming out of those tannoys.”

Pressed by the judge to come up with “a sentence that was actually spoken and leads you to say it was propaganda”, Mr Bowen replies that he can’t remember an exact sentence, but explains that the Croats were broadcasting news of battlefield victories in the same way the BiHTV news he saw in Sarajevo broadcast news of Bosnian Army victories.

“I didn’t take either news broadcast seriously; I regarded both as propaganda,” he adds, perfectly reasonably.

None of this laudable scepticism and balance is apparent in the film though. This wouldn't matter so much if it were also possible to imagine a BBC documentary about the Muslim-Croat conflict beginning with an unexplained account of the Bosnian government's nefarious propaganda, but this is not the case.


In "Bosnia by Television", Nik Gowing,  diplomatic editor for the UK's Channel Four News until 1996, writes that due to difficulties getting there, the conflict in Mostar barely received any coverage until Jeremy Bowen made his film. So as one of the few contemporary accounts of life in Mostar in 1993, "Unfinished Business: War in Mostar" may well have played an important part in shaping Western perceptions of the Muslim-Croat war. But the film itself was clearly shaped by an already prevailing view of that conflict and, by failing to question that view, can be seen to have contributed to a distorted view of the conflict.