Reporting the Attacks on Dubrovnik in 1991, and the Recognition of Croatia

With the edited volume, Reporting the Attacks on Dubrovnik in 1991, and the Recognition of Croatia, Cambridge Scholars Publishing has brought forth an auspicious title that sets out to explore the role of the media in the production of conflict at the beginning of the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It does this by intersecting media studies, the social sciences, and personal accounts. In light of the dangers that the growing ‘fake news’ industry is posing to the ethics of journalism, at first glance, this book seems to have arrived at an apposite moment.

In their introductory chapter, the editors Renaud de la Brosse and Mato Brautović provide analytical insights into a multitude of issues around the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991. The introduction ambitiously promises that the volume’s analysis will span different levels, starting with the individual struggles of journalists, moving on to the role of the attacks on Dubrovnik in the side-taking by representatives of the international community, and finishing with a more general analysis of the war propaganda used by the warring parties. Although the introduction fails to detail how the volume’s authors carried out such overarching analyses, the editors do point out that the book places particular emphasis on the destruction of the public space. Furthermore, they claim that the volume’s originality lies in the fact that it brings together reflections from social scientists and testimonies on the events around the 1991 bombing of Dubrovnik.

The volume is divided into twelve chapters distributed over three parts. The articles in the first part focus on the media’s contribution to the process of international recognition of Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia. The authors accurately point out the symbolic importance of the destruction wreaked on Dubrovnik in attracting the attention of the international community and encouraging them to take Croatia’s side. Albert Bing (‘The Media-Political Paradigm. Dubrovnik and the Creation of the Croatian State’) argues that ‘[t]he image of Dubrovnik enshrouded in a thick cloud of smoke became a media motif much more potent than the veritable inflation of human casualties that could be found at every step in occupied Croatia’ (17). Ivo Banac (‘Six Hours Away. About the Besieged Dubrovnik from Afar’) makes another powerful observation claiming that ‘[t]he Serbs lost the battle of Dubrovnik not because they were poorly armed—they had overwhelming military superiority—but because the glance of international interest in the fate of this fabled city was never permitted to falter’ (47). However, the first part of the book does not go much further than observations similar to the ones I have quoted here. I would make two critical observations about the style and approach of this first part, as they in fact prevail throughout the volume.

Firstly, terms like ‘Serbs’, ‘Montenegrins’, ‘Slobodan Milošević’, ‘Serbian army’, and ‘Yugoslav People’s Army’ are used interchangeably as a metonymy for the ‘attackers of Dubrovnik’. A reader being introduced to the Yugoslav wars through this edited volume would wind up confused as to who actually attacked the city. The first part of the book sets the tone that remains the same throughout—one of binary oppositions that reduce the conflict to ethnic hatred and, in general, oversimplifies the complicated power relations that were at play.

Secondly, this first part of the book openly takes sides when discussing the virtue of truth-telling in war. This ambiguity is reproduced throughout the book. Whereas the authors rightly criticise the aggressors’ propaganda as disseminating lies about the war, at the same time they vindicate the Croatian journalists for not always reporting the truth. This tendency expressed in several chapters through syntagmas like ‘telling the truth in war might be lethal’ (56) or ‘suicidal’ (70) demands clarification of the ethical standpoint of the authors.

The second part of the book reaffirms the monolithic framing of ethnic enmities. Certainly, Chapters Six and Seven provide refreshing eye witness accounts of the bombing and the siege of Dubrovnik. Berta Dragičević, the secretary of the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik at that time, gives a compelling account of the importance of the British philosopher and academic Kathleen V. Wilkes for the dissemination of news about the siege to the rest of the world. Wilkes had been a lecturer at the IUC since 1980 and in 1986 had become Chairwoman of the Centre’s executive committee. Dragičević’s account of the endangerment of the city and its population represents a rare example of non-biased language in this volume. A second example that is convincing in this respect is the chapter written by the war correspondent covering Dubrovnik for the Croatian Public Broadcast Service (HTV), Vedran Benić. He gives a powerful account of the technical problems journalists and media practitioners encountered, and their resourcefulness in overcoming these obstacles and managing to relay the message about the devastation of the city to the rest of the world.

The third part of the book generalizes from the case study of Dubrovnik to examine the construction of propaganda on the different sides involved in the war. Using several case studies, it offers glimpses into the production of propagandist content in the dominant media at the time. However, given this premise of exploring the different warring sides, the attempt to show how a war establishes categories of the ‘Other’ and fosters enmities ends up further perpetuating binary thinking.

The most striking fact about this edited volume is that several chapters are not even about Dubrovnik. In the contribution by one of the editors, Renaud de la Brosse, (‘Milošević’s Propaganda during the Attacks on Dubrovnik and Croatia’), Dubrovnik is mentioned exactly twice, despite the chapter’s title. The city serves merely as a side reference, instrumentalized for the author’s argument against the Serbian propaganda machine, an argument that, in actual fact, works perfectly well without the use of this specific example. I would go as far as to say that this particular chapter casts doubt on the legitimacy of the whole editorial venture. De la Brosse effectively contributes to his own volume by repeating the story of the Serbian propaganda machine during the 1990s in a stereotypical way, while not even linking it to the topic of the book.

The stylistic problem inherent in this volume is too serious to be overlooked. The majority of the chapters suffer from almost incomprehensible language. What is more, the chapter lengths are very uneven, ranging from six to thirty pages. I feel that much of the blame lies with the publisher for allowing a poorly designed and executed book containing highly problematic biases to find its way into the world of academia. The book may have a scholarly format, but it does not play by the rules of publication ethics and good scholarly practice. Just as ‘fake news’ endangers the balance of power in the world, books such as this risk inflicting serious harm on knowledge production. First, the authors develop their arguments on the basis of the fixed and reductionist positions of Serbs vs. Croats vs. Bosniaks, simplifying the conflict’s complexities to a degree that has not been seen for many years and was never effective in the first place. Such an approach undermines twenty-five years of diligent work by numerous scholars who have exposed the complicated trajectories of the Yugoslav wars. Finally, the inadequate analytical lens even fails to contextualize its topic, Dubrovnik, within the broader Yugoslav media field of 1991. In all fairness, some authors do mention issues such as the continuity of certain socialist practices, for example, when it came to journalists’ subservience to power. However, there is nothing to even suggest the lack of infrastructure that would have enabled more independent journalism to have any kind of impact and consequently the very limited options for the circulation and distribution of any such independent views.

This book can thus serve as a reminder to future scholars of Southeast European Studies and Media Studies: It remains essential to approach the reporting of the attacks on Dubrovnik in 1991 with a more sophisticated analytical lens and to provide a better understanding of the role of the media in the power distribution and creation of enmities at the start of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.