Nenad Perić

Media war: “Artillery support” for NATO aggression on the FRY 1999

Abstract: This paper deals with a wide range of media and communication actions performed during the 1990s, directed against the Serbian nation. It analyses media matrix which were very perfidiously designed and implemented in order to blame one (Serbian) side for the breakup of the SFRY and ultimately for the conflict in Kosovo and Metohija, while other parties would be presented as victims. Such media activity culminated at the end of the decade, just before, during and after the bombing of the FRY. The situation was presented to the world public in an untrue and extremely malicious way in order to justify a universal aggression on a sovereign country and its collapse. The paper also analyses the unpreparedness of the state and the system at that time for the media war, which can greatly and sometimes decisively, affect the outcome or the initiation of military actions, and provides suggestions for the prevention of similar situations.

Key words: media, war, FRY, NATO, Kosovo, politics

INTRODUCTION

If the truth is held long enough from the people who will
believe in something else that you offer, the truth that will
be revealed later is of no importance.

               Napoleon Bonaparte

In modern warfare media are an inevitable factor. For the purpose of geopolitical struggle, misinformation, punching (“spinning”) of information, aggressive monopoly over the media space and etc., are used (Šćekić, 2016). Concepts such as „natural boundaries”, “historical law”, “living space”, “state reason”, “limited sovereignty”, “democracy export”, “preventive war”, “human rights protection”, and etc., are often misused for the sake of geopolitical goals (Kovačević, 2014).

Media manipulation has improved over the past century, especially in the USA. It is a culture in which, as the “father of modern propaganda and public relations” Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) said, “lies are not being told, but a new reality is being created. Though virtual and artificial, it “corrects” the reality we live in, in the direction in which the manipulators want it. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind” (Bernays, 1928, p. 10).

“Redefining methods, techniques and instruments of a special war meant building a sophisticated, super-corrective information flow, with the task to uniform public opinion as a psychological basis for military interventions or political pressure against opponents. Reality, fiction and simulation get bind into an inseparable hank, information and misinformation become a whirlwind, while manipulations domineer the electronic empire in which there is less and less room for the truth. News, reports, surveys, interviews, tribunes, round tables and other genres make the cause-and-effect series with the basic motive: to destroy all found in the way, along with a lesson of severe repression that will be the best warning to others!“ (Barbulović et. al. 2004, p. 19)” “Centres that control the information flow form the largest part of the world's opinion, the creation and direction of its attitudes. In this way, other nations, indirectly, through news, popular culture and political marketing, adopt concealed ideological content, identities and views of the world” (Perić, Kajtez, 2013, p. 179).

MATRIX REALIZATION

The only security of all is in a free press.

             Thomas Jefferson

The Serbs' demonization campaign began in July 1991 with a poisonous barrage of articles in German media, led by the influential conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In almost everyday columns, the FAZ editor Johann Georg Reißmüller justified the unlawfully declared independence of Slovenia and Croatia by describing Serbs as “militant Bolsheviks” who “have no place in the European community”. Nineteen months after the reunification of Germany, and for the first time since the Nazi defeat, the German media reiterated their condemnation of a nation, which resembled a pre-war propaganda against the Jews (Pohrt, 1997). In the Bundestag, the leader of The Greens, Joschka Fischer, even forced the renunciation of pacifism to fight Auschwitz, trying to equalize the Serbs with the Nazis?! In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished the constitutionally defined prohibition of military operations outside the NATO defence zone in order to be a “normal” military force again - thanks to “Serbian danger”.

The stereotype of the enemy (Serbs) was pulled out of the most profound German nationalism of the past. “Serbien muss sterbien” (the wordplay sterben = die), which means “Serbia must die“ was the famous slogan of German press before and during the First World War. What happened in Germany was an unusual kind of mass transfer of Nazi identity and guilt to Serbs. But, the campaign of hatred towards the Serbs, which began in Germany, did not stop there (Johnstone, 1999). It was certainly contributed by the fact that the two sides in the conflict, Croatian and Muslim from Bosnia and Herzegovina, hired a US public relations company Ruder Finn Global Affairs, who designed their image and propaganda campaign (Beham, 1997).[1] The so-called CNN effect gained the full opportunity to express itself in the media coverage of the civil war and the break-up of the SFRY (Robinson, 2002).

As the collapse of the SFRY broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina the following year, American journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of Serbian crimes could count on their contributions to be published, with the chance to get the Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, in 1993, the Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism was awarded to authors of the most sensational stories of alleged Serbian crimes that year: Roy Gutman of Newsday and John Burns from the New York Times. In both cases, the award-winning articles were based on the hearsay evidence of dubious credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on the stories of Muslim refugees, were collected in the capital of Croatia and published in a book that was quite inaccurately titled The Witness of Genocide. His claims that the Serbs founded „death camps” were used by the public relations agency Ruder Finn and intensively expanded further, especially to Jewish organizations for the sake of influencing US foreign policy. Bernd's story was an interview with a mentally disturbed person in a Sarajevo prison who acknowledged the war crimes, some of which were later proven to have never existed (Johnstone, 1999).

On the other hand, there was no market for the stories of a journalist who found that Serbian “rape camps” about which they wrote so much did not exist (German TV reporter Martin Letmayer), or for those who provided information about Muslim or Croatian crimes against Serbs, such as the Belgian journalist George Bergezan (Johnstone, 1999). It became almost impossible to oppose the dominant interpretation of the mainstream media, so journalists with a different attitude were blamed to be Serbian agents and associates. Also, media editors prefer simple stories easily understandable to an ordinary person: one criminal and as much blood as possible, as this affects the rating. According to Gaćinović, the best example of this is the “Markale case”. “Muslim separatist terrorists shelled civilians in a queue for bread at Vasa Miskin Street in Sarajevo on May 27th, 1992, when 16 people were killed and 100 injured. This shelling was directed by the Muslim leadership in order to compromise the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the FRY in front of the international community. Thus, these were politically motivated intentions. After that, on May 30th, 1992, the UN Security Council introduced rigorous and comprehensive sanctions for FR Yugoslavia” (Gaćinović, 2005, p. 204). This was analysed by John Schindler in his book Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa'ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad. “One of the worst incidents called the massacre in a queue for bread, occurred on May 27, when sixteen civilians were killed by alleged Serbian mortar shell. The attack caused international anger, but a senior UN official explained that after ballistic analysis of the explosion, it seems likely that the explosion was caused by a set explosive device which could only be done by Muslims” (Schindler, 2011, p. 85).

Subsequently, a ballistic reconstruction with a model of the entire scene of the case in real proportions was made at the Nikinci in Serbia, and the committee of ballistics from nine countries concluded that Schindler was right, which was confirmed by the ex-Deputy Head of the UN Observer Mission for Croatia and Bosnia, a Portuguese Major-General Carlos Branko in his book “The War in the Balkans - Jihadism, Geopolitics and Disinformation” (Branko, 2016). But, Western decisions to withstand media generated pressures for military interventions in Bosnia were to happen because of these cases (Jakobsen, 2000). The propaganda efforts undertaken by the Bosnian Muslims and Croats were quite successful, and this led to frequent complaints from UN personnel in Bosnia and the peace negotiators biased, anti-Serb reporting undermined their work (Owen, 1995; Rose, 1995). Unfortunately, the UN force in Bosnia compounded the problem by disseminating inaccurate information, and even misinformation, to the press (Gjelten, 1998).

MEDIA PREPARATION FOR CULTURAL, SCIENTIFIC AND MILITARY AGGRESSION

In addition to the aforementioned public relations agency Ruder Finn Global Affairs, the Kosovo Albanian leaders also hired the Washington Group, a member of Ketchum Public Relations, which is part of the Omnicom Group, one of the world's leading communications corporations. From January 1998 to the end of July 1999, the experts of this PR Company had the “Government of Kosovo” as clients, with the task of gaining the sympathy of world public opinion. The agency's tasks were: spreading news, information and images of conflict, providing appointments for Albanian leaders hosting in the world's leading media or participating in major political events (history that is still being repeated today), gaining proper mass media attention, establishing contacts with US senators, and important politicians of the United Nations, representatives of non-governmental organizations and institutions, placement of articles and comments in the media on “Serbian crimes in Kosovo”, sending readers' letters and overloading electronic mail addresses of all major editorial offices and public figures, publishing suitable texts in Serbian media, lobbying among public figures to support the struggle for the freedom of Kosovo Albanians, etc. In order to affirm the desired opinion in the media, you must have a powerful person who organizes it: the agency was operated by Susan Molinari, former editor of the most influential newscasts CBS, later powerful Republican congressmen, with a wide array of links in the world's media and political structures. For gaining international support, inflammatory terms such as “ghetto” and “apartheid” are used by the Albanian nationalist leaders (Johnstone, 1999) and also Western media.

That is how the book of Noel Malcolm “Kosovo: A Brief History” appeared, emerging just before the start of the bombing of Yugoslavia, with the task of creating a “scientific” image in the European public about the events and roots of the conflict in the southern Serbian province. By revealing in the introductory part that he wrote the book in just two years, the author acknowledges the urgency of its creation, since it would take him at least two years to read all the sources. Alongside, he absolutely disregards the Serbian archival material, historiography, and science, with the acknowledgment that it is a lack, “but my critics are not historians and are not qualified to judge it.” The writing is based on the ideas of the “ancient Dardania” and Illyrian origin, in which “Kosovars” arrived in these areas in the 7^th century, mixing with the population of “Latin and somewhat Greek speech”, while Serbs lived in the Saxony lands until 15^th century, when Croats brought them to the Balkan Peninsula?! Thus, according to Malcolm's book, the Kosovo Battle was not Serbian because the Dardanians, Poles and Hungarian army were in charge, so “the Albanians defended the Christian West, while the Serbs held to the Ottoman East.” The idea of the book was, obviously, to prove that the Serbs do not have historical and ethnic right in Kosovo, where “they were privileged population for centuries who had endangered the settlers by their domination.” It should be known that Malcolm is author of the book Bosnia: A Brief History, whose publication coincided with the emergence of the crisis in the former Yugoslav republic. In this piece Malcolm advocates the fantastic theory that the Serbs were created by the blending of African black people (brought in by the Romans) with the occupied population of the Balkan Peninsula!? (Barbulović, et. al. 2004).

In the years that followed several doctoral dissertations concluded in Great Britain extensively cited this „trustworthy“ source, so the scientific aggression continued.

The Račak Case

By signing the Agreement on the Autonomy of Kosovo and Metohija between Special American Envoy, Richard Holbrook and Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milošević on October 13th, 1998 there was a slowdown in the pressure on the FRY. A convenient moment for further escalation of the conflict and checking whether the Yugoslav Army possessed the S-300 PVO system[2] was awaited, and as the Yugoslav Army and the police correctly performed their tasks, it was decided that the event should be faked. An OSCE mission led by US diplomat William Walker was sent to the Kosovo and Metohija.

Then the attacks on the police, and other persons in the service of the state, regardless of their nationality started again. Violence was also targeted against prominent Albanians in order to intimidate them to join the terrorist movement, which led to the immediate formation of the Kosovo Liberation Army unit in the territories they controlled. Thus, the ambitiously named unit of the 121^st Brigade of the “KLA” was placed in the village of Račak, with the task of disturbing the police in order to provoke the response.

After the assassination of one policeman and wounding a few others nearby the village, the police blocked the village on January 14th, unaware that it was surrounded by ditches and bunkers, and that it was full of terrorists. In an official statement issued by the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, it is stated that “the police opened fire and broke up terrorist groups. Dozens of terrorists were killed in the combat, most of them wearing uniforms with terrorist KLA symbols.” The official statement of Serbia was published only on January 17th, which resulted to be a big mistake, since the police action was recorded by the cameras of the journalists of Associated Press and Reuters, while OSCE representatives followed what was happening. After the end of the battle, the police left the village with the journalists, informing the investigating judge and the district public prosecutor to come to the scene, but this was not done because of the dusk and the danger of other terrorist attacks. This was a new mistake because the investigation should have been conducted immediately, at the price of constant police security, along with an urgently convened press conference at the scene and presentation of evidence.

The Serbian mistake was used by Walker, who took a numerous of journalists' team to Račak on the next day, where 45 corpses were placed in the village mosque. The performance directed at special service cabinets could begin, and the fake humanist and human rights activist accused the Serbian security forces for the massacre. With the help of the prepared journalists, the news immediately spread over the planet, provoking a wave of condemnation of the Serbian people. “It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life,” Walker almost cried out over the satellite phone in front of the TV cameras to NATO Commander for Europe General Wesley Clark, taking a picture in front of a corpse of a middle-aged man with a keče (Albanian hat) on his head, a symbol indicating the person as an Albanian. The photo masters zoom in the scattered face of the deceased, deformed by the force of the bullet that hit him, but make a rough mistake, since it is impossible for the hat to remain in its place after such a fierce stroke? Walker reacted to the urgent denial of the alleged massacre by the Yugoslav authorities by preventing state authorities to conduct an official investigation.

The NGO Human Rights Watch jumps in to help Walker by reconstructing the incident of the brutal crackdown of police forces on the basis of collected statements by Albanian witnesses, reinforcing impressions by stating that “on many of the 23 bodies there were traces of torture”. The Washington Post then goes on spinning the network of falsehoods, when its journalist Jeffrey Smith first acknowledges Račak as a stronghold of “guerrillas” and then concludes that the Serbs are guilty of hiding the crime by insisting on an autopsy of the fallen. Christiane Amanpour, a CNN star who was denied the visa at that time by the authorities for bias in reporting on events in the SFRY and the FRY, reports the “truth” from Budapest-Hungary, confirming that it was a massacre. Gradation is then increased by Boris Kálnoky, a correspondent of German Die Welt, who rockets a story about a beheaded corpse, and a crushed skull from which “Serbs have spooned the brains” (Barbulović et. al. 2004). Preston Mendehall, an MSNBC correspondent, pours oil onto fire by saying: “Račak. Yugoslavia, January 20. Those who fled did it quickly. Evidence could be found on Wednesday: half-drunk coffee cups in the garden cafes, children’s toys in the abandoned courtyard of a country house. Last Friday, this village fell under the intense fire of Serbian security forces fighting against Kosovo separatists. Five days and 45 bodies later, the name Račak became a synonym for massacre.” (Barbulović et. al. 2004) Imagine a Kosovo village in a barrel with cafes full in the morning hours, when the temperature was -5 °C... In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable (Lipmann, 1922).

For the sake of effectiveness, it was necessary to create an idea with the roughness of an image that must be embedded in the audience’s subconscious. During the night, 15 hours after the police left the village, a horrible film scenario was set up: the bodies of the assassinated terrorists were gathered, but also new ones were added from the neighbouring towns and peasants who would make statements were prepared. In order to make everything even more convincing and upsetting, the country mosque, in which the bodies were arranged in a circle, was selected for the shooting spot. Everything was arranged: upon entering the village, foreign journalists were met by the neatly shaved members of the “KLA” in clean and ironed uniforms, who take care of their safety. The image is absolutely fake because there are no reasons for caution: the FRY forces have retreated; conducting the investigation by legal investigative authorities is not allowed which is the preparation of a terrain for media and political manipulation. Witness statements are identical: “The police forcefully broke into the houses, separated the men from the women, and took them out to the high ground to kill them there.” Special media attention was given to theatricality of the funeral of the victims, but the screenwriter made a mistake because the camera records the presence of women in the mosque, which is contrary to Islam. Still, when it comes to performance, everything is possible! By presenting “KLA” as fighters for freedom, independence, human rights, putting forward the theses about the vulnerability of the Albanian people in Kosovo and Metohija, media manipulators sent a diabolic message to the world public against the FRY and Serbs.

Analysis

The Yugoslav media, as well as the political leadership, did not evaluate the development of the situation in Račak and possible consequences. In contemporary political theory there is a “staged counteraction to public opinion”, which means an urgent and high-quality counter strike. The pictures of the police action taken by foreign TV crews had to be confronted to lies, but at the same time the idyllic display of “Albanian village and innocent peasants” should have been collapsed with evidence of a video shoot of the trenches and positions of the dead terrorists. Media manipulation had to be revealed until the end, and the cautious and slow denial of the Yugoslav media and state organs only served to further disorientation of the world's opinion, which convinced by the omnipotence of television, gives credit to the first information, which was later hardly denied. The emotional images of corpses, tears and damaged houses should have been opposed by the image of the action of the Yugoslav police, with the overall care for the lives of civilians and the final effects of armed actions. The forged spectacle intended for the audience around the world, had to be overthrown by the simplest method of war reporting. It was easy because the victims in Račak were terrorists, in contrast to those cases in which the other parties sacrificed civilians to inspire motive for outside intervention. Thus, this and similar actions should have been accompanied by a war journalist (and there were many of them with such experience in Serbia), who would, along with the state and military officials, distribute material to all available media and news agencies right after the end of the action.

The Račak case is the result of a poorly managed Serbian media. The truth about Račak has never been officially presented to the world public, and the late acknowledgments of individuals about the lies used to seduce the world's opinion had no echo. The bodies of the dead were first examined by the Yugoslav and Belarusian experts, establishing that the injuries occurred during armed conflicts. Western governments simply ignored it, and after the subsequent sending of an international team of pathologists, the task of finding evidence of a massacre was designed. The aim was to make the results appear to be a means of pressure, so the announcement date of the autopsy findings was moved from March 5th to March 8th, then March 17th. Only after the refusal of NATO's ultimatum regarding the deployment of military forces to the Kosovo and Metohija, the existence of “elements of war crimes” has been announced, but without marking who made it. At the press conference on March 17th, Helena Ranta, leader of the pathological experts, announced a series of personal observations, avoiding mentioning the term “massacre”, with much uncertainty, ambiguity and blur, but suggesting allegations of the existence of Serbian guilt and “crimes against humanity”.

After more than a year, Ranta told German reporters “that there was a little confusion at the press conference... It was Walker's decision to call it a massacre; I systematically avoided using that word” (Barbulović et. al. 2004). Pathologists from many different countries have unequivocally established that in only one case the victim was shot dead from the close range, while others were killed in the combat, and Helena Ranta years later acknowledged in the autobiographical book that the team worked under the great pressure of Walker, although a member of her team, prof. Dr Vujadin Otašević documented everything (and recorded it with a camera) and sent to many international organizations, but without any response. However, instead of the real report, the reporters were offered only five pages extracted from the context for the accusation against the Yugoslav security forces and the FRY. One week later military action of NATO started, unauthorized by the UN, the first one of such kind, opening a Pandora's box in next millennium.

NATO AGRESSION ON FRY AND MEDIA

Under the conditions of aggression, the control over information at the level of the FRY was established, based on the decisions of the state authorities in charge. Their validity, however, was related to the duration of the state of war. Informing the general public was very well organized through the Press Centre of the Yugoslav Army.[3]

However, some journalists often made beginner mistakes by reporting, for example, “That 20 Albanians were killed in the police action in Drenica”, instead of “20 terrorists”, because semantic ambiguity has no propaganda effects. When it referred as to terrorists the character of the conflict is defined, since terrorist attack is always, by its definition, directed against the state and the people. At the same time, by increasing the figures and images of the casualties on the opposite side, the Albanian media displayed the second version of the truth, calling for resistance and revenge. By glorifying terrorists, minimizing losses, proclaiming the Yugoslav Army and the police “occupying”, they indoctrinated the neutral population in Kosovo and Metohija.

“Collateral damage” - war, lies, and video tapes

It is yet unknown whether the credit for creating this monstrous language creature for the civilian casualties belongs to NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea or operatives of the Fourth Psychological Operational Group from Fort Brag in New Carolina, who were sitting in CNN offices during the bombing of Serbia and other major US editorial offices, with the task of spreading the selected information and euphemisms that had to remove the scent of blood of innocent victims in the NATO intervention against FRY. All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder (Huxley, 1936).

We will analyse what it looks like in practice, on the case of combating the passenger train in Grdelička Klisura (12.04.1999.), when almost 60 passengers were killed, while 16 were seriously wounded. The “collateral damage” was justified by the NATO propaganda machine by falsified images and the simulation of the event, and on to the video the speed of the train was increased by rigging almost five times. As a counterfeit was detected a NATO representative accepted the possibility of a technical error in the software system used in intelligence analysis, while the spokesman, pressed by the evidence, said that “the pilot acted in good faith and was not able to turn the rocket off the path, when the train appeared on the screen.” Should it be believe that the train is faster than a supersonic aircraft?!

“It is not just that a lot of collateral damage was not due to a simple error but bore a political significance: in reality the attacks focused on country's infrastructure, raising the number of losses among civilians. It is certain that in the long run the financial and ecological destruction of Yugoslavia (through the use of banned weapons-e.g. depleted uranium missiles-and bombing of chemical plants) will produce hundreds of uncommemorated victims who will bear the brunt of the war” (Kavoulakos, 2000, p. 61).

CONCLUSION

Wars and armed conflicts on the territory of the former SFRY testify that “military weaker forces (secessionist armed formations of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Albanian secessionists in Kosovo and Metohija) often compensated inferiority from the battlefield in the media field” (Vuković, 2018, p. 240). The oversight and the delay in media coverage cost the Serbian people a lot, but one should not be naive to think that by foiling propaganda war the real one would have been avoided. However, had the political elite realised the importance of mass media reporting and public opinion, the overall consequences, both image of Serbs as well as the aggression on the FRY, would have been incomparably smaller.

Despite the fact that the conflict in Kosovo was followed by four times more journalists than in Vietnam, the real truth about the victims and the malfeasants remained inaccessible to the world public. During 78 days of bombing that detonated the alleged massacre in Račak, about 2,500 civilians of all nationalities were killed - primarily in Kosovo and Metohija, 1,002 soldiers and police officers, and 238,000 citizens of non-Albanian ethnicity, primarily Serbs, were expelled in the years to come and thus the ethnic homogeneous territory was created. In the internal plan, the media policy was led relatively well, but it was completely defeated on the outer plan, as did the foreign policy of the FRY: although the southern Serbian province formally remained part of Serbia, its armed forces were withdrawn from this territory, and today Serbia is in a difficult struggle to preserve the territorial integrity and Serbian population in Kosovo and Metohija or at least part of the territory on which it is concentrated. In that sense, the policy that has been declaratively called the “The Truth Will Win” in the decade of the conflict suffered a complete debacle. “The Serbian elite paid a high price for not understanding the power of public opinion, the negative publicity, and the tightness of their own media system, due to which, among other things, it experienced global media demonization as well as the whole nation” (Perić, 2008, p. 178). Under the conditions when most of the international news was published by four news agencies representing the anti-Serb politics, such an idea was based either on the gross misunderstanding of how mass media and the global media system function, or of the utter lack of interest in the aforementioned. Due to a profound conviction of the Author, it was a mixture of the aforementioned. Perhaps the knightly trait of the Serbian army and its commanders of the time were involved in the mentioned maxim “The truth will prevail”. Still, there is no knighthood in the media war.

Ending conclusion is that a responsible state must have a sufficiently organized system at the state and military level for responses to similar crises, as well as highly skilled media professionals who can identify these crises through world media reporting and also prepare crisis and operational media plans and contents. Also, a responsible state policy should predict the creation and implementation of a general communication and media plan for correcting the image of the Serbia and its people in a good part of the world public, which could be in correlation with the overall development of the state and all of its essential parts among which the Army is certainly one of the most important.

References

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Footnotes

[1] This agency, which is one of the few most influential ones in the world in terms of forming public opinion, could co-ordinate the efforts of the two sides against one on the synergy of the effects exploited by Kosovo Albanian leaders through, for the agency, extremely lucrative contracts measured in millions of dollars.

[2] Since the photo of soldiers dressed in Yugoslav Army uniforms in command vehicle of S-300 system was released to the public, which probably delayed the attack on the FRY planned for the winter, a period in which the movements of forces can easily be perceived in the field, and the possibility of camouflage reduced - which was later used by the Yugoslav Army in the defence. In the professional public this is considered as a great success of the Yugoslav military intelligence service, because military engineers and volunteers (usually former military members) in the next six months made thousands of very credible models of various arms. Consequently, the Yugoslav Army suffered low losses, in both personnel and equipment, in a situation of complete air inferiority to NATO.

[3]After the aggression cessation, the situation in this area returned to the old, that is, a peaceful situation characterized by passive politics, although Serbia and its people are exposed to media demonization of the highest level before, during and after the aggression.