Enigma Filipovic

False Western propaganda is also a poor excuse for inaction. Tony Borden inadvertently gave himself away when he said, at a ceremony at which Filipovic received an award for online journalism: "Filipovic has undertaken the very kind of truthful reporting that the international community is encouraging among the Serbs." Western leaders, the people who organized and headed the bombing of Yugoslavia, are probably more than satisfied with a version of reality in which the Yugoslav Army, and the Yugoslav People's Army before it, have been systematically killing somebody's children throughout the former Yugoslavia for the past 10 years. They will be easily satisfied by the journalistic revelations of IWPR. They will not listen to Filipovic's cries and denials.

The Serbs are confronted with a far more difficult task. They must gather the truth slowly, painstakingly, taking no shortcuts, with first and last name. Unlike American PBS television, their witnesses must have a face. Videotapes are not enough. Serbs must look each other in the eyes

by Ljiljana SMAJLOVIC and Ivana JANKOVIC

NIN, Belgrade, FR Yugoslavia, April 19, 2001

The biggest journalistic victim of the last year of the Milosevic regime, Kraljevo reporter Miroslav Filipovic, has once again become the main hero of a political and journalistic drama. Persecuted under Milosevic because of an article which appeared on the Internet site of the London based Institute of War and Peace Reporting, Filipovic became known throughout the world as the symbol of a reporter's fight for freedom of expression. He has again become the center of attention in an unexpected manner: through a public clash with the editor of the on-line magazine which made him world famous. They quarreled regarding the most important rule in the world of reporting - the authenticity of the facts that they published together.

This conflict is all the more important for the Serbian public because the facts relate to Serbian crimes in Kosovo. At the time when Filipovic was under the threat of the military justice system, Serbian independent journalists and the critical public all rose in his defense, not asking what, when, why or how he had written but defending his right to publish under his byline the facts that were presented in his reports no matter how unpleasant those facts were for any government institution.

According to general consensus, that was neither the time nor the place to talk about whether Miroslav Filipovic, who has accused Yugoslav security forces of the most serious war crimes in Kosovo of all reporters thus far (not even Albanian sources, as far as we know, made the claim, like Filipovic, that the Yugoslav Army is responsible for the deaths "of at least 800 Albanian children under the age of five"), had reliable information at his disposal. The independent public defended the right of Miroslav Filipovic to perform his professional work the best he knew and saw fit; it did not defend the truthfulness of his reports in and of themselves but reporter Miroslav Filipovic from the accusations of the regime that he was involved in spying instead of reporting.

Silence

The difference between these two things was heavily underlined by the candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia for Yugoslav president at the time, Vojislav Kostunica, who wrote in "Danas" on August 30 of last year the following: "I condemn the judgment against Miroslav Filipovic and believe that he does not belong in prison. At the same time, I am not prepared to agree with the position that Filipovic was sentenced because he allegedly reported the truth. If this were a state based on law, Filipovic certainly would not have ended up in prison because of such texts. At the same time, if we had a state based on law, and if we were not caught up in such moral and spiritual downfall, he probably would have made the effort to verify what he was writing."

There is some irony in the fact that Vojislav Kostunica was later to have the role of pardoning Miroslav Filipovic in the capacity of FRY president. Also, there must be some sort of poetic justice in the fact that after the October 5 change in government, the Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav Army maligned by Filipovic, Nebojsa Pavkovic, had to personally recommend that he be pardoned. At the same time he probably condemned the immense stupidity which led the Yugoslav Army to accuse Filipovic of spying and of slander in the same breath. Namely, the two accusations are mutually exclusive: Filipovic must have either been spying on the Army, which would mean that he was gathering accurate information, or slandering the Army, which would mean that the information he was presenting was false. In other words, the Yugoslav Army is either a criminal institution or one that has been slandered.

After October 5 it seemed that no one in Serbia had either the stomach or the wish to resolve this dilemma, least of all Miroslav Filipovic himself. Despite the fact that immediately after his release he uttered the following sentence, which was taken as a leitmotif on a IWPR Internet site dedicated to the Filipovic case: "My first priority is to vindicate myself and my stories, to prove beyond doubt that I wrote nothing but the truth." In order to resolve this dilemma in "the new Serbia", NIN had to visit the Serbian Government and its premier, Zoran Djindjic, at the beginning of February. The motive was the news that the already acclaimed journalist had been appointed to the function of secretary for information in that government as a "cadre" of the Democratic Party, of which he has been a member for several years. The party did not react and Filipovic suddenly withdrew from the function with the explanation that he was dissatisfied with the organization of the ministry.

The silence in Serbia about this case resumed as did silence regarding Kosovo crimes. Filipovic himself responded angrily and nervously when this silence was interrupted by his London editor, Tony Borden, with a series of articles reprinted in the Belgrade paper Danas. In the articles Borden tried to reconstruct the sequence of events and affirm Filipovic's credibility. He offered a relatively complex but superficially convincing version of events that explains how it is possible that in "liberated Serbia" Miroslav Filipovic and all of his numerous sources of information, among them allegedly a senior military intelligence officer and hundreds of Kraljevo reservists, as well as the authors and participants of a detailed army survey on morale in the army, and witnesses of countless crimes against innocent Albanian civilians could all suddenly disappear. People who wanted to testify against war criminals seemed to have suddenly vanished into thin air in liberated Serbia.

"My sources walk through the town," Miroslav Filipovic told the Banja Luka magazine Reporter in May. "They told me that, in case of a trial, they would testify in court and repeat everything they had told me." While Milosevic was still in power, they risked accusing him of war crimes albeit anonymously. When he fell, it was as if they didn't want to deal with it anymore. Everything can be reduced to the fact that the report on the morale situation in the Army, whose "revelation" by IWPR allegedly influenced Milosevic to refrain from military aggression against Montenegro, actually existed (a senior military intelligence officer one March morning invited Filipovic for a coffee and gave him the top secret report in his office!); however, Filipovic destroyed it for fear of the Police and the intelligence officer later reconsidered and no longer wants to testify, liberated Serbia or not.

Video

Borden's crowning argument in support of the veracity of Filipovic's claims is that the officer sources from Filipovic's text have been taped by American and British TV producers. Their names do not appear on the tapes, it is true, and you can't see their faces but you can read the transcripts of their statements at the PBS website.

NIN's reporters went to work and found the website where nothing was even close to being as clear as Borden would like the reader to believe. Not only are there no stories there about chopped off heads of little children but by lingering for a while on the PBS site it was possible to establish that these interviews were broadcast as far back as February 22 of last year; that is, a full month before Filipovic, according to Borden, heard of the secret army report and the intended attack on Montenegro for the first time. And in Filipovic's article these same officers are already discussing the army survey and the planned aggression against Montenegro in some detail.

All of this has far greater significance for Serbia, of course, then an editorial squabble with London, even though that squabble broke to the surface in Belgrade when Filipovic, in a letter to "Danas", suddenly refuted the existence of both the army report and of the officer who allegedly gave it to him. Something is obviously wrong with IWPR's credibility: either their reporter is lying or the editor is lying or they are both lying. In an interview with NIN, Tony Borden says that he still believes Filipovic as a writer but that he thinks that Filipovic is "in shock" after his article was published in a domestic paper and that as a result of this shock he made "a bad decision" but "it is not my place to judge him". (Before this, however, both of them expressed public horror on several occasions over the fact that Serbia was "not ready" to publish Filipovic's articles.)

Borden admits that he did not even make the attempt to personally convince himself of the existence of the contentious army report (which in the meanwhile has disappeared). It is interesting that the editor has publicly called his reporter a liar (regarding Filipovic's claim that he has withdrawn from journalism, Borden reported that Filipovic is still on the IWPR payroll and that he recently published a new text), but he still believes him with respect to monstrous Serbian war crimes. When asked by NIN whether, perhaps, from the start he was inclined to uncritically accept any alleged evidence for Serbian war crimes, no matter how horrible they may have been, Borden said: "That is an excellent question. That is the most difficult of questions."

The damage which the reporter and the editor have inflicted on each other and on the credibility of their online magazine is nowhere near as great or as significant as the potential damage which failure to believe the two of them may have on the Serbian public, which is not predisposed to believe that the Serbs committed war crimes in Kosovo in any case.

Responsibility

The New Serbia has managed to arrest Milosevic by the American deadline but it hasn't found the time to give serious consideration to his or anyone else's accountability for the war in Kosovo. The new government is asking that the world give it a break and some time so Serbia herself can confront its uglier side in the mirror. However, one couldn't exactly say that that it is grabbing at opportunities to open the topic for discussion. Milosevic is in jail for misuse of funds.

Miroslav Filipovic is right when he says that he doesn't have to do everything himself and it is difficult to hold it against him when he says that it is enough on his part to have been persecuted under the Milosevic regime. The Serbian public cannot sit and wait for someone for someone else to risk familial bliss and a clear conscience on its behalf while it cheers him on and gives him thumbs up or down. The fact that IWPR has been caught in a bind must not be used to smooth over journalistic investigations of the Serbian role in the war. During the time of the bombing all of us here were pulling out the stops to prove that no Serbian crimes in Kosovo could serve as justification for the war crimes which NATO committed against the Serbs. However, if that is true, then it is also true that journalistic sloppiness or irresponsibility on the part of IWPR cannot pardon the Serbian press from responsibility for its vision of the war. There is no more Milosevic to serve as our excuse.

False Western propaganda is also a poor excuse for lack of action. Tony Borden inadvertently gave himself away when he said, at a ceremony at which Filipovic received an award for online journalism: "Filipovic has undertaken the very kind of truthful reporting that the international community is encouraging among the Serbs." Western leaders, the people who organized and headed the bombing of Yugoslavia, are probably more than satisfied with a version of reality in which the Yugoslav Army, and the Yugoslav People's Army before it, have been systematically killing somebody's children throughout the former Yugoslavia for the past 10 years. They will be easily satisfied by the journalistic revelations of IWPR. They will not listen to Filipovic's cries and denials.

The Serbs are confronted with a far more difficult task. They must gather the truth slowly, painstakingly, taking no shortcuts, with first and last name. Unlike American PBS television, their witnesses must have a face. Videotapes are not enough. Serbs must look each other in the eyes.

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