yugoslavias implosion

war against all neighbors and commit war crimes. This propaganda
strategy was implemented very skillfully both at home and abroad.
Serbian nationalists proceeded from certain facts—all Yugoslav peoples
were justified in some of their demands—and then clothed those
facts in fabrications, half-truths, and outright lies.
The resort to lies was considered a legitimate means to attain
just goals, for “in Serb history, the lie has served the Serb nation as
often as courage,” as Ćosić repeated several times. 116 This attitude
toward the truth was best summed up by a participant in a meeting
of national strategists, who said that “we ought to ponder on what
kind of truth about ourselves we wish to project in the West.” Voicing
a “partial truth” to be defended consistently by everyone everywhere
was the only way to make Serbs “understandable to the foreign
world.” The objective was to present “a cross-section view of Serb
reality, a task in which all must participate.” 117
The portrayal of the enemy—one’s neighbors of yesterday—as
inhuman laid the groundwork for their destruction. The Croats were
referred to exclusively as Ustashas, and the Muslims were referred
to derogatorily as balije (a Turkish word meaning “peasant,” but
also understood to denote an uneducated person of no consequence).
Prominent leaders and intellectuals publicly propagated war and
ethnic cleansing as legitimate means of achieving just objectives.
While they depicted others as inhuman, Serbs kept denying their
own crimes. Thus, the discovery of Serb-run concentration camps in
Bosnia in 1992 was discounted by the Serbian Orthodox Church (spc)
as Western propaganda and disinformation: “In the name of God’s
116 Quote taken from Dušica Milanović, Maske uma – o ketmanu i ketmanima, Narodna knjiga,/
Alfa, 2003, p . 265 . Ćosić often used this thesis in his novels, such as the trilogy Deobe: “We lie
to deceive ourselves, to console others, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our
own and somebody elese’s misery. We lie because of honesty. We lie because of freedom. The lie
is an expression of patriotism and the proof of our genuine intelligence. We lie with creativity,
imagination and invention”. It eventually became the leitmotif of nationalistic propaganda .
117 Slobodan Despot, Geopoliticka stvarnost Srba (The Geopolitical
Reality of the Serbs), Belgrade, 1997 .
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