RAND_MR1382

devastation, the latter caused not only by the Serb military, but also by NATO bombs. By
all accounts, the situation inside Yugoslavia was horrible for citizens everywhere,
whether Serbian or ethnic Albanian. The stories may have inspired activists and
influenced public opinion, but it is not clear what if any effect they had on government
decisionmaking.
New-media artists used the web to voice their opinions on the Balkans conflict. In late
March, artist and high school teacher Reiner Strasser put up a site called Weak Blood,
which featured works of visual poetry, kinetic imagery, and interactive art, all making
an antiviolence statement. Strasser vowed to add one or two pieces a day “as long as
bombs are falling and humans are massacred” in the region. 19
Some Serbs with Internet access sent emails to American news organizations calling for
an end to the NATO bombing. Many of the messages contained heated rhetoric that was
anti-NATO and anti-U.S. One letter directed to the Associated Press ended, “To be a Serb
now is to be helpless … to listen to the euphemistic and hypocritical phrases as ‘peacemaking
mission,’ ‘moral imperative.’” Other messages contained human stories about
how their lives were affected. Tom Reid, London correspondent to the Washington Post,
said he received 30–50 messages a day from professors at universities and activists all
over Yugoslavia. The general tenor of the messages was the same, “‘Please remember
there are human beings under your bombs,’” he said. 20
The Serbs used email distribution lists to reach tens of thousands of users, mostly in the
United States, with messages attacking the NATO bombing campaign. One message read
In the last nine days, NATO barbarians have bombed our schools, hospitals, bridges, killed our people but that was
not enough for them now they have started to destroy our culture monuments which represents [sic] the core of
existence of our nation.
Most recipients were annoyed by this unwanted “spam,” which the Wall Street Journal
dubbed “Yugospam.” 21
Dennis Longley, a professor in the Information Security Research Centre at Australia’s
Queensland University of Technology, said they received a suspicious email from Serbia.
The message had two paragraphs. The first was the usual friendly greetings, while the
second was a rant about NATO that read like pure propaganda, characterizing NATO as
a “terrorist organization” that “brought nothing but a gigantic humanitarian disaster to
Kosovo,” while attributing the cause of the problem to “Albanian terrorist and separatist
actions, not the repression by the government security forces.” The second paragraph
exhibited a style unlike the first and a standard of English well below that of the sender,
leading them to speculate that Serb authorities had modified the email. 22 If that is so,
one is left wondering how much other anti-NATO talk hitting the Net was the work of
the Yugoslav government.