Correspondents in the cross hairs
By Yuri Novoselov Posted Wed, Sep 1 1999
The death toll among journalists in the brief Balkan war was high but generally not well covered by the world press. Two German journalists and their interpreter were killed after the NATO air war ended on June 10. The manner in which they died and even their names were not generally reported for hours. The Serbs who died when the Belgrade television center was bombed on April 23 were dismissed as propagandists rather than journalists. Time magazine thought China over-reacted to the death of three journalists when its embassy in Belgrade was bombed May 7.
TWO GERMAN JOURNALISTS SHOT
On June 13, photographer Volker Kraemer, 56, and reporter Gabriel Gruener, 35, were killed while returning to Macedonia from Kosovo after an assignment for the weekly magazine Stern. Kraemer died instantly from a shot in the head when their car came under fire outside Dulje, some 25 miles south of the provincial capital Pristina. Gruener was shot in the abdomen, and he died en route to a hospital in Tetovo, Macedonia.
Media reports were unclear about the number of gunmen involved in the incident. Stern’s first story on the Web said the journalists could have been lured by gunmen to visit a mass grave in Kosovo but were shot instead. Stern online then amended the earlier reports when German soldiers with the international peace force found the journalists’ rental car. The body of their interpreter and driver, Senol Alit, was discovered alongside the car. Now Stern online says the deception did not happen.
Kraemer joined Stern in 1969 after winning acclaim for photographs of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Gruener was an experienced reporter who filed reports from different crisis areas, including the Balkans, Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria and Sudan. He had worked for Stern since 1991.
NATO BOMBS TV HEADQUARTERS
Most TV journalists admit that they are not the only ones who make television. A modern broadcast is impossible without technicians, engineers and others who are involved in the production process. Are they responsible for content? And, if not, are they still regarded as journalists?
Julian Manyon, an ITN correspondent in Belgrade, says that Radio Television Serbia has never had the best reputation. It is known as a slavish supporter of the regime. But, writing in the Spectator, Manyon described the scene after the American cruise missile struck: “All that paled as I saw the crushed body of a TV technician being (pulled) from the rubble of what had been the central control room.”
The woman, 27-year-old Yelitsa Munitlak, was one of about 16 junior employees of the television station killed in the attack. On the night of the bombardment, about 100 technicians and freelancers were working at the station, Manyon wrote. Dragoljub Milanovic, RTS director, had told the workers that anyone who failed to turn up for the night shift would be dismissed. Witnesses said no senior executive personnel was in the building at the time it was bombed. Foreign TV journalists, who used the station’s broadcast equipment to file their reports, also left the building before the bombs hit.
The station workers were warned about the severity of the attack before it began. One executive of an American television company had delivered the news that the television headquarters would be bombed irrespective of civilian casualties. Manyon wonders if the Serbs at the TV station were killed because they were purveyors of hate and lies or because they were the victims of a new stage in NATO’s strategy.
SERBIAN PUBLISHER ASSASSINATED
Quietly, but insistently, many Serbs accused President Slobodan Milosevic of killing one of his own when independent publisher Slavko Curuvija was fatally shot on April 11. The Serbian government says Curuvija, 51, was not assassinated by state decree, but his death came shortly after Serb TV falsely accused him of supporting NATO airstrikes. Curuvija’s friends say this statement of collaboration was a virtual death sentence.
The journalist was shot in the head and back in front of his Belgrade apartment. A police report qualified the shooting as a criminal act. However, The Washington Post sees in the attack a frightening new factor to the unequal struggle under way between the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic and the dwindling number of independent journalists and intellectuals here with pro-Western views.
More than 2,000 people attended Curuvija’s funeral in Belgrade, the city from which he had published the radical daily newspaper Dnevni Telegraf and the magazine Evropljanin. Both publications regularly harangued Milosevic and other prominent Serbs. The Serb government began a crackdown on the independent press in late 1998, which culminated in the confiscation of his passport and his sentencing in March to five months in prison on charges of spreading false information.
JOURNALISTS DIE IN EMBASSY BOMBING
In China, they were hailed as heroes for their work during the NATO strikes.
Zhu Ying and her husband, Xu Xinghu, were asleep in the Chinese Embassy building when bombs hit and killed them on May 7. They lived in the embassy, which housed Chinese officials and other residents. Xu, 31, was the correspondent for The Guangming Daily in Belgrade. Zhu, 27, worked in advertising for the same newspaper. Shao Yunhuan, who also died in the attack, worked for the official New China News Agency.
Chinese officials called the destruction deliberate, but the allied forces said they were misinformed of the embassy’s location. The May 13 funerals for the three journalists were marked with cynicism for the NATO mission and praise for the journalists. Zhu’s father, ZhuFulai, said at the funeral:
“I know that (President) Clinton always calls for human rights, and I agree with him. But why does he not care for the rights of my daughter?”
The Guardian reported on June 18 that a U.S. mission to restore battered ties with China failed. Beijing rejected the first account of how NATO bombed the embassy by mistake. The attack stemmed from the use of outdated Yugoslav maps, one from 1989, the other from 1996. Neither these nor a 1997 U.S. map showed the correct location of the Chinese embassy. U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, named a special envoy by President Clinton to repair relations, left China empty-handed. The state-owned press placed his explanation involving old maps beyond common sense. “They said it was hard to believe that so many things could go wrong at the same time,” says Susan Shirk, a deputy assistant secretary of state.