War In The Balkans: Fatherland sees truth through a looking-glass

The Propaganda War

JUST AFTER Nato's air strikes on Yugoslavia began last week, Belgrade state television entertained its viewers with Wag the Dog. It took a genius to show at such short notice a perfect copy - equally perfectly sub-titled into Serbian - of Hollywood's fantasy about an American president who manufactures a totally artificial war in Albania to escape from private scandal. But no longer do the people of Yugoslavia have to turn to Hollywood.

For to live in Belgrade just now is to see the Balkan war through a looking- glass. While BBC World and Sky TV show a war in which Kosovo Albanians suffer, Belgrade television portrays Nato's attacks as an act of international aggression against an innocent nation - Serbia - which is fighting for its life against KLA "terrorism" in Kosovo.

Instead of fleeing Albanian refugees, it shows bombed-out Serb homes in Kosovo, wounded children - Albanian and gypsy as well as Serb - in a damaged Pristina hospital, and a massive haul of arms captured from Kosovo Albania guerrillas by young Yugoslav soldiers, one of whom eagerly passes on his love for his mother in Subotica the moment a microphone is waved in front of his face.

Even the military briefings are a mirror-image of Nato press conferences. While RAF officers talk to journalists in Brussels, Yugoslav Air Defence Commander General Spasoje Smiljanovic invited us for a Yugoslav armed forces military assessment in Belgrade. In a massive room dripping withchandeliers and decorated with two gold twin-headed eagles of Serbia and Yugoslavia, the general was even equipped with a slide projector to illustrate Nato air strikes and those countries involved in the "aggression" against Yugoslavia. A map showed guilty nations coloured in purple, the innocent - and Russia, of course, is a very big innocent - in white.

General Smiljanovic reels off the codenames of Nato jets involved in the air bombardment with all the panache of a Nato commander: F-15s, F- 16s, F-18s, EAGD "Prowlers", A-10s, E3-Awacs, Mirages, Tornados, Harriers and B-52s. When America's downed F-117A "Stealth" fighter-bomber comes up on the big screen, the general is in top form. "It flew from New Mexico to come to rest on Serb territory," he says sarcastically. "Such a pity! If it had come as a friend, it would still be flying." He insists that Yugoslavia has sustained "minimal losses" among its air-raid personnel - just seven soldiers killed and 17 wounded (a lower figure than the weekend's) - while admitting "severe damage to stationary facilities and infrastructure" costing $300m (pounds 183m).

While Western television viewers were watching exhausted Kosovo Albanian refugees talking of Serb executions and "ethnic cleansing", their Serb counterparts were seeing a badly damaged hospital in Pristina reported to have been bombed by Nato and a damaged maternity ward in which 51 babies were reportedly rescued from incubators as the air attacks began. Film at a different clinic showed children, said to be Albanian as well as Serb, with stomach wounds.

Third item on the national news here in the past 24 hours was a dramatic report of a Yugoslav interception of Albanian "terrorists" carrying weapons into Kosovo, 13 of whom had been killed, the remainder having fled back across the border. The film report - and the arms - appeared to be new; they included a large number of anti-armour weapons, apparently of Austrian manufacture. The Kosovo town of Djakovica had been attacked by Nato forces, viewers were told, and dozens of civilian houses damaged as well as the town's Catholic church and monastery.

Serbs were outraged to be told that the Serb village of Gracanica had been almost totally destroyed by Nato bombs. Other reports said that KLA "terrorists" had attacked military positions immediately they had been targeted by Nato. Clearly, there have been Serb civilian casualties. Yesterday, for example, Care Australia reported that nine Serb refugees from Krajina, captured by Croatian forces more than four years ago, had been killed in Cacak, 85 miles from Belgrade, where they had been living in an abandoned barracks attacked by Nato.

General Smiljanovic insisted that Yugoslav air defence forces had shot down seven Nato aircraft - Nato says it has lost only one - and three helicopters, more than 30 cruise missiles and three pilotlessdrone reconnaissance aircraft.

Nato denies the helicopters although it has made no comment about lost drones or missiles destroyed by ground fire. The general went out of his way to praise his MiG-29 pilots. And indeed, yesterday's issue of Soldier magazine - the journal of the Yugoslav armed forces - shows that Serb and Montenegrin pilots are praised as much here as Nato's warriors of the air are on BBC World. Four MiG pilots were promoted by President Slobodan Milosevic, and a medal of honour went to two senior officers for defending "the Fatherland's airspace".

So much for the gongs. In reality, Yugoslavia has shrewdly kept most of its mobile anti-aircraft missile defences intact, keeping them deactivated and moving them around to avoid Nato target positioning. Whenever air- raid alerts suggest a threat to MiG airfields, Yugoslav jets are scrambled, either returning to their air bases after the alert or, if their airfields are damaged, landing on the great highways that Tito built for just such a purpose more than 20 years ago.

In other words, despite all the Nato bombing, the Yugoslav armed forces are far from down and out. Just who, one wonders here these days, is wagging the dog?