Yugoslavia through official lenses:

...American papers have reported about the gasoline rationing, the widespread electrical blackouts that leave whole sections of cities in the dark for hours at a time, the shortages of detergents, coffee, and even medical supplies...

...The New York Times keeps repeating in just about every one of its stories that "nine people were killed" in the Albanian disturbances, as the Belgrade government has sought to win support against the Albanian "secessionists" and "counterrevolutionaries" by rallying Serbian, nationalism...

...Consequently, the negative reports of the correspondents were thrown away, and the stories rewritten in the office to say that U.S...

...This has been confirmed by Viktor Meier of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung...

...But the West European press, particularly the German and Austrian papers, have quite a different story to tell...

...The underlying objective of press reporting seems to be to support American foreign policy objectives vis-a-vis Yugoslavia which were clearly summed up in June, 1980, by President Jimmy Carter...

...In the case of Iran, it was only as the Shah's regime was in full dissolution that Washington began thinking of alternatives...

...The Croats as a rule regard the Albanians, and not the Serbs, as allies...

...The general Washington response to Yugoslavia's mounting problems has not been to advise basic reforms and solutions, but to proffer more money...

...But little, if anything, of this reached the pages of American newspapers at that point...

...There's a tendency on the part of journalists to view developments from the official points of view of Washington and Belgrade, all the more so since these views coincide...

...And so, too, has Zeri i popullit, the official organ of the Communist party, of neighboring Albania...

...America, he said, strongly supports "the independence, territorial integrity, and unity of Yugoslavia...

...THE AMERICAN press, particularly the New York Times, has over the past two years reported almost reluctantly on the revolt of Yugoslavia's ethnic Albanian minority...

...Binder saw the conflict as pitting Yugoslavia's 1.5 million Albanian minority against the country's overwhelming Slavic majority...

...Last fall, the New York Times's David Binder wrote several articles echoing Belgrade's views...

...Belgrade officials are the main source of information: they concede that the country is facing problems because "of past mistakes," but assure that the government has the situation well in hand and has put in place a "stabilization program" which will improve the situation in a reasonable period of time-three to four years, according to NIN, Belgrade's most widely read weekly...

...would put up the money by itself, if the Europeans did not go along...

...AS FAR AS the basic conflict is concerned, it is not between the minority Albanians and the majority Slavs, as David Binder says, but between the Albanians and the Serbs, as Carl G.Strohm emphasized in Vienna's Die Welt of August 27th...

...The Albanian problem facing Yugoslavia, which cannot be resolved within the framework of that state, dates from 1912, when about 40 percent of the Albanians, inhabiting a nationally-compact area, were included without their consent into Serbia, and after 1918, into Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia...

...The Wall Street Journal in recent months has repeatedly attacked the State Department for trying to mislead private bankers into extending further credits to a financially strapped, and practically bankrupt government...

...In a major policy speech on November 10, Albania's Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha said that 60,000 Yugoslav soldiers were garrisoning Kosovo...

...But Strohm, writing in Die Welt of October 18, insists that though the "post-Tito regime was totally unprepared for the explosion of nationalism in Kosovo," even uninformed foreign tourists traveling through the region were aware that a "confrontation was brewing between the Serbs and Albanians...

...Fifteen years ago, when the Vietnam war was at its height, such a dilemma confronted Time magazine, where I was working as a contributing editor...

...For instance, Heiko Flottau, wrote in the Suddeutsche Zeitung that the situation in Kosovo was so serious, and the unrest so widespread, that Belgrade had to rush a quarter of Yugoslavia's army to Kosovo and western Macedonia...

...Both Belgrade and the Times were extremely surprised by the "violence of the outbreak in Kosovo...

...The New York Times, again accepting official Yugoslav views, speaks of "1.5 million ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia" who are in conflict with the country's overwhelming Slavic majority...

...The MATTHEW M. MESTROVIC, a long-time contributor, teaches at Fair-leigh Dickinson University in New Jersey...

...wishes to see an economically prosperous and politically strong Yugoslavia...

...PRESS SEE EYE TO EYE Yugoslavia through official lenses MATTHEW M. MESTROVIC AMERICAN PRESS coverage of Yugoslavia's grave current economic and political crisis gives me a feeling of deja vu...

...But there does not seem any desire or capacity on the part of American newspapers to discuss the underlying causes of the economic collapse: the bankruptcy of the Yugoslav economic and political system of alleged "worker self-management of enterprises" and one-party Communist political monopoly...

...Enver Hoxha has warned the "greater Serbian chauvinists" that the patience of Albania is coming to an end and that "the Albanians are not a state of three million but a nation of six million," clearly implying that several million of his compatriots live in Yugoslavia...

...On the whole, the American reader was told of quite a different Iran: militarily strong, increasingly prosperous and Westernized, under the firm and enlightened rule of the Pahlevi Shah...

...In the same way, in the late 1970s, during the twilight of the Shah's regime, many Iranian students on government scholarships were studying at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where I moved to after leaving Time...

...Now I have the same feeling concerning the coverage of Yugoslav developments since the death, in 1980, of President Tito...

...The office rumor mill had it that (Continued on page 179) Fuerbringer was constantly on the phone with President Lyndon Johnson discussing the war, and was presumably influenced by the president's assurances that all was well...

...The students told of SAVAK tortures and killings, of the desperate poverty of the Iranian masses amidst the oil wealth, and the growing opposition to both the Shah and America...

...in granting Yugoslavia an.additional $1 billion credit...

...Thus early in December Secretary of State George Shultz tried to persuade our European allies to join the U.S...

...By then, of course, the whole thing was in any case an exercise in futility...

...As far as the number of dead, wounded, and jailed are concerned, European papers give figures several hundred times larger than those reported in America...

...Former Undersecretary of State George Ball was charged with the task of formulating a new policy, but since by that point events in Iran were moving fast, as they often do when revolution starts...

...True, most of Yugoslavia's people are Slavic-speaking, but they do not constitute a single political and national entity, but a number of often mutually hostile peoples, such as the Croats and the Serbs...

...In a story published on November 28th, Binder spoke of "weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage, and industrial violence most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs-Serbs and Montenegrins-out of the province" of Kosovo...

...A recently published study by London's prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict stated that official Yugoslav figures "released by the end of March 1982" show that "at least 2,000 persons were apprehended by the police, over 1,600 received prison sentences, more than 400 of these between one and fifteen years...

...The Belgrade press, notably the daily Politika and the weekly NIN, have carried stories of alleged atrocities perpetrated by Albanian nationalists against the Serbian minority inhabiting the predominately Albanian Kosovo region...

...The West German journalist Wolfgang Pabst, writing in Neue Bildpost, interviewed "members of the Albanian resistance in Kosovo" who told him that from March, 1981, "2,600 people were killed, 3,000 wounded and 4,000 to 5,000 arrested...

...Of Course, the growing dispute between Belgrade and Tirana over the Kosovo issue gives the entire problem another, very dangerous, international dimension...

...forces were winning the war...

...Let's hope the same thing will not be true in the case of Yugoslavia.e in the case of Yugoslavia...

...On the whole, Times correspondents accept as accurate Belgrade's official version of the widespread and continuing unrest in the Albanian-inhabited parts of Yugoslavia, which started in March of 1981, and is still going on two years later...

...Since the death of Tito, Yugoslavia no longer seems to exist so far as the Washington Post is concerned, as if the only significant thing about the country was that Tito happened to be its ruler...

...Ball asked the experts he was huniedly consulting to limit their comments to at most two double-spaced typed pages...

...As far as the alleged Albanian atrocities against the Serbs are concerned, Strohm believes that they are greatly exaggerated by Belgrade to justify a purge of Albanian officials and security forces in Kosovo, and place the region under firm Serbian control, as was the case before 1966...

...And as-London's Institute for the Study of Conflict points out, there were major outbreaks of violence in Kosovo in 1968, 1974, and 1979, though none as massive or lasting as the current unrest...

...Problems arise, of course, when objective reality starts to clash with Washington policies which American journalists, for a variety of often valid reasons, in turn seek to support, as occurred for instance during the ultimately disastrous Vietnam war, and more recently in the case of Iran...

...How serious the Yugoslav situation may actually be was revealed in the concluding sentence of an article in the financial section of the NewYork Times of December8: "Secretary of State George P. Shultz is understood to feel that help for Yugoslavia is urgently needed to prevent a possible economic and political collapse of that country...

...But on balance, the stories are generally upbeat...

...What the students were saying about Iran sharply contrasted with stories published in the American press...

...This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a top administration official has spoken so frankly about the actual state of affairs...

...Facing European reluctance, the State Department has let it be known that the U.S...

...True, the New York Times and, to a lesser extent, the Christian Science Monitor have written quite extensively about Yugoslavia's mounting economic difficulties: the 15 percent unemployment, the 40 percent annual inflation, the staggering burden of foreign indebtedness the true amount of which nobody seems to know for sure (it may stand as high as $28 billion...

...Correspondents in Vietnam had begun sending reports that the fighting was going badly for our side, which ran counter to both Washington determination to win the war and Managing Editor Otto Fuerbringer's deep feelings of patriotic pride...

...But Albanian nationalist exiles in the West insist that there are 2.5 million Albanians in Yugoslavia, and so does the government in Tirana...