By John Bosnitch, Director of the InterMedia Center, Japan

Most foreign observers are still confounded by the political tug-of-war in Belgrade that began in fall 1996 with street demonstrations over local election results. They are confused not because the politics are too complex to fathom, but because the Western media filter is so fine that vital information is not getting through.

The US-led West has promoted tight coordination and homogenization of the news reported from the Balkans. Whenever it has suited the State Department, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has been attacked or defended through the media. First, he was called a nationalist extremist, then "a man we can work with", then the Hitler-esque "butcher of the Balkans", then a guarantor of peace, and most recently, a despotic dictator. These terms spun by government spokesmen are obediently adopted by the media. Politically correct acceptance of such terminology is strongly encouraged, not only by western officials, but also by fellow journalists.

Reports about the Yugoslav situation range from simplistic images of innocent victims and evil aggressors, to superficial character attacks on the wife of the Serbian president. Media reports and cartoon caricatures have produced a myopic view of the 'Serbs' as violent, bearded men who are simultaneously dogmatic communists and fanatical nationalists, and who spend their time raping and pillaging with the apparent support of their church and families.

No wonder the demonstrations in Belgrade came as a shock to so many people. The attractive young women shown in some of the video footage prompted more than a few acquaintances in Tokyo to ask me if all the girls in Belgrade were so pretty. After all, there hadn't been a single photo of an attractive female from Serbia in five years of wartime reports. Neither had there been a word about the Serbian opposition leaders, despite the fact that all three main leaders have been on the scene for years.

Perhaps it's time for a reality check. Many people would tell you Serbia is a country. They would be wrong -- Serbia is one of two constituent republics in a country called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which survives after the secession of Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Macedonia from a former six-republic communist federal Yugoslavia. The misconception of Serbia's status derives from the United States' refusal to recognize the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The US government insists on referring to the country as an ambiguous two-part entity that it calls 'Serbia and Montenegro'. Most US journalists have religiously parroted the government line or have substituted the mildly derogatory term 'rump Yugoslavia'.

I asked other reporters why they refused to print the country's real name. They told me it was their governments that determined whether the countries from which they were reporting actually existed. They told me this despite the fact that we were spending dinars marked "Bank of Yugoslavia", driving cars with Yugoslav license plates, using press ID from the Yugoslav government and walking past Yugoslav flags as they flapped in the breeze. I remain in awe of the government programming that created such an Alice-in-Wonderland mind set among an otherwise well-educated foreign press corps.

At a Sarajevo news conference during the Bosnian elections last September, even President Clinton's Balkans troubleshooter, Richard Holbrooke, was unable to tell me how the United States of America could officially sign as a witness to the Dayton Peace Accords when one of the three parties to the treaty was the supposedly non-existent Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Curious? It gets curiouser.

Back in Belgrade, Western embassies have for years sought to replace Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Their stated motivation runs the gamut of yet unproven claims that he is a war criminal, a communist, an aggressor and an extreme nationalist. The real reason is that unlike other East European leaders, Milosevic has refused to accept that Serbia and Yugoslavia must be reshaped to fit a capitalist new world order designed abroad. He is a dangerous example for others who fear the cultural, economic and military 'drive to the east' embodied by NATO's euphemistically named Partnership for Peace and EU expansion.

Milosevic is following local precedent. The late Yugoslav communist president-for-life, Josip Broz Tito, bucked Stalin's effort to guide Yugoslavia into his new order. Monarchist prewar Yugoslavia opposed Hitler's efforts to integrate it into his new world order. The Kingdom of Serbia defeated the Austro-Hungarian Empire's efforts to bring it to heel in World War I. The tiny principality of Serbia, which liberated itself from Ottoman Turkish occupiers the 1800s, was the only state in Europe to refuse to accept a German prince as its monarch. Until the Belgrade demonstrations this past fall, most of Milosevic's domestic rivals appeared to support the same independent tradition.

However, everything was being done to make the opposition leaders more palatable to the West. A source at the US embassy in Belgrade told me key opposition leaders visited the embassy so regularly that the staff joked about installing a revolving door to handle the traffic.

The three leaders of the opposition coalition Zajedno, or Together, all have strong ties to western countries. However, Mr Vuk Draskovic, Mr Zoran Djindjic and Ms Vesna Pesic are fundamentally at odds with each other.

Vesna Pesic heads an alliance of assorted anti-war committees and other left of center opponents of Milosevic. Groups associated with her have received money from the US financier George Soros, who is alleged in Serbia to be a CIA front-man. Pesic has been called a traitor for opposing what is still widely seen in Serbia as the necessary military defense of Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. Her supporters include former communist officials who were dumped when Milosevic came to power and revamped the party. Journalists arriving in Belgrade are encouraged by biased colleagues to head first to Ms Pesic and her supporters to get the 'facts'. Marginal self-appointed 'human rights activists' and 'dissidents' linked to Pesic continue to get top billing in Time magazine and other US establishment mouthpieces.

Zoran Djindjic is the youthful leader of the Democratic Party, the main opposition party to form when multiparty democracy was introduced. He reached the top of his party after it splintered and its leaders dueled until only he was left. Once associated with nationalist Serb leaders in Bosnia, Djindjic now says he supports the Dayton Accords that ended the civil war. Djindjic is a darling of the US government, but he studied in Germany where he has influential connections. He calls for a market economy and is said to be the most pragmatic of the three leaders. However, Djindjic is criticized by former leaders of his own party as being a brazen opportunist.

Vuk Draskovic, a well-known writer, is the monarchist leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, a party that began with fervent nationalism that mirrored his novels. Many of those initially drawn to him by his forbidden writings about the World War Two Croat and Muslim genocide of Serbs have since defected after he flip-flopped on defending Serb minorities in Bosnia and Croatia. He is often called unbalanced and is ridiculed for his Rasputin-like appearance. Draskovic's wife publicly goads her husband to extremes, having herself led demonstrators in attacking police. Draskovic gets financial support from Serbs and others in the United States. He cries out for press freedom despite having worked for the state news agency when it was far more controlled than it is now.

The opposition leaders are credited with setting an example for demonstrators in Albania and Bulgaria, two other Balkan states lagging behind in the regional swing into the US orbit.

Some of these details can be gleaned from western magazines and wire services. But what you can't find in most North American media reports is more interesting...

The media have focused on presumed opposition victories in disputed November municipal elections. But they don't say those elections followed undisputed Yugoslav elections in which Serbia's governing Socialist Party trounced the opposition. The federal elections are more important, but one would not know it from the news reports.

The media image suggests that the Together coalition groups all of the opposition forces. Not true. Two key opposition leaders have stayed out of the protests. There have been virtually no media reports explaining their absence and most of the western public is completely unaware of their existence.

Western media say Milosevic personally annulled the municipal election results. In fact, early protests called on him to intervene with the local officials responsible for the cancellation. Milosevic has since sacked a number of local officials.

Western media give the impression of monolithic demonstrations shaking the foundations of the Yugoslav state. Wrong. Despite being a public relations nuisance, the marches at no time threatened the fifty-year-old state infrastructure. The claimed crowds of half a million had petered out to well under ten thousand by the time opposition leaders suspended the marches in mid-February. With the exception of superficial hand-holding among the three party leaders, the 'Together' coalition did not have anything 'together' at all. No common platform was ever adopted and regular statements by the leaders were often directly contradictory.

Can almost three months of daily marches be discounted? Yes. The opposition has always had the support of a large minority in Belgrade. With continuing western sanctions putting even more people out of work, there is an even greater pool of potential marchers to draw upon. There have been many protests in Belgrade since the start of the Yugoslav civil conflict. The leaders are the same, and the protesters continue to march for a long list of mostly opposing reasons. Even the crowds have now disappeared, much as the Million Man March on Washington faded into nothingness.

The media have played down the role of the non-partisan student protesters who sparked the massive marches. Initial student protests caught the opposition unprepared. When the opposition tried to hijack the movement, the students attacked them just as much as the government. A fellow member of the InterMedia Center news agency lived with the student organizers during the protests. He observed that despite marching every day in the same city as the opposition supporters, the students never joined forces with them and regularly denounced them for trying to politicize the protest. Opposition efforts to draw in the workers that make up mainstream society were also unsuccessful.

The US media's picture of the protests is mostly wishful thinking. A glance at other sources might help make things more clear...

Information that would discredit the Together coalition never made it across the Atlantic into US media reports. If it had, the image of respectable, peaceful marchers would evaporate.

Opposition leader Vuk Draskovic's wife was quoted in the Belgrade press as saying government leaders should be drawn and quartered. She said, "What they need is to be beaten on the heads with clubs. I would go and charge through the police lines myself right now. It is a disgrace for Serbia that it has no... terrorism. Everything should be blockaded. Their houses should be blockaded, they should be pelted with stones and bombs. We must take up arms."

Draskovic defended his wife's comments with the following words on Radio Belgrade: "And then this state television, those stealing mother-fuckers, say that they, poor things, can see somebody calling for terrorism". He then told the opposition-leaning Beta news service that "I want Slobodan Milosevic to know that if anything happens to (my wife) Danica, I will personally gouge out the eyes of the person who hurt her."

Zoran Djindjic was quoted by Der Spiegel as saying Milosevic and his wife could end up like "Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu". He turned his back on his associates in Bosnia, saying he would turn former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic over to the International War Crimes Tribunal if he were in charge of Serbia and they were in the republic. Forgetting patriotic sensibilities in Serbia, he went so far as to say, "I am the horse that the West should back."

Vesna Pesic is taken even less seriously in Yugoslavia's male-dominated political culture. Her fawning support for foreign-based humanitarian and peace groups continues to drive a broad segment of Serbs into supporting President Milosevic as the protector of Serbian honor against unbelieved allegations of war crimes.

Milosevic also benefits from the communist holdover of public adulation for strong leaders. For almost a decade, the opposition has been unable to unite behind a single person. The Serbian public is always left trying to answer the question of why they should trust the opposition leaders if the leaders themselves can't trust each other enough to let one be the chief. Milosevic adeptly amplified his authority by dismissing the daily tirades from the opposition with a deafening presidential silence.

There is a widespread belief among Serbs that the West is trying to dismember their nation, putting the Bosnian Serbs at the mercy of Muslim fundamentalists, Serbs from Croatia into the hands of fanatic Croat nationalists, the southern Serbian province of Kosovo under Albanian control and leaving what remains of Serbia to starve under eternal sanctions. Serbian state media regularly reprint texts from US policy magazines such as Foreign Affairs that call for "Economic war in perpetuity against an unrepentant Serbia". Milosevic has capitalized on this, while the opposition inexplicably associates itself even more closely with the foreign enemy.

Serbs who despise Milosevic opt for him as the lesser of two evils in a time of crisis. Better a dictator than an idiot, is a common refrain. Western leaders guided their media into lionizing the Serbian opposition because it would be embarrassing not to do something when the demonstrations dragged on so long. A lack of change in any US Balkans policies is proof positive that the western support was only for show.

What surprises me about these events is not the predictable course that they have taken, but the degree to which the media has exaggerated the opposition threat to President Milosevic.

Milosevic, rather than being weakened, is stronger than before. Yes, he accepted the electoral results, but this is the same president who accepted a virtual US appointee, Milan Panic, as prime minister and then roundly defeated him at the polls. Milosevic far outshines the best tacticians that United States has set against him. He decided the agenda for this latest test of wills. The municipal councils are now and were always relatively unimportant.

Milosevic has also successfully completed yet another cull of unreliable members of his own party by allowing a crisis to escalate to the point that the rats abandon the (apparently) sinking ship. He has highlighted the opposition disunity as well as their reliance on foreign powers. He has exposed the student leaders by letting them attend President Clinton's inauguration while other students are refused visas at the US embassy gate. He has shown the steady hand needed to combat the continuing western economic blockade and the perceived efforts to divide and conquer the Serbs of Serbia, Montenegro and the Serb Republic in Bosnia.

All of this would be evident to an experienced correspondent in the field. The InterMedia Center news agency to which I belong has had a number of independent correspondents covering this story. Did we have any special information that gave us an advantage in understanding the situation? No, we merely stopped our own dislike of the government's policies from affecting our professional judgment.

Somehow, though, the mainstream media fed the public a different impression from ours. If this were still 1991, I could ascribe the incorrect analyses to inexperience. But now, with western journalists in the area for years and with reports readily available from relatively unbiased European sources, I must come to another conclusion: the misleading images are no accident.

For whatever purpose, entire bureaus of what we call journalists are spewing out a daily diet of inaccurate information. It is becoming more pronounced as time goes on. The information they generate closely conforms with US government pronouncements and repeats unsubstantiated official whisper campaigns.

Journalists have become foot-soldiers who are 'only following orders' in the clash of world-views, cultures and civilizations in the region.

Instead of shedding crocodile tears over yesterday's stories of media bias in the Gulf War, the Cold War, the Yugoslav Civil War, the coverage of Yeltsin's attack on the Parliament and so on, it is time that journalists accept that all mainstream media is by definition biased in favor of governmental and economic interests. It is time to stop lagging behind events by merely studying our past transgressions while keeping the blinders on about today.

The misrepresentation of the events in Belgrade follows much worse distortions in Bosnia, where western journalists became willing accomplices in the Muslim and Croat propaganda campaigns. There is much blood on the hands of such journalists. Their campaigns in the media were the necessary precursors to brutal military campaigns on the ground.

This is the true portent of the information age -- the media are more than ever being used to manipulate the public into granting tacit approval for cultural, economic and military aggression. What should we journalists do in response? Rather than reporting about some of the people who appear to be rebelling in the streets some of the time, we journalists should be rebelling against the way the media are being used to mislead all of the people all of the time.