THE TIME WHEN REAL CORPSES WERE NOT ENOUGH FOR "NATIONAL WORKERS": Vukovar; November 1991
Vjekoslav Radović, former journalist of the Belgrade bureau of Reuters, former correspondent of Tanjug from America and head of the DSS Information Service, reminded us ("Politika", February 27; "War and peace instigators") of one episode of the "media war" ( which was also lost, and now we know why: because of shameless lying). It is about the famous "40 babies from Vukovar", as the case was called. The horrified veteran of the lost war was offended because his name was mentioned in the context of this silly attempt to deceive the public, and for the sake of warmongering. Vjeko Radović uses the opportunity to attack "peace instigators", who - according to him - are the same as those of war, even worse. Those villains, who with their "incitement to peace" gave material to a French professor to write a study on the role of the Serbian media in these wars, so now it is being used by the Hague Tribunal, Vjeko Radović denounces them one by one in "Politica", with names (by the way , these are all honorable people and reliable witnesses). According to Vjeko Radović, they "incited the international public against their own people". As positive examples of reputation, he cites "a plethora of honorable names that found themselves in a negative context" (all of them voluntary donors of other people's blood). That's how we got the pairs "patriot - traitor": Dobrica Ćosić - Pera Luković, Jovan Rašković - Nebojša Popov, Raša Smiljanić - Rade Veljanovski, Milica Lučić-Čavić - Vasilije Krestić, Brana Crnčević - Filip David, Gojko Đogo - Lazar Lalić and so on. ... Well, now they are suddenly both different and the same: some incited war, others incited peace; some "patriots", others "traitors". And all this because of the "babies of Vukovar", a weak-minded and dishonorable attempt to "raise the patriotic mood" and smear Vukovar magnum crimena.
What happened? A certain Goran Mikić, a photographer, appeared at the AP (Associated Press) office on November 20 with the story that somewhere in Borovo Naselje he saw and photographed "41 slaughtered Serbian children, aged five to seven"; there is also a certain Italian journalist from RAI Uno, but quite distracted (no wonder, considering the place and time), with a similar story. The AP people ask logical questions: where are the pictures; where did 41 children come from in one place during the siege of Vukovar; how does he know that the children are Serbian, etc. Goran Mikić has no answers - not even pictures - so he moves on. According to the then explanations of Don Forbes, head of the Reuters bureau, and Tim Heritage, his deputy and successor (Forbes was about to retire), it was Vjekoslav Radović who served them the story, and they believed it and released the news (since the news is kept for ten years, we did not were able to check the signature, i.e. the author's initials). The story spread like wildfire and RTS began to happily watch over the "babies of Vukovar", as did the other "patriotic media", after all: they were thirsty for Serbian blood all the time anyway. At the same time, other journalists began to check this, at first glance, questionable story: the then Major Dr. Zoran Stanković, with great difficulty, was located in Vukovar, where he was doing his work, through a military telephone connection; the man nicely said that it was nonsense and yelled at the reporter, something like "Are you normal? Who would keep so many children in one place? After all, there were children's corpses, but five, killed by the bombing!". In a day or two, the deception was exposed, and Vjekoslav Radović was "convinced" that he should resign because no agency likes to "kill" the news (he denies it later), especially such news, nor to fire associates. Whether, as he now claims, he was in fact fired because he did not want to write about some Lipizzaners - we do not know; we know what our colleagues from Reuters told us then. None of them said that Vjeko Radović was "sent to Vukovar to find babies", so that thanks to him the news was killed, as he now claims. After all, big agencies will never publicly admit that they fired an associate because of something like that: it's not convenient...
Of course there was a scandal. "Patriots" and "national workers" were desperate because 41 Serbian children were not slaughtered, because they Serbs only like slaughtered; They don't need living Serbs ("nejac", "zivalj"), and neither does Mrs. Biljana Plavšić ("Six million if we disappeared, it would be worth it..."). If we recall a little, it was the time when "the Ustashas made burek from Serbian eyes" and "necklaces from the fingers of Serbian children", when living people from Tovarnik were declared "slaughtered" by taking their names from the phone book; the time when "Stradun was waiting for freedom" ("Politika Express"). Somehow very quickly Vjeko Radović became a correspondent of Tanjug from New York; whoever is interested in what he wrote should dig through the newspapers of that time, because we as journalists remember it well.
That unfortunate Goran Mikić suddenly disappears from circulation, as well as the shaken Italian journalist. Two or three years later, Goran Mikić will contact this author with a pitiful and confused letter from the white world: he had to flee, he says, because he was the victim of a conspiracy by the South-Communist JNA that "hid the terrible crime against Serbian children in Vukovar", so he wanted to "liquidate him as a witness" as well. Truth be told, the then Information Service of the Political Administration of the SSNO was also somewhat sorry that 41 Serbian children remained alive in Vukovar; they were in the middle of a mobilization crisis and a crisis of "patriotism"…
A few months later we had another such case: the famous lie about "thirteen Serbian babies from Banja Luka". Bora Jović admitted in his memoirs that he launched that abomination in June 1992, because it seemed convenient to him; "Vreme" exposed that deception right away, in a great article by Dušan Radulović. And again, the "national workers" screamed in agony because 13 Serbian babies did not die, because only dead Serbian babies are good for them, and they don't know what to do with living ones.
Well, now: Vjeko Radović has shown his "patriotism" so far in Tanjug, "Glas javnosti", DSS and in other places and that's fine: this is a free country, let him; there he is. Just be kind and don't be naive: "Who? Is it me?".
You, Vjeko, you!
