Truth as Hiding

The War in the Balkans by Carlos Branco

Abstract

This essay analyses Carlos Branco’s book “A Guerra nos Balcãs” (war in the Balkans) taking into account the analytical process it develops around the work of the media in the Yugoslav conflicts, therefore dissecting the idea of “concealment” – or better, disinformation – that they produced in order to present a Manichean “truth” which was easy to swallow in its dualism and that contrasts with what he saw on the ground while serving the United Nations. Branco shows, through his experiences in Mostar – where he noticed the close connections of the Croat army to Germany and the entrance of Islamic fighters in Europe through Bosnia (once he had the possibility to witness the not much noticed conflict between Croats and Muslims), – in the Krajina – where he witnessed the expulsion of thousands of Serbs by the Croatian army with the support of NATO - and in Zagreb – where as the vice-chief of staff at the Operational Command he had access to detailed reports of what happened at the Srebrenica massacre – that the news coverage of the war was very superficial and followed a paradigm of demonization of the Serbs by not showing that the massacres committed at the wars were done by all the factions and not only one. Branco leaves us, through this, a reading that prepares us for an analysis of media discourse about conflicts which proposes a more responsible distancing.