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Chronicle
CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
YUGOSLAVIA
Kirka, a free-lance journalist from California, is living in Zagreb and covering the war for a number of publications.
In August, in the early weeks of Yugoslavia's civil war, Spanish reporter Hermann Tertsch and half a dozen colleagues were traveling through central Croatia when Serbian irregular troops stopped them, lined them up against a wall, and threatened to execute them because, they said, the reporters knew too much about military positions. The journalists were ultimately freed, although one of their cars and all of their equipment were confiscated. "I was saying, 'I was not here. I promise you, I'll forget it,'" says Tertsch, the Eastern European correspondent for Madrid's El Pais, a major daily. "I was damned afraid. This war is so unpredictable. You have so many uncontrollable people."
What distinguishes the fighting between Croatian forces, Serbian irregulars, and the Serb-led Yugoslav army is confusion. Reporters have often strayed into the conflict, which heated up shortly after Croatia declared its indepenence last June.
Since then, seventeen journalists have died in Yugoslavia, according to the International Federation of Journalists. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists lists eighteen dead, including four non-Yugoslavs -- one shot, two killed by mines, and one by mortar fire. Also, two Soviet journalists are missing and presumed dead.
"What we have is a very disorganized type of war," says Branko Salaj, Croatia's information minister.
Some reporters, including Askold Krushelnycky, who worked for Robert Maxwell's European, contend that Serb-backed forces target the press. "A section of Serbian fanatics has decided that Western journalists are sort of a fifth column for the Croatians, and that our coverage of the war is sympathetic and that we're part of the enemy," says Krushelnycky, a veteran war reporter. "Certainly, I've never been anywhere where so many journalists have lost their lives in such a short time."
Croatia's government, which has tried to use diplomacy to attain independence, hails reporters as messengers who bring word of the war to the outside world. For Serbia, Western reporters seem to be an annoyance. The rumor that both sides use cars marked "press" to ferry guns to the front adds to journalists' anxieties. Some reporters continue to blanket their cars with the words "press" and "TV"; others have stopped placing press marketings on their cars altogether, feeling safer incognito.
The high risk of covering this war has failed to curb the number of reporters willing to do so. Though many come and go, more than 2,000 journalists, mostly European, have been accredited by the Croatian government since the conflict began. Some who stay are stringers. Most, like Tertsch, refuse to remain safely ensconced in their hotel rooms.
But even he has had second thoughts. Such misgivings came recently as he drove on a supposedly safe path through a minefield: "I was saying to myself, 'Hermann, is it necessary, so much color?'"
