This riveting documentary follows step by step the persuasive media offensive waged by a powerful public relations firm for their client in the Balkan War in 1992. It shows how the key phrase “ethnic cleansing” was used in a media campaign by the firm Ruder Finn. There, James W. Harff orchestrated the campaign that implied “ethnic cleansing” was a human rights violation harking back to the Nazi era. This key phrase was planted in the media around the world with the certainty that this euphemism for genocide would jolt the West’s collective memory of past atrocities to lead world opinion against Serbia. It worked.
Harff describes his strategy: how he pursued print and TV journalists, and finally the White House. He used the photogenic Bosnian Foreign Minister, Dr. Haris Silajdzic to make Bosnia’s case more compelling. Serbian leaders including the former prime minister Milan Panic, admit making serious errors in putting forth their side of the story.
So successful was Harff’s campaign to vilify Serbia that it became the first nation ever to be expelled by the United Nations. Following that, the UN set up a tribunal in The Hague to examine war crimes.
“The effect of the PR company was …to implant this very black-and-white picture in the minds of the public…” says Sylvia Poggioli of NPR. And Margaret Tutwiler, former State Department spokesperson says that none of the parties were totally innocent. The documentary concludes “the PR industry is poised to write the history of the 21st Century.”
