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Coverage of the War in Dubrovnik in the Serbian Daily "Politika" (October 1, 1991 - January 2, 1992)

Although more than twenty years have passed since the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and the Serbian and Montenegrin Territorial Defense (TO) forces attacked the city and municipality of Dubrovnik, the Croatian, Serbian and international media still find the war in Dubrovnik an interesting topic to write about. The fierceness of the war, the specific nature of the territory where it was fought and the shelling of the protected Old Town of Dubrovnik by the JNA units made the war in Dubrovnik an interesting subject for numerous news reporters already in the fall of 1991. In that period, certain Serbian print media, primarily those strongly inclined to Slobodan Milošević’s regime, wrote about the war in Dubrovnik in a particularly inconsiderate and biased manner. Politika, a Serbian daily published in Belgrade, represents a perfect example of such media. As of the beginning of October 1991, it provided daily and exhaustive coverage of the conflicts in Dubrovnik, fully supporting the aggressor and carrying out, from the present perspective, such propaganda that would not stop at nothing in the attempt to discredit the legally elected government of the Republic of Croatia and the small number of defenders that protected the Dubrovnik area. Since Politika’s coverage of the war in Dubrovnik has been rather purely investigated in Croatian historiography so far, we have tried to determine the manner in which the articles published in this Serbian daily in the observed period were conceptualized, i.e. establish whether there were one or more paradigms that the writers applied when writing stories about the “Dubrovnik battlefield”. We have therefore divided our paper into four different sections based on the extent of coverage of particular topics that, almost as a principle, present the main theses appearing in the stories published in Politika in the observed period.

Politika, Dubrovnik, JNA, Montenegro, coverage, war conflicts

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