The Associated Press / This photo of an emaciated man, who appears to be behind barbed wire, was taken from an ITN documentary in 1992. The men were reported to be in a concentration camp, but in fact they were outside the wire looking in, and the camp was actually a holding centre for Serb refugees.

Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, recently blasted the international media and banned the rebroadcast of foreign news programs because of what he called their inherent anti-Serbian bias. And when he closed several opposition radio stations and newspapers a few weeks ago, it passed with almost no public outcry because many people believe Serbia's negative image abroad has had a harmful influence on the local opposition media.

Zoran Milich, National Post / Serbian children sit atop Yugoslav army tanks at the beginning of the Kosovo conflict. Photographs such as this one shocked the world, and critics charge they were used by public relations firms to strengthen an anti-Serb sentiment in the international arena.

This may all sound like some sort of paranoid nationalist propaganda, but many media analysts say it's not entirely exaggerated. Since the beginning of the Bosnian war in 1991, they say reports of Serbian atrocities, against Bosnian Muslims and others, have to some extent been manipulated by a powerful U.S. public relations firm, Ruder Finn, that's working on behalf of Serbia's enemies.

At the federal Secretariat for Information here, bureaucrats are so convinced of the importance of public relations in influencing U.S. and European public opinion that they now hand out glossy press kits to foreign reporters outlining how the international press is allied with Ruder Finn to discredit Yugoslavia.

Ironically titled "Freedom of Expression or Freedom to Lie --The Show Must Go On," the press kit outlines how "powerful interest groups and international media lobbies" have taken largely unsubstantiated news reports and whipped them up into larger conspiracies.

"News has become a dirty business," says Sasa Aksentijevic, head of the foreign press department at the Yugoslav Secretariat for Information. "What amazes me is that these public relations firms and the people who use them have no shame. They are so open about what they do. They are proud of their abilities to manipulate information and to lie. It's unbelievable."

At different times over the past several years, the governments of Croatia, Bosnia, and representatives of the Kosovo Albanian separatists have hired Ruder Finn to press their case against their collective enemy -- the Serbs -- with American and European lawmakers and the international press.

In addition to its work in the Balkans, Ruder Finn has also successfully worked with the Swiss government to put a positive spin on their involvement in the recent scandal over Nazi gold and dormant Holocaust-era accounts. In the early 1980s, the firm represented Tampax in its bid to stem the hysteria related to Toxic Shock Syndrome.

In a scenario that seems straight out of Wag the Dog, a Hollywood film about the power of public relations firms to manipulate public opinion in the United States, Ruder Finn executives have, in the past, disseminated information about what they called Serb "atrocities" to the international media, organized U.S. congressional visits to war-torn areas of the region, and lobbied powerful American and European diplomats and politicians for greater autonomy for their Balkan clients.

One of their best clients in the last several years has been Kosovo. According to a Washington newsletter that chronicles the work of U.S. public relations firms, in 1993 Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo paid Ruder Finn Global Affairs in Washington a combined fee of over $320,000 (US) for six months' work. Of that amount, "Kosovo paid the most, kicking in $230,141 to the firm's coffers," according to the Washington newsletter. "For that, Ruder Finn focused its efforts on building international support for actions designed to prevent 'ethnic cleansing' by Serb forces in Kosovo."

If the plight of Kosovo Albanians is today viewed around the world as an issue of self-determination for an oppressed minority group, then it is largely due to the efforts of former Ruder Finn executive James Harff, who almost single-handedly reduced a historically complex conflict to a black and white morality play, complete with oppressed good guys and bloodthirsty bad guys.

Although Ruder Finn dissolved its international division a year ago when Mr. Harff left the company, and is no longer doing business with its former Balkan clients, their influence still seems strongly felt in the region.

"Ruder Finn has succeeded in making everything simplistic, but I'll tell you that nothing is ever black and white in the Balkans. It's different shades of grey," says Dusan Batakovic, a professor of Balkan studies at the University of Belgrade. "Take the Kosovo situation. This is an issue that is centuries old. But today people only see Kosovo Albanians as an oppressed people, thanks to Ruder Finn. Never mind the fact that there is a terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army harassing Serb civilians in the region. For most people around the world, Serbs are the bad guys and the Kosovar Albanians the good guys."

The sentiment is echoed over and over again in Yugoslavia by everyone from government officials to Orthodox monks, liberal intellectuals, and even members of the opposition press, who are no fans of President Milosevic or what they see as his cynical bid to consolidate power by fomenting a crisis in Kosovo when he took power in 1989. While they admit that Serb police and army units have a very bleak human rights record, many believe that the Serb record on atrocities has been blown out of proportion thanks to clever public relations efforts.

"The Serbs are certainly responsible for a lot of nasty things," said Dusan Masic, a journalist with B-92, the leading independent radio station in Belgrade. "But you people in the international press really don't know what you are writing about. You buy into the whole Ruder Finn line, and you don't really do any independent reporting. That's the reason I really don't believe in a free international press."

French journalist Jacques Merlino agrees. In his groundbreaking 1993 book Les verites Yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes a dire, Mr. Merlino chronicles how many in the international press, whom he characterizes as mainly sensationalistic and often incompetent, allowed themselves to be manipulated to some extent by Ruder Finn executives. He describes how, with the aid of a fax machine, a computer, and a huge list of contacts in international government and press circles, the Ruder Finn team disseminated largely unverified reports -- picked up by U.S. and European journalists -- of Serb atrocities, such as those related to Nazi-style concentration camps and the systematic rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serb troops.

Indeed, following Newsday's report of "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs, an Independent Television Network crew was dispatched to the region and brought back startling footage of an emaciated man they identified as a Bosnian Muslim, who seemed to be behind a barbed wire fence. The press report, which instantly made headlines worldwide and was responsible for directing a great deal of international political pressure against Serbia, was later discredited. It was discovered that the ITN team had filmed from inside the wire and that the man was not a Muslim but a Serb named Slobodan Konjevic, who was painfully thin because he had reportedly suffered from tuberculosis for 10 years. The so-called concentration camp was actually a holding centre for Serb refugees, Mr. Merlino reported.

In his book, Mr. Merlino quotes from an interview he conducted with Mr. Harff about how he used this information to whip up anti-Serb sentiments.
 
"Almost immediately, there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content, such as 'ethnic cleansing,' 'concentration camps,' which evoked images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz," Mr. Harff says. "The emotional charge was so powerful that nobody could go against it."

Similarly, in 1992 members of the international press corps reported the systematic rape of Muslim women by Serb soldiers. Reports referred to thousands of rapes, but some journalists were skeptical. In 1993, Jerome Bony noted that "when I got to 50 kilometres from Tuzla I was told, 'Go to Tuzla high school. There are 4,000 raped women.' When I got 20 kilometres from Tuzla the figure dropped to 400. At 10 kilometres, only 40 were left. Once at the site I found only four women willing to testify."

When asked about his work in disseminating this type of largely unsubstantiated information, Mr. Harff reportedly responded, "Our work is not to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favourable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it known that Newsday affirmed it."

Ruder Finn representatives have been unwilling to talk about the firm's involvement in Croatia and Kosovo.

But in the past, David Finn, Ruder Finn's president, has justified his company's activities elsewhere. Referring to its work in defending the Swiss government over its stonewalling about dormant Jewish accounts and the Nazi gold scandal, Mr. Finn, who is Jewish, said, "I am helping to bring about historical truth."

What is undeniable is the power of public relations firms to influence international diplomatic and political decisions. And it's not restricted to the Balkans. In his book Second Front, John R. MacArthur chronicles how Hill & Knowlton, another U.S. public relations firm, manipulated some of the events that eventually led to the Gulf War.

According to Mr. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's Magazine in New York, Hill & Knowlton produced a 15-year-old girl who testified before a congressional committee that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators. Her dramatic story was reported without question by the international press, and even taken up by human rights groups, Mr. MacArthur says. But when the Gulf War was over, the story was revealed to be a fraud. The girl was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. Hill & Knowlton had been employed by the Kuwaitis to get U.S. public opinion on their side, according to Mr. MacArthur.

But if public relations firms are now so seemingly indispensable to influencing foreign policy, why hasn't the Serb government hired its own?

"I think the reason is that they are more concerned about what happens in Serbia," said Milos Vasic, president of the Independent Journalists' Association in Belgrade. "This government has always been really inward-looking and pig-headed. The current Serbian government believes that it alone has a monopoly on truth and it devises all sorts of conspiracy theories to whip up support at home."