Question:
Discuss about the Media role in Conflict.
The Second World War took place in the period of 1939- 1945. From the ending months of 1940 till the beginning of 1941 a number of conflicts evolved which had ultimately taken the shape of the deadly war. The campaign of East Africa and the Western Desert took place in this period. The issue of the campaign had emerged due to the fighting between the Italian and British forces across the deserts of Libya and Egypt from the stretch of Kenya to Ethiopia (Baden and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2017).
A cooperation declaration was signed in Berlin between Germany, Japan and Italy which was named as the Tripartite Pact. There were incidents in which the forces of Japan had captured Vietnam in order to establish their base in French Indo- China and kept on attacking China.
On the other hand, Mussolini had ordered his men to put an attack on Greece which evolved as the Greco- Italian War and the Balkans campaign. The battle of Britain also continued along with because the German and British forces continued their bombing raids and attacks in the sea (Bell 2014).
The United States of America intensified the amount of the continuing global conflict by commencing lend- lease program. As per the program, they had shipped arms and other materials of worth $50 billion to the associated countries. A dark episode started shaping up in this way. The Germans also added to the darkness by building up walled ghettos in Warsaw and other places of Poland in order to collect the Jews and moving them forcefully into the enclaves (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016).
Out of all the conflicts, the Balkan campaign can be selected as the topic of discussion for the rest of the assignment. The Balkan campaign took place as a result of the Italian attack on Greece. This incident happened in the year 1940 on 28th of October. The campaign got the name from the Balkan Peninsula which is a situated in the disputed area of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. This specific region has Balkan Mountains which continued from the Serbian- Bulgarian border to the Black Sea (Crampton 2014).
In the beginning of 1941, Italy had started the invasion and Greece replied with a counter attack in Albania. This lit the fire of the Balkan campaign. Germany arranged for troops to send to Romania and Bulgaria so that Italy can get the required support to attack Greece from the eastern side. At the same time, the British had also sent troops and air forces for defending Greece (Duke, Phillips and Conover 2014).
On 27th March 1941 the Yugoslav coup d’état took place in Belgrade, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This incident was planned and executed by a group of supporters of Western Serb nationalist which made Hitler furious and he ordered for the capture of the country. As per the order, the attack of Yugoslavia began with the joint effort of Italy and Germany on 6th April alongside the Battle of Greece.
Again on 11th April, Hungary participated in the attack which made the Yugoslavs sign for a settlement. By 30th April, all the major parts of Greece were under the control of German or Italy. Again on 20th May Germany continued the conflict by invading Crete giving rise to the Battle of Crete in 1941 (Elbasani and Roy 2015). By 1st June rest of the Greek and British forces on the particular island had surrendered to Germany. Bulgaria was not a part of the attack that took place in April but it successfully captured some areas of Yugoslavia as well as Greece for the rest of the Balkan war.
The conflict started taking shape in the year 1939 when Mussolini’s forces had attacked Albania to capture Zog and occupied the country to the Italian Empire. On 1st June 1941, all the areas Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia were under the Axis control with Greece being placed under triple occupation and at the same time Yugoslavia was also captured and dissolved (Elbaz and Bar-Tal 2016). In this way Germany had been able to get a significant advantage over strategy by getting direct access to the Mediterranean. Although they joined the Axis powers but Bulgaria did not participate in the attack of Yugoslavia and also in the battle of Greece. Again on 20th April, The Bulgarian forces captured a major part of the Western Thrace along with the Greek province of Eastern Macedonia which was already under the control of Germany. Their aim was to regain the 1st World War outlet to the Aegan Sea. The Bulgarian forces also captured a lot of Eastern Serbia which was segregated between Bulgaria and Italy (Goul, Balkan and Dolk 2015).
For the remaining part of the war, active resistance from Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania pushed Germany and the associated countries to stronghold a number of soldiers in the three countries and with denied permission to other fronts. After 1943, the threats from the associated countries in Yugoslavia and the activities of the supporters facilitated a large amount of opposing and revolt operations which included numerous divisions. During World War II the incidents of murder, rape and mass capital punishment were very common by the Partisan fighters and the Chetnik rebels and German troops. The resistance posed to Hitler resulted in a terrible brutality in Yugoslavia during the war (Hamelink 2015).
It was mentioned in the previous paragraphs that the dictator Adolf Hitler had ordered for the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. This assault was launched by him in order to protect the Balkan border of Germany for his spring invasion of Soviet Union of 1941, Operation Barbarossa. During the period of World War II the population structure of Yugoslavia was really complicated. The two popular ethnic groups were the Serbs and Croats apart from the Albanians, Slovenes and Macedonians. There was also a miniscule part of Muslim population. Hitler made use of the situation caused due to tension between the ethnic groups specifically between the Serbs and the Croats. This made the Yugoslav forces succumb to the attack that they faced from all the three sides and the Croatian also surrendered in front of the attacking Germans (Hart 2015).
Media plays a major role in the peace building, managing conflict and preventing serious issues. This can change the perception of the general people about the media. The various categories of media are used for the purpose of distributing knowledge on a global scale and thus the free mass media is considered as a tool of democracy from a very long time.
Analysis of the role of media in the process of conflict has focuses on the potential of the media to support the efforts of democracy in order to build up sustainable peace. It can be mentioned in this regard that no similar efforts have been put before to analyze the role played by the media in the prevention of conflict. Also, the media’s ability to provoke conflict has not been evaluated properly (Irion and Jusic 2014).
The media was the key source of information for the Americans during the era of World War II. Moreover, the media has been responsible for shaping up the image of Adolf Hitler as it was portrayed by most of the Americans during that time. The media had spread the information about the war through radio, newspapers, newsreels and magazines.
Prior to the attack of Japan on the American fleet of ship in Pearl Harbor they were not much involved in the war. As soon as the information had spread about the attack on Pearl Harbor, all the Americans kept sitting in front of the radio. The information that the people got through the media helped them to realize that Pearl Harbor was a part of their own country and as a matter of fact they seemed to be at war. The newspaper sector of the press was established long ago before the 1st World War which not only served the purpose of informing people about the war but also played a part in civil rights which was not a popular issue for broadcasting till that day (Kolstø 2016).
The flame of Balkan conflict was ignited by newspapers and electronic media which controlled the ultra nationalist government of that period. During the war period, the media propagated the ideas of a ‘one man/ one party’ rule. The arrival of the national media all over the Balkans in that period served the purpose of a middleman in the production of Milosevic tenet. It is important to mark at this point that not all the media person in the Balkans were victim of national extremism but there were many who had died in Bosnia. This resulted in the trial of upholding the principles of free and independent journalism (Iriye 2014).
The significance of the role of media in both conflict and maintaining peace should not be underestimated. Although media had been responsible for promoting ethnic tensions in the Balkans in the previous years but the issues of state, society and press were overlooked. This was a major mistake which should have been prevented by the global community in the effort of promoting peace to other areas of conflict all over the world. The media was considered as powerful equipment in the process of balkanization as well as resolution. Even though there were many media outlets in the Balkan areas which had changed from preaching unity to promote cultural and patriotic hate in the later period.
The media during the Balkan conflict did not fail to prove their effectiveness as a symbol of inter- cultural resolution when they were motivated to do so. The audience who appreciates the good part in journalism exceeds cultural boundaries (Kaldellis 2013). In order to fight nationalistic and cultural voices in the media sector, the global community required to back up the democratic media organizations which look out to reach above the ethno- political boundaries. The intervention done by the global community was on the basis of presumption that the members of the Balkan areas do not share the same language. The ethnic tensions that were created in the conflict areas were not possible to fight by the global community using the ethnic responses. A huge amount of finance was used for the media to operate in different languages.
In order to fight the media the integrated with extreme patriotic or ethnocentric promotion, the global community must look into the expansion of democratic media that is considered as the possible alternative by the local community are not closely similar (Kaiser 2015). It can be stated that media reporting during the Balkan period escalated the conflict and might have been responsible for inflicting war crimes. The working and contribution of the local media gave rise to inter ethnic fear and hatred in the specific period. It can be undoubtedly mentioned that the media was instrumental in arranging the stage for atrocities that took place in the Balkans at that period.
The war leaders of the former Yugoslavia would not have been successful in the use of lethal mechanism of the army until nationalism was generated earlier. The Balkan conflict sets an example how the media was developed in the post war period through positive and negative intervention. Media in that specific region had been always facing criticism for igniting conflicts and instigating hatred and fear among the local cultural community. The war in the former Yugoslavia had taken a bad shape with the influence of the media and is still continuing. The press and the electronic media controlled the political parties too who preferred conflict over discussion and compromise. The whole assignment has focused on the role played by media in evoking conflict since the Second World War and the effect of it is still in the run (Patrick 2016)
References
Baden, C. and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K., 2017. The search for common ground in conflict news research: Comparing the coverage of six current conflicts in domestic and international media over time. Media, War & Conflict, p.1750635217702071.
Bell, P.M.H., 2014. The Origins of the Second World War in Europe. Routledge.
Björkdahl, A. and Buckley-Zistel, S. eds., 2016. Spatialising Peace and Conflict: Mapping the Production of Places, Sites and Scales of Violence. Springer.
Crampton, R.J., 2014. The Balkans since the second world war. Routledge.
Duke, J.D., Phillips, R.L. and Conover, C.J., 2014. Challenges in Coalition Unconventional Warfare: The Allied Campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945. NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIV FORT MCNAIR DC.
Elbasani, A. and Roy, O., 2015. Islam in the post-Communist Balkans: alternative pathways to God. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 15(4), pp.457-471.
Elbaz, S. and Bar-Tal, D., 2016. Dissemination of culture of conflict in the Israeli mass media: The wars in Lebanon as a case study. The Communication Review, 19(1), pp.1-34.
Goul, M., Balkan, S. and Dolk, D., 2015, January. Predictive analytics driven campaign management support systems. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 4782-4791). IEEE.
Hamelink, C.J., 2015. Media and conflict: Escalating evil. Routledge.
Hart, B.L., 2015. A History of the Second World War. Pan Macmillan.
Irion, K. and Jusic, T., 2014. International assistance and media democratization in the Western Balkans: A cross-national comparison.
Iriye, A., 2014. The origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. Routledge.
Kaiser, D.E., 2015. Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War: Germany, Britain, France, and Eastern Europe, 1930-1939. Princeton University Press.
Kaldellis, A., 2013. The original source for Tzimiskes’ Balkan campaign (971 AD) and the emperor’s classicizing propaganda. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 37(1), pp.35-52.
Kolstø, P., 2016. Media discourse and the Yugoslav conflicts: Representations of self and other. Routledge.
Patrick, A., 2016. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem and Maurus Reinkowski (eds): World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide. xvi, 304 pp. London: IB Tauris, 2015.£ 62. ISBN 978 1 78453 246 8. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 79(3), pp.652-654
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