In 1992 Sretko Damjanovic and his wife Nada and their friend Borislav Herak took a wrong turn in the road in the divided city of Sarajevo. What happened next would put the best propaganda minister of the Nazis to shame, and ruin these two ...young Serb's lives.
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The Wrong Turn PART 1
Most of us have made a wrong turn on a road. For three Serbs who made a wrong turn on a road close to Sarajevo, the mistake brought a fundamental, catastrophic change to their lives. It meant torture, unbelievable world-wide humiliation, horror. A hopeless life in jail spent in the hands of a merciless enemy.
On November 11, 1992, Sretko Damjanovic, 31, and his wife Nada Tomic, 46, were traveling in their Volkswagen Golf with their friend Borislav Herak, 21, in the divided city of Sarajevo. The civil war had already been ragging around the city for at least seven months.
In their secessionist demand to form a separate country and control the whole of Bosnia Izetbegovic's fundamentalists seemed quite unreasonable. The Muslims who were ruling class during four centuries of Turkish occupation never inhabited, as majority population, more than 15% of the territory of Bosnia. Those were then the only territories they could control militarily. In all of those they found themselves surrounded - under siege. Their war against the Bosnian Serbs would have been hopeless was it not for their Western guarantors who put intense diplomatic and military pressure on their behalf.
As the war ragged around them, the Serbian trio was traveling from one Serb-held suburb of Sarajevo to another, from Vogosce to Ilidza. After making the wrong turn they stumbled into a Muslim separatists' check point and were arrested on the spot. To make things worse, Mr. Herak and Mr. Damjanovic, were wearing Yugoslav military uniforms.
What a treat for the Islamist rulers of Sarajevo - not just Serbs - but Serbs in uniform! The prey seemed to be heaven-sent. The Muslim government desperately needed a scapegoat for the suffering endured by their population. Someone had to be blamed for the siege.

Propaganda blitz
Two weeks after their fatal turn, the world had not yet heard of Herak and Damjanovic, but behind the scenes an amazing propaganda campaign was being prepared. On November 26, 1992, the London "Evening Standard" was the first to show a photograph of Mr. Herak. The photograph was subtitled:
Serbian soldier Borislav Herak, 21, is held at gunpoint in a Bosnian army jail in Sarajevo. He is accused of killing 29 Moslems.
The next day all hell broke loose, as hundreds of Western newspapers and TV stations reported on Mr. Herak who, with Mr. Damjanovic, were soon to become the personification of cruelty. The news reports contained accusations horrible enough to boil the reader's blood.
And the reports had the intended effect.
The point of the propaganda campaign was to tarnish an entire people, the Serbs; to present them as mindless beasts, perpetrators of mass murder and mass rape. The goal was to make them worse than the Nazis themselves. The very top of the Bosnian Serb leadership was to be blamed. Supposedly they planned, they orchestrated, they ordered the carnage.
To simply quote here what the Western press was writing would only add to the astonishing injustice the propaganda accomplished. Instead, for a moment, let's turn the clock forward.