Inside Milosevic's Propaganda Machine

By Gillian Sandford and Duska Anastasijevic/Belgrad

How can Serbs support Slobodan Milosevic after what he has done in Kosovo?" Westerners often ask. The truth is many Serbs just don't know the facts. Their ignorance is symptomatic of life in Serbia, where appearance and reality are carefully managed by Milosevic's propaganda machine. And though some Serbs have access to CNN and the Internet, it's still tough for them to get a clear view in a state where Milosevic controls even the weather report.

At all costs Milosevic wants to maintain his fiction that Serbia won the war and Kosovo is not lost. To achieve this illusion, Milosevic has had to engineer one of the strangest U-turns in the history of propaganda. First, NATO was the enemy, the evil aggressor who bombed Serbia. Now peacekeepers from NATO countries are said to be protecting the Serbs--and, ultimately, their stake in the province. Last week TIME's Belgrade team assembled a week's worth of Milosevic's propaganda. Then we turned to some spin experts for their analysis. Though they spotted some holes, it's clear that getting rid of Milosevic will involve finding a way to weaken his propaganda operations.

--By Gillian Sandford and Duska Anastasijevic/Belgrade