Public opinion in Serbia on ICTY: A chicken or an egg?

Abstract

© 2017 Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Serbia.All Rights Reserved. The paper presents seven consecutive public opinion polls in Serbia (in the period 2000-2011) on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its “partiality“towards Serbs. The author connected changes in attitudes of citizens during the observed years with the public statements of the “national leaders“about the Tribunal, as well as with the presentation of the facts of Serbian war crimes in Serbian media. Even though the observed correlation could not be interpreted in the terms of causal relation, the author pointed out to the importance of creators of the public opinion, and offered a possibility that the leading politicians and media in Serbia were not reactive to the attitudes of citizens (as they claimed) but vice versa - they created the public opinion of citizens by their statements or by presentation of the facts about Serbian war crimes.