The public opinion on the detrimental effects of depleted uranium and the effects of the bombing of SRY (1999) in Serbia today

The bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 has raised controversial questions concerning its legitimacy, justification, efficacy, and its impact on the health of Serbia's citizens. A striking lack of a clear and unambiguous common scientific attitude concerning the impact and harm of employing DU weapons, together with the absence of a clear political and legal attitude of international and national institutions, have been stirring up public opinion for decades, magnifying the ambiguity in dealing with this extremely important issue. It is obvious that, without sufficient and reliable research into the long-term impact of bombing with DU munitions, it will be very difficult to shape a grounded and plausible international policy concerning the usage of depleted uranium weapons. Moreover, it will provoke conflicts and increase 'the public fog' making it impossible to present an objective scope of damage and prove or refute the argument that DU weapons should be banned. In the case of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, almost 20 years after the bombing, the Serbian government established a Commission aimed at estimating the overall impact of DU 'bombing' of Serbia. During these two decades, the chances of a thorough and continual monitoring of the citizens and areas which had been exposed to DU were missed, in spite of the fact that the bombing of the FRY was the first case in which NATO had been forced to publicly confirm their usage of DU munitions. The paper addresses the following question: How is public opinion built in the absence of reliable data? The theoretical background in this approach is based on the theories of public opinion which assume that "individuals turned to the media to help themselves define social reality." (Moy & Bosch, 2013). This means that public opinion, particularly public opinion on controversial issues which are not presented in a transparent and objective way, is built on stereotypes framed by political assumptions and affinities, without making a clear distinction between facts and preferences. The paper presents the results of an online survey conducted on the sample of 534 Serbian citizens, in which we tried to use the above-mentioned approach as a hypothesis and to operationalize and prove it. The results show that attitudes toward the harmful effects of DU munitions depend greatly on the respondents' political affinities for the East or the West and their views on how the Kosovo crisis should be resolved. It also correlates significantly to their positive/negative identification with the Serbian national identity.