"Is it really his to gamble?" Serbian-language leaflet 04-B-02-L002, Operation Allied Force
Is It Really His to Gamble?, a Serbian-language leaflet from 1999
U.S. leaflet 04-B-02-L002 from Operation Allied Force, 1999, tells Serbian readers that Milosevic is gambling with their future. Public domain via Commons.
Techniques named on the archive record
Card stacking
Date
1999
Made by
United States armed forces psychological operations (leaflet air-dropped during the NATO air campaign, Operation Allied Force); no issuer named on the leaflet
Wikimedia Commons (scans originally from psywarrior.com, 'Divide and Conquer PSYOP', SGM Herbert A. Friedman, ret.) , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
Public domain (US government work; Commons PD-USGov tag, issuer not printed on leaflet) US armed forces psychological operations leaflet 04-B-02-L002, 1999. Scans via psywarrior.com and Wikimedia Commons.
Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.
Leaflet 04-B-02-L002, dropped by U.S. psychological-operations forces during Operation Allied Force in 1999, pairs a portrait of Slobodan Milosevic with a list of territories it says were lost under his policies.
What the leaflet prints
It is printed on both sides. The front carries an unlabelled photograph of Slobodan Milosevic and a paragraph in Serbian Cyrillic. The back shows a building on fire next to a short question. A code in the lower-left corner of the front identifies the design.
[Front:] Слободан Милошевић се већ годинама коцка са будућношћу српског народа. Његовом политиком изгубљена је Крајина, источна Славонија, Барања и Сарајево. Он се сада поново коцка својим погромом на Косову. Он се клади са српском колевком, са српским местом у свету и са животима својих људи. Зар је то све његово, лично и сме да се прокоцка?
04-B-02-L002
[Back:] Са чиме то он нађе да се коцка?
Issuer
No issuer is printed on the leaflet. The archive credits United States armed forces psychological operations, dropping leaflets during the NATO air campaign called Operation Allied Force. The scans come to Wikimedia Commons from psywarrior.com, from a page by retired Sergeant Major Herbert A. Friedman titled "Divide and Conquer PSYOP." The English title used here, "Is it really his to gamble?", is Friedman's wording for the leaflet.
How to read it
The design is in the title of Friedman's article: divide. The leaflet separates a leader from his people. Every loss in the list is laid at one man's feet, and the reader is cast as one of those whose cradle, place in the world, and lives are being staked. FRAME tags it as card stacking: the losses are selected, and the selection points to a single cause. The Serbian reader is offered a way to oppose the war without being named as its author.
The leaflet also uses a charged word, "pogrom," for what was happening in Kosovo. That is an accusation, not a description the reader can check from the paper. A careful reader in Belgrade could accept the appeal to the nation's interest and still ask who had chosen these words and why.
For American readers, the test is the one this site applies to every leaflet, whoever was in the White House: what is claimed, what was selected, and who signs it. This one is unsigned. Compare the 1991 Gulf War leaflet on this site, which uses a label where this one uses a list.
Sources
FRAME object record, "Is it really his to gamble?" Serbian-language leaflet 04-B-02-L002, Operation Allied Force, 1999. Issuer as recorded: United States armed forces psychological operations; no issuer named on the leaflet.
Wikimedia Commons, Kosovo Demoralization Leaflet 04-B-02-L002, scans from psywarrior.com, "Divide and Conquer PSYOP," SGM Herbert A. Friedman (ret.), retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (PD-USGov).
