The supporters of the US/NATO bombings do not question at all the media images of Serbs as mass rapists and ethnic cleansers, as those who supported the Gulf War did not question the story of a Kuwaiti woman who claimed to have witnessed Iraqui soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators. (The story was later revealed to be a fraud, and the woman turned out to be the daughter of Kuwaiti's ambassador to the US. Too late.)
The supporters of the US/NATO expansion into the Balkans conveniently forget that it is the United States' encouragement and overt/covert funding--see the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513--to small, right-wing, nationalist parties that first helped to break up Yugoslavia. A section of the same law cut off all aid, credit, and loan from the US to Yugoslavia as well. Also, the law demanded separate elections in each of the six republics and further stipulated that the State Dept. approve of election procedures and results before aid would be resumed. The above sanctions, of course, helped to create an economic disaster, which could only further Croatian, Bosnian, Albanian separatist groups that the US had already been building up.
In the subsequent civil war, atrocities were committed by all sides, but the Western media insistently gave us a radically one-sided picture, the picture meant to portray only Serbs as the aggressors who deserve to be bombed by the US/NATO. The supporters of the KLA today continue to endorse the agenda of the US/NATO by repeating the same propaganda. For the critique of such media images, I refer you to, among others, _NATO in the Balkans_, published by the International Action Center.
In an article included in _NATO in the Balkans_, Barry Lituchy writes:
*** Many of the stories on the Bosnian conflict that we read about and see on TV are actually fed to the media by public relations firms. Jim Harff, President of Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, the public relations firm that handles the accounts of Bosnia, Croatia, and the Albanian opposition in Kosovo, argues that modern wars cannot be fought and won today without good public relations work. "In terms of persuading and convincing the UN to take proper measures," says Harff, "it's even more important." According to U.S. Justice Department records, Bosnia and Croatia pay Ruder Finn more than $10,000 a month plus expenses "to present a positive image to members of Congress, administration officials, and news media."
The amount of covered "expenses" is many times greater than the disclosed fee. Because of international economic sanctions imposed on the Serbs by the UN--largely due to false stories in the media [e.g. using photos of dead Serbs and labeling them "Muslim victims," as was the case with the Jan. 4, 1993 issue of Newsweek and the story of a "concentration camp" that was later debunked by Thomas Deichman to be utterly false]--the Serbs, ironically, are barred from hiring a public relations firm. ***
Here it is important the role that the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton played in the Gulf War, feeding America and the world with the aforementioned young woman falsely testifying before a congressional committee about an 'atrocity' that never occurred--the story of the Iraqui soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators.
We need to work on building our media literacy. The first principle is, doubt everything that they tell you when they are trying to build support for the US government's war efforts.
Yoshie