Precis follows.
Although Nato had the advantage at its press briefings of a sympathetic body of journalists, in the initial phase of the war the Serbian side appeared better coordinated in its handling of the media. It often had spokespersons ready to make statements to the camera.
The NATO side initially had a press department consisting essentially of one person, Jamie Shea. All information available to him came through SHAPE and was handled by middle level officers not by generals, who lacked seniority.
The Djakovica convey incident of 14th April changed all that. On that day NATO plans hit a military convoy north of Djakovica and a civilian convoy of refugees south of Djakovica on the road coming up from Prizren.
Shea first learned of this from a friendly journalist in Belgrade who telephoned him personally and said that the Serbs wanted to take them down to Kosovo. He immediately thought, he says, that this sounded serious. Wesley Clarke, the NATO supreme commander learned of the incident first from a CNN news broadcast showing Serbian pictures of dead peasants.
Within 3 hours Clarke claimed on a radio interview that NATO planes had hit Serb targets and they had reason to believe the Serbs had retaliated by attacking a column of Albanian refugees.
Ken Bacon, Press Spokesperson at the Pentagon, had started his press conference telling a different story and learned of Clarke's statement during it. He telephoned him in the middle of the conference but could not clarify the issues. Clarke said to BBC2 that the source of the story was an intercepted Serb radio transmission which was incorrectly translated.
NATO went on to the offensive with a blitz of briefings on day 2, 15th April. They were convinced that the Serbs routinely used Albanian civilians as human shields.
The BBC2 programme however featured an Albanian man, who first showed his home, burned out by the Serbs, and then described how he lost a brother and a hand in the convey as a result of the NATO attack. He said he saw no Serb police or military in the convoy from where he was.
Shea's press conference on 15th played a tape of a NATO pilot, and implied this was the pilot involved in the incident. It was not. Meanwhile refugees from the convoy were arriving in Albania in tears, and telling the international media their story. This undermined all the credibility NATO had got previously from refugee interviews.
At 11pm that evening Shea was telephoned by an official who said he had been listening in to a conversation between Clinton and Blair. He said they had decided that Shea needed more resources. "Your life is about to change." Alistair Campbell, Blair's spin doctor arrived in Brussels by Eurostar 24 hours later.
Meanwhile on days 4 and 5 after the convoy incident NATO stalled on the information and lost the good will of the journalists. On April 19th they put on the stand Brigadier General Daniel Leaf in charge of the bombing crews, after he had been coached with two dry runs of his presentation. He claimed a mixture of military and civilian vehicles in the convoy, and said that civilians "may" have been hit. Even today he is not fully certain that civilians were hit by NATO bombs.
The resources Shea received to support his one man band, was a 25 strong team called the Media Operations Centre. This had a strategy team directly under Solana, consisting of a representative of SHAPE, of NATO (Shea), Alistair Campbell, and representatives from Germany and France.
Thereafter there were twice daily communications between the White House, Downing Street, SHAPE and NATO.
Alistair Campbell developed a particularly good relationship with Clarke and stayed at his chateau in Belgium on subsequent visits. Campbell also sat in on the daily meeting of generals planning the bombing targets.
The Media Operations Centre had subcommittees working on press briefings, rebuttal of the Serbs, monitoring of media coverage, lines (sound bites), Yugoslavia, and a specific one for Milosevic.
As Milosevic refused to give in, the media war became even more important. Doubts came to be voiced about the strategy of relying only on air power. The reports in the daily briefings by NATO became much more positive about the amount of damage done to the Serb army in Kosovo. Journalists asked how that could be, and they were told there were newer high tech methods of getting information back. Only after the liberation of Kosovo has it been made clear that the damage to the Yugoslav army was very light.
The NATO spokepersons said that they only said "we struck x tanks" not that we destroyed them [or that they were not dummies].
The BBC programme ended by arguing that it has now been possible to evaluate the amount of damage that NATO did to Serb forces in Kosovo. It should also be possible- it argued, to investigate how much collateral damage it did. This apparently has not occurred to any of the people they interviewed on the point.
However the Albanian man who has returned to his burned out farm finds he cannot support his family of 16 dependents minus his brother and an arm. Rather mildly, he expressed the view that "they should think of giving pensions to those injured" in such actions.
I am submitting this precis in the interests of the important debate that Doug hosted on this list even though he had very strong views himself.
[My view remains that the demand of the Kosovans for self-determination was a just one, but that NATO was not the most trustworthy or wisest agent of their freedom. But there is another debate that has just broken out, of why NATO won.]
Presumably the message of this particular BBC 2 programme is that without the involvement of Tony Blair and his senior public relations officer, the NATO alliance might have been split and Serbia might have won.
Chris Burford
London