HOW TO MANIPULATE HEARTS AND MINDS
Lies and more damned lies
_________________________________________________________________
The discovery of 14 Serb corpses at Gracko on 23 July was confirmation
that a counter-ethnic cleansing might be taking place in Kosovo. Some
of the Albanians who were victims of Belgrade's troops are taking
revenge on the Serbian minority and the gypsies. As the Kosovar
refugees returned, 160,000 of the 200,000 Serbs have had to flee. It
is a bruising defeat for the 35,000 members of K-For, made worse by
the KLA's refusal to hand over its weapons on time. All this adds to
doubts about Nato's war aims and criticisms of its manipulation of the
media.
by ROBERT FISK
_________________________________________________________________
Shortly after Nato troops had reached Pristina in June, Cathy Sheridan of The Irish Times drove up the road to Vucitrn, a sinister little town still in the hands of Serb security forces. She saw a single dead body lying in the street and in the town many Serb interior ministry policemen - known by their Serb acronym as the MUP. She hastily returned to Pristina, telling a BBC radio reporter on the way that she'd seen a corpse in Vucitrn but that the place was "littered with MUP". Within minutes, he had gone on the air with a report that an "Irish reporter" had seen the town of Vucitrn "littered with corpses".
An hour later I found Keith Graves of Sky TV outside the Grand Hotel in Pristina asking a British army officer if he thought there was any way he could get a television crew to Vucitrn to film all the bodies. It was getting dark and Graves - a resourceful and hard-headed reporter - preferred to travel next day. Then he heard the truth: the BBC had simply muddled Sheridan's words. Within hours the BBC had promised the Irishwoman air time to explain what she had actually seen. Then, to her astonishment and anger, the broadcast was cancelled. "That's the bloody trouble right now", Graves was heard to comment later. "All the public wants is atrocity stories."
And that, for several days, is what they got. It wasn't difficult to find mass graves. Even before the villages north of Pec had been entered by Nato forces, I came across people on the main road to Pristina - littered with wrecked trucks, dead animals and burning houses - who wanted to show me the bodies of their loved ones. Their village was called Coska. Lightning crackled down from black skies as we entered their doomed hamlet. More than 30 men had been executed by Serb special police, they said. They showed me pieces of carbonised skeletons, backbones, fingers, a wedding ring. We even found the widow of the executed man with the ring who - like the other Albanians separated from their womenfolk - had been shot, then burned in three empty houses by the Serbs.
I knew how the story would be played: the Serbs had done evil deeds - which they had - in their wicked persecution of the Albanian population of Kosovo. All along, Nato had said they were murdering these poor people - and now the proof was here for all to see. And so - again I was correct in guessing the next bit of logic - the Nato air bombardment of Yugoslavia, indeed the whole cruel war which Nato began last March, had been justified. Nato was "liberating" Kosovo after its war of "values" - Tony Blair's description - and damned be he or she who suggested that the whole senseless conflict need never have taken place.
From the start, most of our journalistic colleagues played the role of sheep at Nato's daily press briefings, failing to question spokesman Jamie Shea about Nato's claims of destroying the Yugoslav Third Army, failing to elicit any response to the appointment of a Croatian army "ethnic cleanser" from Krajina as the new Kosovo Liberation Army commander-in-chief (Agim Cecu), failing to ask why - at the end of the war - Nato's conditions for a halt to the bombing were so much less severe than the terms for a peace that Serbia had originally rejected.
And when Nato's extraordinary claims of victory over the Serb military turned out to be a pack of lies - they had, it turned out, destroyed only 13 tanks in all of Kosovo and the Third Army withdrew with its equipment intact - the journalists at Nato headquarters remained as silent as lambs.
Did it have to be this way? Did both newspaper reporters and television journalists have to act as mouthpieces for the Nato generals and secretaries of state? By the time the air bombardment was almost over (although most reporters used Nato's phrase about an "air campaign" as if Serbian Mig jets were swarming through the skies every day to fight Nato planes), Shea was able to announce that the bombing of Sudurlica hospital was deliberate because the hospital was a barracks. His statement was totally untrue. We visited the sanatorium, saw the pitiful remains of the dead - a 19-year-old girl poet among them -- yet not a single journalist questioned Nato about its lie.
More seriously, few seemed to question the morality behind Nato's bombing of the Serbian television station in Belgrade. Some two days before the attack, CNN had been warned by their offices in Atlanta that the Belgrade building was to be destroyed. They were told to remove their facilities from the premises - which they did at once.
Then the Serbian information minister, Aleksandar Vucic, a Milosevic crony and an obvious target for Nato, was invited onto the Larry King Live show in the early morning hours and requested to turn up half an hour early for make-up. Vucic says he was late turning up. CNN says he cancelled his appearance 12 hours in advance. Had he kept his appointment, he would have been just in time for the Nato missiles that slammed into the building and killed the young girl in the make-up room. CNN says this was all coincidence.
Let us hope so. Because there was nothing coincidental or excusable about the media's refusal to investigate Nato's original "peace" terms as they were laid down before the Serbs in Paris in mid-March. These would have Serb acquiescence in Nato military movement throughout all of Yugoslavia - including Belgrade - and a "mechanism" for the population of Kosovo (90% of whom are, of course, Albanians) to decide their own future after three years. For the Serbs, the "peace" was a form of surrender which not only destroyed Yugoslav sovereignty but presaged the future independence of their province of Kosovo.
So they refused to sign it. And Nato went to war. And Serbia commenced the brutal "ethnic cleansing" of at least half the Albanian population. And once the bombardment began to drag on from one to three to six to seven weeks, journalists began to parrot the Nato line: that Nato was fighting "to get the refugees back into their homes". Not one reporter pointed out that most of these refugees were still in their homes when the war began - and that the Serbs had pointed out (in the words of General Nebojsa Pavkovic) that they would "settle accounts" with the Albanians if Nato struck at Yugoslavia.
General Wesley Clark, the supreme Nato commander, was to say that the epic tragedy of the refugees was "entirely predictable" - but not a single reporter asked why he had not shared this information with us at the time.
Then when Nato, the European Union, the Russians and the Serbs did sign up to peace, it turned out that Nato's forces would be restricted only to Kosovo - there would be no free movement around the rest of Serbia - and that the "mechanism" which might give the Albanians independence after three years had mysteriously disappeared. Again, the press and television ignored this.
It was significant that the Americans and the British were far less keen to challenge authority - the duty of any journalist in a democracy at war - than the French. While French television's "Les Guignols" on Canal + were lampooning Jamie Shea's press conferences (for two night the puppet Shea was making excuses for a missile attack on a bus, then apologising profusely for shooting down a Mig-25), the British and Americans stayed po-faced to the end. When I went to Brussels to question a Nato general at the daily press briefing about the Nato use of depleted uranium munitions (which appear to have caused massive cancers in Iraq), the general admitted their use and his reply was broadcast live. But when CNN came to edit the press conference for later airing, my question and the general's reply was mysteriously cut from the tape.
Only recently Tony Blair's press secretary, Alastair Campbell, was pontificating to the Royal United Services Institute in London about how the press had been taken in by "the Serb lie machine" - ignoring, of course, the obedient journalists who flocked to Nato briefings - and returning to the tired old theme that we had heard throughout the war: if Nato killed the innocent, it did so by accident; if Serbia killed the innocent, it did so on purpose.
There are two problems with this infantile argument. The first is that Nato's attacks on Yugoslavia became so promiscuous that, towards the end, it was almost impossible to believe that an air force that had consistently hit hospitals, bridges, a railway train, two buses, a village bridge on market day, and numerous housing estates, as well as empty barracks and oil refineries, was not deliberately targeting civilians in its desperation to end the war.
The second was the lie that Serb atrocities would have taken place even if Nato had not gone to war, that total commitment to Nato's war was the patriotic and human duty of every journalist. It is perfectly true that the Serbs were responsible for the rapes and executions and dispossessed the innocent of Kosovo. But the nature of the peace that ended the war strongly suggests that the war might have been unnecessary.
If the Serb civilians who died were killed accidentally, does that make their deaths less painful or more acceptable? There is not much difference between being beheaded by a cluster bomb or a Serb rocket-propelled grenade. True again, the Serbs were committing evil deeds - if what I saw in just the village of Coska was anything to go by - whereas Nato did not intend (or so we must profoundly hope) to kill civilians. But if the war need not have been fought, then the deaths laid at Nato's door are onerous indeed. And those journalist reporting from inside Yugoslavia were - far from being a tool of anybody's "lie machine" - providing a painful but necessary account of what we - us, Nato, our Western civilisation - was doing to the Serbs.
The latest attack on journalists comes from reporters themselves. In The Irish Times, a journalist has accused me of creating "parity of victimhood" - a childish as well as dangerous expression - because I predicted in early June, accurately, that "first the Kosovo Albanians were ethnically cleansed by the Serbs. And in a few days - two weeks at most - the Serbs would be ethnically cleansed by Nato's Albanian allies." Apart from the fact that the quotation was taken out of context, my real sin was that I was right.
Almost the entire Serb population has since fled Kosovo, along with more than half the gypsy population. And the Serb civilians I saw huddled in their family cars or squatting in tears atop farm carts were every bit as innocent as the Albanians so cruelly thrown out of their country two months earlier. But that these new refugees were Serbs was enough to "downgrade" their "victimhood". I thought about the Germans of the Sudetenland and of the eastern territories of Germany at the end of the second world war. We didn't care about them. Serves them right, we said. And now we are busy bestialising a whole people - the Serbs - because of the crimes of their government and their wolfish paramilitaries.
Why do we do this? In a magnificent send-up of foreign correspondents in his famous novel Scoop - which should be essential reading for all journalists - Evelyn Waugh writes: "With regard to policy," said Lord Copper of the Daily Beast, "what the British public wants first, last and all the time is News. Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital. That is The Beast policy for the war."
British troops entered Pristina on Saturday 12 June 1999. Scoop was written in 1938.
__________________________________________________________________ *Journalist for The Independent, London, and special correspondent
in former Yugoslavia
Original text in English __________________________________________________________________