By David Walls
For years I've been on friendly terms with Project Censored's founder Carl Jensen, his young assistant Mark Lowenthal, and more recently the current director Peter Phillips. As manager of the university's foundation for a time, I cheered with Jensen and Lowenthal when they brought in the first modest checks from that limited circle of progressive foundations and philanthropists willing to fund critical media projects.
After watching Jensen run Project Censored out of his hip pocket, I thought it was a wonder that he managed with these small grants and an enthusiastic group of undergraduate students to turn out an annual book with a commercial publisher since 1993, plus a 20th anniversary collection in 1997. As Jensen made plans to retire in 1997, few sympathizers thought the project would survive for long. That a touchy curmudgeon like Jensen could defy "founder's syndrome" and turn over his baby to someone else was another small miracle. When the highly improbable comes to pass, you want to cut it a little slack. And Phillips, his anointed successor, is a fellow sociologist and lefty.
When I had disagreements with Project Censored, I shelved them, rationalizing that the media are not my field and I was busy enough with my own work. If the project can score an occasional hit trying to poke its stick in the ribs of the corporate media elite, more power to it, right? So when I surveyed this year's Censored 2000 collection, I was surprised by my reaction to its treatment of Kosovo in an unprecedented five articles and a commentary on a single topic. For two years in a row Project Censored has whitewashed human rights atrocities committed by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia -- last year in Bosnia and now in Kosovo. Project Censored, I sadly concluded, has departed the terrain of the democratic left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists, Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.
Pipelines and Lead Mines
Oddly enough, Project Censored's top-ranked story on Kosovo is the most obviously insubstantial: #6, "NATO Defends Private Economic Interests in the Balkans." Of the three articles cited, two are about oil from the Caspian Sea region, arguing that a pipeline has to be built through the Balkans because shipping oil across the Black Sea and through the Bosporus would be too environmentally risky. Never mind that you can stand on the shores of the Bosporus in Istanbul and watch tankers cruising past all day. Last month a final decision was made to construct the pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to a port in Turkey on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Anyone with an atlas can see that puts the pipeline in the Caucuses, nearly a thousand miles east of the Balkans.
The third article cited in #6 is by Sara Flounders, "Kosovo: It's About the Mines," originally from a July 1998 issue of Workers World, the publication of the Workers World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist sect formed by the late Sam Marcy in 1959 after leaving the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Flounders is co-director of the International Action Center, a WWP front group for which one-time attorney general Ramsey Clark serves as figurehead. Flounders argues the Serbian-controlled Trepca mining complex in Kosovo is coveted by U.S. and European capitalists for its reserves of lead, zinc, copper, cadmium, gold and silver. Well, the prices of these minerals have been steady or declining for the last ten years. There's no world shortage of any of them; for most there's a glut. The fate of global capitalism hardly hangs on a polluted lead mine in Kosovo. Item #6 is entirely a conspiratorial fantasy - simply vapor.
Atrocious History
New reports are surfacing that turn other Project Censored stories into puffs of smoke. Take story #12: "Evidence Indicates No Pre-war Genocide in Kosovo and Possible U.S./KLA Plot to Create Disinformation." In January 1999 U.S. diplomat William Walker led a group of reporters to a site in Racak where 23 Kosovar men had been killed by Serbian police. Charges were raised that a battle scene may have been rearranged by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to look like an atrocity. Newsweek International just broke a story in its issue dated April 24, 2000, that Finnish investigator Helena Ranta and her team made return visits to the scene and discovered new forensic evidence. She found bullets in the ravine covered by snow at the time of her original inspection, confirming that the killing was indeed a massacre as earlier reported.
Project Censored also highlighted three additional stories on Kosovo in Censored 2000: #10, #20, and #22, which variously blame the war over Kosovo on the U.S., NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, and U.S. and German arms dealers.
Dissecting and debating these complex arguments would take more space than I have here. Sources for these stories include two of the most prolific apologists for Serbia: Paris-based writer Diana Johnstone (#10) and University of Ottawa economics professor Michel Chossudovsky (#'s 20 and 22). Johnstone, once the respected European correspondent for In These Times, was also a source for the ludicrous Caspian Sea oil pipeline story in item #6.
What these three stories and Michael Parenti's commentary (ch. 6) lack is any historical perspective on the last decade of war in the former Yugoslavia. Two points should be highlighted. First, and most importantly, the unravelling of Marshall Tito's multiethnic and politically balanced Yugoslavia was begun by Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic when he moved to end the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina provinces in 1989. Kosovars lost their legislature, their Albanian language schools and employment opportunities, and became second class citizens in a region where they were a 90 percent majority. Milosevic refused for a decade to deal with Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of a popular nonviolent movement to restore Kosovar rights. These actions were interpreted by the other republics of Yugoslavia as an attempt by Milosevic to establish Serbian domination of the entire country.
Second, NATO intervention in Kosovo followed a brutal war in Bosnia, which reached its nadir in Srebrenica, a U.N.-protected "safe haven," in July 1995. Some 300 lightly armed Dutch troops in the U.N. force were pushed aside by heavily armed Bosnian Serb forces, and 7,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys were marched off and killed. Over 1,500 bodies have been recovered; the rest remain unaccounted for. This event is widely acknowledged to be the largest atrocity to occur in Europe since the end of the World War II. A Bosnian Serb general, Radislav Krstic, is presently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in connection with this slaughter.
Last summer in Brussels I interviewed officials of the European Socialists and the Greens groups in the European Parliament, and asked them about the reasons their parties had supported NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Serb atrocity in Srebrenica was a decisive incident influencing their support. The democratic left in Europe was determined not to let this happen again in Kosovo. In light of the centrality of this atrocity, it shows breathtaking audacity for Parenti in his Censored 2000 commentary to refer to Srebrenica only to allege killings by Bosnian Muslims in the area in 1992, three years before the infamous massacre.
Practicing Denial
Should we have seen this coming? Last year, Censored 1999 selected as its #17 censored story, "U.S. Media Provides Biased Coverage of Bosnia." The primary article concerned a visit of British Independent Television News (ITN) in August 1992 to Bosnian Serb detention camps at Omarska and Trnopolje. The issue revolved around whether a widely-publicized photo of an emaciated Muslim man leaning against a barbwire fence presented a misleading picture of the camps. German free-lance writer Thomas Deichmann visited the camps in 1996 and authored an article in the British journal Living Marxism in February 1997 claiming the photo was staged to falsely portray the facilities as concentration camps and the Serbs as modern-day Nazis. Living Marxism (later renamed LM) was started by members of a British Trotskyist splinter, the Revolutionary Communist Party. Diana Johnstone was also represented with an article supporting the #17 story.
ITN filed a libel suit, and in March 2000 a British court found that LM had presented no credible evidence to support its charges. The court awarded ITN a large financial judgement, bankrupting LM. But the most important judgement regarding the nature of the Omarska camp was the earlier verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal in the case of Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb who was found guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" of numerous heinous crimes, including the beating and torture of several men at the Omarska camp in June 1992. The sentencing judgement for Tadic (www.un.org/icty/judgement.htm), describing these crimes in gruesome detail, has been available since July 1997, over a year before Project Censored went to press with its story in Censored 1999 whitewashing the Bosnian Serb atrocities at Omarska. Deichmann, author of the LM article, had appeared as a media expert witness in October 1996 for Tadic's defense in his ICTY trial.
Finally, the need for better fact-checking is also apparent in story #14, "U.S. Media Ignores Humanitarian Aspects of Famine in Korea." Five minutes in my personal clipping files turned up three articles to the contrary, mainstream press stories devoted to the humanitarian side of the North Korean famine. I found stories from the Washington Post in February 1997 and February 1999, and a New York Times article from December 1998 that quotes from the very World Food Program report which Project Censored cites as the leading information source.
In recent weeks Project Censored has been criticized on substantive and procedural grounds by Don Hazen on AlterNet (www.alternet.org), by Brooke Shelby Biggs on MoJo Wire (www.motherjones.com), and by Bay Area labor writer David Bacon. Whatever you think of their points, they deserve discussion and debate. In particular, Project Censored needs to recover its grasp of a working distinction between news and opinion, between reporting and propaganda. I hope the faculty and students associated with Project Censored can review its mission and methodology, and get the project back on the tracks to becoming a fresh, exciting and serious critic of the contemporary media scene. Then Project Censored's 25th anniversary next year can be celebrated as a rebirth, not a wake.
Adapted from the Sonoma State Star, May 2, 2000 9 May 2000 **********
David Walls is professor of sociology and dean of the school of extended education at Sonoma State University. He is the author of The Activist's Almanac: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to the Leading Advocacy Organizations in America (Simon & Schuster/Fireside, 1993).
Again, via email: Omarska/Racak Chronology
For two years in a row, Project Censored has whitewashed stories of human rights atrocities committed by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia -- last year in Bosnia and now in Kosovo. Censored 1999 covers up gruesome crimes at Omarska camp in Bosnia in 1992, and Censored 2000 covers up a massacre of civilians at Racak in Kosovo in 1999. Assuming that Project Censored staff were taken in by apologists and propagandists for the Slobodan Milosevic regime, the question becomes: What should they have known and when should they have known it?
Omarska
18 June 1992: Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb, and others beat and torture six Bosnian Muslim men in hanger at Omarska camp in Bosnia. Four of the men were not seen again alive. (Counts 10 & 11)
8, 9, or 10 July 1992: Dusko Tadic and others beat a man at "the notorious white house on the grounds of the Omarska camp"; he later died from these injuries. (Counts 13 & 14)
27 July 1992: Dusko Tadic and others beat three men behind the white house in the Omarska camp; two found dead later. (Counts 16 & 17)
Source: ICTY Sentencing Judgement, 14 July 1997 (see below)
5 August 1992: British Independent Television News (ITN) team of Penny Marshall, Ian Williams, and Ed Vulliamy visit and film at Omarska and Trnopolje camps, reporting that grim things were happening to Bosnian Muslims at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs running the camps. A still shot from ITN video of an emaciated Bosnian Muslim man standing behind barb wire was picked up by numerous media around the world and used to illustrate various news stories on ethnic cleansing and brutality by Bosnian Serbs.
Source: ITN and LM reports, stipulated by all concerned.
30 October 1996: German free-lance writer Thomas Deichmann appears as expert witness on German media for the defense at International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) trial of Dusko Tadic at The Hague, Netherlands.
Source: British TV Court Library summary; stipulated by Deichmann.
December 1996: Thomas Deichmann visits Trnopolje to ascertain nature of enclosures at camp.
Source: His report/article at:
www.emperors-clothes.com/images/bosnia/camp.htm
January/February 1997: Deichmann article on ITN visit to Omarska and Trnopolje, appears in German magazine Novo, arguing that the famous picture of the emaciated man was staged, and that there was no barb wire surrounding the camp.
February 1997: English translation of above, "The Picture that Fooled the World," appears in British magazine Living Marxism (later renamed LM).
Sources: various, stipulated by all concerned.
7 May 1997: ICTY guilty verdict (judgement) in case of Dusko Tadic, including crimes at Omarska camp.
Source: UN/ICTY web site: www.un.org/icty/judgement.htm
14 July 1997: ICTY sentencing judgement in case of Dusko Tadic, including crimes at Omarska camp.
Source: UN/ICTY web site: www.un.org/icty/judgement.htm
May 1998: Terry Allen, the respected 8-year editor of CovertAction Quarterly (CAQ), is fired by CAQ's corporate officers Louis Wolf, Ellen Ray, and Bill Schaap. Allen says she was fired because she "refused to be bullied by Wolf, Ray, and Schaap into publishing whacko-conspiracy theories and articles that served their agenda but failed to distinguish between facts and political fairy tales." Among the "inferior or polemical material" proposed by the publishers was "a story presenting Serbia as the blameless victim of Bosnian aggression."
Source: Amanda Ripley, "Fascist Lefties," The Washington City Paper, May 22-28, 1998, p. 12.
Fall 1998: Under new editorial direction, CAQ publishes Thomas Deichmann's article from LM as "Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp" in its Fall 1998 issue, No. 65, along with an article by Diana Johnstone, "Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass."
Fall 1998: Over one year after the ICTY judgements in the case of Dusko Tadic, including crimes at Omarska camp, Project Censored goes to press with Censored 1999, including story #17, "U.S. Media Promotes Biased Coverage of Bosnia," referencing the Deichmann article on Trnopolje and Omarska and the article by Diana Johnstone, both from the Fall 1998 issue of CAQ.
March 2000: British court rules in favor of ITN in libel suit brought against LM for the Deichmann story on the ITN visit to the Omarska and Trnopolje camps, bankrupting LM.
Source: Various, including former LM websites
Racak
15 January 1999: Serbian police enter Racak, looking for Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas. In town, 22 people including some women and children are killed in scattered places. Another 23 men are killed, it is claimed, at a ravine, most shot in the head or neck. The next day observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are escorted to the town and ravine. Serbian officials later charge what was a firefight had been rearranged by the KLA to appear to be a massacre.
Source: see summary from Newsweek, April 24, 2000, p. 49.
22 January 1999: Finnish investigator Dr. Helena Ranta leads EU Forensic Expert team to Racak to perform autopsies on 40 bodies brought to hospital.
17 March 1999: Report issued by Helena Ranta's EU Forensic Expert Team. Report notes "There were no indications of the people being other than unarmed civilians." She notes she cannot use the term "massacre" based on the autopsies because a full criminal investigation of the circumstances has not yet been conducted.
Source: http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/eur/balkans/kosovo/texts/racak.htm
17 March 1999: OSCE Chairman-in Office, Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek of Norway, notes there was no indication of the victims being other than unarmed civilians, and condemns the Racak killings as an atrocity.
Source: www.osce.org/e/docs/presrel/pr22-99.htm
24 March 1999--11 June 1999 (approx): NATO at war with Serbia over Kosovo.
June 1999: Peter Phillips releases an editorial opinion piece linking Omarska and Racak as examples of media bias and of misrepresented, demonize-the-Serbs stories.
Fall 1999: Project Censored goes to press with Censored 2000, including story #12, "Evidence Indicates No Pre-War Genocide in Kosovo and Possible U.S./KLA Plot to Create Disinformation," referencing two stories on Racak and a more general story on Kosovo.
24 April 2000: Report that Helena Ranta's EU Forensic Expert Team has returned twice to Racak and found bullets in ravine inaccessible in January 1999 because of snow, confirming original report of massacre of villagers.
Source: Newsweek, April 24, 2000, p. 49.
David Walls 9 May 2000