ACTION ALERT: Kosovars Vs. Kurds Similar Crises Get Divergent Treatment in the New York Times
June 25, 1999
An article in the June 24 New York Times reported on the trial in Turkey of captured Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. The Times provided background on the war between Kurdish separatist guerrillas and Turkish security forces:
"The war that Ocalan has waged has cost more than 30,000 lives and made him the object of intense hatred. It has also made him a heroic figure to many Kurds who live in Turkey's southeast."
Contrast this description with the way the New York Times presents the background of another, very similar, separatist war (3/27/99):
"The Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanians has seen more than 2,000 killed in the last year, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes, according to the United Nations."
The two news articles quoted above appear to assign responsibility for casualties in each war to one or the other side in the conflict: In the case of Turkey, blame for the 30,000, mostly Kurdish, dead goes to the leader of the Kurdish rebels. In the case of Yugoslavia, blame for the 2,000, mostly ethnic Albanian, dead is put squarely on the shoulders of the Serbian authorities putting down the rebellion.
This disparity is typical in Times coverage of the two conflicts. In an editorial on the Ocalan trial (6/24/99), the Times explained the Kurdish war:
"In response to Mr. Ocalan's violence, the country's armed forces have devastated Kurdish-inhabited areas of southeastern Turkey, razing villages, and driving tens of thousands of refugees to Ankara and Istanbul."
On the other hand, in a March 24 editorial about NATO's bombing ("The Rationale for Air Strikes"), the Times' editoral writers describe the Kosovo conflict this way:
"Serbian forces are shelling and burning villages, forcing tens of thousands to flee. They have also been killing ethnic Albanian civilians."
In these editorials, the two very similar conflicts are described in very similar terms. But the editorial about Turkey makes it clear that the security forces are acting "in response to Mr. Ocalan's violence"; whereas the editorial about Kosovo does not mention the existence of the Kosovar guerrillas at all. In fact, a reader who knows nothing about the Kosovo conflict would have literally no inkling, from reading this editorial laying out "The Rationale for Air Strikes," that an insurgency has ever taken place there.