Accuracy in Media Monitors On Kosovo
Date: 4/23/1999 1:41:28 PM Central Daylight Time
From:
On April 18th, both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran long
stories about how the Clinton Administration got involved in the no-win war
in Yugoslavia. Both papers said that the key incident which sparked U.S.
military involvement was the alleged Serb massacre of Albanians in the
village of Racak in Kosovo. We say "alleged" because it's not at all clear
that what happened was a massacre. In fact, some evidence suggests that
Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists attacked the Serbs and then dressed up some
of the victims to make them look like civilians. But "massacre" is how the
Post and Times described it.
The point is that this incident is what started the U.S. on the road to
deeper and deeper military involvement. In other words, the Clinton
Administration may have gotten the U.S. involved through an incident that was
manipulated and staged for propaganda value.
The Times said that NATO commander General Wesley Clark was so outraged about
this alleged massacre that he met with Yugoslavian President Slobodan
Milosevic and presented him with photographs of the victims. The Times
reported that Milosevic said the killings had resulted from a firefight
between Serb security forces and the KLA. Here's how the Times reported how
Milosevic described what happened then: "The rebels, he continued, rearranged
the bodies and dressed them to make them look like peasants and farmers,
shooting the bodies through the heads and necks to make the incident look
like a massacre."
The Times didn't report how Clark responded to this, and the paper didn't
explain what was wrong with Milosevic's explanation. But the fact is that his
explanation of what happened is consistent with how some foreign newspapers
reported the incident.
Unfortunately, this isn't the only dubious report or claim that has come out
of the White House, NATO or the American media during this war. Some other
phony reports include NATO's claim that two Albanian Kosovo leaders had been
executed by the Serbs, the alleged transformation of a soccer stadium in
Kosovo into a death camp, and blaming the Serbs for the bombing of a refugee
convoy. One of those Kosovo Albanian leaders was the subject of a recent
article in the Washington Post. The Post said he was sitting in a friend's
living room when he heard the news of his death broadcast live from NATO
headquarters. NATO apparently based the report of his death on the fact that
his offices had been ransacked and his security guard killed. Obviously,
however, NATO released the "news"of his death publicly without having a shred
of hard evidence to justify the claim.
It is quickly becoming apparent that NATO, at least in some cases, has been
less than forthcoming in reporting the truth. In a related matter, a Bosnian
Serb TV station in the NATO-occupied state of Bosnia has been ordered to stop
broadcasting because its coverage of the war was deemed inflammatory and
inaccurate. The order could be enforced by a NATO-led Stabilization Force,
whose troops could literally take over the station at the point of a barrel
of a gun.
The question period at the annual shareholders meeting of the New York Times
this year began with a strong statement by a Marine Vietnam veteran urging
that the Times quit supporting the NATO war on Yugoslavia. He said most of
the reserve units are now on alert and that "we are obviously preparing to
make a major invasion." He feared that this could lead to a third world war.
He was totally opposed to the bombing, which was now hitting civilian
targets. He concluded, "I think this is terrible, and I look to The New York
Times to take the lead in opposing this."
Representing Accuracy in Media at the meeting, I momentarily surprised the
chairman, Arthur Sulzberger, saying that the Times had published some
excellent stories on Kosovo-stories by David Binder, Alan Cowell, and Henry
Kamm. But they were all written in 1987. That year was a turning point for
Kosovo according to those stories. One by David Binder, published on Nov. 1,
1987, said, "Ethnic Albanians already control almost every phase of life in
the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil
service, schools and factories. In the last seven years, 20,000 (Serbs and
Montenegrins) have fled the province, often leaving behind farmsteads and
houses, for the safety of the Slavic north."
That year the Kosovo Serbs began demonstrating to protest their persecution
by the ethnic Albanians, who outnumbered them 9 to 1. Binder said, "Slavic
Orthodox churches have been attacked and flags have been torn down. Wells
have been poisoned and crops burned."
The Kosovo Serbs wanted protection from Belgrade, but some Communist Party
leaders were reluctant to alienate the Albanian head of the Kosovo Communist
Party. Binder reported that the goal of the radical ethnic Albanians was "an
ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of
southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself." Kosovo, Binder said, was the
principal battleground.
Slobodan Milosevic, who was then the Serbian Communist Party secretary, went
to Kosovo and assured the Serbs that their persecution at the hands of the
Albanians would be halted. Binder concluded his article saying, "The hope is
that something will be done to exert the rule of law in Kosovo while drawing
ethnic Albanians back into Yugoslavia's mainstream." The autonomy Tito had
given Kosovo in 1974 was withdrawn in 1989, setting off violent Albanian
protests.
This 1987 article by David Binder casts the present conflict in a different
light. David Binder was recently on C-SPAN, displaying his impressive
knowledge of the Balkans, acquired during his 35 years as a European
correspondent for the Times. He warned against the reckless use of words like
genocide and massacre in describing what has happened in Kosovo. Only 2,000
on both sides were killed in the fighting in Kosovo last year. More Kosovo
Albanians were killed by our bombs in four weeks than were killed in the
Racak "massacre," the incident used to justify the bombing.
Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst for ABC News, has blown the whistle on
NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Cordesman, who has worked for
NATO, has stated publicly what many people suspect -- that the bombing has
contributed to the worsening plight of the refugees. When Cordesman appeared
on ABC's World News Tonight on April 16th, to give his bleak assessment of
the NATO campaign, anchor Peter Jennings knew what was coming because he had
already read his report, made available in advance to ABC News. Jennings knew
that Cordesman was going to present bad news for NATO.
Although NATO and White House officials have made much of the thousands of
sorties, or bombing raids, undertaken against Yugoslavia in the first three
weeks, Cordesman said only 102 fixed targets had been hit and very little
damage had been inflicted on Yugoslav troops. His report stated, "The net
impact of NATO operations may be to worsen the plight of ethnic Albanians
rather than paralyze the Serbian operations." Jennings called that "strong
stuff."
Although the purpose of some of the raids is to disrupt or cut-off supplies
for the Yugoslav forces, Cordesman said the result is likely to be the
acceleration of the Yugoslav campaign to clear the Albanians out of Kosovo.
Indeed, Cordesman said the pressure on the Serbs may force them to use the
refugees as human shields to protect their own forces as they operate in
Kosovo.
Cordesman also took aim at Pentagon terminology about what targets are being
hit and what damage, if any, is being inflicted. He compared the so-called
"damage assessment" to the body count terminology of the Vietnam War, in
which it was assumed that progress in the war was being made because certain
numbers of the enemy were being killed. One problem, he said, is that targets
are being reported to have undergone "severe damage" when no one seems to
know what that means. Another category of damage is called "destroyed," which
seems fairly obvious, but still another category is "moderate damage."
Cordesman says this apparently means that a target has been hit in some vague
and undefined way.
At the same time, executives of seven major U.S. news organizations have
written a letter of protest to Defense Secretary William Cohen, saying that
"on many days, the state-controlled Yugoslav media has been more specific
about NATO targets than the United States or NATO." The editors said that
"Detailed information about the allied operation is vital to an informed
public discussion of this matter of national interest." They said journalists
are not being given basic information about how many war planes are being
sent on bombing runs on any particular day and how many are actually dropping
bombs.
In response, President Clinton, who spoke to the newspaper editors and
executives at a meeting in San Francisco, agreed that more details needed to
be provided. He blamed the lack of information on a lack of coordination by
NATO allies, as well as cloudy weather over Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, NATO was
preparing to bomb Serbian TV, which has been more accurate and quicker with
information about the war than NATO itself.
The new chorus among politicians and the media has been that NATO ought to
bomb Serbian TV and shut it down. In fact, however, some of the top editors
and executives of major U.S. newspapers have written to Defense Secretary
Cohen, saying that Serb TV has been giving out more accurate information than
NATO. "On many days," they said in a letter to Cohen, "the state-controlled
Yugoslav media has been more specific about NATO targets than the United
States or NATO."
But Serb TV has also been more accurate on other matters. Serb TV was the
first medium to report that an American stealth aircraft had been shot down
over Yugoslavia. And Serb TV was the first medium to report that NATO had
attacked a civilian refugee convoy in Kosovo.
In that case, NATO was actively spreading disinformation -- some would call
it lies -- about what had happened. A CNN report posted on its Internet site
the afternoon of the tragedy disclosed that NATO General Wesley Clark "said
he had received verbal reports that after the military convoy was struck,
Serb troops got out and attacked civilians." In other words, NATO had
attacked a military rather than civilian convoy and, in retaliation, the
Serbs murdered the refugees. A variation of this claim was reported in the
Washington Post, which said that Clark "first suggested that the attacks on
the refugees may have been perpetrated as a retaliatory action by Yugoslav
forces...." The Post said that Clark later "retracted that theory."
That "theory," according to CNN, was based on "verbal reports" that Clark
received from someone, somewhere. But who were these people? We still don't
know. But Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon also attempted to blame the Serbs. At
a briefing, in the words of the Post, he "raised the possibility that air
strikes on refugees in Kosovo may have been perpetrated by Serbian aircraft."
In response to all of this, Yugoslavian authorities called these claims
"monstrous lies." They were right. So why did NATO eventually admit the
truth? Was it because they were full of integrity and wanted to set the
record straight? We would hope that NATO wanted to admit a mistake and
apologize for killing dozens of refugees. But the fact is that the
Yugoslavian authorities had access to bomb fragments that were manufactured
in NATO countries. They could prove to the media and the world that NATO was
guilty of this atrocity.
The incident also demonstrated the unreliability of testimony from refugees.
Asked who had bombed them, one refugee was quoted in the Post as saying about
the aircraft, "probably it was Serb because NATO would not attack us." Well,
NATO did attack them, although it was clearly an accident. And the irony is
that the Serb media, which may soon be attacked, gave the American people the
truth that they did not immediately get from their own government and media.
Once the Serb media are off the air, we may not have any independent way to
check the claims coming out of NATO headquarters or Washington.