Since Vietnam, news management has been a key preoccupation of governments at war. But in today’s information-rich environment the flow of news is far more difficult to control. Via the Internet, you can now read both Yugoslav and Albanian commentaries and reports on the crisis in Kosovo, as well as accessing American and European news sites.
Yet politicians and Nato spokesmen have persistently attempted to serve us bite-size News McNuggets, and the vast majority of the British public still rely on their own media to tell them what is happening. Even in the era of the Information Superhighway, it is to newspapers and television that most of us turn for facts, and the info-glut has arguably made interpretation and analysis more important than ever. So how successful have the British media been in giving us an informative account of the Kosovo crisis?
Nato’s bombing campaign started when the Rambouillet negotiations broke down. Yet there has been virtually no critical analysis of why this happened. What were the objections of the Yugoslav government, for example? The Boston Herald wrote that: ‘The deal they were told to accept, or else, involved immediate autonomy for Kosovo and a three-year transition toward unspecified goals, supervised by Nato troops’. In Britain, we are told that the Serbs rejected a reasonable ‘peace agreement’ which preserved Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity. The Rambouillet accord is available on the Internet. Take a look, and ask yourself if you can think of any sovereign state in the world that would accept its terms.
And what were the objectives of the Albanian delegation at Rambouillet? A BBC Ceefax report of the time makes interesting reading in light of subsequent justifications of Nato action: ‘The Foreign Secretary insists Kosovar Albanians must sign up to peace plans before air strikes could be carried out’. It is difficult to see how this squares with the claim that Nato bombing was designed to prevent a humanitarian disaster. For an account which does at least make sense, take a look at US magazine The Nation.
In response to a second offer of negotiations from Belgrade, this week Nato escalated its bombing while politicians stepped-up the rhetoric. Defence Secretary George Robertson told us that Yugoslav forces in Kosovo are ‘perpetrating the worst violence that some people have seen since medieval times’. Wednesday’s Evening Standard highlighted Newsweek‘s reporting of fears among White House officials that similarly hawkish rhetoric from Secretary of State Madeline Albright had undermined the possibility of resolving the crisis peacefully in the past. Yet in Britain, most journalists have preferred to follow the official line that Yugoslavia’s unilateral Easter cease-fire is a ‘cynical ploy’, rather than engage in a serious discussion of the substantive issues involved in reaching a settlement.
With a few honourable exceptions, neither has there been any real attempt to explain the background to the conflict in Kosovo. Instead, we are offered historical and religious pseudo-explanations. The Sun –worried, perhaps, that ‘white van person’ might not be immediately convinced of the necessity to ‘Clobba Slobba’ and ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb’– provided a helpful question-and-answer section on ‘the conflict that’s 600 years old’. Titled ‘What is the war for?’ the article asked: ‘Where is Kosovo?’, ‘What are the different religious groups?’, ‘Why do they hate each other?’ and, bizarrely, ‘Is this the same war that happened in Bosnia?’.
Not to be outdone by the tabloids, a feature in the Sunday Telegraph presented the conflict as a latter-day Crusade by the Orthodox Church, whilst TV reporters describe it as ‘medieval loot and pillage’. Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post, argues that: ‘The reason for the killing in Kosovo is not mindless ethnic hatred but quite rational power politics’. Yet it seems that New Labour would prefer us to see it as an epic battle of Good vs. Evil, started by a ‘serial ethnic-cleanser’.
Nor has war in Europe prompted any investigative journalism. The moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova was said by Nato to be in hiding, before he appeared on TV calling for a halt to the air strikes. Perhaps British journalists are wary of accepting the Yugoslav version of events, but a French press agency interviewed him. Greek TV interviewed him. Is there a story to be investigated there, or shall we just stick to the latest Nato press statement on whether Rugova was blackmailed, drugged, or coerced? Similarly, after telling us the Albanian Rambouillet negotiator Fehmi Agani had been executed, Nato now says his death is ‘unconfirmed’. Surely this is a story worth checking out?
Too much of what passes for ‘analysis’ is actually just a discussion of which strategy would work best for Nato: air-power or ground troops. Far less attention is given to the more fundamental issue of how Nato went to war in the first place and why its aims seem to change on an almost daily basis. First we were told that the Nato bombing campaign was designed to get President Slobodan Milosevic to sign up to the Rambouillet accord. Then we were told the reason was to avert, then to halt, a humanitarian disaster. Now we are told Nato’s objective is to allow the refugees to return to their homes. Since no international agency declared a ‘humanitarian crisis’ before Nato started bombing, is their mission now simply to clean up their own mess?
Much space is given to pictures of planes taking off and the plight of refugees, but aren’t there any questions to be asked? Are we really expected to believe that the mass exodus from Kosovo is due to the execution of a premeditated plot and has nothing to do with Nato bombs? Why were refugees in no danger from Nato’s ‘humanitarian’ air strikes when they were attempting to flee Kosovo, but at risk from Nato bombing once Yugoslavia closed its borders? What about the tens of thousands of Serbian refugees–are they being ‘ethnically cleansed’ too? How have the Kosovo Liberation Army been transformed from an organisation which the US government classified as ‘terrorists’, to the group on whom the peaceful future of Kosovo depends?
Vietnam veteran General Wesley Clark has announced his intention of degrading and ultimately destroying Yugoslavia’s military capability. The ability of the British media to inform the public of what is happening in Yugoslavia is also in danger of being severely degraded, if not destroyed altogether.
A version of this appeared in the London Times (4/9/99).
