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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the five hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait? A story repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication years later.
During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of pursuing an official policy of rape. "Go forth and rape" a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that story never could be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far as we know, no such utterance was ever made. Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that "the existence of 'a systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to be proved."
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 Muslim women. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military engagements. A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible supporting evidence. Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with the utmost skepticism--and not be used as an excuse for an aggressive and punitive policy against Yugoslavia.
The "mass rape" propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify the continued NATO slaughter of Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner (April 26, 1999) tells us: "SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY." No evidence or testimony is given to support the charge of organized rape. Only at the bottom of the story, in the nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens "and not many dozens," according to the OSCE spokesperson. This same story did note that the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal sentenced a Bosnian Croat military commander to ten years in prison for failing to stop his troops from raping Muslim women in 1993--an atrocity we heard little about when it was happening.
A few dozen rapes is a few dozen too many. But can it serve as one of the justifications for a massive war? If Mr. Clinton wants to stop rapes, he could begin a little closer to home in Washington D.C., where dozens of rapes occur every month.
The Serbs were blamed for the infamous Sarajevo market massacre. But according to the report leaked out on French TV, Western intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.
On one occasion, notes Barry Lituchy, the New York Times ran a photo purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an obscure retraction the following week.
The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that prominent personages on the Left--who oppose the NATO policy against Yugoslavia-have felt compelled to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy, referring to unspecified and unverified Serbian "brutality" and "the monstrous Milosovic." Thus critics like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn reveal themselves as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they criticize on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of Milosovic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia.
Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. Such casualties reveal a civil war, not genocide. The forced expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces in those areas where KLA mercenaries were operating.
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands also fled Kosovo because it was being mercilessly bombed by NATO, or because it was the scene of sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or because they were just afraid and hungry. An Albanian woman crossing into Macedonia was eagerly asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb police. She responded: "There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the [NATO] bombs." I had to read this in the San Francisco Guardian not in the New York Times or Washington Post. During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of Kosovo took flight (mostly north but some to the south), as did thousands of Roma, Macedonians, and others. Were the Serbs ethnically cleansing themselves? Or were these people not fleeing the bombing and the ground war? Yet, the refugee tide caused by the bombing was repeatedly used by U.S. warmakers as justification for the bombing, a pressure put on Milosovic to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers--usually well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, trucks, or cars, many of them young men of recruitment age--they were described as being "slaughtered." It was repeatedly reported that "Serb atrocities"--not the extensive ground war with the KLA and certainly not the massive NATO bombing-"drove more than one million Albanians from their homes." Now there are hints that Albanian Kosovar refugees numbered nowhere near that number.
Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as "genocide." But experts in surveillance photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous," according to these independent critics.
Early in the war, Newsday reported that Britain and France were seriously considering "commando assaults into Kosovo to break the pattern of Serbian massacres of ethnic Albanians." What discernible pattern of massacres? Of course, no commando assaults were put into operation, but the story had served its purpose of hyping an image of mass killings. In similar fashion, the Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. These estimates were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large ash heap.
An ABC "Nightline" made dramatic and repeated references to the "Serbian atrocities in Kosovo" while offering no actual evidence. Ted Kopple asked a group of angry Albanian refugees, what specifically had they witnessed. They pointed to an old man in their group who wore a wool hat. One of them reenacted what the Serbs had done to him, throwing the man's hat to the ground and stepping on it-"because the Serbs knew that his hat was the most important thing to him." Kopple was appropriately horrified. It was the only example of a "war crime" the program offered.
A widely circulated story in the New York Times, headlined "U.S. REPORT OUTLINES SERB ATTACKS IN KOSOVO," tells us that the State Department issued "the most comprehensive documentary record to date on atrocities." The report concluded that there had been organized rapes and systematic executions. But as one reads further and more closely into the article, one finds that Stae Department reports of such crimes "depend almost entirely on information from refugee accounts. There was no suggestion that American intelligence agencies had been able to verify, most, or even many, of the accounts . . . and the word 'reportedly' and 'allegedly' appear throughout the document."
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence or even consistent hearsay. One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist, while her husband told him how all the women had been robbed of their jewelry and other possessions. A spokeman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of killings in three villages, but when Gillan pressed him for more precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six teenage rape victims. But he had not spoken to any witnesses, and admitted that "we have no way of verifying these reports."
Gillan notes that some refugees had seen killings and other atrocities, but there was little to suggest that they had seen it on the scale that is reported. One afternoon, officials in charge said there were refugees arriving who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village and fifty in another, but Gillan "could not find one eye-witness who actually saw these things happening." Yet every day western journalists reported "hundreds" of rapes and murders. Sometimes they note in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated, but then why were such unverified stories being so eagerly reported in the first place?
In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." Still, Milosovic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary executions of a hundred or so individuals, again, alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO bombing had started, yet were used as justification for the bombing. The biggest war criminal of all is NATO and the political leaders who orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction. But here is how the White House and the U.S. media reasoned at the time: Since the aerial attacks do not intend to kill civilians, then presumably there is no liability and no accountability, only an occasional apology for the regrettable mistakes-as if only the intent of an action counted and not its ineluctable effects.
In response, George Kenney, a former State Department official under the Bush Administration, put it well: "Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing."
In sum, through a process of monopoly control and distribution, repetition and image escalation, the media achieve self-confirmation, that is, they find confirmation for the images they fabricate in the images they have already fabricated. Hyperbolic labeling takes the place of evidence: "genocide," "mass atrocities," "systematic rapes" and even "rape camps"--camps which no one has ever located. Through this process, evidence is not only absent, it becomes irrelevant.
So the U.S. major media (and much of the minor media) are not free and independent, as they claim, they are not the watchdog of democracy but the lapdog of the national security state. They help reverse the roles of victims and victimizers, warmongers and peacekeepers, reactionaries and reformers. The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
Michael Parenti is the author of Against Empire and America Besieged. His most recent book is History as Mystery (City Lights Books).