KK-Forum,
her følger en oppsummering av Jake Lynch om den vanlige journalistiske
dekningen av Kosovokonflikten, oppsummert konsist av BBC World Affairs
editor John Simpson: "I think we were suckered."
Fra "We" må unntas KLA's offisielle støttespillere som visste godt hva de
(dvs. både KLA og støttene, f.eks. Vollebæk, Solheim og Haaland Matlary)
holdt på med.
En smakebit:
"... Could the KLA have reasonably expected that an intervention would
eventually come?
Analyses in newspaper Op-Ed sections often presented Kosovo as a 'Cinderella
conflict', left out of the Dayton accords and ignored by the West. Actually
it was only the
non-violent, democratically elected leaders who were ignored. US policy had
been clear
and explicit as long ago as 1992, when a diplomatic telegram from President
Bush
specifically threatened armed intervention in the event of any violence in
Kosovo. The full
text was only published in April 1999, in the Washington Post, together
with the
disclosure that it was to be read out loud by the then US ambassador,
"verbatim,
face-to-face and without elaboration" to President Milosevic himself.
Can it have been the case that this policy was subsequently allowed to lie,
dormant, on
the table until Western journalists forced it to be revisited, six years
later? Jan Oberg,
director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research
(TFF), is not
alone in concluding that there must have been some form of „clandestine
support for the
KLA... How else," he wonders, "was an army developed since 1993? International
missions, embassies, intelligence services... must have been fully aware...
One wonders
why, for instance, Nato, the OSCE, the UN etc in Albania did nothing to
control the
transborder [arms] traffic and the extensive build-up and training of the
KLA in northern
Albania."
***********************
http://www.transnational.org/features/2000/LynchPeaceJourn.html
"TRANSCENDING ASSUMPTIONS"
by Jake Lynch
Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia enjoyed almost universal editorial support among
mainstream British newspapers. The passage of time made it possible to
gauge more of
the consequences and led to some reassessments, including a nagging
suspicion summed
up by BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson: "I think we were suckered." What
assumptions were built into news reporting before and during the bombing,
how did these
help to construct a framework of understanding which made it seem to make
sense, and
how could it have been different?
An award-winning correspondent with a major US TV network put her finger on
one
widespread assumption at the London launch of The First Casualty, the new
edition of
Phillip Knightley‚s classic history of war reporting which contains an
important chapter on
Kosovo. She recalled a period in the Autumn of 1998 when, as she put it, „the
international community was putzing around, wondering what the hell to do"
about the
growing crisis in the province. An appealing narrative to journalists since
the next logical
step is for intrepid coverage of atrocities to act as a 'prod to the
conscience' of a
disinterested international community, bringing it reluctantly to
intervene. While there was,
no doubt, a great deal of soul-searching on the part of many politicians
and officials in
Nato countries about the Alliance‚s responses to events in Kosovo, this may
not have
been the full story. In March 2000, Allan Little‚s profoundly important BBC
Panorama
special, 'Moral Combat', suggested that at the very moment the
correspondent referred
to, elements, at least, of the international community knew exactly what
they were doing,
they were farfrom disinterested and the intervention was already underway.
The OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, headed by William Walker, a
high-ranking
State Department official, was busy carrying out a lopsided brief which
effectively
cleared Kosovo of Yugoslav Army (VJ) units and allowed the KLA to take over
their
revetted positions, thus entrenching the guerillas as a threat to Serb
police and civilians.
Having withdrawn the armoured divisions, only to find the enemy stealing a
march,
Yugoslavia then sent them back in. Most breaches of the ceasefire were
still coming from
the KLA but this intelligence, reported to the Nato council of ambassadors
at the time,
was never publicly disclosed.
A second assumption was that the KLA had spontaneously arisen as a factor
in the
equation, an inchoate upsurge of resistance in response to the iron heel of
Belgrade. So
when reporters did uncover scenes of violence it came with a built-in
analysis - Œthe
Serbs‚ were to blame forŒstarting it‚. This ignores the fears and
grievances of one party
to the conflict - we are left with explanations for its behaviour such as
that offered by
Newsweek, which decided the obduracy of President Milosevic under fire
could be
attributed to the influence of his wife, Mira Markovic, "an extremist even
more fanatical
than himself." Extremism and fanaticism are not reasonable and cannot be
reasoned with
- explain violence in this way, as the expression of evil and
irrationality, and it seems to
make sense to coerce the party guilty of Œstarting it‚ into backing down -
or to punish it
when it refuses.
The antidote is to accord equal esteem to the suffering of all parties.
During the bombing,
the US media activism group, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting)
circulated a
New York Times special report from Kosovo which listed familiar allegations
- young
men shot in their beds, systematic rape of women and girls, crops burned,
wells
poisoned, desecration of national and religious symbols. A recent story? No
- the date
was not 1999 but 1987; the complainants not Albanians, but Serbs.
Seldom can it have been clearer that delving back into the history of a
conflict in an
attempt to identify who 'started it'‚ leads to an incomplete account. The
proportion of
ethnic Serbs in Kosovo when the province gained self-governing status in
the mid-sixties
was nearly thirty percent - by the time of the FAIR piece, it was under ten
percent.
Neither did Albanians gain very much as a result - in the mid-eighties, if
the GDP per
head in Kosovo was 100, in Slovenia it was 700, albeit redistributed to a
certain extent
through Yugoslavia's federal state apparatus - one of the centrifugal
forces pulling the
country apart.
The grievances of Serbs in the late 1980s were cynically instrumentalised
by one S
Milosevic in the odious nationalist politics which propelled him to power -
but in order to
be so instrumentalised they had to exist, and did exist, in the first
place. Without Mr
Milosevic, the violent break-up of Yugoslavia would almost certainly not
have been
avoided, any more than preventing the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
would have
prevented the First World War.
By 1999, of course, Yugoslavia had more refugees than any other European
country,
each one adding to the collective resentment and insecurity which creates
the conditions
for violence. While reporting for Sky Newsfrom Nato headquarters in
Brussels, I put
questions at briefings, to Tony Blair and Javier Solana, about a plan put
forward by the
TRANSCEND Network for Peace and Development. This called for a settlement
based
on repatriating the Serbian refugees from the Krajina, violently expelled
by the Croatian
Army in 1995, in parallel with the return of the Kosovans.
This was inspired in part by the epic correspondence in 1991 between
Hans-Dietrich
Genscher, the German politician chiefly responsible for breaking up
Yugoslavia, and
Javier Perez de Cuellar, last-but-one Secretary General of the United
Nations. Warning
against the ncoordinated flurry of recognitions which brought Croatia and
Slovenia into
being as separate states, and triggered the disastrously divisive
referendum on
independence for Bosnia, Perez de Cuellar urged that any solution must work
for the
whole of Yugoslavia, no one party should be favoured and plans must be
acceptable to
minorities.
Nato was keen to commend its actions as the result of a sense of moral
purpose -
something greeted by some reporters with a cynicism which served to replace
the
demonisation of the Serbs with a similar demonisation of Nato.
Indeed, one opinion piece from the Guardian was titled, 'Nato - act with a
moral
purpose? Don't make me laugh'. But taking this on its merits leads us to
seek the
analytical factors most often missing, thereby conveying a fuller and
fairer picture. If it is
right that Kosovars be allowed to return to their homes, then it is also
right for Serbians
to return to theirs.
What about the realist interpretation of the KLA, that their actions and
motivations could
be understood as expressing a latent sense of national identity, brutally
suppressed by
'the Serbs'? In August 1999, in the NUJ magazine, The Journalist, I
suggested another
explanation - provoking newsworthy reprisals, hoping they would be reported
in isolation
as Serb aggression‚ and creating the apparent need for international
intervention to stop
it. It would have been a fair expectation given the lopsidedness in most
Western
coverage of Yugoslavia's upheavals of the past decade. As BBC diplomatic
correspondent Mark Urban has remarked about an earlier phase of the
violence: "Few of
the British-employed journalists... seem to have been concerned with
telling us the tales
of the Serbian housewives blown away by Muslim snipers‚ bullets, or the
Croat villagers
whose throats were slit by Muslim raiders."
Allan Little's film contained a frank interview with Hacim Thaci in which
he admitted the
KLA had known that civilian deaths would ensue as a result of their own
policies. BBC
World presenter Nik Gowing, in an important critique of reporting in the
Great Lakes
crisis of 1996-7, writes that journalists must never again underestimate
the sophistication
of parties to a conflict operating under what he calls 'the tyranny of
real-time news'. His
warning: "understand from the start that warring factions, even if their
soldiers wear
gumboots, have now acquired a sophisticated military doctrine and
techniques for fighting
low-level information warfare using manipulation, disinformation,
misinformation and
obstruction."
Furthermore, individuals in a media-savvy world have internalised the
narrative structures
which best appeal to news - the stories reporters want to hear. Hence 'The
Truth About
Rajmonda', a remarkably brave and honest piece of reporting by a Canadian TV
correspondent, Nancy Durham, about a nineteen-year-old woman who presented
herself
as bereaved, her younger sister shot by Yugoslav forces, and about to take
up arms with
the resistance. In a series of reports screened by broadcasters around the
world, Durham
tracked Rajmonda's progress through 1998 as she joined the KLA, then, after
the
bombing, visited her home village, only to find the 'dead' sister
conspicuously alive and
well. One Albanian explains in Durham's valedictory report that if the lie
helped to bring
about Western intervention, it was justified.
The piece offers one of those rare, uncomfortable moments when journalism
examines its
own part in the sequence of cause and effect. Generally, realist
explanations for events
commend themselves to news because it too is accustomed to explaining
itself in realist
terms - 'I just report the facts‚ as if facts arose spontaneously of their
own accord. We
need more reporting which opens for inspection the process by which facts
are created in
order to be reported, and techniques for news to meet the responsibilities
this brings,
whilst remaining, recognisably, news. In this respect, 'The Truth About
Rajmonda'
represents pioneering work.
Could the KLA have reasonably expected that an intervention would
eventually come?
Analyses in newspaper Op-Ed sections often presented Kosovo as a 'Cinderella
conflict', left out of the Dayton accords and ignored by the West. Actually
it was only the
non-violent, democratically elected leaders who were ignored. US policy had
been clear
and explicit as long ago as 1992, when a diplomatic telegram from President
Bush
specifically threatened armed intervention in the event of any violence in
Kosovo. The full
text was only published in April 1999, in the Washington Post, together
with the
disclosure that it was to be read out loud by the then US ambassador,
"verbatim,
face-to-face and without elaboration" to President Milosevic himself.
Can it have been the case that this policy was subsequently allowed to lie,
dormant, on
the table until Western journalists forced it to be revisited, six years
later? Jan Oberg,
director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research
(TFF), is not
alone in concluding that there must have been some form of „clandestine
support for the
KLA... How else," he wonders, "was an army developed since 1993? International
missions, embassies, intelligence services... must have been fully aware...
One wonders
why, for instance, Nato, the OSCE, the UN etc in Albania did nothing to
control the
transborder [arms] traffic and the extensive build-up and training of the
KLA in northern
Albania."
What would have happened if the KLA had received a different set of signals
about the
likely Western response to anyone stirring up trouble? Early in 2000, we
were treated to
a fascinating 'study in microcosm‚ in the emergence of the 'UCPMB‚ in the
Presevo
valley - a crescent of southern Serbia abutting the Kosovo provincial
border with a
majority Albanian population. They too give the classic realist account of
their
appearance on the scene, describing themselves to reporters as "the small
army in
uniform which arose to defend our people".
The difference in news response was epitomised by Jonathan Steele in the
Guardian who
'dis-aggregated‚ the parties involved by reporting that at least some
Albanian residents,
both in Kosovo and in the Presevo valley itself, opposed the UCPMB and its
actions. If
you refuse to divide people into two neat categories of villains and
victims it makes it
more difficult to visualise a solution being brought about by intervening
on one side
against another.
The other difference was that, on this occasion, American KFOR troops made it
abundantly clear they would not ride to the rescue. Just after this 'media
launch' of the
'UCPMB', they carried out a high-profile seizure of guns and explosives
belonging to the
group, from an illegal arms dump. The result was ambivalent, with the UCPMB
continuing to crop up in reports in association with murders of Serb
civilians. But shortly
after these signals were sent, the group at least issued a statement
renouncing violence
and vowing to pursue a political settlement of their grievances.
Another widespread assumption helped to shape assessments, before, during
and after
the bombing, of its likely strategic impact in 'making the world a safer
place' - namely that
the consequences of violence can be confined to visible, physical damage
and to the
conflict arena itself. What about Russia's offensive in Chechnya: not, by
any means,
directly caused by Operation Allied Force but indissociable from what
Professor Johan
Galtung, director of TRANSCEND, has called "Our geo-political predicament
after
Nato's war on Yugoslavia."
Further afield, even the GAM, the armed rebels fighting for independence in
the
Indonesian province of Aceh, have been accused of keeping thousands of
villagers in
refugee camps, blaming their plight on Jakarta, in order to draw outside
intervention to
their side. New Internationalist's Anouk Ride reported: "the refugees are
being
controlled, even created, and their image manipulated into a humanitarian
plea for
independence." Last year a huge banner draped across the tarmac at Banda
Aceh airport
called for Nato to send its planes to the province.
And in Yugoslavia itself the psychological damage left by the bombing and
ethnic
cleansing has now driven thousands of non-Albaniansfrom their homes and
will keep the
international community present on the ground for decades.
Here, too, there must be a degree of co responsibility. Yes, Belgrade's
Spring Pogrom
was, as Robert Fisk called it in one of many memorable dispatches for the
Independent,
an act of "great wickedness." Yes, it was planned as Operation Horseshoe -
but planned
as a response to bombing, when Nato's deployment of the OSCE Extraction
Force in
Macedonia confirmed that violence was on the agenda and enacted after
Rambouillet
removed any doubts.
At any rate, it cannot be properly understood on the basis of a Œblack-hat,
white-hat‚
map of the conflict. The approaches which Conflict and Peace Forums and
others are
developing is based on the need to transcend this discourse and, therefore,
offer
audiences a better service in informing them about a complex and dangerous
world.
Jake Lynch is a member of TRANSCEND, the invited network of scholars and
practitioners for peace and development, a consultant to Conflict and Peace
Forums and
author of their publication, What Are Journalists For? Copies can be
obtained by
contacting C & PF on phone 01628.591233 or at conflict.peace@poiesis.org.
****************************
Knut Rognes
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