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.Although it made ample reference to the brutality of Serb forces,it did not once mention the KLA. Serbian forces are shelling and burningvillages, forcing tens of thousands to flee.They have also been killing ethnic100 DEGRADED CAPABILITYAlbanian civilians , the editorialists wrote.An uninformed reader would beleft wondering what brought on the wave of violence.A 22 March Times articlereferred to Nato s plans for bombing  elite Serbian units carrying out attackson ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and to  tens of thousands of civilians now fleeingthe offensive in Kosovo.Only much later in the piece was there a singlefleeting reference to  rebel forces.This tendency was particularly acute onUS television, which focused primarily on images of huddled refugees andatrocity stories rather than reporting on the political and military situationinside Kosovo.During the early days of Nato s bombing, when Kosovo tookup most of the evening network news broadcasts, it was not uncommon forentire broadcasts to go by without any reference to the Kosovo guerrillas orthe civil war on the ground.3The US media s transformation of Kosovo s civil war into a one-sidedethnic holocaust becomes clearer when one compares the New York Timescoverage of Kosovo with its treatment of a similar war  the Kurdish conflictin eastern Turkey.In one case, the Times assigns responsibility for the violenceto the guerrillas; in the other case, the security forces putting down therebellion are blamed.On 24 June 1999 the New York Times reported on thetrial in Turkey of captured Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan.The Timesprovided background on the war between Kurdish separatist guerrillas andTurkish security forces:The war that Ocalan has waged has cost more than 30,000 lives andmade him the object of intense hatred.It has also made him a heroic figureto many Kurds who live in Turkey s southeast.While here it is Ocalan s war that has cost  more than 30,000 lives , in this27 March Times depiction of the Kosovo conflict, the KLA simply disappears:The Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanians has seen more than2,000 killed in the last year, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovarsdriven from their homes, according to United Nations refugee officials.Eliminating one party from the description of each of these conflicts does nothelp readers to understand the situations in all their complexity; but it doeshelp to simplify the conflict so that those without additional information willsee that the side supported by Washington are the  good guys , and the otherside are the  bad guys.Diplomatic RewritingNobody worked harder than Madeleine [Albright] at Rambouillet to tryand achieve peace.And nobody should forget that President Milosevichad every opportunity to resolve this issue through dialogue.It was his refusalTHE UNITED STATES MEDIA AND KOSOVO 101to negotiate in good faith that produced the conflict.(British ForeignSecretary Robin Cook, 22 April 1999)In reporting diplomacy, too, American journalists read from the script writtenfor them by Nato officials.On 23 March 1999, US envoy Richard Holbrookewas in Belgrade to deliver a final ultimatum to Yugoslav President SlobodanMilosevic: sign the Rambouillet plan  the document that emerged from thetalks in France between the Yugoslav government, ethnic Albanians and thefive-nation Contact Group  or be bombed.Milosevic s government refusedto ratify the plan, which envisioned a very high degree of autonomy forKosovo, and would have allowed Nato troops access to all of Yugoslavia.On24 March the bombing began.But in the media, 24 March also marked thebeginning of a remarkable process of historical revision in which the pictureof the previous months of diplomacy at Rambouillet was seriously distorted.In order better to serve the war effort, establishment news outlets brazenlyrewrote the history of pre-war negotiations, presenting Belgrade as rejectionistand the US as reasonable and accommodating.One month earlier, at the close of the first round of Rambouillet talks, NewYork Times correspondent Steven Erlanger had summarised the diplomaticscene by noting that  Mr Milosevic has shown himself at least as reasonableas the ethnic Albanians about a political settlement for Kosovo (24 February1999).He went on to note that Yugoslavia  via Milosevic s chief negotiatorat Rambouillet, Milan Milutinovic  had shown flexibility on the main stickingpoint: the nature of an international peacekeeping force to implement asettlement in Kosovo:Already, the Serbian president, Milan Milutinovic, has said that, when nego-tiations resume on March 15, the Serbs are ready to discuss  an internationalpresence in Kosovo to carry out political arrangements of any agreement.And other Serbs have floated ideas that include leavening Western forceswith lots of Russians.On the eve of war, however, Erlanger s reporting underwent a remarkablesea change.The journalist s 24 March dispatch was headlined  US NegotiatorsDepart, Frustrated by Milosevic s Hard Line , giving precisely the oppositeimpression than his earlier reports  even though the Yugoslav position hadnot changed at all.The piece was full of quotes from US officials assertingBelgrade s obstinacy, charging that Milosevic had refused  every opportunityto avoid Nato bombing; that Milosevic stubbornly  can t agree to a foreignforce on Yugoslav soil because of history or politics or whatever ; and that  ifthere had been any sign of compromise the officials  probably wouldn t beon the way to the airport right now.Yet only hours before Erlanger filed his dispatch, the Serbian leadershipreaffirmed its earlier position  which Erlanger had a month previously called reasonable  in a series of parliamentary resolutions.These rejected the102 DEGRADED CAPABILITYRambouillet document, mainly because it envisioned the occupation ofKosovo by 28,000 Nato soldiers who would have the right to move throughoutall of Yugoslavia.The resolutions denounced  the demand to deploy Nato troopsand repudiated the notion of deploying  foreign military troops in Kosovo,which it called an  occupation of Serbia.But in a highly significant move,an accompanying resolution (called a  decision ) was passed, declaring thatSerbia was:ready, immediately after the signing of the political settlement about selfmanagement [that is, Kosovo autonomy], negotiated and accepted by therepresentatives of all the national communities which live in Kosovo andMetohija, to consider the dimensions and character of the internationalpresence in Kosmet, intended for the implementation of such a settlement.4Although Erlanger s 24 March article reported that the Serbian parliamentmet  to reject the idea of allowing foreign troops into Kosovo and even quoteda hawkish Serb parliament member debating the issue, he omitted anymention of the other outcome of that debate: the resolutions urging anagreement on an  international presence.Those resolutions, which representone of the most significant events in Kosovo s recent history, went unreportedby virtually every major American news outlet.Curiously, Erlanger incon-spicuously slipped a mention of the 23 March resolution into one of the finalparagraphs of an 8 April Times dispatch, describing the parliament s statementas a call for  United Nations forces [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]