By Barry Grey
6 July 1999
In recent days scattered reports have emerged in the American media of
the inflated and misleading character of claims by US officials of Serb
atrocities against the Kosovan Albanians. On June 28 the Detroit Free
Press carried an article by foreign correspondent Lori Montgomery,
datelined Prizren, which bore the headline, “Rapes not a policy in
Kosovo: Assaults were individual acts by Serbs, evidence indicates.”
The article stated: “Western officials have accused Serb soldiers of
raping ethnic Albanian women as a tool of war. Although numerous
credible accounts detail attacks by Serb soldiers, it now appears that
rape was rarely systematic and that allegations of ‘rape camps' and ‘rape
hotels' will never be proved...
“Along Kosovo's Albanian border, where US officials alleged in April
that Serb soldiers were raping and killing women at an army base near
the southwestern town of Djakovica and in a hotel in the western city of
Pec, few signs of sexual abuse could be found.”
Three days later USA Today carried the front-page headline, “Kosovo's
plight exaggerated.” The article began: “Many of the figures used by the
Clinton administration and NATO to describe the wartime plight of
Albanians in Kosovo now appear greatly exaggerated as allied forces
take control of the province.” It cited House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Porter Goss, a Republican critic of the US-NATO war, who
said, “Yes, there were atrocities. But no, they don't measure up to the
advance billing.”
The article went on to note that US claims of up to 100,000 murdered
ethnic Albanians have been replaced by official estimates of 10,000. It
debunked a statement made by Clinton to a veterans group in May that
600,000 ethnic Albanians were “trapped within Kosovo itself, lacking
shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves dug
by
their executioners,” noting that thousands of Kosovars did indeed go into
hiding during the war, but there is no evidence they were starving or
without shelter. The article further said Kosovo's livestock, wheat and
other crops were not destroyed by Serb forces, as had been widely
reported.
That evening NBC Nightly News carried a segment by foreign
correspondent Andrea Mitchell on the same theme. Mitchell
characterized the war-time reports of Kosovan deaths as a “gross
exaggeration” and said officials now estimate the civilian death toll in
Kosovo since the onset of NATO bombing last March 24 to be between
3,000 and 6,000.
These reports have been simply ignored by the “newspapers of
record”—the New York Times and the Washington Post—which
enthusiastically backed the bombing of Yugoslavia and retailed the
government claims of mass murder, rape and genocide that were used to
justify the war and manipulate public opinion.
Significantly, none of the American officials who responded to the USA
Today and NBC News defended the veracity of their earlier claims.
Instead, they passed off the flagrant inaccuracies as honest and
unavoidable mistakes. State Department official James Foley told NBC
News that the government had no choice but to base itself on refugee
accounts. Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security
Council, told USA Today there was no effort to mislead. The Clinton
administration found that “as you go through a campaign like this, there
is
a great deal of uncertainty.”
There was, of course, nothing “uncertain” about the reports of mass
killing and rape given out by President Clinton, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and a host of
lesser officials. These were presented to the American people and
international public opinion as facts, not speculation.
Kenneth Bacon, spokesman for Defense Secretary Cohen, told USA
Today that the “best estimates available” had been used. He defended
the comparisons between Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and
Hitler, adding, “I don't think you can say killing 100,000 is 10 times
more
morally repugnant that killing 10,000.”
This cynical bit of moralizing is typical of the official campaign waged
in
support of the war. From the outset those prosecuting the bombing
sought to intimidate and stifle opposition by depicting critics of NATO
as
defenders of Milosevic and “ethnic cleansing.” But Bacon's response
begs the question: if the issue is purely one of abstract morality, and
the
scale of atrocities is not important, why the systematic resort to
exaggeration and falsification?
One of those interviewed on the NBC news segment, former Democratic
Congressman Lee Hamilton, while no less cynical, was a bit more
forthright. He explained there was always a tendency in war to demonize
the enemy so as to whip public opinion into line.
Clinton's own statements during and after the war make clear that what
is
involved in the official presentation of events in Kosovo is not “making
the best estimates available,” but using the vast resources of the
government and a pliant media to mislead the public into thinking Serb
atrocities were on such a order—reaching the level of genocide—as to
justify the aerial destruction of power plants, oil refineries, bridges,
water
supplies, schools, hospitals and even television headquarters, and the
killing of thousands of civilians.
Within days of the onset of NATO bombing, Clinton described the
ensuing Serb attack as an attempt to wipe out the Kosovan Albanian
population. In a radio address from the Oval Office on April 3 he said
the “cold clear goal” of Milosovic was to “keep Kosovo's land while
ridding it of its people.” Twelve days later he told the American Society
of Newspaper Editors that Milosovic was “determined to crush all
resistance to his rule even if it means turning Kosovo into a lifeless
wasteland.”
On May 5, in a speech at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, he added
to the list of Serb crimes the setting up of concentration camps,
something that never occurred. In a Memorial Day address on May 31
he compared Milosevic to Hitler, saying his government “like that of Nazi
Germany rose to power in part by getting people to look down on
people of a given race and ethnicity, and to believe they had... no right
to
live.” On June 11, on the eve of the deployment of NATO troops into
Kosovo, Clinton described the actions of the Serbs as “an attempt to
erase the very presence of a people from their land, and to get rid of
them dead or alive.”
Since the withdrawal of Serb forces, Clinton's rhetoric has become, if
anything, more unrestrained. Even as NATO was quietly lowering its
estimates of ethnic Albanian deaths, Clinton repeatedly said the evidence
of death and destruction in Kosovo was “even worse than we imagined.”
In a June 20 interview on Russian television he said, “We were only
trying to reverse ethnic cleansing and genocide.” Two days later, in a
speech to KFOR troops in Macedonia, he spoke of “young girls [being]
raped en masse.”
In his White House press conference of June 25, Clinton all but declared
that the continued rule of Milosevic would signify the collective guilt
of the
Serb people in the atrocities carried out against the Kosovan Albanians.
Justifying his opposition to Western aid for the reconstruction of Serbia,
he said, “And then they [the Serbs] are going to have to decide whether
they support his leadership or not; whether they think it's OK that all
those tens of thousands of people were killed and all those hundreds of
thousands of people were run out of their homes and all those little girls
were raped and all those little boys murdered.” (Emphasis added)
The function of such exaggerated and often unsubstantiated atrocity
claims, relentlessly repeated and reinforced by the most sophisticated,
modern techniques of media manipulation, is to overwhelm the critical
faculties of the public. The aim is not so much to convince as to benumb
and bully, and thereby obtain, if not active support, at least passive
acquiescence.
However the falsification is not simply a matter of exaggerated atrocity
stories and statistics. There were, after all, terrible crimes committed
against innocent Kosovars, and on a large scale. At least as decisive in
the US war propaganda is the removal of the events in Kosovo from
their real context, and the erection of a completely self-serving and
distorted version of recent Yugoslav history. Only on such a basis could
the violent and tragic events in Kosovo be attributed to the evil motives
and machinations of one man, the new Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic, and
the role of the United States and the other imperialist powers be
whitewashed.
According to Clinton and his NATO allies, all of the tragedy and turmoil
of the past decade in the former Yugoslavia are the result of Milosevic's
grand design to forge a Greater Serbia at the expense, even the
destruction, of the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians. That
Milosevic is a Serb nationalist, and that Greater Serbian chauvinism is
a
reactionary political force, are truisms. This, however, is only one part
of
the picture.
What is left out is the disruptive and destructive role played by
US-dominated financial institutions, such as the International Monetary
Fund, which imposed austerity and capitalist market policies on
Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s, driving up unemployment and poverty
and undermining the economic foundations of the federated Yugoslav
state. These policies encouraged the growth of nationalist tendencies
among all ethnic groups.
In 1991 and 1992 the European powers and the US supported the
secession of three Yugoslav republics—Slovenia, Croatia and
Bosnia—without allowing any expression of the will of the Yugoslav
people as a whole, or any negotiations with Belgrade to secure the rights
of large Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia. These suddenly found
themselves stripped of their constitutional guarantees and ruled by hostile
nationalist regimes. As many had predicted, the inevitable result was an
eruption of civil war.
The Croatian nationalism of Tudjman, Muslim nationalism of Izetbegovic
and Albanian nationalism of the Kosovo Liberation Army are no less
intolerant and reactionary than the politics of Milosevic. In the successive
civil wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, all sides have resorted to
methods of “ethnic cleansing,” not simply the Serbs.
What set Milosevic up for demonization and destruction, however, was
the conclusion reached by the United States that Serb nationalism cut
across its strategic interests in the Balkans. Thus Washington came to
support, financially, politically and militarily, the nationalist cliques
in
Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo as instruments of its policy directed against
Serbia. In Kosovo this first took the form of covert CIA support for the
KLA, which began several years ago to wage an armed struggle for the
secession of the province from Serbia.
This is the real context within which the US decided to go to war. The
US-NATO bombing, on top of the ongoing struggle between Belgrade
and the KLA, created the conditions for the eruption on a mass scale of
Serb violence against Albanians, and the reprisals by Albanians against
Serbs which have followed the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from
Kosovo.