By Philip Hammond
'A Good Day', said Nato on 14 May, when it killed at least 87
ethnic Albanian refugees in the
village of Korisa, and injured a hundred more. What would constitute
a 'bad day' for Nato? The
bullish response was part of an increasingly strident propaganda
campaign in which each new
bloody 'accident' is offset by repeated atrocity stories about
the Serbs and pictures of the plight of
refugees.
'We do not target civilians', says Nato spokesman Jamie Shea.
Yet it stretches credibility to
describe all Nato attacks on civilians as 'accidents'.
The bombs that hit Nis marketplace on 3
May, for example, were cluster bombs designed to kill and maim
people with shrapnel, although
the stated target was an airport runway. Similarly, when
Nato hit a bus on 1 May, killing 47
people, was it also an accident that Nato aircraft returned for
a second strike, hitting an ambulance
and injuring medical staff at the scene? It is certain
at least that the attack on the television building
in Belgrade was carried out in the full knowledge that civilians
were inside. Nato's definition of a
'legitimate military target' is flexible enough to include homes,
schools and hospitals.
The catalogue of disastrous 'accidents' presents a challenge for
Nato spin doctors. The protocol
is to start by blaming the Serbs. When US State Department
spokesman James Rubin suggested
the refugees at Korisa may have been hit by Serb shells not Nato
bombs, he was following a
procedure established over civilian bomb damage to Pristina and
the bombing of the Djakovica
refugee convoy. Both were initially pinned on the Serbs
in the hope that the first headlines would
make a lasting impression. After promising a 'thorough
investigation', Nato then admits some
culpability, but continues to hint that the enemy is really to
blame. In the case of Korisa, this was
accomplished by claiming the refugees were being used as 'human
shields'. According to Western
reporters at the scene there was no military target at Korisa.
Yet the Serbs apparently knew the
village would be bombed on 14 May and therefore hurried to re-populate
it just in time.
This 'blame-the-enemy' strategy was taken to absurd lengths by
Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon,
who suggested the Serbs' aim at Korisa was to cause a public
relations disaster for Nato.
(Perhaps the cunning Chinese moved their embassy for the same
reason?) British politicians have
also expressed frustration at bad publicity, adopting a 'shoot-the-messenger'
approach. Prime
Minister Tony Blair described his speech to the Newspaper Society
on 10 May as 'not an attack
on the media'. Presumably he meant this in the same sense
that Nato's round-the-clock bombing
campaign is 'not a war'. In fact New Labour have
attacked the media from the beginning,
portraying John Simpson's reports as Serbian propaganda, and
denouncing as 'appeasers' those
who question the effectiveness of Nato strategy.
Blair complains that 'refugee fatigue' has set in, and that journalists
are being manipulated by the
Serbs into concentrating too much on the civilian damage and
death caused by Nato action. The
opposite is true. Kosovo has sometimes slipped down the
news agenda, but reports from the
refugee centres have featured almost daily in the news.
And although there have been some
high-profile Nato errors, other attacks on civilian targets have
attracted less attention. The TV
station in Novi Sad bombed on 3 May barely merited a mention,
and the hospital hit on 20 May
did not make a single front page. The style of reporting
on ethnic Albanian refugees has been
highly emotive, in contrast to the implacable lack of interest
in Serbs fleeing Nato bombs. One
BBC correspondent found he was 'running out of words to describe
how these people have
suffered, except to say that it's cruel, brutal, inhumane and
criminal'. He went on to say: 'it's high
time it stopped'. Like Blair, some reporters evidently
know that such coverage can be effective
pro-Nato propaganda.
In his Newspaper Society speech, Blair also linked reporting on
refugees to coverage of atrocity
stories. 'When you've reported one mass rape, the next
one's not so newsworthy' he commented
sarcastically, 'see one mass grave, you've seen the lot'.
In fact there has been a constant stream of
atrocity stories, often based on the flimsiest of evidence.
The source for these stories is sometimes
Nato politicians with an obvious interest in manipulating the
news, many of whose claims - that
Pristina stadium was being used as a concentration camp, for
example - have been false.
The other source is refugees themselves, although they have sometimes
proved unreliable
witnesses. Even when told they had been bombed by Nato,
survivors of the attack on the
Djakovica convoy blamed the Serbs. From the viewpoint of ethnic
Albanians who welcome Nato
action, such statements are understandable. But it is less
obvious why Western reporters should
be determined to accept them. Channel Four News, for example,
reported a large exodus from
Prizren on 29 April, the day after the town had been heavily
bombed by Nato. Yet this was not
even mentioned as a possible reason for the flight of refugees.
Instead, one man was interviewed
who thought he had heard 'a different kind of explosion in the
early hours' and suspected it was
'Serbian police shelling a house near him'.
The atrocity stories are taken on trust for two reasons.
First, Nato politicians have successfully
demonised the Serbs, who are now portrayed as the new Nazis,
perpetrating genocide and
capable of anything. Although they are under bombardment
from up to 700 Nato sorties a day,
we are asked to believe that Serbian soldiers are simultaneously
fighting the Kosovo Liberation
Army, attacking Albania, preparing to overthrow the Montenegrin
government, burning villages,
deporting hundreds of thousands of people, keeping thousands
more as human shields, forcing
ethnic Albanian men to don orange uniforms and dig graves, digging
the bodies up again and
moving them, herding boys around as mobile blood banks, and raping
thousands of women. As if
they were not busy enough, we are now told they spend their time
thinking up ways to embarrass
Nato.
Secondly, the Bosnian war is cited as a precedent which lends
credibility to current claims. The
BBC's Matt Frei, for example, said 'there can now be no doubt
that Serbian security forces have
been and may still be involved in the systematic rape of Kosovar
women. We don't know the
exact numbers, but if the Bosnian war, where the same thing happened,
is anything to go by, the
victims could be in their thousands'. The claim that
more than 50,000 Muslim women were raped
by Serbs in Bosnia is regularly bandied about. Yet a 1993
United Nations commission scaled
down to 2,400 victims - including Serbs and Croats - based on
119 documented cases. Frei also
wrote in the Sunday Telegraph of suspicions that 'there may be
scores, perhaps hundreds, of rape
camps inside Kosovo, just as there were in Bosnia'. Strange,
then, that no one ever found a single
'rape camp' in Bosnia, and that a member of a European Community
team sent to find such camps
in 1992 resigned because the delegation interviewed only four
victims before making its report that
20,000 women had been raped.
Bosnia is also mentioned to support claims that the Serbs are
exhuming mass graves and moving
the bodies to sites bombed by Nato or areas once occupied by
the KLA. This unlikely story is a
chilling development in the propaganda war, especially when coupled
with the allegation about
'human shields'. As Nato's ever-intensifying and often
inaccurate bombing continues, we can
expect the casualties it causes will all be blamed on the Serbs.
Next time, it will be the experience
of Kosovo which is cited as the 'proof' to support claims of
enemy atrocities.
Philip Hammond is senior lecturer in media at South Bank University
and worked as a consultant on
BBC2's Counterblast: Against the War (4 May). His articles
on the propaganda war, written for the Times, Independent and Broadcast,
are available at www.fair.org.
Email: hammonpb@sbu.ac.uk