BY MARJALEENA REPO
The Yugoslavian government has just expelled some
journalists from NATO countries from its territory. This is
deplored by the media as censorship, but in some of us it has
created a strange sense of relief: perhaps now there will be
a
ceasefire in the 10-year disinformation campaign about the
Yugoslavian conflict in general and the Serbs in particular.
Or
at least the journalists (few actually deserve the name) have
to declare that what they are talking about is unverified
rumour and hearsay since they are nowhere near the scene.
Up to this point they have been able to create the false
impression that they have witnessed the events they report
on.
The Western media's relentless demonization of the Serbs of
Yugoslavia has, however, produced a very predictable (and
no doubt, wished-for) result: a truly genocidal assault on the
Serbian people by Western military might, Canada to its
eternal shame participating, breaking every relevant
international covenant and treaty.
The pack-journalism over the last ten years has also
succeeded in hoodwinking many Canadians into thinking that
what is at stake is the good-riddance of a Serbian Hitler who
has attempted a "final solution" of sorts on assorted ethnic
groups in Yugoslavia. A lot of well- intentioned people are
cheering the bombing of yet another pariah nation into the
Stone Age. With the accumulated effects of mediarumour-
mongering and willful disinformation, who can blame these
folks for their barely controlled blood thirst? After all,
because Hitler wasn't stopped in time, millions perished in
concentration camps, goes the heart-felt argument.
Yet the labelling of Yugoslavia's Serb leaders as Hitlers and
the Serbs themselves as brutal, subhuman monsters is a
familiar trick from recent history. It has been perpetuated by
the various hired hands, PR firms, who have worked
overtime for the various ethnic groups pushing for secession
which would utterly destroy the once well-functioning, multi-
ethnic Yugoslavian federation and replace it with small
nation-states which ethnically cleansed themselves (Croatia,
for instance, expelled between 500,000 and a million Serbs
from its territory.) The media has merely carried the message
of these "hidden hands" of the Balkan conflict.
The world was shocked to find out that a PR firm, Hill and
Knowlton, had manufactured the "incubator babies" incident
in Kuwait which precipitated the Gulf War: Iraqi soldiers
ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in a genocidal
fashion. Phony eywitnesses to this atrocity tearfully testified
in front of U.S. politicians and the media, adding to public
support for the subsequent bombing of Iraq and contributing
hugely to the demonization of the Iraqis, leaders and citizens
alike. Even Amnesty International was taken in by the
falsehood, which was later exposed as such, but only after the
military damage was done.
Yet the shock of being duped soon wore off and gullibility
returned. In no time another American PR firm, Ruder Finn,
working for the Croatian and Bosnian separatists, publicly
bragged that it had been able to turn world opinion against the
Serbs. In April 1993 on French television, James Harff, the
director of Ruder Finn, described his proudest public relations
effort as having "managed to put Jewish opinion on our
[Croatian and Bosnian] side." This was a "sensitive matter,"
he added, as "the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by
real and cruel anti- semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews
perished in Croatian camps... Our
challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded
masterfully. At the beginning of July 1992, New York
Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We
jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three
big Jewish organizations.... That was a tremendous coup.
When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side
of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the
Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood
what was happening in Yugoslavia.... By a single move, we
were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad
guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting
the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear
change of language in the press, with the use of words with
high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration
camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the
gas chambers of Auschwitz. "
The PR firm was piling hoax upon hoax. The famous story of
Serb concentration camps was built on a photo of a gaunt
man surrounded by others, staring at the viewer from behind
barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to the bones. It took
years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in an
article titled "The picture that fooled the world," described
how the famous photo was staged by its takers, British
journalists, who were photographing the inhabitants from
inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural products
and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp; the
men stood outside of it; and at no time was there a
barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. But by that time the
image had done its deed, terminally slamming the Serbs as
genocidal mass murderers.
There are countless other stories, all deliberately maligning
the Serbs to further the ends of military intervention. These
stories and photos of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" (a la
Hitler) in a civil war, in which Serbs are guilty as sin and
others are their innocent victims, are repeated ad nauseam by
western reporters without the slightest evidence, and have
provided the ground for the public's (hopefully only
temporary) acceptance of the illegal and brutal war against the
sovereign nation of Yugoslavia.
They continue after NATO's bombing began, unabated, with
new absurdities such as the suggestion that the Serbs are
really bombing themselves! Perhaps in the war crimes court
there will soon be a place for journalists and PR firms who
with their inflammatory reporting and fraudulent actions
cause wars to begin.
MARJALEENA REPO is a free lance writer with a special
interest injustice issues. She is also the national organizer
of
Citizens Concerned About Free Trade. She lives and works in
Saskatoon and Toronto (Canada).She can be reached by
e-mail: ccafttor@sympatico.ca