Sul lavoro effettuato dai criminali della agenzia di lobbying
"Ruder&Finn" per fomentare la guerra nei Balcani si veda:
http://www.marx2001.org/crj/DOCS/ruderfinn.html
http://www.marx2001.org/crj/DOCS/desinf.html
---
STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
RUDER FINN - Boycott ALL of their clients!!!
Ruder Finn has repeatedly distributed false accusations against the
Yugoslav
nation and the Serbian people, with both the intention AND THE RESULT of
inciting other governments to engage in armed attacks, sanctions, and
other
unprovoked acts of destruction against the Yugoslav nation and the
Serbian
people.
"Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" is punishable,
according
to Article 3 of the U.N. General Assembly resolution 260 A (III),
"Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
(See
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm).
>The following acts shall be punishable:
>(a) Genocide;
>(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
>(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
>(d ) Attempt to commit genocide;
>(e) Complicity in genocide.
Therefore, Ruder Finn and its owners and employees are war criminals in
the
tradition of Josef Goebbels and Julius Streicher.
What to do about it? The best way to shut down this, or any other,
public
relations firm once and for all is to boycott ALL of their clients.
DON'T buy ANYTHING from ANY of their clients. And tell those clients why
you
aren't buying from them!
DON'T subscribe to any periodical that carries an ad for Ruder-Finn's
public
relations services. And write to that periodical explaining what is
wrong
with Ruder Finn!
DON'T travel to any country or locality that uses their services, unless
you
are traveling to Kosovo to assist beleaguered Serbs or Roma.
PASS THIS MESSAGE ALONG!!!
Alida Weber
"NEXT YEAR IN KOSOVO!"
=====================================================
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2000 9:10 AM
Subject: [STOPNATO] Ruder Finn
http://www.plannedtelevisionarts.com/intl/index.html
RUDER FINN STILL AT IT
travel & tourism clients | international relations clients | economic
development clients
Travel & Tourism clients
American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA)
Association of Croatian Travel Agencies
ATLAS Travel Agency of Dubrovnik
Australian Tourist Commission
Barbados Tourism Authority
Canadian Airlines
Cathay Pacific Airways
City of Cannes and Convention Center
Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Public Library; Regional Transportation
Authority
Croatia National Tourist Board
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau
Finnair
Hilton Hotels Corporation
Howard Johnson
Hyatt Hotel Corporation
New Orleans
Qantas Airways
South African Airways
St. James Club/Los Angeles
The Tudor Hotel (New York)
Toronto, Canada: Toronto International Festival; Toronto Transit
Commission
Universal Studios, Florida
Vail / Beaver Creek, Colorado
Westin Hotels
travel & tourism clients | international relations clients | economic
development clients
International Relations Clients
American Society of Travel Agents
Atlas Travel of Dubrovnik
Axa-Medi Assurances
Croatian National Tourism Office
European Council of American Chambers of Commerce
Fyffes Bananas
Plastico Limited
Republic of Albania
Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Republic of Croatia
Republic of El Salvador
Republic of Estonia
Republic of Kosova
The Rebuild Dubrovnik Fund
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
World Alpine Ski Championships
This is truly am interesting post.
Reminds me of my days in college in American Government class listening
to
all the Second Amendment arguments and wondering what it was all about!
(?)
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2000 9:10 AM
Subject: [STOPNATO] Ruder Finn
>> STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
>>
>> I suggest everyone check out Ruder Finns website. A
>> list of Ruder Finns
>> clients can be found at
>>
>(http://www.plannedtelevisionarts.com/intl/index.html).
>> They include such
>> non-existent states as the Republic of Kosova and
>> the Turkish Republic of
>> Northern Cyprus. Other Balkan clients include,
>> Bosnia, Albania,
>> Croatia...hmmm, does this firm have a political
>> agenda or what?
>>
>"We have the best congress money can buy!"
>This could very well be the slogan of this PR firm and
>the others working for the forses of genocide and
>anti-Serb racism on Capitol Hill.
>As a American I am ashamed to say that these firms
>have bought access to our corupt and criminal national
>government which is now involved in the slaughter and
>genocide of the Serbian people.
>I would like to add that these firms have also locked
>us out of congress so that common sense and humanity
>cannot get through.
>As an American I am UPSET that these governments can
>come here to my country and have more access to MY
>government that I do. They use this access to spread
>hate.
>congress is committing genocide because the price is
>right.
>We may soon have to take that original rights of self
>defense and clear house on capital hill.
---
STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
http://swans.com
Swans
The Media and their Atrocities
by Michael Parenti
May 22, 2000
For the better part of a decade the U.S. public has been bombarded with
a media campaign to demonize the Serbian people and their elected
leaders. During that time, the U.S. government has pursued a goal of
breaking up Yugoslavia into a cluster of small, weak, dependent,
free-market principalities. Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern
Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector
economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It
was--and what's left of it, still is--charting an independent course not
in keeping with the New World Order.
Targeting the Serbs
Of the various Yugoslav peoples, the Serbs were targeted for
demonization because they were the largest nationality and the one most
opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. But what of the atrocities they
committed? All sides committed atrocities in the fighting that has been
encouraged by the western powers over the last decade, but the reporting
has been consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents of Croat and Muslim
atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press, and
when they did they were accorded only passing mention.1 Meanwhile Serb
atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabricated, as we shall
see. Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the Hague War
Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and
elsewhere. Where were the U.S. television crews when these war crimes
were being committed? John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald
Concentration Camp, USA, asks: Where were the TV cameras when hundreds
of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?2 The official
line, faithfully parroted in the U.S. media, is that Bosnian Serb forces
committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.
Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when
they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the five hundred premature babies
whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait? A story
repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication years later.
During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of pursuing an
official policy of rape. "Go forth and rape" a Bosnian Serb commander
supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that story
never could be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far
as we know, no such utterance was ever made. Even the New York Times
belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that "the existence of
'a systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to be proved."3
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000
Muslim women, the stories varied. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not
more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military
engagements. A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of
massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian
governments and had no credible supporting evidence. Common sense would
dictate that these stories be treated with the utmost skepticism--and
not be used as an excuse for an aggressive and punitive policy against
Yugoslavia.
The "mass rape" propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify the
continued NATO slaughter of Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco
Examiner (April 26, 1999) tells us: "SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE,
KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY." No evidence or testimony is given to support the
charge of organized rape. Only at the bottom of the story, in the
nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo
mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found
no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the
dozens "and not many dozens," according to the OSCE spokesperson. This
same story did note in passing that the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal
sentenced a Bosnian Croat military commander to ten years in prison for
failing to stop his troops from raping Muslim women in 1993--an atrocity
we heard little about when it was happening.
A few dozen rapes is a few dozen too many. But can it serve as one of
the justifications for a massive war? If Mr. Clinton wanted to stop
rapes, he could have begun a little closer to home in Washington D.C.,
where dozens of rapes occur every month. Indeed, he might be able to
alert us to how women are sexually mistreated on Capitol Hill and in the
White House itself.
The Serbs were blamed for the infamous Sarajevo market massacre. But
according to the report leaked out on French TV, Western intelligence
knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in
the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international
negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his
memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.4
On one occasion, notes Barry Lituchy, the New York Times ran a photo
purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact
the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an
obscure retraction the following week.5
The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that
even prominent personages on the Left--who oppose the NATO policy
against Yugoslavia--have felt compelled to genuflect before this
demonization orthodoxy, referring to unspecified and unverified Serbian
"brutality" and "the monstrous Milosevic."6 Thus they reveal themselves
as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they
criticize on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of
Milosevic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim
that Serb forces are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to
challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's
aggression against Yugoslavia.
The Ethnic Cleansing Hype
Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo
had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo
Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources put the figure at 800. Such
casualties reveal a civil war, not genocide. Belgrade is condemned for
the forced expulsion policy of Albanians from Kosovo. But such
expulsions began in substantial numbers only after the NATO bombings,
with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces especially from areas where
KLA mercenaries were operating
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands also fled Kosovo because
it was being mercilessly bombed by NATO, or because it was the scene of
sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or
because they were just afraid and hungry. An Albanian woman crossing
into Macedonia was eagerly asked by a news crew if she had been forced
out by Serb police. She responded: "There were no Serbs. We were
frightened of the [NATO] bombs."7 I had to read this in the San
Francisco Guardian, an alternative weekly, not in the New York Times or
Washington Post.
During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of
Kosovo took flight (mostly north but some to the south), as did
thousands of Roma and others.8 Were the Serbs ethnically cleansing
themselves? Or were these people not fleeing the bombing and the ground
war? Yet, the refugee tide caused by the bombing was repeatedly used by
U.S. war makers as justification for the bombing, a pressure put on
Milosevic to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."9
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers--usually
well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, trucks, or
cars, many of them young men of recruitment age--they were described as
being "slaughtered." It was repeatedly reported that "Serb
atrocities"--not the extensive ground war with the KLA and certainly not
the massive NATO bombing--"drove more than one million Albanians from
their homes."10 More recently, there have been hints that Albanian
Kosovar refugees numbered nowhere near that number.
Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced expulsion of Albanian
villagers were described as "genocide." But experts in surveillance
photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a
"propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence.
State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000
missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous," according to these
independent critics.11 Their findings were ignored by the major networks
and other national media.
Early in the war, Newsday reported that Britain and France were
seriously considering "commando assaults into Kosovo to break the
pattern of Serbian massacres of ethnic Albanians."12 What discernible
pattern of massacres? Of course, no commando assaults were put into
operation, but the story served its purpose of hyping an image of mass
killings.
An ABC "Nightline" show made dramatic and repeated references to the
"Serbian atrocities in Kosovo" while offering no specifics. Ted Kopple
asked a group of angry Albanian refugees, what specifically had they
witnessed. They pointed to an old man in their group who wore a wool
hat. One of them reenacted what the Serbs had done to him, throwing the
man's hat to the ground and stepping on it-"because the Serbs knew that
his hat was the most important thing to him." Kopple was appropriately
horrified about this "war crime," the only example offered in an
hour-long program.
A widely circulated story in the New York Times, headlined "U.S. REPORT
OUTLINES SERB ATTACKS IN KOSOVO," tells us that the State Department
issued "the most comprehensive documentary record to date on
atrocities." The report concluded that there had been organized rapes
and systematic executions. But as one reads further and more closely
into the article, one finds that State Department reports of such crimes
"depend almost entirely on information from refugee accounts. There was
no suggestion that American intelligence agencies had been able to
verify, most, or even many, of the accounts . . . and the word
'reportedly' and 'allegedly' appear throughout the document."13
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about
atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence or credible
specifics. One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist,
while her husband told him how all the women had been robbed of their
jewelry and other possessions. A spokesman for the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like
hundreds of killings in three villages, but when Gillan pressed him for
more precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six
teenage rape victims. But he had not spoken to any witnesses, and
admitted that "we have no way of verifying these reports."14
Gillan notes that some refugees had seen killings and other atrocities,
but there was little to suggest that they had seen it on the scale that
was being reported. One afternoon, officials in charge said there were
refugees arriving who talked of sixty or more being killed in one
village and fifty in another, but Gillan "could not find one eye-witness
who actually saw these things happening." Yet every day western
journalists reported "hundreds" of rapes and murders. Sometimes they
noted in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated, but then
why were such unverified stories being so eagerly reported in the first
place?
The Disappearing "Mass Graves"
After NATO forces occupied Kosovo, the stories about mass atrocities
continued fortissimo. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic
Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in
western Kosovo. They "might be" or they might not be. These estimates
were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting
down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies"
discovered near a large ash heap.15
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO occupation
that 10,000 Albanians had been killed (down from the 100,000 and even
500,000 Albanian men supposedly executed during the war). No evidence
was ever offered to support the 10,000 figure, nor even to explain how
it was arrived at so swiftly and surely while NATO troops were still
moving into place and did not occupy but small portions of the province.
Likewise, repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves," each
purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims
also failed to materialize. Through the summer of 1999, the media hype
about mass graves devolved into an occasional unspecified reference. The
few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or
sometimes twice that number, but with no certain evidence regarding
causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there
was reason to believe the victims were Serbs.16
On April 19, 1999, while the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were going on,
the State Department announced that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were
missing and feared dead. On May 16, U.S. Secretary of Defense William
Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine now serving in President
Clinton's Democratic Administration, stated that 100,000 military-aged
ethnic Albanian men had vanished and might have been killed by the
Serbs.17 Such widely varying but horrendous figures from official
sources went unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals who
supported NATO's "humanitarian rescue operation." Among these latter
were some supposedly progressive members of Congress who seemed to
believe they were witnessing another Nazi Holocaust.
On June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office
Minister Geoff Hoon said that "in more than 100 massacres" some 10,000
ethnic Albanians had been killed (down from the 500,000 and 100,000
bandied about by U.S. officials)."18 A day or two after the bombings
stopped, the Associate Press and other news agency, echoing Hoon,
reported that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs.19 No
explanation was given as to how this figure was arrived at, especially
since not a single war site had yet been investigated and NATO forces
had barely begun to move into Kosovo. On August 2, Bernard Kouchner, the
United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo (and organizer of Doctors
Without Borders), asserted that about 11,000 bodies had been found in
common graves throughout Kosovo. He cited as his source the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia
(ICTY). But the ICTY denied providing any such information. To this day,
it is not clear how Kouchner came up with his estimate.20
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings
was hyped once again. Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass
graves," each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of
Albanian victims were publicized in daily media reports. In September
1999, Jared Israel did an internet search for newspaper articles,
appearing over the previous three months including the words "Kosovo"
and "mass grave." The report came back: "More than 1000-- too many to
list." Limiting his search to articles in the New York Times , he came
up with eighty, nearly one a day. Yet when it came down to hard
evidence, the mass graves seemed to disappear.
Thus, in mid-June, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites
listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, one
purportedly containing six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged
107,000 pounds of equipment into Kosovo to handle what was called the
"largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history," but it came up with
no reports about mass graves. Not long after, on July 1, the FBI team
returned home, oddly with not a word to say about their investigation.21
Forensic experts from other NATO countries had similar experiences. A
Spanish forensic team, for instance, was told to prepare for at least
2,000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual
graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture. Most seemed to have
been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert,
Emilio Perez Puhola, acknowledged that his team did not find one mass
grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves
as being part of the "machinery of war propaganda."22
The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried
in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Or they
might not. Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials
refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions
"four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large ash heap, with no
details as to who they might be or how they died.23
In late August 1999, the Los Angeles Times tried to salvage the genocide
theme with a story about how the wells of Kosovo might be "mass graves
in their own right." The Times claimed that "many corpses have been
dumped into wells in Kosovo . . . Serbian forces apparently
stuffed...many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their
campaign of terror."24 Apparently? Whenever the story got down to
specifics, it dwelled on only one village and only one well--in which
one body of a 39-year-old male was found, along with three dead cows and
a dog. Neither his nationality nor cause of death was given. Nor was it
clear who owned the well. "No other human remains were discovered," the
Times lamely concluded. As far as I know, neither the Los Angeles Times
nor any other media outlet ran any more stories of wells stuffed with
victims.
In one grave site after another, bodies were failing to materialize in
any substantial numbers-or any numbers at all. In July 1999, a mass
grave in Ljubenic, near Pec (an area of concerted fighting), believed to
be holding some 350 corpses, produced only seven after the exhumation.
In Djacovica, town officials claimed that one hundred ethnic Albanians
had been murdered, but there were no bodies because the Serbs had
returned in the middle of the night, dug them up, and carted them away,
the officials seemed to believe. In Pusto Selo, villagers claimed that
106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March, but again
no remains were discovered. Villagers once more suggested that Serb
forces must have come back and removed them. How they accomplished this
without being detected was not explained. In Izbica, refugees reported
that 150 ethnic Albanians were executed in March. But their bodies were
nowhere to be found. In Kraljan, 82 men were supposedly killed, but
investigators found not a single cadaver.25
The worst incident of mass atrocities ascribed to Yugoslavian leader
Slobodan Milosevic allegedly occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by
U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down
the shafts or disposed of them in the mine's vats of hydrochloric acid.
In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic
teams investigating Trepca. Not one body was found in the mine shafts,
nor was there any evidence that the vats had ever been used in an
attempt to dissolve human remains.26
By late autumn of 1999, the media hype about mass graves had fizzled
noticeably. The many sites unearthed, considered to be the most
notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the thousands
or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and
with no evidence of torture or mass execution. In many cases, there was
no certain evidence regarding the nationality of victims.27 No mass
killings means that the Hague War Crimes Tribunal indictment of
Milosevic "becomes highly questionable," notes Richard Gwyn. "Even more
questionable is the West's continued punishment of the Serbs."28
No doubt there were graves in Kosovo that contained two or more persons
(which is NATO's definition of a "mass grave"). People were killed by
bombs and by the extensive land war that went on between Yugoslav and
KLA forces. Some of the dead, as even the New York Times allowed, "are
fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary
deaths"-- as would happen in any large population over time.29 And no
doubt there were grudge killings and summary executions as in any war,
but not on a scale that would warrant the label of genocide and justify
the massive death and destruction and the continuing misery inflicted
upon Yugoslavia by the western powers.
We should remember that the propaganda campaign waged by NATO officials
and the major media never claimed merely that atrocities (murders and
rapes) occurred. Such crimes occur in every war, indeed, in many
communities during peacetime. What the media propaganda campaign against
Yugoslavia charged was that mass atrocities and mass rapes and mass
murders had been perpetrated, that is, genocide, as evidenced by mass
graves.
In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office
privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic
cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in Kosovo, an
explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not
verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were]
not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined
group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged
supporters."30
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced
expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary executions of a hundred
or so individuals, again, alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO
bombing had started, yet were used as justification for the bombing. The
biggest war criminal of all is NATO and the political leaders who
orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction. But here is
how the White House and the U.S. media reasoned at the time: Since the
aerial attacks do not intend to kill civilians, then presumably there is
no liability and no accountability, only an occasional apology for the
regrettable mistakes-as if only the intent of an action counted and not
its ineluctable effects. In fact, a perpetrator can be judged guilty of
willful murder without explicitly intending the death of a particular
victim--as when the death results from an unlawful act that the
perpetrator knew would likely cause death. George Kenney, a former State
Department official under the Bush Administration, put it well:
"Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result
in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing."31
In sum, through a process of monopoly control and distribution,
repetition and image escalation, the media achieve self-confirmation,
that is, they find confirmation for the images they fabricate in the
images they have already fabricated. Hyperbolic labeling takes the place
of evidence: "genocide," "mass atrocities," "systematic rapes" and even
"rape camps"--camps which no one has ever located. Through this process,
evidence is not only absent, it becomes irrelevant.
So the U.S. major media (and much of the minor media) are not free and
independent, as they claim, they are not the watchdog of democracy but
the lapdog of the national security state. They help reverse the roles
of victims and victimizers, warmongers and peacekeepers, reactionaries
and reformers. The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any
war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
--------------
Michael Parenti is the author of Against Empire and America Besieged.
His most recent book is History as Mystery (City Lights Books).
Notes:
1. For instance, Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops
'Cleansed' the Serbs," New York Times, March 21, 1999, a revealing
report that has been ignored in the relentless propaganda campaign
against the Serbs.
2. John Ranz in his paid advertisement in the New York Times, April 29,
1993.
3. "Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia," New York Times, October 23,
1993.
4. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, p. 262.
5. Barry Lituchy, "Media Deception and the Yugoslav Civil War," in NATO
in the Balkans, p. 205; see also New York Times, August 7, 1993.
6. Both Noam Chomsky in his comments on Pacifica Radio, April 7, 1999,
and Alexander Cockburn in the Nation, May 10, 1999, describe Milosevic
as "monstrous" without offering any specifics.
7. Brooke Shelby Biggs, "Failure to Inform," San Francisco Bay Guardian,
May 5, 1999, p. 25.
8 Washington Post, June 6, 1999.
9. See for instance, Robert Burns, Associated Press report, April 22,
1999.
10. For example, New York Times, June 15, 1998.
11. Charles Radin and Louise Palmer, "Experts Voice Doubts on Claims of
Genocide: Little Evidence for NATO Assertions," San Francisco Chronicle,
April 22, 1999.
12. Newsday, March 31, 1999.
13. New York Times, May 11, 1999.
14. Audrey Gillan "What's the Story?" London Review of Books, May 27,
1999.
15. Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
16. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof
NATO Fails to Protect Serbs," New York Times, August 27, 1999.
17. Both the State Department and Cohen's figures are reported in the
New York Times, November 11, 1999.
18. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
19. Associate Press release, June 18, 1999. Reuters (July 12, 1999)
reported that NATO forces had catalogued more than one hundred sites
containing the bodies of massacred ethnic Albanians.
20. Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's
Killing Fields?" Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
21. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, "Playing the Numbers Game"
(www.aim.org/mm/1999/08/03.htm).
22. London Sunday Times, October 31, 1999.
23. Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
24. Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1999.
25. Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's
Killing Fields?" Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
26. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
27. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof
NATO Fails to Protect Serbs," New York Times, August 27, 1999.
28. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
29. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
30. Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, January 12,
1999 and October 29, 1998 to the German Administrative Courts,
translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, April 20, 1999.
31. Teach-in, Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, May 23, 1999.
http://www.swans.com
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
"Ruder&Finn" per fomentare la guerra nei Balcani si veda:
http://www.marx2001.org/crj/DOCS/ruderfinn.html
http://www.marx2001.org/crj/DOCS/desinf.html
---
STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
RUDER FINN - Boycott ALL of their clients!!!
Ruder Finn has repeatedly distributed false accusations against the
Yugoslav
nation and the Serbian people, with both the intention AND THE RESULT of
inciting other governments to engage in armed attacks, sanctions, and
other
unprovoked acts of destruction against the Yugoslav nation and the
Serbian
people.
"Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" is punishable,
according
to Article 3 of the U.N. General Assembly resolution 260 A (III),
"Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
(See
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm).
>The following acts shall be punishable:
>(a) Genocide;
>(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
>(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
>(d ) Attempt to commit genocide;
>(e) Complicity in genocide.
Therefore, Ruder Finn and its owners and employees are war criminals in
the
tradition of Josef Goebbels and Julius Streicher.
What to do about it? The best way to shut down this, or any other,
public
relations firm once and for all is to boycott ALL of their clients.
DON'T buy ANYTHING from ANY of their clients. And tell those clients why
you
aren't buying from them!
DON'T subscribe to any periodical that carries an ad for Ruder-Finn's
public
relations services. And write to that periodical explaining what is
wrong
with Ruder Finn!
DON'T travel to any country or locality that uses their services, unless
you
are traveling to Kosovo to assist beleaguered Serbs or Roma.
PASS THIS MESSAGE ALONG!!!
Alida Weber
"NEXT YEAR IN KOSOVO!"
=====================================================
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2000 9:10 AM
Subject: [STOPNATO] Ruder Finn
http://www.plannedtelevisionarts.com/intl/index.html
RUDER FINN STILL AT IT
travel & tourism clients | international relations clients | economic
development clients
Travel & Tourism clients
American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA)
Association of Croatian Travel Agencies
ATLAS Travel Agency of Dubrovnik
Australian Tourist Commission
Barbados Tourism Authority
Canadian Airlines
Cathay Pacific Airways
City of Cannes and Convention Center
Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Public Library; Regional Transportation
Authority
Croatia National Tourist Board
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau
Finnair
Hilton Hotels Corporation
Howard Johnson
Hyatt Hotel Corporation
New Orleans
Qantas Airways
South African Airways
St. James Club/Los Angeles
The Tudor Hotel (New York)
Toronto, Canada: Toronto International Festival; Toronto Transit
Commission
Universal Studios, Florida
Vail / Beaver Creek, Colorado
Westin Hotels
travel & tourism clients | international relations clients | economic
development clients
International Relations Clients
American Society of Travel Agents
Atlas Travel of Dubrovnik
Axa-Medi Assurances
Croatian National Tourism Office
European Council of American Chambers of Commerce
Fyffes Bananas
Plastico Limited
Republic of Albania
Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Republic of Croatia
Republic of El Salvador
Republic of Estonia
Republic of Kosova
The Rebuild Dubrovnik Fund
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
World Alpine Ski Championships
This is truly am interesting post.
Reminds me of my days in college in American Government class listening
to
all the Second Amendment arguments and wondering what it was all about!
(?)
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2000 9:10 AM
Subject: [STOPNATO] Ruder Finn
>> STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
>>
>> I suggest everyone check out Ruder Finns website. A
>> list of Ruder Finns
>> clients can be found at
>>
>(http://www.plannedtelevisionarts.com/intl/index.html).
>> They include such
>> non-existent states as the Republic of Kosova and
>> the Turkish Republic of
>> Northern Cyprus. Other Balkan clients include,
>> Bosnia, Albania,
>> Croatia...hmmm, does this firm have a political
>> agenda or what?
>>
>"We have the best congress money can buy!"
>This could very well be the slogan of this PR firm and
>the others working for the forses of genocide and
>anti-Serb racism on Capitol Hill.
>As a American I am ashamed to say that these firms
>have bought access to our corupt and criminal national
>government which is now involved in the slaughter and
>genocide of the Serbian people.
>I would like to add that these firms have also locked
>us out of congress so that common sense and humanity
>cannot get through.
>As an American I am UPSET that these governments can
>come here to my country and have more access to MY
>government that I do. They use this access to spread
>hate.
>congress is committing genocide because the price is
>right.
>We may soon have to take that original rights of self
>defense and clear house on capital hill.
---
STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
http://swans.com
Swans
The Media and their Atrocities
by Michael Parenti
May 22, 2000
For the better part of a decade the U.S. public has been bombarded with
a media campaign to demonize the Serbian people and their elected
leaders. During that time, the U.S. government has pursued a goal of
breaking up Yugoslavia into a cluster of small, weak, dependent,
free-market principalities. Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern
Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector
economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It
was--and what's left of it, still is--charting an independent course not
in keeping with the New World Order.
Targeting the Serbs
Of the various Yugoslav peoples, the Serbs were targeted for
demonization because they were the largest nationality and the one most
opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. But what of the atrocities they
committed? All sides committed atrocities in the fighting that has been
encouraged by the western powers over the last decade, but the reporting
has been consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents of Croat and Muslim
atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press, and
when they did they were accorded only passing mention.1 Meanwhile Serb
atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabricated, as we shall
see. Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the Hague War
Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and
elsewhere. Where were the U.S. television crews when these war crimes
were being committed? John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald
Concentration Camp, USA, asks: Where were the TV cameras when hundreds
of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?2 The official
line, faithfully parroted in the U.S. media, is that Bosnian Serb forces
committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.
Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when
they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the five hundred premature babies
whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait? A story
repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication years later.
During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of pursuing an
official policy of rape. "Go forth and rape" a Bosnian Serb commander
supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that story
never could be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far
as we know, no such utterance was ever made. Even the New York Times
belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that "the existence of
'a systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to be proved."3
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000
Muslim women, the stories varied. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not
more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military
engagements. A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of
massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian
governments and had no credible supporting evidence. Common sense would
dictate that these stories be treated with the utmost skepticism--and
not be used as an excuse for an aggressive and punitive policy against
Yugoslavia.
The "mass rape" propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify the
continued NATO slaughter of Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco
Examiner (April 26, 1999) tells us: "SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE,
KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY." No evidence or testimony is given to support the
charge of organized rape. Only at the bottom of the story, in the
nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo
mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found
no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the
dozens "and not many dozens," according to the OSCE spokesperson. This
same story did note in passing that the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal
sentenced a Bosnian Croat military commander to ten years in prison for
failing to stop his troops from raping Muslim women in 1993--an atrocity
we heard little about when it was happening.
A few dozen rapes is a few dozen too many. But can it serve as one of
the justifications for a massive war? If Mr. Clinton wanted to stop
rapes, he could have begun a little closer to home in Washington D.C.,
where dozens of rapes occur every month. Indeed, he might be able to
alert us to how women are sexually mistreated on Capitol Hill and in the
White House itself.
The Serbs were blamed for the infamous Sarajevo market massacre. But
according to the report leaked out on French TV, Western intelligence
knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in
the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international
negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his
memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.4
On one occasion, notes Barry Lituchy, the New York Times ran a photo
purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact
the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an
obscure retraction the following week.5
The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that
even prominent personages on the Left--who oppose the NATO policy
against Yugoslavia--have felt compelled to genuflect before this
demonization orthodoxy, referring to unspecified and unverified Serbian
"brutality" and "the monstrous Milosevic."6 Thus they reveal themselves
as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they
criticize on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of
Milosevic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim
that Serb forces are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to
challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's
aggression against Yugoslavia.
The Ethnic Cleansing Hype
Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo
had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo
Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources put the figure at 800. Such
casualties reveal a civil war, not genocide. Belgrade is condemned for
the forced expulsion policy of Albanians from Kosovo. But such
expulsions began in substantial numbers only after the NATO bombings,
with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces especially from areas where
KLA mercenaries were operating
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands also fled Kosovo because
it was being mercilessly bombed by NATO, or because it was the scene of
sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or
because they were just afraid and hungry. An Albanian woman crossing
into Macedonia was eagerly asked by a news crew if she had been forced
out by Serb police. She responded: "There were no Serbs. We were
frightened of the [NATO] bombs."7 I had to read this in the San
Francisco Guardian, an alternative weekly, not in the New York Times or
Washington Post.
During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of
Kosovo took flight (mostly north but some to the south), as did
thousands of Roma and others.8 Were the Serbs ethnically cleansing
themselves? Or were these people not fleeing the bombing and the ground
war? Yet, the refugee tide caused by the bombing was repeatedly used by
U.S. war makers as justification for the bombing, a pressure put on
Milosevic to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."9
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers--usually
well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, trucks, or
cars, many of them young men of recruitment age--they were described as
being "slaughtered." It was repeatedly reported that "Serb
atrocities"--not the extensive ground war with the KLA and certainly not
the massive NATO bombing--"drove more than one million Albanians from
their homes."10 More recently, there have been hints that Albanian
Kosovar refugees numbered nowhere near that number.
Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced expulsion of Albanian
villagers were described as "genocide." But experts in surveillance
photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a
"propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence.
State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000
missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous," according to these
independent critics.11 Their findings were ignored by the major networks
and other national media.
Early in the war, Newsday reported that Britain and France were
seriously considering "commando assaults into Kosovo to break the
pattern of Serbian massacres of ethnic Albanians."12 What discernible
pattern of massacres? Of course, no commando assaults were put into
operation, but the story served its purpose of hyping an image of mass
killings.
An ABC "Nightline" show made dramatic and repeated references to the
"Serbian atrocities in Kosovo" while offering no specifics. Ted Kopple
asked a group of angry Albanian refugees, what specifically had they
witnessed. They pointed to an old man in their group who wore a wool
hat. One of them reenacted what the Serbs had done to him, throwing the
man's hat to the ground and stepping on it-"because the Serbs knew that
his hat was the most important thing to him." Kopple was appropriately
horrified about this "war crime," the only example offered in an
hour-long program.
A widely circulated story in the New York Times, headlined "U.S. REPORT
OUTLINES SERB ATTACKS IN KOSOVO," tells us that the State Department
issued "the most comprehensive documentary record to date on
atrocities." The report concluded that there had been organized rapes
and systematic executions. But as one reads further and more closely
into the article, one finds that State Department reports of such crimes
"depend almost entirely on information from refugee accounts. There was
no suggestion that American intelligence agencies had been able to
verify, most, or even many, of the accounts . . . and the word
'reportedly' and 'allegedly' appear throughout the document."13
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about
atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence or credible
specifics. One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist,
while her husband told him how all the women had been robbed of their
jewelry and other possessions. A spokesman for the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like
hundreds of killings in three villages, but when Gillan pressed him for
more precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six
teenage rape victims. But he had not spoken to any witnesses, and
admitted that "we have no way of verifying these reports."14
Gillan notes that some refugees had seen killings and other atrocities,
but there was little to suggest that they had seen it on the scale that
was being reported. One afternoon, officials in charge said there were
refugees arriving who talked of sixty or more being killed in one
village and fifty in another, but Gillan "could not find one eye-witness
who actually saw these things happening." Yet every day western
journalists reported "hundreds" of rapes and murders. Sometimes they
noted in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated, but then
why were such unverified stories being so eagerly reported in the first
place?
The Disappearing "Mass Graves"
After NATO forces occupied Kosovo, the stories about mass atrocities
continued fortissimo. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic
Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in
western Kosovo. They "might be" or they might not be. These estimates
were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting
down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies"
discovered near a large ash heap.15
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO occupation
that 10,000 Albanians had been killed (down from the 100,000 and even
500,000 Albanian men supposedly executed during the war). No evidence
was ever offered to support the 10,000 figure, nor even to explain how
it was arrived at so swiftly and surely while NATO troops were still
moving into place and did not occupy but small portions of the province.
Likewise, repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves," each
purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims
also failed to materialize. Through the summer of 1999, the media hype
about mass graves devolved into an occasional unspecified reference. The
few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or
sometimes twice that number, but with no certain evidence regarding
causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there
was reason to believe the victims were Serbs.16
On April 19, 1999, while the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were going on,
the State Department announced that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were
missing and feared dead. On May 16, U.S. Secretary of Defense William
Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine now serving in President
Clinton's Democratic Administration, stated that 100,000 military-aged
ethnic Albanian men had vanished and might have been killed by the
Serbs.17 Such widely varying but horrendous figures from official
sources went unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals who
supported NATO's "humanitarian rescue operation." Among these latter
were some supposedly progressive members of Congress who seemed to
believe they were witnessing another Nazi Holocaust.
On June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office
Minister Geoff Hoon said that "in more than 100 massacres" some 10,000
ethnic Albanians had been killed (down from the 500,000 and 100,000
bandied about by U.S. officials)."18 A day or two after the bombings
stopped, the Associate Press and other news agency, echoing Hoon,
reported that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs.19 No
explanation was given as to how this figure was arrived at, especially
since not a single war site had yet been investigated and NATO forces
had barely begun to move into Kosovo. On August 2, Bernard Kouchner, the
United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo (and organizer of Doctors
Without Borders), asserted that about 11,000 bodies had been found in
common graves throughout Kosovo. He cited as his source the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia
(ICTY). But the ICTY denied providing any such information. To this day,
it is not clear how Kouchner came up with his estimate.20
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings
was hyped once again. Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass
graves," each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of
Albanian victims were publicized in daily media reports. In September
1999, Jared Israel did an internet search for newspaper articles,
appearing over the previous three months including the words "Kosovo"
and "mass grave." The report came back: "More than 1000-- too many to
list." Limiting his search to articles in the New York Times , he came
up with eighty, nearly one a day. Yet when it came down to hard
evidence, the mass graves seemed to disappear.
Thus, in mid-June, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites
listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, one
purportedly containing six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged
107,000 pounds of equipment into Kosovo to handle what was called the
"largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history," but it came up with
no reports about mass graves. Not long after, on July 1, the FBI team
returned home, oddly with not a word to say about their investigation.21
Forensic experts from other NATO countries had similar experiences. A
Spanish forensic team, for instance, was told to prepare for at least
2,000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual
graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture. Most seemed to have
been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert,
Emilio Perez Puhola, acknowledged that his team did not find one mass
grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves
as being part of the "machinery of war propaganda."22
The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried
in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Or they
might not. Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials
refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions
"four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large ash heap, with no
details as to who they might be or how they died.23
In late August 1999, the Los Angeles Times tried to salvage the genocide
theme with a story about how the wells of Kosovo might be "mass graves
in their own right." The Times claimed that "many corpses have been
dumped into wells in Kosovo . . . Serbian forces apparently
stuffed...many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their
campaign of terror."24 Apparently? Whenever the story got down to
specifics, it dwelled on only one village and only one well--in which
one body of a 39-year-old male was found, along with three dead cows and
a dog. Neither his nationality nor cause of death was given. Nor was it
clear who owned the well. "No other human remains were discovered," the
Times lamely concluded. As far as I know, neither the Los Angeles Times
nor any other media outlet ran any more stories of wells stuffed with
victims.
In one grave site after another, bodies were failing to materialize in
any substantial numbers-or any numbers at all. In July 1999, a mass
grave in Ljubenic, near Pec (an area of concerted fighting), believed to
be holding some 350 corpses, produced only seven after the exhumation.
In Djacovica, town officials claimed that one hundred ethnic Albanians
had been murdered, but there were no bodies because the Serbs had
returned in the middle of the night, dug them up, and carted them away,
the officials seemed to believe. In Pusto Selo, villagers claimed that
106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March, but again
no remains were discovered. Villagers once more suggested that Serb
forces must have come back and removed them. How they accomplished this
without being detected was not explained. In Izbica, refugees reported
that 150 ethnic Albanians were executed in March. But their bodies were
nowhere to be found. In Kraljan, 82 men were supposedly killed, but
investigators found not a single cadaver.25
The worst incident of mass atrocities ascribed to Yugoslavian leader
Slobodan Milosevic allegedly occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by
U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down
the shafts or disposed of them in the mine's vats of hydrochloric acid.
In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic
teams investigating Trepca. Not one body was found in the mine shafts,
nor was there any evidence that the vats had ever been used in an
attempt to dissolve human remains.26
By late autumn of 1999, the media hype about mass graves had fizzled
noticeably. The many sites unearthed, considered to be the most
notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the thousands
or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and
with no evidence of torture or mass execution. In many cases, there was
no certain evidence regarding the nationality of victims.27 No mass
killings means that the Hague War Crimes Tribunal indictment of
Milosevic "becomes highly questionable," notes Richard Gwyn. "Even more
questionable is the West's continued punishment of the Serbs."28
No doubt there were graves in Kosovo that contained two or more persons
(which is NATO's definition of a "mass grave"). People were killed by
bombs and by the extensive land war that went on between Yugoslav and
KLA forces. Some of the dead, as even the New York Times allowed, "are
fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary
deaths"-- as would happen in any large population over time.29 And no
doubt there were grudge killings and summary executions as in any war,
but not on a scale that would warrant the label of genocide and justify
the massive death and destruction and the continuing misery inflicted
upon Yugoslavia by the western powers.
We should remember that the propaganda campaign waged by NATO officials
and the major media never claimed merely that atrocities (murders and
rapes) occurred. Such crimes occur in every war, indeed, in many
communities during peacetime. What the media propaganda campaign against
Yugoslavia charged was that mass atrocities and mass rapes and mass
murders had been perpetrated, that is, genocide, as evidenced by mass
graves.
In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office
privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic
cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in Kosovo, an
explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not
verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were]
not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined
group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged
supporters."30
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced
expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary executions of a hundred
or so individuals, again, alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO
bombing had started, yet were used as justification for the bombing. The
biggest war criminal of all is NATO and the political leaders who
orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction. But here is
how the White House and the U.S. media reasoned at the time: Since the
aerial attacks do not intend to kill civilians, then presumably there is
no liability and no accountability, only an occasional apology for the
regrettable mistakes-as if only the intent of an action counted and not
its ineluctable effects. In fact, a perpetrator can be judged guilty of
willful murder without explicitly intending the death of a particular
victim--as when the death results from an unlawful act that the
perpetrator knew would likely cause death. George Kenney, a former State
Department official under the Bush Administration, put it well:
"Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result
in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing."31
In sum, through a process of monopoly control and distribution,
repetition and image escalation, the media achieve self-confirmation,
that is, they find confirmation for the images they fabricate in the
images they have already fabricated. Hyperbolic labeling takes the place
of evidence: "genocide," "mass atrocities," "systematic rapes" and even
"rape camps"--camps which no one has ever located. Through this process,
evidence is not only absent, it becomes irrelevant.
So the U.S. major media (and much of the minor media) are not free and
independent, as they claim, they are not the watchdog of democracy but
the lapdog of the national security state. They help reverse the roles
of victims and victimizers, warmongers and peacekeepers, reactionaries
and reformers. The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any
war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
--------------
Michael Parenti is the author of Against Empire and America Besieged.
His most recent book is History as Mystery (City Lights Books).
Notes:
1. For instance, Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops
'Cleansed' the Serbs," New York Times, March 21, 1999, a revealing
report that has been ignored in the relentless propaganda campaign
against the Serbs.
2. John Ranz in his paid advertisement in the New York Times, April 29,
1993.
3. "Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia," New York Times, October 23,
1993.
4. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, p. 262.
5. Barry Lituchy, "Media Deception and the Yugoslav Civil War," in NATO
in the Balkans, p. 205; see also New York Times, August 7, 1993.
6. Both Noam Chomsky in his comments on Pacifica Radio, April 7, 1999,
and Alexander Cockburn in the Nation, May 10, 1999, describe Milosevic
as "monstrous" without offering any specifics.
7. Brooke Shelby Biggs, "Failure to Inform," San Francisco Bay Guardian,
May 5, 1999, p. 25.
8 Washington Post, June 6, 1999.
9. See for instance, Robert Burns, Associated Press report, April 22,
1999.
10. For example, New York Times, June 15, 1998.
11. Charles Radin and Louise Palmer, "Experts Voice Doubts on Claims of
Genocide: Little Evidence for NATO Assertions," San Francisco Chronicle,
April 22, 1999.
12. Newsday, March 31, 1999.
13. New York Times, May 11, 1999.
14. Audrey Gillan "What's the Story?" London Review of Books, May 27,
1999.
15. Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
16. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof
NATO Fails to Protect Serbs," New York Times, August 27, 1999.
17. Both the State Department and Cohen's figures are reported in the
New York Times, November 11, 1999.
18. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
19. Associate Press release, June 18, 1999. Reuters (July 12, 1999)
reported that NATO forces had catalogued more than one hundred sites
containing the bodies of massacred ethnic Albanians.
20. Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's
Killing Fields?" Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
21. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, "Playing the Numbers Game"
(www.aim.org/mm/1999/08/03.htm).
22. London Sunday Times, October 31, 1999.
23. Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
24. Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1999.
25. Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's
Killing Fields?" Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
26. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
27. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof
NATO Fails to Protect Serbs," New York Times, August 27, 1999.
28. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
29. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
30. Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, January 12,
1999 and October 29, 1998 to the German Administrative Courts,
translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, April 20, 1999.
31. Teach-in, Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, May 23, 1999.
http://www.swans.com
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