Z Magazine
a political monthly
http://www.ZMag.org/
February 2002 Issue
Fog Watch
The NATO-Media Lie Machine
"Genocide" in Kosovo?
By Edward S. Herman & David Peterson
NATO's "humanitarian" enterprise in Kosovo was built on a structure of
lies, many of them flowing from NATO headquarters and officials of the
NATO powers, and uncritically passed along by the mainstream media of
the NATO countries.
One of the great ironies of Operation Allied Force, NATO's brief 1999
war against Serbia, was that Yugoslavia's broadcasting facilities were
bombed by NATO on the claim that they were a "lie machine" serving the
Yugoslav apparatus of war. This was contrasted with the NATO media,
which in the view of NATO officials, and in that of media personnel as
well, were "objective" and provided what Richard Holbrooke described
as "exemplary" coverage. It never occurred to media leaders and
journalists that Holbrooke's accolade should embarrass them-although
were Slobodan Milosevic to have lauded the Serb media's performance as
"exemplary" we suspect their NATO-bloc counterparts would have
interpreted this as proof of the "lie machine" accusation. The double
standard runs deep.
An important reason for the congruity between Holbrooke's and the
media's views was the sense of self-righteousness that accompanied
Operation Allied Force. The belief that NATO was fighting a "just war"
against an evil enemy had been so well cultivated over the prior
decade that for the media, "getting on the team" and thereby promoting
the war effort seemed perfectly consistent with "objective" news
reporting. This perspective, which was not shared by most governments
and media outside NATO, or by a vigorous but marginalized media within
the NATO countries, was ideal from the viewpoint of the NATO war
managers, as it made their mainstream media into de facto propaganda
arms of NATO.
Ultimately, this gave NATO and its dominant governments a freedom to
ignore both international opinion and international law-and to destroy
and kill-that would have been far more difficult to achieve if their
media's performance had been less "exemplary."
Genocide Politicized
One of the many successes of the NATO-media lie machine was
effectively pinning the label of "genocide" on the Serbs for their
operations in Kosovo. "Genocide," like "terrorism," is an invidious
but fuzzy word, that has long been used in propaganda to describe the
conduct of official enemies. It conjures up images of Nazi death camps
and is frequently used along with the word "holocaust" to describe
killings that are being condemned. On the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust model,
genocide implies the attempt to wipe out an entire people. But in the
Genocide Convention of 1948 the word was defined more loosely as any
act "committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such." The Convention
even included in genocide acts that were causing serious "mental harm"
or inflicting "conditions of life" aimed at such destruction. This
vagueness has contributed to its politicization, and Peter Novick
notes how in the 1950s its users "focused almost exclusively on the
crimes-sometimes real, sometimes imagined-of the Soviet bloc" (The
Holocaust in American Life).
It is a notorious fact that the Clinton administration carefully
refrained from using the word genocide to apply to the huge 1994
Rwanda massacres of Tutsis by the Hutus. To have allowed the word to
be used there would have suggested a need to act, and having decided
not to act, the decision to avoid using an emotive word that might
have mobilized public opinion on the need to act followed accordingly.
By contrast, in the case of Kosovo, the decision to act demanded the
mobilization of opinion to support violent intervention, so the
aggressive use of the word genocide followed.
In the context of the wars over the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and
in its opportunistic use elsewhere, the word genocide has been applied
loosely wherever people are killed who are deemed "worthy" victims. In
our view this is not only opportunism but also a corruption of meaning
of a word whose unique sense implies not just killing or massacre but
an attempted extermination of a people, in whole or substantial part.
Genocide Pinned on Serbia
The word genocide was applied to the Serbs in the early 1990s by some
Western analysts and journalists who had aligned themselves with other
Yugoslav factions (notably the Bosnian Muslims), but it came into
intense use during the NATO 78-day bombing campaign and briefly
thereafter. In good part this escalated usage was a result of the
virtual hysteria of NATO leaders at the Serb reaction to their
bombing, which had been put forward as necessary to stop Serb
brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians but which caused their
exponential increase. With the help of the media, and cries of
genocide, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schroeder, and other NATO
spokespersons were able to transform the consequences of their bombing
strategy-the refugee crisis-into its retrospective justification.
To make their case the NATO leaders needed generous numbers of
victims, stories of Serb terror, and images of women and children in
flight or being put on expulsion trains, allowing recollections of
trains to Auschwitz. The number allegedly "missing" and suggested to
represent massacre victims by William Cohen on May 16 was 100,000, a
figure which peaked at 500,000 in a State Department estimate. Both
during and after the bombing campaign the main interest of the
cooperative NATO media was in finding victims; a scramble to unearth
and report on "mass graves" was launched. There were many victims, but
the media's appetite for them was insatiable and their gullibility led
them to make numerous errors, exaggerations, and misrepresentations
(see Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, eds., Degraded Capability:
The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, forthcoming from Pluto press, for
many illustrations). Numerous published images of departing Albanian
woman and children were linked to the "Holocaust," although as one
British commentator noted "the Nazis did not put Jews on the train to
Israel, as the Serbs are now putting ethnic Albanian Kosovars on the
train to Albania" (Julie Burchill, Guardian, April 10, 1999).
The word genocide was applied to Serb operations in Kosovo even before
the NATO bombing, although the number killed in the prior 15 months
was perhaps 2,000 on all sides and despite the fact that there was no
evidence of an intent to exterminate or expel all Albanians. The
Kosovo conflict was a civil war with defining ethnic overtones and
brutal but not unfamiliar repression (less ferocious than that carried
out by the Croatian army against the Krajina Serbs in August 1995, in
which some 2,500 civilians were slaughtered in the course of a few
days).
Even for the period of the bombing the term genocide is ludicrously
inapplicable. The Serb reaction to bombing, while frequently savage,
was based on their correct understanding that the KLA was linked to
NATO and that NATO was giving it air support (Tom Walker and Aidan
Laverty, "CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army," Sunday Times [London],
March 13, 2000). Their brutalities and expulsions were concentrated in
KLA stronghold areas, and those expelled were sent not to death camps
but to safe havens outside Kosovo. The intensive postwar search for
killings and mass graves has produced under 3,000 dead bodies from all
causes-killings of the same order of magnitude as the 1995 Krajina
massacres of Serbs, carried out with U.S. support.
In short, the use of the word genocide for Serb actions in Kosovo was
gross propaganda rhetoric designed to mislead as to the facts and to
provide the moral basis for aggressive intervention. It paralleled the
use of the War Crimes Tribunal to indict Milosevic in the midst of the
NATO bombing campaign-an indictment that was also designed to justify
NATO's increasingly civilian-oriented (and illegal) bombing of Serbia
by demonizing the head of the state under NATO attack.
Media & Left NATO Propaganda
Having encouraged the disintegration of Yugoslavia from 1991, and
actually obstructed peaceful solutions to the problem of protecting
minorities in breakaway states, the policies of Germany and the United
States in particular assured ethnic violence. Their chosen villain was
Serbia, and an intense official and media focus on Serb crimes
followed. This involved not only selectivity of outrage and a
misreading of causes and locus of responsibility, but also a
demonization process helped along by the one-sided, ahistorical
portrayal of events frequently infused with disinformation (as in the
British news station ITN's fabrication of a "death" or "concentration"
camp at the Trnopolje refugee center in 1992; see Thomas Deichmann,
"The Picture That Fooled the World," Living Marxism, Feb. 1997).
Demonization and the continuous purveying of atrocity news created a
moral environment receptive to charges of genocide. This reached
deeply into the liberal and left communities and media, with many
liberals or leftists passionate supporters of "doing something,"
including the NATO bombing war. This was to be expected of the New
Republic, where the notion of collective Serb guilt a la Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, conveniently justifying
attacking Serbian civil society and committing war crimes, found a
happy home. (Stacy Sullivan, "Milosevic's Willing Executioners," New
Republic, May 10, 1999). But it also affected the Nation, whose UN
Correspondent Ian Williams was pleased to see the UN bypassed in the
interest of humanitarian bombing (April 2, 1999), and where Kai Bird
(June 14, 1999) and Christopher Hitchens (November 29, 1999, among
others) both found Serb behavior "genocidal" in the course of their
quasi-defenses of NATO policy. Only Hitchens seemed to suggest that
the Serbs were trying to exterminate a people (based on ludicrous
arguments; see Herman, "Hitchens on Serbia and East Timor," Z
Magazine, April 1999).
In the mainstream media, genocide was used even more lavishly and
uncritically. Often it was presented in the form of assertions by
officials, with numbers like Cohen's 100,000, but reporters or
commentators rarely if ever challenged the figures or questioned
whether the actions designated as genocidal were intended to
exterminate a people. It was rare indeed to mention the difference
between trains to Auschwitz and to the Albanian border, as did Julie
Churchill in the Guardian.
Genocide was used as a symbol of aversion and disapproval, justifying
extreme measures against the "dictator" and his people-the media felt
impelled to call Milosevic a "dictator" even though this put a crimp
in condemning "ordinary Serbs" as responsible for his actions, but
they managed to do both at the same time (Anthony Lewis, "The Question
of Evil," NYT, June 22, 1999). Some commentators were carried away by
their own passion, David Rieff, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and Chistopher Hitchens favorite, asserting that "the Milosevic regime
was trying to eradicate an entire people" ("Wars Without End?," NYT,
September 23, 1999). But most commentators were satisfied with using
the word without getting specific as to meaning or providing facts.
They never acknowledged any military rationale to the post-bombing
expulsions and killings: it was evil people doing evil things for evil
reasons.
In a masterpiece of the NATO anti-genocide apologetics genre, the New
York Times provided Sebastian Junger's "A Different Kind of Killing"
(NYT Magazine, February 27, 2000), where it is explained that even if
the number of bodies found in Kosovo were not of genocidal scope and
some stories turned out to be untrue, nevertheless "A single murder
can be considered an act of genocide if it can be shown that there was
an intent to kill everyone else in that person's group." Junger then
recounts his visit to the site of an unclaimed body of a teenage
woman, allegedly kidnapped, raped, and killed by Serbian "irregular
forces." Junger then says that, "it was not until this century that a
mechanized army carried out such crimes in the service of its
government. That is genocide; the rest is just violence." Junger makes
not the slightest effort to show that the "irregular forces" had done
this as part of a government plan and "in the service of its
government" rather than on their own, or that the KLA or U.S. army
didn't carry out similar acts. In short, this is completely worthless
nonsense-but it pins the word genocide on the official enemy, and
therefore the New York Times allows this travesty to appear in its
sunday magazine.
Some Comparative Data
We can also measure the spectacular politicization of the word
genocide by comparing its lavish use in describing Serb conduct in
Kosovo with its minimal use for Turkey's treatment of its Kurds in the
1990s (indeed, for decades) and Indonesia's treatment of East Timorese
in 1999 as well as in earlier years. The force of this comparison is
strengthened by the facts that Turkey killed far more Kurds in the
1990s than the Serbs killed Albanians in Kosovo, not only before the
bombing (whose number presumably elicited the "humanitarian"
intervention) but even including those killed during the 78-day
bombing and war (see Chomsky's New Military Humanism). Indonesia's
invasion-occupation led to the death of almost a third of the East
Timor population (1975-1980), and Indonesia was subsequently
responsible for the 1998-1999 slaughter and expulsion of a still
untold number of East Timorese associated with a UN-sponsored
election. The number of East Timorese killed in this latest round of
Indonesian terror far exceeded the pre-bombing total of Kosovo
Albanian victims-estimates run from 3,000-6,000 killed even before the
August 30, 1999 referendum unleashed unrestrained Indonesian
destruction and murder-and the grand total for 1999 is surely far
larger than the overall total of Kosovo Albanians killed by the Serbs
in 1998 and 1999.
But as Turkey and Indonesia are clients of the United States and the
recipients of aid, military supplies, and diplomatic support from the
United States, Britain, and the Western powers generally, their human
rights crimes are never referred to by Western officials as genocide.
In fact, in a droll feature of the NATO campaign against Serb genocide
in Kosovo, Turkey, a member of NATO, took part in the war against
Yugoslavia with direct bombing missions and the provision of bases for
flights of other NATO powers, perhaps generously reallocating its own
forces from the ethnic cleansing of Kurds to "humanitarian" NATO
service.
Given this warm relationship between the NATO powers and Turkey and
Indonesia, we would expect the NATO media to follow in the footsteps
of their leaders and treat Turkey and Indonesia kindly, refraining
from serious investigative effort and the enthusiastic searches for
"mass graves" they pursued in Kosovo, and avoiding the use of an
invidious word like genocide in reference to these client states, no
matter how applicable and inconsistent with their usage of the word as
regards Serbia. This expectation is fully realized.
We will limit ourselves here to usage in the New York Times, although
we believe the findings applicable to the general run of mainstream
media. In the Times the bias is startling, and has some unexpected
sidelights. The accompanying table shows that in the year 1999, the
word genocide was ascribed to the Serbs in Kosovo in 85 different
articles, including 15 that began on the front page, and in 16
editorials and op-ed columns. In some of these articles the word was
used repeatedly. (In one remarkable example, during the current year
and outside our sample proper, Michael Ignatieff repeated the word
genocide 11 times in a single op-ed [February 13, 2000]).
By contrast, the word showed up in the Times in only 9 items referring
to East Timor in 1999, only once in an editorial or opinion piece, and
only 15 times for East Timor in the entire decade of the 1990s. The
word was never used in a front-page article during the 1990s.
Furthermore, no Times reporter or editorial writer ever used the word
genocide in application to East Timor over the entire period,
1975-1999. (That is to say, in all instances where the word did
appear, it did not express the opinion of the Times writer, but was
attributed to another source.) Anthony Lewis, who repeatedly referred
to Serb action as genocidal and called for Western intervention there,
spoke of "human rights abuses in East Timor" (July 12, 1993), but he
never called it genocide or urged intervention. Barbara Crossette
repeatedly complimented Suharto for bringing "stability" to the
region. In a notable mention of the word genocide, veteran Times
reporter Henry Kamm explicitly denied its application to East Timor,
calling such usage "hyperbole," and allocating the mass deaths to
"cruel warfare and the starvation that accompanied it on this
historically food-short island" (February 15, 1981).
Equally remarkable, the table also shows that the word genocide was
never once used in application to Turkey and its treatment of its
Kurds in 1999, and was used only five times for such a relationship in
the decade of the 1990s, never in a front-page article. However, in a
wonderful illustration of how the Times follows the line of U.S.
foreign policy, the table shows that Iraq's mistreatment of its Kurds
in the years 1990-1999 was described as genocidal 22 times, in five
cases in front-page articles.
In short, only "worthy victims"-that is, the victims of officially
designated enemies like Yugoslavia and Iraq-suffer from genocide;
those that are unworthy, like East Timorese and the Turkish Kurds, are
merely subject to "cruel warfare" and adverse natural forces, as Henry
Kamm explained in regard to East Timor. So the Western media and
"international community" will be mobilized on behalf of the former,
and the latter will be compelled to suffer in silence. But as we have
stressed, there never was genocide in Kosovo, so that the NATO war
there was based on a lie. And that lie, like the May 27 indictment of
Milosevic by the War Crimes Tribunal, served mainly to provide a moral
cover that allowed NATO to bomb the hostage population of Serbia into
submission. That population now joins Iraq's in being subject to
further "sanctions of mass destruction" whose effects offer a much
closer fit to "genocide" than the Serb actions which, allegedly,
precipitated NATO's war.
Questions? Comments? Contact us at sysop@....
a political monthly
http://www.ZMag.org/
February 2002 Issue
Fog Watch
The NATO-Media Lie Machine
"Genocide" in Kosovo?
By Edward S. Herman & David Peterson
NATO's "humanitarian" enterprise in Kosovo was built on a structure of
lies, many of them flowing from NATO headquarters and officials of the
NATO powers, and uncritically passed along by the mainstream media of
the NATO countries.
One of the great ironies of Operation Allied Force, NATO's brief 1999
war against Serbia, was that Yugoslavia's broadcasting facilities were
bombed by NATO on the claim that they were a "lie machine" serving the
Yugoslav apparatus of war. This was contrasted with the NATO media,
which in the view of NATO officials, and in that of media personnel as
well, were "objective" and provided what Richard Holbrooke described
as "exemplary" coverage. It never occurred to media leaders and
journalists that Holbrooke's accolade should embarrass them-although
were Slobodan Milosevic to have lauded the Serb media's performance as
"exemplary" we suspect their NATO-bloc counterparts would have
interpreted this as proof of the "lie machine" accusation. The double
standard runs deep.
An important reason for the congruity between Holbrooke's and the
media's views was the sense of self-righteousness that accompanied
Operation Allied Force. The belief that NATO was fighting a "just war"
against an evil enemy had been so well cultivated over the prior
decade that for the media, "getting on the team" and thereby promoting
the war effort seemed perfectly consistent with "objective" news
reporting. This perspective, which was not shared by most governments
and media outside NATO, or by a vigorous but marginalized media within
the NATO countries, was ideal from the viewpoint of the NATO war
managers, as it made their mainstream media into de facto propaganda
arms of NATO.
Ultimately, this gave NATO and its dominant governments a freedom to
ignore both international opinion and international law-and to destroy
and kill-that would have been far more difficult to achieve if their
media's performance had been less "exemplary."
Genocide Politicized
One of the many successes of the NATO-media lie machine was
effectively pinning the label of "genocide" on the Serbs for their
operations in Kosovo. "Genocide," like "terrorism," is an invidious
but fuzzy word, that has long been used in propaganda to describe the
conduct of official enemies. It conjures up images of Nazi death camps
and is frequently used along with the word "holocaust" to describe
killings that are being condemned. On the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust model,
genocide implies the attempt to wipe out an entire people. But in the
Genocide Convention of 1948 the word was defined more loosely as any
act "committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such." The Convention
even included in genocide acts that were causing serious "mental harm"
or inflicting "conditions of life" aimed at such destruction. This
vagueness has contributed to its politicization, and Peter Novick
notes how in the 1950s its users "focused almost exclusively on the
crimes-sometimes real, sometimes imagined-of the Soviet bloc" (The
Holocaust in American Life).
It is a notorious fact that the Clinton administration carefully
refrained from using the word genocide to apply to the huge 1994
Rwanda massacres of Tutsis by the Hutus. To have allowed the word to
be used there would have suggested a need to act, and having decided
not to act, the decision to avoid using an emotive word that might
have mobilized public opinion on the need to act followed accordingly.
By contrast, in the case of Kosovo, the decision to act demanded the
mobilization of opinion to support violent intervention, so the
aggressive use of the word genocide followed.
In the context of the wars over the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and
in its opportunistic use elsewhere, the word genocide has been applied
loosely wherever people are killed who are deemed "worthy" victims. In
our view this is not only opportunism but also a corruption of meaning
of a word whose unique sense implies not just killing or massacre but
an attempted extermination of a people, in whole or substantial part.
Genocide Pinned on Serbia
The word genocide was applied to the Serbs in the early 1990s by some
Western analysts and journalists who had aligned themselves with other
Yugoslav factions (notably the Bosnian Muslims), but it came into
intense use during the NATO 78-day bombing campaign and briefly
thereafter. In good part this escalated usage was a result of the
virtual hysteria of NATO leaders at the Serb reaction to their
bombing, which had been put forward as necessary to stop Serb
brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians but which caused their
exponential increase. With the help of the media, and cries of
genocide, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schroeder, and other NATO
spokespersons were able to transform the consequences of their bombing
strategy-the refugee crisis-into its retrospective justification.
To make their case the NATO leaders needed generous numbers of
victims, stories of Serb terror, and images of women and children in
flight or being put on expulsion trains, allowing recollections of
trains to Auschwitz. The number allegedly "missing" and suggested to
represent massacre victims by William Cohen on May 16 was 100,000, a
figure which peaked at 500,000 in a State Department estimate. Both
during and after the bombing campaign the main interest of the
cooperative NATO media was in finding victims; a scramble to unearth
and report on "mass graves" was launched. There were many victims, but
the media's appetite for them was insatiable and their gullibility led
them to make numerous errors, exaggerations, and misrepresentations
(see Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, eds., Degraded Capability:
The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, forthcoming from Pluto press, for
many illustrations). Numerous published images of departing Albanian
woman and children were linked to the "Holocaust," although as one
British commentator noted "the Nazis did not put Jews on the train to
Israel, as the Serbs are now putting ethnic Albanian Kosovars on the
train to Albania" (Julie Burchill, Guardian, April 10, 1999).
The word genocide was applied to Serb operations in Kosovo even before
the NATO bombing, although the number killed in the prior 15 months
was perhaps 2,000 on all sides and despite the fact that there was no
evidence of an intent to exterminate or expel all Albanians. The
Kosovo conflict was a civil war with defining ethnic overtones and
brutal but not unfamiliar repression (less ferocious than that carried
out by the Croatian army against the Krajina Serbs in August 1995, in
which some 2,500 civilians were slaughtered in the course of a few
days).
Even for the period of the bombing the term genocide is ludicrously
inapplicable. The Serb reaction to bombing, while frequently savage,
was based on their correct understanding that the KLA was linked to
NATO and that NATO was giving it air support (Tom Walker and Aidan
Laverty, "CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army," Sunday Times [London],
March 13, 2000). Their brutalities and expulsions were concentrated in
KLA stronghold areas, and those expelled were sent not to death camps
but to safe havens outside Kosovo. The intensive postwar search for
killings and mass graves has produced under 3,000 dead bodies from all
causes-killings of the same order of magnitude as the 1995 Krajina
massacres of Serbs, carried out with U.S. support.
In short, the use of the word genocide for Serb actions in Kosovo was
gross propaganda rhetoric designed to mislead as to the facts and to
provide the moral basis for aggressive intervention. It paralleled the
use of the War Crimes Tribunal to indict Milosevic in the midst of the
NATO bombing campaign-an indictment that was also designed to justify
NATO's increasingly civilian-oriented (and illegal) bombing of Serbia
by demonizing the head of the state under NATO attack.
Media & Left NATO Propaganda
Having encouraged the disintegration of Yugoslavia from 1991, and
actually obstructed peaceful solutions to the problem of protecting
minorities in breakaway states, the policies of Germany and the United
States in particular assured ethnic violence. Their chosen villain was
Serbia, and an intense official and media focus on Serb crimes
followed. This involved not only selectivity of outrage and a
misreading of causes and locus of responsibility, but also a
demonization process helped along by the one-sided, ahistorical
portrayal of events frequently infused with disinformation (as in the
British news station ITN's fabrication of a "death" or "concentration"
camp at the Trnopolje refugee center in 1992; see Thomas Deichmann,
"The Picture That Fooled the World," Living Marxism, Feb. 1997).
Demonization and the continuous purveying of atrocity news created a
moral environment receptive to charges of genocide. This reached
deeply into the liberal and left communities and media, with many
liberals or leftists passionate supporters of "doing something,"
including the NATO bombing war. This was to be expected of the New
Republic, where the notion of collective Serb guilt a la Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, conveniently justifying
attacking Serbian civil society and committing war crimes, found a
happy home. (Stacy Sullivan, "Milosevic's Willing Executioners," New
Republic, May 10, 1999). But it also affected the Nation, whose UN
Correspondent Ian Williams was pleased to see the UN bypassed in the
interest of humanitarian bombing (April 2, 1999), and where Kai Bird
(June 14, 1999) and Christopher Hitchens (November 29, 1999, among
others) both found Serb behavior "genocidal" in the course of their
quasi-defenses of NATO policy. Only Hitchens seemed to suggest that
the Serbs were trying to exterminate a people (based on ludicrous
arguments; see Herman, "Hitchens on Serbia and East Timor," Z
Magazine, April 1999).
In the mainstream media, genocide was used even more lavishly and
uncritically. Often it was presented in the form of assertions by
officials, with numbers like Cohen's 100,000, but reporters or
commentators rarely if ever challenged the figures or questioned
whether the actions designated as genocidal were intended to
exterminate a people. It was rare indeed to mention the difference
between trains to Auschwitz and to the Albanian border, as did Julie
Churchill in the Guardian.
Genocide was used as a symbol of aversion and disapproval, justifying
extreme measures against the "dictator" and his people-the media felt
impelled to call Milosevic a "dictator" even though this put a crimp
in condemning "ordinary Serbs" as responsible for his actions, but
they managed to do both at the same time (Anthony Lewis, "The Question
of Evil," NYT, June 22, 1999). Some commentators were carried away by
their own passion, David Rieff, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and Chistopher Hitchens favorite, asserting that "the Milosevic regime
was trying to eradicate an entire people" ("Wars Without End?," NYT,
September 23, 1999). But most commentators were satisfied with using
the word without getting specific as to meaning or providing facts.
They never acknowledged any military rationale to the post-bombing
expulsions and killings: it was evil people doing evil things for evil
reasons.
In a masterpiece of the NATO anti-genocide apologetics genre, the New
York Times provided Sebastian Junger's "A Different Kind of Killing"
(NYT Magazine, February 27, 2000), where it is explained that even if
the number of bodies found in Kosovo were not of genocidal scope and
some stories turned out to be untrue, nevertheless "A single murder
can be considered an act of genocide if it can be shown that there was
an intent to kill everyone else in that person's group." Junger then
recounts his visit to the site of an unclaimed body of a teenage
woman, allegedly kidnapped, raped, and killed by Serbian "irregular
forces." Junger then says that, "it was not until this century that a
mechanized army carried out such crimes in the service of its
government. That is genocide; the rest is just violence." Junger makes
not the slightest effort to show that the "irregular forces" had done
this as part of a government plan and "in the service of its
government" rather than on their own, or that the KLA or U.S. army
didn't carry out similar acts. In short, this is completely worthless
nonsense-but it pins the word genocide on the official enemy, and
therefore the New York Times allows this travesty to appear in its
sunday magazine.
Some Comparative Data
We can also measure the spectacular politicization of the word
genocide by comparing its lavish use in describing Serb conduct in
Kosovo with its minimal use for Turkey's treatment of its Kurds in the
1990s (indeed, for decades) and Indonesia's treatment of East Timorese
in 1999 as well as in earlier years. The force of this comparison is
strengthened by the facts that Turkey killed far more Kurds in the
1990s than the Serbs killed Albanians in Kosovo, not only before the
bombing (whose number presumably elicited the "humanitarian"
intervention) but even including those killed during the 78-day
bombing and war (see Chomsky's New Military Humanism). Indonesia's
invasion-occupation led to the death of almost a third of the East
Timor population (1975-1980), and Indonesia was subsequently
responsible for the 1998-1999 slaughter and expulsion of a still
untold number of East Timorese associated with a UN-sponsored
election. The number of East Timorese killed in this latest round of
Indonesian terror far exceeded the pre-bombing total of Kosovo
Albanian victims-estimates run from 3,000-6,000 killed even before the
August 30, 1999 referendum unleashed unrestrained Indonesian
destruction and murder-and the grand total for 1999 is surely far
larger than the overall total of Kosovo Albanians killed by the Serbs
in 1998 and 1999.
But as Turkey and Indonesia are clients of the United States and the
recipients of aid, military supplies, and diplomatic support from the
United States, Britain, and the Western powers generally, their human
rights crimes are never referred to by Western officials as genocide.
In fact, in a droll feature of the NATO campaign against Serb genocide
in Kosovo, Turkey, a member of NATO, took part in the war against
Yugoslavia with direct bombing missions and the provision of bases for
flights of other NATO powers, perhaps generously reallocating its own
forces from the ethnic cleansing of Kurds to "humanitarian" NATO
service.
Given this warm relationship between the NATO powers and Turkey and
Indonesia, we would expect the NATO media to follow in the footsteps
of their leaders and treat Turkey and Indonesia kindly, refraining
from serious investigative effort and the enthusiastic searches for
"mass graves" they pursued in Kosovo, and avoiding the use of an
invidious word like genocide in reference to these client states, no
matter how applicable and inconsistent with their usage of the word as
regards Serbia. This expectation is fully realized.
We will limit ourselves here to usage in the New York Times, although
we believe the findings applicable to the general run of mainstream
media. In the Times the bias is startling, and has some unexpected
sidelights. The accompanying table shows that in the year 1999, the
word genocide was ascribed to the Serbs in Kosovo in 85 different
articles, including 15 that began on the front page, and in 16
editorials and op-ed columns. In some of these articles the word was
used repeatedly. (In one remarkable example, during the current year
and outside our sample proper, Michael Ignatieff repeated the word
genocide 11 times in a single op-ed [February 13, 2000]).
By contrast, the word showed up in the Times in only 9 items referring
to East Timor in 1999, only once in an editorial or opinion piece, and
only 15 times for East Timor in the entire decade of the 1990s. The
word was never used in a front-page article during the 1990s.
Furthermore, no Times reporter or editorial writer ever used the word
genocide in application to East Timor over the entire period,
1975-1999. (That is to say, in all instances where the word did
appear, it did not express the opinion of the Times writer, but was
attributed to another source.) Anthony Lewis, who repeatedly referred
to Serb action as genocidal and called for Western intervention there,
spoke of "human rights abuses in East Timor" (July 12, 1993), but he
never called it genocide or urged intervention. Barbara Crossette
repeatedly complimented Suharto for bringing "stability" to the
region. In a notable mention of the word genocide, veteran Times
reporter Henry Kamm explicitly denied its application to East Timor,
calling such usage "hyperbole," and allocating the mass deaths to
"cruel warfare and the starvation that accompanied it on this
historically food-short island" (February 15, 1981).
Equally remarkable, the table also shows that the word genocide was
never once used in application to Turkey and its treatment of its
Kurds in 1999, and was used only five times for such a relationship in
the decade of the 1990s, never in a front-page article. However, in a
wonderful illustration of how the Times follows the line of U.S.
foreign policy, the table shows that Iraq's mistreatment of its Kurds
in the years 1990-1999 was described as genocidal 22 times, in five
cases in front-page articles.
In short, only "worthy victims"-that is, the victims of officially
designated enemies like Yugoslavia and Iraq-suffer from genocide;
those that are unworthy, like East Timorese and the Turkish Kurds, are
merely subject to "cruel warfare" and adverse natural forces, as Henry
Kamm explained in regard to East Timor. So the Western media and
"international community" will be mobilized on behalf of the former,
and the latter will be compelled to suffer in silence. But as we have
stressed, there never was genocide in Kosovo, so that the NATO war
there was based on a lie. And that lie, like the May 27 indictment of
Milosevic by the War Crimes Tribunal, served mainly to provide a moral
cover that allowed NATO to bomb the hostage population of Serbia into
submission. That population now joins Iraq's in being subject to
further "sanctions of mass destruction" whose effects offer a much
closer fit to "genocide" than the Serb actions which, allegedly,
precipitated NATO's war.
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