George Kenney
HOW MEDIA MISINFORMATION LED TO BOSNIAN INTERVENTION
in "Living Marxism" (London), April, 1997
Was it inevitable that the West
intervened militarily in Bosnia's civil war, taking sides against the
Serbs, and then occupying the country? I doubt it. Was it right? No,
not insofar as careful, objective, after-the-fact investigation of key
media events was lacking.
The first turning point, that led straightaway to the introduction of
Western troops,coincided with ITN's broadcast of images of what was
widely
assumed to be a concentration camp, at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje
refugee collection centre in August 1992. Now, in a stunning
development,
Thomas Deichmann has discovered that those ITN images 'fooled the
world'.
To understand the impact that those misleading ITN pictures had, one
must
look at the atmosphere of July/August in Washington. Beginning with his
19 July articles on the Serb-run detention centres at Manjaca and
Omarska,
Roy Gutman of Newsday began filing a series of storiesbased, he
minimally
acknowledged at that time, only on second and third-hand accountsthat
culminated in his charge in several stories filed from 2-5 August that
the
Bosnian Serbs were operating 'Nazi-style' (his words) death camps for
non-Serb prisoners of war.
As the Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department, I knew about these
stories before they were printed, because Gutman had contacted the then
US
Consulate General in Zagreb to tell officials of his suspicions and ask
for help in corroborating his findings.
Specifically, he wanted US spy satellites to determine whether a 'death
camp' was in operation. Nobody took this request seriously, but I knew
such reports could create a public relations firestorm, so I made a
special effort to keep the highest levels of the State Department's
management, including Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger's office,
informed of his work. I did not, however, think management paid much or
enough attention before Gutman's story broke.
Among other tasks, I was responsible for drafting press materials, which
mainly involved preparing State Department Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler
for her daily noon press briefing. Tutwiler, who was Secretary James
Baker's closest confidant and unofficially the second most influential
person at State, felt that the USA should have been doing considerably
more to stop, or at least suppress, the civil war in Bosnia. Alone
among
senior officials in her surreptitious dissent, she drew constant
attention
to the war's worst aspects, hoping to spur the administration to greater
action if for no other reason than Baker's fear of bad press. At my
initiative, she had already used the term 'ethnic cleansing' in mid-May
to
describe Bosnian Serb actions, introducing this previously unknown
revilement into the vernacular. Frequent use of this sort of lurid
language conditioned the press into a Pavlovian yearning for ever more
shocking news of atrocities.
On Tuesday, 4 August Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Tom Niles
was scheduled to give routine testimony to the House International
Relations European Subcommittee, and in carrying out this obligation he
badly erred, compounding public outcry about Gutman's 'death camps'
report. Inexplicably, Niles decided to stonewall instead of earnestly
declaring that we knew little, but took the matter seriously and were
looking into it. The subcommittee responded poorly, with Niles
particularly enraging its presiding member, Tom Lantos, a survivor of
pro-Nazi Hungarian concentration camps. Adding to public frustrations,
Niles' comments appeared to differ from what Tutwiler's assistant
Richard
Boucher told the press pool at the State Department the day beforethat
the
USA knew about the Gutman stories. Boucher had meant only that US
officials read newspapers, but the leading papers unanimously (and
mistakenly) reported that he said State had independent confirmation
from
its intelligence sources. Reporters, smelling a cover-up, launched into
full-throated choruses of 'what did they know, and when did they know
it?'
More importantly, they asked, 'what is the USA going to do?'.
The truth was, the State Department knew very little. The real scandal
was that it did not want to know more, because whatever could have been
learned might also have brought new obligations to do something
(anything). But by early 1992 the White House had decided not to incur
the least substantive responsibility for the Yugoslav crisis, in order
to
avoid a Vietnam-like slippery slope and messy foreign entanglements
during
an election. We did not know whether minor measures might have brought
results, but had no will to experiment. Yugoslavia, in the US
government's view, was Europe's problem; the State Department was
determined it should stay that way. In any case, by mid-week the State
Department's public affairs officials were in a nuclear panic. The
Yugoslav desk was asked, twice, to review its files about what we knew
on
'death camps', and I gave Boucher a thick folder to photocopy of
telegrams
from my unofficial, personal file on Bosnia. There was not much
information therenothing confirming Gutman's storyand the State
Department
struggled to find words to get out of the hole it had dug for itself.
We
had to explain our limited knowledge and say something more than 'we do
not like concentration camps', but less than 'we intend to invade Bosnia
and shut them down'.
Sensing an opportunity to attack President George Bush, on 5 August
then-candidate Bill Clinton renewed his call for the USA, through the
United Nations, to bomb Bosnian Serb positions. The US Senate began
consideration of a symbolic vote (eventually approved) to permit the use
of force to ensure aid deliveries and access to the camps. Even high
Vatican officials, speaking unofficially for the Pope, noted parallels
between Nazi atrocities and Bosnian camps, and called for military
intervention 'to hold back the hand of the aggressor'.
A kind of hysteria swept through the Washington press corps. Few
outsiders believed State was trying to tell the truth. After I resigned
over policy in late August, senior Clinton campaign officials speedily
approached me regarding the camps issue, seeking advice on whether they
should pursue spy satellite records which the administration allegedly
ignored. I told them not to waste their time. And for years afterwards
journalists continued to ask me about 'the cover-up'.
On Wednesday 5 August, in an effort to quell the burgeoning
Boucher/Niles
'cover-up' story and regain control of the press, Deputy Secretary
Eagleburger's office issued a clarification of the State Department's
position, including an appeal for 'war crimes investigations' into
reports
of atrocities in Bosnian detention centres. Immune to his efforts,
extremely harsh press criticism continued to mount from every quarter.
On
Thursday, President George Bush issued an ill-prepared statement urging
the United Nations Security Council to authorise the use of 'all
necessary
measures' to ensure relief deliveries, but stopped short of calling for
the use of force to release prisoners. British and French officials
responded that his statement was a reaction to political concerns in the
USA. Meanwhile, further inflaming the public outcry, Serb forces
stepped
up their attacks on Sarajevo.
At almost exactly the moment of President Bush's call to arms, ITN's
pictures first aired. I do not know whether senior State Department
officials saw or learned of them that day, but I viewed them, to the
best
of my recollection, with a handful of colleagues on Friday morning or
possibly early afternoon, in the office of European Bureau's chief of
public affairs. We were unanimous, from our respective
mid-to-mid-senior
level vantage points, that the tape was ruinous for the Bush
administration's hands-off policy and could not but result in
significant
US actions. The notion that 'we have got to do something' echoed down
State's corridors.
At the start of the week possible critical policy shifts were dimly
perceived and highly tentative, but by week's end ITN's graphic
portrayal
of what was interpreted as a 'Balkan Holocaust' probably ensured that
those shifts became irreversible. Those shifts remain fundamental to
policy to this day. On 13 August the UN Security Council passed
Resolutions 770 and
771, which for the first time authorised the international use of force
in
Bosnia and promised to punish war criminals, the precursors of the
current
international occupation of Bosnia and the International War Crimes
Tribunal at the Hague. On the 14th, the United Nations Human Rights
Commission appointed former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a
highly pious Catholic, as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the
Former Yugoslavia, a position from which he tended to target only
Bosnian
Serbs. And, on the
18th, Britain reversed itself and pledged to send 1800 soldiers to
Bosnia
for humanitarian aid operations, the first step towards what became by
mid-September a UNSC approved, enlarged UN Protection Force mission in
Bosnia the seed that sprouted into IFOR and now SFOR.
Lost in the shuffle was any understanding of what was actually going on
in
the camps, who ran them, and why. Official Washington and the US press
almost completely ignored an International Committee of the Red Cross
report issued on 4 August, describing ICRC visits to 10 camps and their
finding of blatant human rights violations by all sides. And though the
Serbs did indeed, as the ICRC said, run more camps, it was not
disproportionately more. In the rush to convict the Serbs in the court
of
public opinion, the press paid no more attention to other, later reports
throughout the war, up to and after the Dayton agreement, of hellish
Croat
and Muslim run camps. Nor did the press understand that each side had
strong incentives to hold at least some prisoners for exchanges.
Medieval xenophobes reincarnated as high-tech cowboys, Western opinion
leaders fixated their fear and anger against the unknown. Defying
reason
and logic, a myth of a Serb perpetrated Holocaust, coupled with the
refusal to even acknowledge atrocities against Serbs, became
conventional
wisdom. This was the first instance and future model for post-modern
imperialistic intervention to determine the winner in a bloody civil
war.
Washington loves to go to war in August. The florid atmosphere of
August
1992, though not (yet) exactly a shooting match, comprised a more than
satisfactory propaganda war, vaguely reassuring those who lost their
bearings with the end of the Cold War, together with a new generation of
journalists who needed a fraught, dirty conflict on which to cut their
teeth. Bosnia made excellent sport.
It is no surprise, after all, that the temptation for news organisations
to try to change policy, when they knew how easily they could, was
overwhelming.
George Kenney resigned from the US State Department in August 1992, in
protest at the Bush Administration's policy towards the former
Yugoslavia.
This is his personal account of how the bogus interpretation which the
world placed upon ITN's pictures of Trnopolje camp helped to put
Washington on a war footing.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
HOW MEDIA MISINFORMATION LED TO BOSNIAN INTERVENTION
in "Living Marxism" (London), April, 1997
Was it inevitable that the West
intervened militarily in Bosnia's civil war, taking sides against the
Serbs, and then occupying the country? I doubt it. Was it right? No,
not insofar as careful, objective, after-the-fact investigation of key
media events was lacking.
The first turning point, that led straightaway to the introduction of
Western troops,coincided with ITN's broadcast of images of what was
widely
assumed to be a concentration camp, at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje
refugee collection centre in August 1992. Now, in a stunning
development,
Thomas Deichmann has discovered that those ITN images 'fooled the
world'.
To understand the impact that those misleading ITN pictures had, one
must
look at the atmosphere of July/August in Washington. Beginning with his
19 July articles on the Serb-run detention centres at Manjaca and
Omarska,
Roy Gutman of Newsday began filing a series of storiesbased, he
minimally
acknowledged at that time, only on second and third-hand accountsthat
culminated in his charge in several stories filed from 2-5 August that
the
Bosnian Serbs were operating 'Nazi-style' (his words) death camps for
non-Serb prisoners of war.
As the Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department, I knew about these
stories before they were printed, because Gutman had contacted the then
US
Consulate General in Zagreb to tell officials of his suspicions and ask
for help in corroborating his findings.
Specifically, he wanted US spy satellites to determine whether a 'death
camp' was in operation. Nobody took this request seriously, but I knew
such reports could create a public relations firestorm, so I made a
special effort to keep the highest levels of the State Department's
management, including Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger's office,
informed of his work. I did not, however, think management paid much or
enough attention before Gutman's story broke.
Among other tasks, I was responsible for drafting press materials, which
mainly involved preparing State Department Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler
for her daily noon press briefing. Tutwiler, who was Secretary James
Baker's closest confidant and unofficially the second most influential
person at State, felt that the USA should have been doing considerably
more to stop, or at least suppress, the civil war in Bosnia. Alone
among
senior officials in her surreptitious dissent, she drew constant
attention
to the war's worst aspects, hoping to spur the administration to greater
action if for no other reason than Baker's fear of bad press. At my
initiative, she had already used the term 'ethnic cleansing' in mid-May
to
describe Bosnian Serb actions, introducing this previously unknown
revilement into the vernacular. Frequent use of this sort of lurid
language conditioned the press into a Pavlovian yearning for ever more
shocking news of atrocities.
On Tuesday, 4 August Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Tom Niles
was scheduled to give routine testimony to the House International
Relations European Subcommittee, and in carrying out this obligation he
badly erred, compounding public outcry about Gutman's 'death camps'
report. Inexplicably, Niles decided to stonewall instead of earnestly
declaring that we knew little, but took the matter seriously and were
looking into it. The subcommittee responded poorly, with Niles
particularly enraging its presiding member, Tom Lantos, a survivor of
pro-Nazi Hungarian concentration camps. Adding to public frustrations,
Niles' comments appeared to differ from what Tutwiler's assistant
Richard
Boucher told the press pool at the State Department the day beforethat
the
USA knew about the Gutman stories. Boucher had meant only that US
officials read newspapers, but the leading papers unanimously (and
mistakenly) reported that he said State had independent confirmation
from
its intelligence sources. Reporters, smelling a cover-up, launched into
full-throated choruses of 'what did they know, and when did they know
it?'
More importantly, they asked, 'what is the USA going to do?'.
The truth was, the State Department knew very little. The real scandal
was that it did not want to know more, because whatever could have been
learned might also have brought new obligations to do something
(anything). But by early 1992 the White House had decided not to incur
the least substantive responsibility for the Yugoslav crisis, in order
to
avoid a Vietnam-like slippery slope and messy foreign entanglements
during
an election. We did not know whether minor measures might have brought
results, but had no will to experiment. Yugoslavia, in the US
government's view, was Europe's problem; the State Department was
determined it should stay that way. In any case, by mid-week the State
Department's public affairs officials were in a nuclear panic. The
Yugoslav desk was asked, twice, to review its files about what we knew
on
'death camps', and I gave Boucher a thick folder to photocopy of
telegrams
from my unofficial, personal file on Bosnia. There was not much
information therenothing confirming Gutman's storyand the State
Department
struggled to find words to get out of the hole it had dug for itself.
We
had to explain our limited knowledge and say something more than 'we do
not like concentration camps', but less than 'we intend to invade Bosnia
and shut them down'.
Sensing an opportunity to attack President George Bush, on 5 August
then-candidate Bill Clinton renewed his call for the USA, through the
United Nations, to bomb Bosnian Serb positions. The US Senate began
consideration of a symbolic vote (eventually approved) to permit the use
of force to ensure aid deliveries and access to the camps. Even high
Vatican officials, speaking unofficially for the Pope, noted parallels
between Nazi atrocities and Bosnian camps, and called for military
intervention 'to hold back the hand of the aggressor'.
A kind of hysteria swept through the Washington press corps. Few
outsiders believed State was trying to tell the truth. After I resigned
over policy in late August, senior Clinton campaign officials speedily
approached me regarding the camps issue, seeking advice on whether they
should pursue spy satellite records which the administration allegedly
ignored. I told them not to waste their time. And for years afterwards
journalists continued to ask me about 'the cover-up'.
On Wednesday 5 August, in an effort to quell the burgeoning
Boucher/Niles
'cover-up' story and regain control of the press, Deputy Secretary
Eagleburger's office issued a clarification of the State Department's
position, including an appeal for 'war crimes investigations' into
reports
of atrocities in Bosnian detention centres. Immune to his efforts,
extremely harsh press criticism continued to mount from every quarter.
On
Thursday, President George Bush issued an ill-prepared statement urging
the United Nations Security Council to authorise the use of 'all
necessary
measures' to ensure relief deliveries, but stopped short of calling for
the use of force to release prisoners. British and French officials
responded that his statement was a reaction to political concerns in the
USA. Meanwhile, further inflaming the public outcry, Serb forces
stepped
up their attacks on Sarajevo.
At almost exactly the moment of President Bush's call to arms, ITN's
pictures first aired. I do not know whether senior State Department
officials saw or learned of them that day, but I viewed them, to the
best
of my recollection, with a handful of colleagues on Friday morning or
possibly early afternoon, in the office of European Bureau's chief of
public affairs. We were unanimous, from our respective
mid-to-mid-senior
level vantage points, that the tape was ruinous for the Bush
administration's hands-off policy and could not but result in
significant
US actions. The notion that 'we have got to do something' echoed down
State's corridors.
At the start of the week possible critical policy shifts were dimly
perceived and highly tentative, but by week's end ITN's graphic
portrayal
of what was interpreted as a 'Balkan Holocaust' probably ensured that
those shifts became irreversible. Those shifts remain fundamental to
policy to this day. On 13 August the UN Security Council passed
Resolutions 770 and
771, which for the first time authorised the international use of force
in
Bosnia and promised to punish war criminals, the precursors of the
current
international occupation of Bosnia and the International War Crimes
Tribunal at the Hague. On the 14th, the United Nations Human Rights
Commission appointed former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a
highly pious Catholic, as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the
Former Yugoslavia, a position from which he tended to target only
Bosnian
Serbs. And, on the
18th, Britain reversed itself and pledged to send 1800 soldiers to
Bosnia
for humanitarian aid operations, the first step towards what became by
mid-September a UNSC approved, enlarged UN Protection Force mission in
Bosnia the seed that sprouted into IFOR and now SFOR.
Lost in the shuffle was any understanding of what was actually going on
in
the camps, who ran them, and why. Official Washington and the US press
almost completely ignored an International Committee of the Red Cross
report issued on 4 August, describing ICRC visits to 10 camps and their
finding of blatant human rights violations by all sides. And though the
Serbs did indeed, as the ICRC said, run more camps, it was not
disproportionately more. In the rush to convict the Serbs in the court
of
public opinion, the press paid no more attention to other, later reports
throughout the war, up to and after the Dayton agreement, of hellish
Croat
and Muslim run camps. Nor did the press understand that each side had
strong incentives to hold at least some prisoners for exchanges.
Medieval xenophobes reincarnated as high-tech cowboys, Western opinion
leaders fixated their fear and anger against the unknown. Defying
reason
and logic, a myth of a Serb perpetrated Holocaust, coupled with the
refusal to even acknowledge atrocities against Serbs, became
conventional
wisdom. This was the first instance and future model for post-modern
imperialistic intervention to determine the winner in a bloody civil
war.
Washington loves to go to war in August. The florid atmosphere of
August
1992, though not (yet) exactly a shooting match, comprised a more than
satisfactory propaganda war, vaguely reassuring those who lost their
bearings with the end of the Cold War, together with a new generation of
journalists who needed a fraught, dirty conflict on which to cut their
teeth. Bosnia made excellent sport.
It is no surprise, after all, that the temptation for news organisations
to try to change policy, when they knew how easily they could, was
overwhelming.
George Kenney resigned from the US State Department in August 1992, in
protest at the Bush Administration's policy towards the former
Yugoslavia.
This is his personal account of how the bogus interpretation which the
world placed upon ITN's pictures of Trnopolje camp helped to put
Washington on a war footing.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------