Features

By Phillip Knightley who places the Kosovo atrocity stories in their historical context The Indepedent June 27, 1999 If history is any guide, then many of the atrocity stories from Kosovo that have dominated the media since the end of the war will turn out to be false. Written and filmed by some of the self-styled “mass-grave correspondents”, they may at the moment appear to have the chilling ring of truth: after all, mass graves have unquestionably been found. Some of the stories may indeed be genuine, but many will vanish under investigation, or the scrutiny of time. When passions have cooled – as one hopes that they will even in the hate-strewn Balkans – we may even hear the confessions of those who invented them. Invented? In the case of Kosovo the inventions will have been the work not of British journalists but of those feeding them with information. In...

Similar Crises Get Divergent Treatment in the New York Times From Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Media analysis, critiques and news reports New York, June 25, 1999 An article in the June 24 New York Times reported on the trial in Turkey of captured Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. The Times provided background on the war between Kurdish separatist guerrillas and Turkish security forces:“The war that Ocalan has waged has cost more than 30,000 lives and made him the object of intense hatred. It has also made him a heroic figure to many Kurds who live in Turkey’s southeast.”Contrast this description with the way the New York Times presents the background of another, very similar, separatist war (3/27/99):“The Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanians has seen more than 2,000 killed in the last year, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes, according to the United Nations.” The...

A Proposal on an International Non-Military Force for Peace ByMel Duncanand David Hartsough From: Civilian Peace Service http://www.superaje.com/~marsin/cps.htm 24 June 1999 INTRODUCTION Tanks rumble into Kosovo. NATO proclaims victory from 15,000 feet above after eleven weeks of pounding bombs without a single Alliance casualty. The Serb army retreats from the province to the cadence of their butcher leader also proclaiming victory. The KLA marches in. Over a million Kosovar Albanians resentfully return to the rubble of home as Kosovar Serbs are cleansed northwards out of their homes. The irradiated landscape soaked in blood, strewn with land mines and pocked with mass graves flows with hate. Thousands of well armed multinational troops will attempt to keep the hatred at bay while relief organizations beg for millions to help rebuild from the carnage. While the technology has dramatically advanced, we end this century, the bloodiest century of humankind, the way we began...

When There is Little Left for a Radical to Say By Robin Hahnel ZNet Commentary June 16, 1999 Paul A. Volcker is best known as the conservative, inflation fighting Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979 through 1987. Prior to that he served Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in a variety of capacities. After retiring from the Fed he became Chairman of James D. Wolfenson & Co. Inc. and is the Henry Kaufman Visiting Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Paul Volcker is exactly the kind of person I would expect to be invited to make the luncheon address to the Overseas Development Council Conference on Making Globalization Work (March 18, 1999). But I did not expected him to have this to say: “Everybody talks about globalism these days to the point we are all sick of the term. But what...

From the Spanish weekly “Articulo 20” No. 30, of June 14, 1999, about the NATO bombing raids against Yugoslavia and the role of Americans inmaking all decisions. By Jose Luis Morales The pilots of Spanish planes who participated in bombing raids against Yugoslavia do not feel like “supermen” nor as masters of air space. Quite on the contrary, they say that our forces play to the tune of music played by the North Americans, and accuse NATO of having honoured with medals the bombing of civilian targets, what they otherwise name “collateral damages”. Captain Adolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz, who returned to Spain end of May after having participated in the bombings since the beginning, an “authentic expert for the dreadful F-18”, the war plane most often used in the war strategy of “scorched land” in the Balkans, is very categoric: “First of all, I want to make it...

Ignore the Dangerous Precedent Set Media Advisory  As NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia neared its conclusion, the press began debating whether or not the war was a success. Many mainstream commentators and reporters were critical of NATO’s tactics, but NATO’s basic spin on the war–it was a just war waged against genocidal evil, and it has improved the region’s chances for peace and democracy–went almost unchallenged. The idea that the war in Kosovo has proved that military force is an integral part of a humanitarian foreign policy appeared again and again in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. As Thomas Friedman put it (New York Times, 6/4/99), if Slobodan Milosevic really carries out his end of the deal, then NATO’s action in Kosovo “will establish that an air war for limited humanitarian goals can be effective, albeit costly.” A Washington Post editorial of the same day followed...

This is what Marc Beginin wrote to TFF as an introduction to his letter to the New York Times. I am one of the few non-journalists who actually made an excursion to Rambouillet during the peace “negotiations.” At that time, it came home that the primary function of the modern, mainstream journalist was to simply to increase ratings of their representative organizations in order to increase advertising revenue. This means of course sensationalism, not offending the source, and black and white reporting. I was blown away by all the “correct” questions that were asked of the powers that be and the lack of interest in actually reporting the facts. It was an added shock when all the reporters poised questions to James Rubin, spokesperson for the Secretary of State and then a voice came from the back of the crowd lightly shouting “Jamie.” Mr. Rubin’s attention shifted and his face...

By JANE PERLEZThe New York Times June 11, 1999 COLOGNE, Germany — Although the political future of Kosovo is left vague in the settlement that ended the war, American and NATO officials say they envision an international protectorate that will in theory be part of Yugoslavia but that may well, after a few years, become independent. As refugees return and society is rebuilt, a senior NATO official said Thursday, Kosovo will become virtually “walled off” from Yugoslavia. People living in Kosovo would not serve in the Yugoslav Army or pay taxes to Yugoslavia; a new police force and judiciary would have to be created without Serbian influence; the currency would probably be either the German mark or the American dollar, and trade would turn south and west toward Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro instead of north toward Serbia. None of these points are spelled out in the settlement that President Slobodan...

The Security Council, Bearing in mind the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security, Recalling its resolutions 1160 (1998) of 31 March 1998, 1199 (1998) of 23 September 1998, 1203 (1998) of 24 October 1998 and 1239 (1999) of 14 May 1999, Regretting that there has not been full compliance with the requirements of these resolutions, Determined to resolve the grave humanitarian situation in Kosovo, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and to provide for the safe and free return of all refugees and displaced persons to their homes, Condemning all acts of violence against the Kosovo population as well as all terrorist acts by any party, Recalling the statement made by the Secretary-General on 9 April 1999, expressing concern at the humanitarian tragedy taking place in Kosovo, Reaffirming the right of all refugees and displaced persons...

NATO Compellence as Global Norm Times of India By SIDDHARTH VARADARAJAN DESPITE the imposition of a peace agreement on Belgrade last week and the tabling of a draft resolution in the UN Security Council, it is still not certain how the crisis in Kosovo will finally end. After violating every principle of international law and international humanitarian law for more than nine weeks by attacking a sovereign country, bombing civilian targets and killing some 1,500 non-combatants, one-third of whom were children, NATO has definitely achieved a measure of success. And yet, the draft UN resolution is ambiguous on the precise role NATO will play in the international peacekeeping force to be sent to Kosovo. It merely calls on “member states and relevant international organisations” to organise the force; NATO is mentioned only in an appendix and no leadership role is assigned to it. Nevertheless, the US insists the mission will...

Milosevic Held Out Againsta Humiliating Peace Accord Many of us were critical of the bombing campaign’swastefulness. In the end, we were proved right By Lewis MacKenzieThe Vancouver Sun How quickly some commentators, particularly in Canada and the United States, jumped on and off the Kosovo war bandwagon.Since the first hint of a ceasefire more than a week ago some reputable columnists proclaimed a NATO victory and declared that the air strikes worked to perfection in forcing President Slobodan Milosevic’s capitulation.They decried the retired politicians, bureaucrats and generals who said the air strikes would fail as a bunch of crybabies who were woefully out of date. Assuming that I was included in this condemnation I decided to research what some of the anti-bombing alumni had actually said. To my considerable pleasure I discovered that the Kissingers and Powells, the Lord Owens and Ambassador Bissetts of the world, and further down the...

Only the most dedicated spinmaster at the White House would have the audacity to claim victory as the outcome of the NATO war, especially at this stage. Milosevic’s “surrender” may spare the country further devastation and enable an eventual restoration of normalcy for Kosovo, but it hardly vindicates the means used to reach such goals. If anything, it transmits the dreadful message that the United States and its main European allies are willing to bomb a small country ferociously and indefinitely so long as we don’t have to accept casualties on our side. Not since Vietnam has the West fallen so deeply into a black hole with regard to a major foreign policy initiative as it did in Kosovo. In Vietnam, however, once Washington had acknowledged its policy failure and withdrawn, the country was left geographically, ethnically and psychologically intact. Kosovo continues to offer a far more difficult challenge. Ethnic...