The guns are silent but the international press corps
can’t stop sniping at each other
By Henry Porter
Sunday July 4, 1999
The Observer
More than 2,500 journalists entered Kosovo with allied troops three weeks ago, according to the New York Times. Even by modern standards, that’s an enormous press pack. If size were anything to go by, you might conclude that the effort paid off in terms of the information and detail that began to flow from Kosovo as the first reporters found a cellphone beacon which enabled them to file their stories. But the war, or at least this stage of it, has ended with the media feeling far from satisfied with its own behaviour.
A distinctly rancorous dispute has broken out between those journalists who feel that the media rolled over to become Nato’s gullible plaything, and those who allege that some of the reporters based in Belgrade were dangerously compromised in their relations with the Serbs.
Beyond this lies an almost universal concern among editors and reporters about the level of accuracy of Nato briefings. It now turns out the damage inflicted on the Serb ground forces in Kosovo was minute compared to that claimed by Jamie Shea and his colleagues in effusive daily press conferences. Whether they were deliberately misleading the Western public or were victims of faulty intelligence is impossible to say.
The dispute between journalists spilled into the public arena last week when Robert Fisk, of the Independent, wrote a howling condemnation of his colleagues’ war record. Fisk, who spent most of the three month war in Belgrade, claims the reporters fell into two categories the sheep who blindly followed Nato’s word and the ‘frothers who had convinced themselves of the justice of the war and the wickedness of the other side’. A third category, of which, by implication, he is a member, consisted of the truthful few those who saw Nato’s expansionism and arrogance for what it was. Allegations abound that reporters on lone missions with the KLA in Serb occupied territory stretched the truth to match the expectations of their news editors; that other journalists lost their moral bearings in Belgrade; that they wallowed in the gore and tragedy of the war and refugee crisis.
Compared to the evident suffering of both sides in the Balkan conflict the problems of the media are minuscule, but they are important in the long term particularly in how they influence the way in which press coverage is handled in future conflicts by news organisations and those who are bound to try to manipulate them.
The conditions of war conspire to mislead reporters but also to instil in them a partisanship that makes objectivity a forlorn hope. Phillip Knightley, author of the classic study of war reporting, The First Casualty, returned to the subject last week in the Independent on Sunday where he doubted the evidence of war crimes in Kosovo, putting them in the context of the ‘German atrocities’ dreamt up by the British propaganda machine during the First World War. ‘When the war ended,’ Knightley wrote of Kosovo, ‘Nato was naturally anxious to uncover evidence of Serb atrocities in Kosovo. If there were none, then the whole edifice on which it was based would have collapsed. Fortunately, the media, militarised to a degree unknown since the Second World War, was anxious to help.’
Knightley said that mass graves proved nothing, because reporters were unable to establish how their occupants had died. This is a perilous line to argue, especially when dealing with Serb paramilitaries who dug mass graves at Vukovar in Croatia and Srebrenica in Bosnia, the sites of incontestable massacres of Muslim men.It is therefore reasonable to assume that the many burial sites in Kosovo are not filled with the victims of a sudden plague, which is why the media rushed to the villages where atrocities were reported to have taken place.
It may have been unedifying to Knightley and Auberon Waugh and John Pilger, another noted pair of anti war columnists, but it would have been rather odd if they had not, because the atrocity story was the essence of the issue. Of course, these graves may contain the casualties of Nato bombing raids, and in some cases we will never know how people met their end. In part, Nato is to blame: it became clear about four weeks into the war that Nato high command was either concealing the truth or, despite its sophisticated intelligence gathering equipment, had little idea what was happening on the ground in Kosovo.
There seemed to be a pattern of obfuscation that was supported in moments of embarrassment by a flow of artfully drafted semi admissions that never did much to clarify whether Nato had killed innocent civilians or not. This shiftiness in Nato’s presentation, its reliance latterly on the spin tutorials of Alastair Campbell, and its cosy relationship with the less challenging members of the defence corps in Brussels gave fuel to the argument that the alliance was bent on an almost racist crusade against the Serbs.
Certainly Fisk, a controversy dependent journalist at the best of times, approached the war with an interpetation which holds that action taken by the US and its ‘puppet allies’ in Nato is motivated by congenital imperialist tendencies. It is a Cold War analysis that some still religiously apply to situations thrown up in the post-Communist world. The trouble is that this position, shaped during the Vietnam years, seems in the Balkan context to require a glossing over and in some cases an outright rejection of stories of Serb atrocities. The anger flowing between the two camps those who broadly supported Nato’s action and those who argued that the Serbs were being victimised is going to last a long time.
Patrick Bishop, a senior correspondent with the Daily Telegraph who has covered the Balkans since 1991, is outraged by Fisk’s view of the war. ‘I find his attempts to make a moral equivalence between what Nato did and what the Serbs have been doing absolutely nauseating.’ Janine di Giovanni, who is an old Bosnia hand and covered the war for the Times, the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, said that his views stemmed from being too long in Belgrade. ‘But the point is that we now know that what happened in Kosovo is far worse than what Nato led us to believe,’ she added. ‘Just as some people were tempted to swallow the Nato line, he has swallowed everything the Serbs told him. He should have spent time talking to the refugees in Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia. He should have gone to visit the sites of mass graves. But he took the other side. He is an attention seeker.’
Fisk, christened Fiskovic by one of his colleagues in Belgrade, was undeniably aided by the Serb authorities. It is said that he was one of the few journalists to be given frequent yellow authorisation documents to make visits outside Belgrade, and these trips were more often than not used to attack Nato actions in the stories that he filed. It’s a reasonable enough tactic in a war when journalists are tripping over each other to condemn the enemy and praise the brilliance of allied strategy. But as the US commentator Michael Kinsley says in the current edition of Time: ‘. . . there ought to be a sense that criticism of military operations in progress should meet a higher standard of seriousness because such criticism does aid the enemy, whether it is intended or not.’
In a perfect world, this higher seriousness should be applied to the reporting of both points of view in a war, but, in effect, truth emerges between the extremes for instance, between Mark Laity’s reports for the BBC from Nato headquarters and John Simpson’s humanising dispatches from Belgrade, often shown in the same bulletins. Both sides of a complicated running news story are much better than one, and in this sense Fisk had a contribution to make even if we knew that his reports were refracted through the lens of Serbian interest. What he perhaps did not take into account when excoriating the ‘frothers’ and ‘sheep’ was their motive.
Many of the reporters he criticised for being too partisan had been deeply influenced by events in Bosnia, especially those that occurred exactly four years ago this week, when the Serbs began their final assault on Srebrenica, the little town in eastern Bosnia which had been declared a UN safe area. By 16 July 1995, 7,500 people, mostly men, had disappeared. Many were executed and buried in mass graves. Others were cut down by Serb soldiers who had stolen the UN peacekeepers’ blue helmets. Until a young reporter named David Rohde, who was working for the Christian Science Monitor, began to investigate, stories of huge loss of life were not taken seriously in the Western media. Rohde entered Serb territory and came back with evidence of this terrible crime. What he discovered had a deep effect on the journalists who had covered the Bosnian civil war. They became not so much militarised as passionately committed to fighting Milosevic’s regime.
A point which perhaps Knightley and Fisk may concede when criticising the media’s behaviour in the Balkans is that if Rohde had not at some personal risk set out to prove the rumours about the massacres, a great truth would have been buried along with the thousands of men from Srebrenica.Certainly, there are some sheep in the media, some war tourists and some frothers among the 2,500 journalists who covered Kosovo but there are also many people like Rohde who take the view that a mass grave is still an important story.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
