Some of the UK’s first analyses of the Kosovo conflict
from a peace journalism perspective
REPORT 1“TRANSCENDING ASSUMPTIONS“
Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia enjoyed almost universal editorial support among mainstream British newspapers. The passage of time made it possible to gauge more of the consequences and led to some reassessments, including a nagging suspicion summed up by BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson: “I think we were suckered.” What assumptions were built into news reporting before and during the bombing, how did these help to construct a framework of understanding which made it seem to make sense, and how could it have been different?
An award-winning correspondent with a major US TV network put her finger on one widespread assumption at the London launch of The First Casualty, the new edition of Phillip Knightley‚s classic history of war reporting which contains an important chapter on Kosovo. She recalled a period in the Autumn of 1998 when, as she put it, „the international community was putzing around, wondering what the hell to do” about the growing crisis in the province. An appealing narrative to journalists since the next logical step is for intrepid coverage of atrocities to act as a ‘prod to the conscience’ of a disinterested international community, bringing it reluctantly to intervene. While there was, no doubt, a great deal of soul-searching on the part of many politicians and officials in Nato countries about the Alliance‚s responses to events in Kosovo, this may not have been the full story. In March 2000, Allan Little‚s profoundly important BBC Panorama special, ‘Moral Combat’, suggested that at the very moment the correspondent referred to, elements, at least, of the international community knew exactly what they were doing, they were farfrom disinterested and the intervention was already underway.
The OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission, headed by William Walker, a high-ranking State Department official, was busy carrying out a lopsided brief which effectively cleared Kosovo of Yugoslav Army (VJ) units and allowed the KLA to take over their revetted positions, thus entrenching the guerillas as a threat to Serb police and civilians. Having withdrawn the armoured divisions, only to find the enemy stealing a march, Yugoslavia then sent them back in. Most breaches of the ceasefire were still coming from the KLA but this intelligence, reported to the Nato council of ambassadors at the time, was never publicly disclosed.
A second assumption was that the KLA had spontaneously arisen as a factor in the equation, an inchoate upsurge of resistance in response to the iron heel of Belgrade. So when reporters did uncover scenes of violence it came with a built-in analysis – Œthe Serbs‚ were to blame forŒstarting it‚. This ignores the fears and grievances of one party to the conflict – we are left with explanations for its behaviour such as that offered by Newsweek, which decided the obduracy of President Milosevic under fire could be attributed to the influence of his wife, Mira Markovic, “an extremist even more fanatical than himself.” Extremism and fanaticism are not reasonable and cannot be reasoned with – explain violence in this way, as the expression of evil and irrationality, and it seems to make sense to coerce the party guilty of Œstarting it‚ into backing down – or to punish it when it refuses.
The antidote is to accord equal esteem to the suffering of all parties. During the bombing, the US media activism group, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) circulated a New York Times special report from Kosovo which listed familiar allegations – young men shot in their beds, systematic rape of women and girls, crops burned, wells poisoned, desecration of national and religious symbols. A recent story? No – the date was not 1999 but 1987; the complainants not Albanians, but Serbs.
Seldom can it have been clearer that delving back into the history of a conflict in an attempt to identify who ‘started it’‚ leads to an incomplete account. The proportion of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo when the province gained self-governing status in the mid-sixties was nearly thirty percent – by the time of the FAIR piece, it was under ten percent. Neither did Albanians gain very much as a result – in the mid-eighties, if the GDP per head in Kosovo was 100, in Slovenia it was 700, albeit redistributed to a certain extent through Yugoslavia’s federal state apparatus – one of the centrifugal forces pulling the country apart.
The grievances of Serbs in the late 1980s were cynically instrumentalised by one S Milosevic in the odious nationalist politics which propelled him to power – but in order to be so instrumentalised they had to exist, and did exist, in the first place. Without Mr Milosevic, the violent break-up of Yugoslavia would almost certainly not have been avoided, any more than preventing the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand would have prevented the First World War.
By 1999, of course, Yugoslavia had more refugees than any other European country, each one adding to the collective resentment and insecurity which creates the conditions for violence. While reporting for Sky Newsfrom Nato headquarters in Brussels, I put questions at briefings, to Tony Blair and Javier Solana, about a plan put forward by the TRANSCEND Network for Peace and Development. This called for a settlement based on repatriating the Serbian refugees from the Krajina, violently expelled by the Croatian Army in 1995, in parallel with the return of the Kosovans.
This was inspired in part by the epic correspondence in 1991 between Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German politician chiefly responsible for breaking up Yugoslavia, and Javier Perez de Cuellar, last-but-one Secretary General of the United Nations. Warning against the ncoordinated flurry of recognitions which brought Croatia and Slovenia into being as separate states, and triggered the disastrously divisive referendum on independence for Bosnia, Perez de Cuellar urged that any solution must work for the whole of Yugoslavia, no one party should be favoured and plans must be acceptable to minorities.
Nato was keen to commend its actions as the result of a sense of moral purpose – something greeted by some reporters with a cynicism which served to replace the demonisation of the Serbs with a similar demonisation of Nato.
Indeed, one opinion piece from the Guardian was titled, ‘Nato – act with a moral purpose? Don’t make me laugh’. But taking this on its merits leads us to seek the analytical factors most often missing, thereby conveying a fuller and fairer picture. If it is right that Kosovars be allowed to return to their homes, then it is also right for Serbians to return to theirs.
What about the realist interpretation of the KLA, that their actions and motivations could be understood as expressing a latent sense of national identity, brutally suppressed by ‘the Serbs’? In August 1999, in the NUJ magazine, The Journalist, I suggested another explanation – provoking newsworthy reprisals, hoping they would be reported in isolation as Serb aggression‚ and creating the apparent need for international intervention to stop it. It would have been a fair expectation given the lopsidedness in most Western coverage of Yugoslavia’s upheavals of the past decade. As BBC diplomatic correspondent Mark Urban has remarked about an earlier phase of the violence: “Few of the British-employed journalists… seem to have been concerned with telling us the tales of the Serbian housewives blown away by Muslim snipers‚ bullets, or the Croat villagers whose throats were slit by Muslim raiders.”
Allan Little’s film contained a frank interview with Hacim Thaci in which he admitted the KLA had known that civilian deaths would ensue as a result of their own policies. BBC World presenter Nik Gowing, in an important critique of reporting in the Great Lakes crisis of 1996-7, writes that journalists must never again underestimate the sophistication of parties to a conflict operating under what he calls ‘the tyranny of real-time news’. His warning: “understand from the start that warring factions, even if their soldiers wear gumboots, have now acquired a sophisticated military doctrine and techniques for fighting low-level information warfare using manipulation, disinformation, misinformation and obstruction.”
Furthermore, individuals in a media-savvy world have internalised the narrative structures which best appeal to news – the stories reporters want to hear. Hence ‘The Truth About Rajmonda’, a remarkably brave and honest piece of reporting by a Canadian TV correspondent, Nancy Durham, about a nineteen-year-old woman who presented herself as bereaved, her younger sister shot by Yugoslav forces, and about to take up arms with the resistance. In a series of reports screened by broadcasters around the world, Durham tracked Rajmonda’s progress through 1998 as she joined the KLA, then, after the bombing, visited her home village, only to find the ‘dead’ sister conspicuously alive and well. One Albanian explains in Durham’s valedictory report that if the lie helped to bring about Western intervention, it was justified.
The piece offers one of those rare, uncomfortable moments when journalism examines its own part in the sequence of cause and effect. Generally, realist explanations for events commend themselves to news because it too is accustomed to explaining itself in realist terms – ‘I just report the facts‚ as if facts arose spontaneously of their own accord. We need more reporting which opens for inspection the process by which facts are created in order to be reported, and techniques for news to meet the responsibilities this brings, whilst remaining, recognisably, news. In this respect, ‘The Truth About Rajmonda’ represents pioneering work.
Could the KLA have reasonably expected that an intervention would eventually come? Analyses in newspaper Op-Ed sections often presented Kosovo as a ‘Cinderella conflict’, left out of the Dayton accords and ignored by the West. Actually it was only the non-violent, democratically elected leaders who were ignored. US policy had been clear and explicit as long ago as 1992, when a diplomatic telegram from President Bush specifically threatened armed intervention in the event of any violence in Kosovo. The full text was only published in April 1999, in the Washington Post, together with the disclosure that it was to be read out loud by the then US ambassador, “verbatim, face-to-face and without elaboration” to President Milosevic himself.
Can it have been the case that this policy was subsequently allowed to lie, dormant, on the table until Western journalists forced it to be revisited, six years later? Jan Oberg, director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), is not alone in concluding that there must have been some form of „clandestine support for the KLA… How else,” he wonders, “was an army developed since 1993? International missions, embassies, intelligence services… must have been fully aware… One wonders why, for instance, Nato, the OSCE, the UN etc in Albania did nothing to control the transborder [arms] traffic and the extensive build-up and training of the KLA in northern Albania.”
What would have happened if the KLA had received a different set of signals about the likely Western response to anyone stirring up trouble? Early in 2000, we were treated to a fascinating ‘study in microcosm‚ in the emergence of the ‘UCPMB‚ in the Presevo valley – a crescent of southern Serbia abutting the Kosovo provincial border with a majority Albanian population. They too give the classic realist account of their appearance on the scene, describing themselves to reporters as “the small army in uniform which arose to defend our people”.
The difference in news response was epitomised by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian who ‘dis-aggregated‚ the parties involved by reporting that at least some Albanian residents, both in Kosovo and in the Presevo valley itself, opposed the UCPMB and its actions. If you refuse to divide people into two neat categories of villains and victims it makes it more difficult to visualise a solution being brought about by intervening on one side against another.
The other difference was that, on this occasion, American KFOR troops made it abundantly clear they would not ride to the rescue. Just after this ‘media launch’ of the ‘UCPMB’, they carried out a high-profile seizure of guns and explosives belonging to the group, from an illegal arms dump. The result was ambivalent, with the UCPMB continuing to crop up in reports in association with murders of Serb civilians. But shortly after these signals were sent, the group at least issued a statement renouncing violence and vowing to pursue a political settlement of their grievances.
Another widespread assumption helped to shape assessments, before, during and after the bombing, of its likely strategic impact in ‘making the world a safer place’ – namely that the consequences of violence can be confined to visible, physical damage and to the conflict arena itself. What about Russia’s offensive in Chechnya: not, by any means, directly caused by Operation Allied Force but indissociable from what Professor Johan Galtung, director of TRANSCEND, has called “Our geo-political predicament after Nato’s war on Yugoslavia.”
Further afield, even the GAM, the armed rebels fighting for independence in the Indonesian province of Aceh, have been accused of keeping thousands of villagers in refugee camps, blaming their plight on Jakarta, in order to draw outside intervention to their side. New Internationalist’s Anouk Ride reported: “the refugees are being controlled, even created, and their image manipulated into a humanitarian plea for independence.” Last year a huge banner draped across the tarmac at Banda Aceh airport called for Nato to send its planes to the province.
And in Yugoslavia itself the psychological damage left by the bombing and ethnic cleansing has now driven thousands of non-Albaniansfrom their homes and will keep the international community present on the ground for decades.
Here, too, there must be a degree of co responsibility. Yes, Belgrade’s Spring Pogrom was, as Robert Fisk called it in one of many memorable dispatches for the Independent, an act of “great wickedness.” Yes, it was planned as Operation Horseshoe – but planned as a response to bombing, when Nato’s deployment of the OSCE Extraction Force in Macedonia confirmed that violence was on the agenda and enacted after Rambouillet removed any doubts.
At any rate, it cannot be properly understood on the basis of a Œblack-hat, white-hat‚ map of the conflict. The approaches which Conflict and Peace Forums and others are developing is based on the need to transcend this discourse and, therefore, offer audiences a better service in informing them about a complex and dangerous world.
Jake Lynch is a member of TRANSCEND, the invited network of scholars and practitioners for peace and development, a consultant to Conflict and Peace Forums and author of their publication, What Are Journalists For? Copies can be obtained by contacting C & PF on phone 01628.591233 or at conflict.peace@poiesis.org.
REPORT 2“HEAVENLY DISPATCHES“
by Andrew Wasley
Throughout the Kosovo war a Serbian Orthodox priest simultaneously bombarded western journalists with impartial email news whilst providing sanctuary to hundreds of terrified refugees. Branded the “cybermonk” and “modern day Schindler” – was he the conflict’s premier peace journalist?
“The Kosovo war was ending, but Serbian police and paramilitaries were still torching buildings. Afraid of being burnt alive, ethnic Albanians fled their homes, cowering in the woods and countryside for a rainy, seemingly endless night. Then, winding down a wooded lane, came two monks in a white van from the nearby cloistered and ancient Serbian Orthodox monastery of Visoki Decani, Western Kosovo. “Come with us”, they told the Albanians. “We will keep you safe.” “
This is not a contemporary Albanian folk tale, but how US journalist Scott Canon opened a report highlighting the actions of a remarkable group of Orthodox monks in June 1999, during last year’s Kosovo war. Canon’s piece, the first of many to examine the activities of the Decani monks, told of how the priests provided sanctuary to scores of refugees – both Kosovo Albanian and Kosovo Serb – fleeing the region’s spiralling violence. The 12th century monastery, and its substantial lawns, became something of an oasis to terrified men, women and children – the walls providing a seemingly impenetrable protection from the bombs and violence outside.
“Without them [the Decani monks]” said one Albanian, “my whole family would be dead.”
Despite the monks rising status as guardians of the people, it was the actions of a senior priest, Father Sava Janjic, which captured the attention of western journalists hungry for news. Rumours began to abound of the ‘cybermonk’ who herded weary children into the safety of the Decani cellars by day before retiring to his computer study to compile news reports to email to the outside world by night. Fr Sava’s Decani web site, the first of its kind in the Balkans, was created in 1997 but it was during the build up to the Kosovo crisis that his online presence became noticed.
Born in Dubrovnik, the 34 year old Sava Janjic grew up in Trebinje, Bosnia Herzogovina, and later went on to study English before entering the Orthodox church. As secretary to the Bishop of Raska-Prizren, he began working with computers and later became credited for putting the Serbian church on the web – several months before his many contemporaries in the west discovered cyberspace. The priest is currently active in the Council of Kosovo and has recently sought to consolidate the Decani position internationally – opposed to all violence, the reintegration of Kosovo as a multicultural state, and an end to the current Milosovic regime in Belgrade. Such ideas, although far from exclusive, perhaps lend themselves to a peace journalists’ analysis of the Kosovo situation.
Peace journalism is partly concerned with overturning the simplistic notion that conflicts can be systematically explained in terms of ‘victims’ (good) and ‘aggressors’ (bad). Rather, it attempts to alert audiences to the myriad of perspectives present in conflict, highlighting the agendas, mindsets and reasoning of all sides. This enables the audience to gain a fuller understanding which empowers them, and allows them to think about alternative courses of action, stretching beyond the typical string of unconnected facts and pictures of missiles hurtling off into the sky.
Much of Fr Sava’s media activity during the Kosovo war attempted to do just this. Whilst many news outfits were content to explain the violence in Kosovo as solely the fault of Serbian policy and aggression (and thus justify NATO’s air war and subsequent occupation of the region), Fr Sava sought to alert his global audience to the shortcomings on all sides which had led to the crisis. Even early on as Kosovo Albanians fled the Serbian military and (later), NATO bombs, Fr Sava posted details of atrocities committed by all sides on the Decani web site. At the time, with much of the western media preoccupied with speculation about the scale of the “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” which the Serbs were reportedly undertaking, Fr Sava’s reports were one of few sources acknowledging that the Albanian KLA were also capable of war crimes.
Language is seen as key to the successful application of peace journalism, its advocates aware that poorly conceived headlines and dialogue can have serious implications. As Conflict and Peace Forums’ Jake Lynch has pointed out, the media’s passing reference to (perceived) unfavourable individuals or groups (Islamic activists for example) as ‘fanatics’ contains a built in assumption that such individuals cannot be reasoned with. Far from steering an audience to a thorough understanding and appreciation of a given conflict situation, such a label serves only to reinforce or fuel existing prejudice. Similarly, in much of the conventional reporting of the Kosovo war, London would “confirm” that x has occurred whilst Belgrade would “claim” that x has occurred – implying that the London sources were by nature inherently more reliable. Peace journalism attempts to address such distortions by applying appropriate critical coverage to every source, a principle vigorously adhered to by Fr Sava in his reporting.
The language used on the Decani site (and in Fr Sava’s email reports) was clearly designed to avoid offence. Derogatory phrases so common amongst other news sources were seldom employed, and overtly inflammatory dialogue shunned. Whereas sections of the western media had few qualms about branding Serbia militiamen ‘fanatics’ or ‘crazed murderers’, Fr Sava restrained himself in adopting such bloodletting descriptions to describe Serbian combatants – even when recounting in detail how the KLA had reportedly gunned down innocent Serbian boys fleeing the violence.
NATO’s ground intervention in Kosovo brought with it thousands of news crews, opening up a region previously inaccessible to all but the most adventurous correspondents. The need for an impartial, independent news source became visibly less, with Fr Saver’s news output dwindling as editors and reporters moved on and into the next war. Despite the drop in demand, the Decani web site and news service is still there (albeit with a change in emphasis – a clear concentration on Serb losses and the desecration of Serb artefacts, history and culture as opposed to more balanced reports on the cost of the war for all,), still feeding a hungry western media with news from within the Kosovo region.
And Fr Sava himself? In between the still regular reporting sessions, he’s likely be found touring the globe, attending foreign policy conferences or peace seminars. Perhaps in light of the recent boom in criticism levelled at the western media for its coverage of the Kosovo war, the example set by the cybermonk Fr Sava should be taken seriously. Perhaps next time he appears even more journalists should come out to hear his words. Those eager to report in a humane and responsible manner, which considers the needs of those caught up in violence, would do well to listen.
This an edited version of a longer article available from NPC Media Project. (Contact details below).
REPORT 3“UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ARISING FROM THE MEDIA’S COVERAGE OF THE KOSOVO WAR“
by Rosemary Bechler
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised to see some of our best-educated, best- informed, better-intentioned journalists – men who have the ear of government, and who – in all other respects, must be counted among the more thoughtful and ethically astute of our modern commentators – thoughtlessly adding to the chorus of defensive and obsessive masculinist rhetoric when it came to the Nato campaign last year.
It began, harmlessly enough, on April 11, with Andrew Marr suggesting that for a successful analysis of the Kosovan conflict – we probably had to abandon complexity: “In a fight between brutal clarity and decent haziness, the brutes will win.” This mooted, Marr got into his stride. On 25 April, he offered a more elaborated theory: “Since World War 1, the arrival of TV in battlefields, authentic accounts of how war brutalises, increasingly realistic war-films have all helped to make us feel that war is bestial; and that is that.”
But it turns out that “that” isn’t really “that”. Instead, we find: “We have become feminised, at least a bit”. Rather than succumbing feebly to the brutal facts – Marr urges us to remember that people have believed that war was “necessary, praiseworthy, for thousands of years”, and to ask ourselves if we have changed for the better. “War is hell – but not being able to go to war is undignified and embarrassing.”
And it is not just the British people, but Europe, which has become “feminised”: “We have, like the late Romans, decided that risk is for others…[Nato] has become decadent. It is Europe’s decadence, not its strength, that has led to…leaving the Yugoslav army in Kosovo to carry on killing…This dependency culture is shameful and embarrassing…We are a kindergarten of sullen children…It is time for the European countries to stagger out of America’s shadow and start to take some responsibility in a still-dangerous world that cannot be kept safe without bloodshed…Like the Serbs, we are undignified prisoners of our own history, but soft and flabby in our case, rather than racist and paranoid”… and in conclusion – “War is bad – but it isn’t the worst thing of all”.
No, the worst thing of all is being “feminised” or rendered decadent, soft and flabby, dependent, shameful and embarrassing – like women and sullen children. The worst thing of all is not being “real men”. And who, we might ask, are the preferred role models? Marr recommends a newly published “gripping account” – ( echoes of the “ripping yarn”?)- of the KLA’s war as “horrible, tragic. But it also described things we have forgotten – genuine heroism, self-sacrifice and generosity of spirit.” Just in case he has got carried away, he qualifies his encomium at this point: “Noble?, perhaps not. I expect if they found a wounded Serb – they’d shoot him.” But he argues, nevertheless, that these are the heroes of the hour.
It was depressing to see this vague rhetorical misogyny used to elevate a theme about our winning some pretty hazy European spurs over any attempt to weigh up the consequences of a potentially destructive military intervention. But there was vaguer to come. What caught my eye was the use of two Shakespeare quotations: one from “Macbeth”, when the hero says, “I am in blood/ Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go’oer” ; the other – “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame” – from Sonnet 129.
On April 18th, Marr contributed to a round-table discussion. He was quite clear about needing this quotation to get him through any residual, and presumably unmanly, doubts he might still have had: “Having said that I thought it was disastrous to start with, and I do, I want to put the
Macbeth option: which is that we’re so steeped in blood we should go further.” In Shakespeare, this is a kind of wilful paradox which indicates madness and the nightmare image of a man wading through self-created “multitudinous seas incarnadine”. Of course, this is the Scottish play.
Even so – in Marr – undoubtedly amongst those thinkers leading the way in our long-overdue debate about devolution – it becomes an uncharacteristically British act of patriotic history-making.
On the whole, moreover, this is not a play to turn to if you want to study military tactics. It is however a play whose main protagonists spend quite a lot of time worrying about what it takes to be “real men”, as you may remember:
Lady M. “unsex me here;/ And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full/ Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,/ Stop up the access and passage to remorse; That no compunctious visitings of nature/ Shake my fell purpose…”
Lady M. “Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valour/ As thou art in desire ?”
M. Prithee peace; I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none…
Lady M. “When you durst do it, then you were a man…”
Marr had used the same reference a few days earlier in conjunction with his second Shakespeare quote: “Is it thinkable” he asked, “that after…the expense of missiles in a waste of shame, the current Serb government would be left in power ?…It is of course impossible! The truth is that things have already gone too far”… and again, “War has its own logic: the bigger the expense of blood and effort the bigger the prize must be…” This oft-quoted line in context continues, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action”. People read the sonnet differently, but most agree that it expresses the perverse and self-defeating energies which lead to sexual shame, lurking in the wings for the unwise, or the cowardly “loser”, and regretted far too late. What is interesting about Marr’s choice of these quotes is the underlying doubt and guilt which they suggest, in stark contradiction to the certainty he is striving to project.
(Appositely enough – Michael Billington’s recent review of Battersea Arts Centre’s production of “Macbeth”, described Macbeth’s mental journey thus: “Applying military solutions to political problems he learns that you cannot achieve security simply by eliminating the opposition”)
But the overwhelming effect of Marr’s use of these quotes is an unquestioning linkage of violence and virility. His rhetoric finally provoked an enthusiastic echo, both more ribald and more amusing from one of his colleagues, Andrew Rawnsley who, throwing in a bit of Edmund Burke, Pope’s “dunciad”, Hans Christian Anderson and the odd hymn for good measure, opined on May 23: “There is a nightmare stalking Number 10.
Clinton has used the PM just as he used Monica Lewinsky …who found that, as soon as things got heavy, Bill wouldn’t go all the way. The White House is flaccid, the Europeans are flaky. What can our Christian soldier do except march onwards…His words of war have made retreat impossible. He can only deal with being so exposed by making himself more so. He keeps advancing up the mountain of rhetoric, piling on pledges of unconditional victory.” Which only left Hugo Young to bring up the rear with a Shakespearean coda, sadly chronicling the fact that “All passion is spent for the war”.
This is quite amusing stuff, but regardless of what one thinks or has thought about Blair’s bellicosity – there is only one assumption which everyone who reads this is encouraged to share – and that is that war is a matter of male pride and shame. That is what is at stake…. Where then, you might ask, can we turn for any alternative notion of what it is to be a “real man”? During the worst of the conflict, I could find only one lone voice in the same pages from the Guardian and Observer, rather like the boy in the crowd who points at the naked Emperor – and similarly brave and patriotic, under the circumstances. John Nichol, who had seen action as an RAF pilot in the Gulf war, as well as in Bosnia, felt obliged to remind people that once upon a time we could at least expect to have Just War criteria applied to any analysis of military intervention: “By any measure we have failed, dismally in [our] objective but it appears that to state the obvious provides succour to the enemy and undermines the morale of our armed forces.” He did not disguise his contempt for this particular form of argumentation, adding only, “or our political leaders to suggest such a thing is a convenient way of avoiding their responsibilities”.
Meanwhile – perhaps it is not surprising that so few rigorous conclusions have been drawn about the effects of military action in Kosovo, when so few real questions were posed beforehand. Faced with this rhetoric, and as Andrew Marr takes over as Political Editor for the BBC – there are lots more questions we might want to ask. But what exercised me at the time was this: as a culture, are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth really the best role models we can come up with for “Raising Boys”?
Rosemary Bechler is the co-chair of the NPC Council (see below).
For further information on NPC’s research programme, or on peace journalism in particular, please contact:
Andrew Wasley, staff journalist
NPC Media
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