By
Jake Lynch is an experienced international reporter in television and newspapers, currently for BBC News in London. He covered the Nato briefings from Brussels during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. He is also co-director of the journalism think-tank,
Reporting the World. Send you comments to Jake Lynch at
The recurrent theme of The First Casualty, the classic account of war reporting through the ages, by Phillip Knightley, is the unforgiving verdict of history on the way conflicts are presented by journalists to their readers and audiences.
It recounts a struggle between media and the military, from the earliest authentic frontline despatches, in the Crimea – which exposed a face of war the generals would rather have remained hidden – through World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War and, in more recent editions, Kosovo, which Knightley sees as a ‘final victory’ for military propagandists over the cause of honest reporting.
In all these cases, journalism, the first draft of history, had to be substantially redrafted as hindsight showed that important parts of the story – often the most important – had been omitted at the time. This familiar pattern is now unfolding in Kosovo.
Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia, in 1999, is still reported as a model of effective ‘humanitarian intervention’. But recent clashes, in which almost thirty people have been killed, are indications that the legacy of violence has been to make underlying conflict issues more problematical and more dangerous. There are echoes of Gandhi’s famous dictum – ‘I am against violence because when it appears to do good, the good is temporary; the harm it does is permanent’.
It is instructive, now, to recall key elements of the Kosovo story as presented in mainstream news, in Nato member states and in particular the main belligerent countries, the US and UK. Instructive because the issues hidden, buried or distorted at the time are now playing a key role in driving the course of events on the ground. Here, I examine those issues under three headings, each one a contention integral to the case for war.
1. Involvement by the international community was a disinterested attempt to protect civilians and ensure they could live in peace in their own homes. The bombing was a last resort in dealing with an obdurate Milosevic.
The official version: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he visited Nato HQ in April, 1999, told a press conference:
‘We took this action after months of political and diplomatic activity in which we tried to persuade Milosevic that he should do the decent civilised thing, stop this repression in Kosovo, get his forces out of there and allow these people to live in peace. It was his decision to refuse that agreement; it was our decision inevitably then to take the military action upon which we are now engaged.’
The media view: Many journalists in the US and UK media took a less flattering view of this ‘political and diplomatic activity’. Sheila McVicar, then a senior correspondent with ABC TV and now with CNN, described it as ‘the international community, putzing around, wondering what the hell to do about Kosovo’.
Hidden issues: At the time both Blair and McVicar were referring to, the Autumn of 1998, elements, at least, of the international community knew exactly what they wanted to do and were already pursuing a strategy to bring it about. In the process, prospects for diplomacy to deliver a satisfactory outcome were undermined, then destroyed.
Officially, the hopes of the ‘contact group’ of governments – the Russians, Americans, British and French – for ‘decent civilised’ behaviour to prevail between Yugoslavia and the Albanian Kosovars, were invested in the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), sent in to the province, in its distinctive bright orange four-wheel-drives, by the OSCE, the Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe.
This came after a Spring offensive by the Kosovo Liberation Army and savage reprisals against the civilian population by the Yugoslav Army, the VJ. The KVM successfully oversaw the withdrawal of army units, but the initiative was not even-handed. It was not briefed to do anything about the KLA.
The guerrillas swarmed forward to take over the VJ’s revetted positions, from where they intensified their campaign of harassment against Serb targets such as police patrols. In Brussels, Nato’s governing body, the North Atlantic Council of ambassadors, was briefed by the KVM that most truce violations were coming from the KLA.
| Would you be reading this now, if it wasn’t useful to you? Get more quality articles in the future |
This fact was uncovered long after the war by a BBC investigation; at the time, it was kept deadly secret. In pronouncements by political leaders in London and Washington, it was ‘the Serbs’ who were invariably portrayed as ‘the baddies’ – also by far the dominant analysis in media reports.
The VJ were sent back into Kosovo to face an opponent gathering strength under the wing of the OSCE, with predictable results – a major escalation of what had been, by international standards, a relatively low-intensity civil war.
It’s indispensable now to any real appraisal of what is going on and why. Underlying the violence is the continuing unresolved issue of Kosovo’s political future. US diplomat Richard Holbrooke has said the province will have to agree an ‘amicable divorce’ from Serbia, of which it is still legally a part.
Whatever the final form of any political settlement, it is surely right that it will have to be relatively ‘amicable’ if it is to work. It is equally clear that the prospects for reaching one have been set far, far back by the legacy of bitterness from the violence of the late 1990s. For that violence – both the Nato bombing itself and the escalating civil war – the ‘international community’ must be held at least co-responsible.
This was an analysis almost entirely absent from media reports at the time, but now, in retrospect, increasingly important in assessing the real impact of decisions made in Nato capitals.
2. Milosevic brought the bombing on himself by refusing, unreasonably, to sign up for a peace plan devised by the international community – The Rambouillet accord.
The Milosevic government was brought by ultimatum to the Chateau Rambouillet outside Paris, to agree an accord under which Kosovo would win autonomy within Serbia and 28,000 Nato troops would police the agreement. The trigger – or pretext – for war came, as Blair averred at Nato, when they refused to sign it.
The official version: On March 19, 1999, days before the start of Nato bombing, James B Foley, a State Department media briefing officer, was asked about the prospects for war. He replied:
‘The critical factor here is… whether President Milosevic reverses course. We are seeing quite the opposite. He’s digging in his heels; he’s digging in his forces; he’s refusing to negotiate. He’s putting himself in a position where he will bear the consequences of his obstinacy.’
The media view: The bombing enjoyed editorial support from the entire British press, perhaps most surprisingly from the Guardian. The paper’s diplomatic editor Ian Black, who reported on the negotiations both from Rambouillet and when they later reconvened in Paris, became involved in an extraordinary public spat with veteran war correspondent John Pilger.
Was it fair and accurate to see the refusal by President Milosevic to sign up to the draft accord as ‘obstinacy’, or ‘digging in his heels’ against reasonable demands that he behave in a ‘decent civilised’ way?
Hidden issues: As statements from both sides of the Atlantic, quoted here, suggest, this version of events was key to the pro-war narrative, but, as Pilger pointed out, its veracity depended on what, precisely, was on the table. He drew attention to two provisions in particular, absent from media reports at the time.
One was for Nato troops to enjoy unfettered access not merely to Kosovo but also into and across the whole of the territory of Yugoslavia, where they would, moreover, be immune from local criminal and civil laws. The other was that Kosovo, under Nato’s protection, would have an economy run ‘in accordance with free market principles’.
Black used a Guardian column to accuse Pilger of inventing these elements to suit his own ignoble purposes – ‘a canard now circulating among Serb apologists’. Actually, both these provisions were categorically stated in the draft accord. The reason Black did not recognise them was because he had been content to report on the talks without even reading the document under discussion – as he was later forced to admit.
Actually, neither delegation at Rambouillet was prepared to sign up to the Accord. The KLA refused because it would have meant them giving up both their arms and their demand for full independence.
By the time the talks reconvened in Paris, however, another draft was on the table. This new document contained key concessions to the KLA, who’d spent the intervening period in talks with the US State Department. One was that provisions in the original draft for demilitarising Kosovo, including across-the-board disarmament, would not apply to weapons in the hands of Albanian Kosovars, which would instead be classed as private property.
Again, it is worth revisiting this now because it is indispensable to any appraisal of the situation today. The UNMIK/Nato authorities in Kosovo held a gun amnesty last year, expected to yield as many as 150,000 weapons – instead only 900 were handed in, and the continuing reality of an armed population exerts a destabilising influence, as evidenced by the exchanges of violence in recent days.
The other concession was in code, albeit a fairly transparent one – that within three years there would be a referendum on Kosovo’s final political status, a referendum certain to result in a vote for independence and, therefore, a redrawing of international borders.
This brought the KLA onside but ensured that no Serbian leader could possibly sign up to it, as it would have meant losing sovereignty over Kosovo and, with it, historic sites viewed as the cradle of Serbian national identity.
It would also have meant Serbs in Kosovo being ruled over by a people instrumentalised by the Nazis as their oppressors in World War II – a fear enthusiastically played upon by the baleful narratives of Serb nationalism, in Kosovo no less than in Croatia and Bosnia.
3. ‘Nato won’ – political leaders enjoyed overwhelming public support in prosecuting a successful military campaign.
Kosovo has been held up ever since as a successful example of ‘humanitarian intervention’. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was quick to hold this line when asked, on Friday, March 21, about the recent violence.
The official view: From the transcript of a brief press conference following a meeting with the Italian foreign minister:
Question: ‘On Kosovo, is this a sign that the first war that this government has embarked on has actually been less successful in nation building and peace making than you expected?’
Foreign Secretary: ‘No it is not, it is a sign that there are deep historic divisions going back centuries right across the Balkans, and many of these historic pressures are represented in the divided communities in Kosovo… I would just ask colleagues here to think about the state the Balkans were in and what would have happened if we in our back yard had allowed that kind of ethnic cleansing, brutal genocidal slaughter to go on unchecked.
There was in practice no alternative to us intervening in Kosovo, we were right to do it and were right to stay there.’
The media view: As with last year’s invasion of Iraq, detailed examination of whether the Kosovo campaign could be described as a ‘victory’ was drowned out by the powerful images saturating television coverage in particular.
In 2003 it was the toppling of Saddam’s statue, conveniently right in front of the hotel used by most international media; four years earlier, the countless pictures of Kosovo Albanians making victory salutes as Nato troops entered the province, seemed to cement in media discourse the notion that Nato had ‘won’ the war.
Hidden issues: George Robertson, then British Defence Secretary and later, as Lord Robertson, Secretary-General of Nato, said the aim of war was to ‘avert a humanitarian catastrophe’. But that was before the onset of bombing triggered, er, a humanitarian catastrophe-in-the-making, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians on the move into neighbouring Albania and Macedonia, bringing with them harrowing tales of ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the hands of Serbian paramilitaries.
Later the war aim was redefined as being to ‘reverse’ this turn of events. Indeed the Albanians did eventually go back to their homes in Kosovo, but the end of the war saw the exodus of as many as 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic minorities, condemned to life as refugees either elsewhere in Kosovo or elsewhere in Serbia.
The continuing salience and appeal of extreme nationalist politics in Serbia owes something to this injustice, and, in its turn, makes any progress towards political agreement on Kosovo’s future correspondingly less likely.
Alastair Campbell, then Downing Street Press Secretary, said in a lecture after the war that ‘the only battle Nato might lose was the battle for hearts and minds… that would have meant Nato ending and losing the war’.
The fact is that, as the bombing entered its third month, this battle was, indeed being lost. A Pew Research Center poll found that, in mid-April, 1999, Americans approved of President Clinton’s handling of foreign policy by 51% to 39%. A month later, the same poll showed a much closer margin at 46% to 43%.
Nato needed a way out, and turned to other players, notably the Russians, to help provide it. The diplomatic initiative launched by former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and former Finnish President Mahti Ahtisaari, led to the drafting of yet another version of a political framework for Kosovo and agreement for Nato troops to police it.
This was adopted by the G8 at Konigswinter, and the EU in Cologne, in June; and was later passed by the UN Security Council as Resolution 1244. It differed from earlier versions in one crucial respect – the provision for a referendum on independence for Kosovo was dropped. In its place was a mandate to establish ‘substantial self-government’, with the Rambouillet Accords taken ‘into full account’ – diplomatese for ‘kicked into the long grass’.
This was essential to getting Belgrade’s agreement to pull its forces out of Kosovo, and to avoiding a UN veto from Moscow. It is instructive now to recall that, in this crucial respect, Nato was forced to settle for less than it demanded at the outset. Instructive, again, because indispensable to understanding what is going on now.
The bombing
A word on the bombing itself. The first question I asked, at the first of Nato’s televised news conferences I attended after arriving in Brussels, was for an estimate of how many pieces of Yugoslav Army ordnance had been destroyed or disabled by the bombing.
The answers, at the time, were evasive; the official assessment, after the campaign came to an end, modest. What nothing could quite dispel was the image of the Yugoslav Army rolling out of Kosovo, its tanks and artillery pieces rather conspicuously intact after 78 days of ‘Operation Allied Force’.
Actually, there were two, simultaneous bombing campaigns going on. One, targeted, according to Nato rhetoric, at ‘the fielded forces in Kosovo’, was ineffective – and never, in truth, expected to be effective, except for consumption by the media which, by and large, accepted it.
The other was aimed at battering the Serb population and political leadership into submission. When Nato started hitting power stations, in April, bow-tied Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told reporters: ‘This is a different class of target… we think the Serbs should put pressure on their leadership to end this’.
US General Michael Short, in charge of sending out the bombers from Aviano airbase in Italy, remarked later that ‘most of our political leaders don’t really understand air power’. During the war, he briefed the Washington Post and New York Times as to the tactics which could be expected to work: ‘I think no power to your refrigerator, no gas to your stove, you can’t get to work because the bridge is down – the bridge on which you hold your rock concerts and you all stood with targets on your heads. That needs to disappear at 3:00 in the morning’.
Yugoslavia’s foreign minister told Balkans specialist Tim Judah, for his book, Kosovo – War and Revenge, that it was the bombing of power stations and other civilian targets that was instrumental in persuading Belgrade to pull out of Kosovo.
As Timothy Garton Ash, investigating the campaign in a piece for the New York Review of Books, pointed out, it also meant ‘patients on life-support systems and babies in incubators had their power cut off’.
It was the Yugoslav political leadership, and the public in Nato countries, who began to lose their stomach for any continuation of the war when these effects made themselves felt. Nato leaders were prepared to continue inflicting them for as long as they thought it remained politically possible to do.
