The Peace Journalism Option 3
By
Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums
PART 3
3. REPORTING OF ‘THE KOSOVO CRISIS’
‘The Serbs’ – Aggregation and Dis-Aggregation
Nowhere has the tendency to ‘aggregation’ been more evident than in coverage of the past decade’s upheavals in present and former Yugoslavia. The zero-sum analysis offered by most Western reporting is based on the proposition that ‘the Serbs’ were guilty of ‘starting it.’ A piece for the BBC’s Newsnight, screened as Yugoslav forces vacated the province in June 1999, proved an extraordinary example of this underlying narrative and an apt illustration of how ‘aggregation’ plays an important part in constructing it.
The report was filed from Urosevac as local Serb civilians fled in fear of violence by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In the link read by the presenter, we learned that Russia had, that day, called for an urgent debate in the United Nations Security Council on demilitarising the KLA, as called for under Resolution 1244, which ended Nato’s bombing campaign. The reporter’s voice-over began:
“Imagine the Serbs’ reversal of fortune today. The rulers have themselves become refugees. Shedding tears of departure – and stashing the loot – two phones in the back of a car. But the Serbs are scared. Having bombed them from the air, the Americans are now having to protect them on the way out – with the deadline fast approaching.”
Clip of interview with US Commander: “I told them at 1400 that they could move with the escort. They can move whenever they want to, we’re not stopping them at all.”
Reporter: “Such is the Serbian fear of the Kosovo Liberation Army and Albanian revenge that they’re prepared to pack up in 20 minutes and accept an American escort. Their humiliation is complete.”
Clip of interview with Yugoslav army soldier: “Yesterday we had KLA with guns, they took the post office, and a local ambulance…”
Reporter: (over pictures of people boarding a bus) “Brutality has given way to self-pity. Following the Serb armour is a pathetic trail of Serb refugees. Overnight, the villains think they’ve become the victims in this war.”
The “Serb armour” belonged to the VJ, the Yugoslav National Army, a largely conscripted body drawn from any and every one of the many ethnic indentities still represented even in Yugoslavia’s attenuated latter-day form. This, the Serbian MUP (Interior Ministry Police) and various paramilitary groups were all lumped together in most reporting of the Kosovo story as “The Serbs” – a demonised aggregate including, as is clear from this piece, the civilian population as well.
Distinctions collapse – the Americans bombed “them” from the air – meaning, at least in Nato’s official version of events, strictly military targets – now they’re escorting “them” out of Kosovo; the “deadline” referred to was for the troops to leave, but the pictures showed families fleeing their homes.
The reference to “the villains” was over pictures of civilians boarding a bus; and to “stashing the loot” over a picture of a soldier putting two telephone handsets in the back of a car. If evidence existed for the allegation of looting, it was not adduced – judging from what we are told and shown, the phones might, for all the reporter knew, have rightfully belonged to the family in question.
This treatment of the exodus from Kosovo after the end of Nato bombing served to make a violent solution seem to make sense, in this case in retrospect. The disparity of esteem for suffering produced blanket coverage when the province’s ethnic Albanian population came in waves across neighbouring borders; then, after the bombing, buried the persecution and ejection of Serbs, Roma and other minorities on the inside pages of a couple of newspapers. They were tainted by association, therefore unworthy victims.
Conversely, treating their plight with due seriousness inevitably raises questions about the wisdom and effectiveness of the policy. The Guardian, in its editorial stance a staunch supporter of Operation Allied Force, was one of the newspapers which afterwards maintained at least some interest in the situation on the ground in Kosovo. In an editorial on December 7, 1999, on Russia’s bombing of Chechenya, its leader writer remarked: “Chechenya is not Kosovo, and Russia is not Serbia. Much as some might wish it, we cannot send in the smart bombers. And as Kosovo since the war has shown, that would not, in any case, be much of a solution or even any at all.”
Dis-Aggregation
How to report on events within this arena in a way which accurately frames the conflict and helps audiences to understand what is important, and what effects are likely to be wrought by, say, particular kinds of policies pursued by third parties? If the third parties are their own governments, this is essential equipment for reaching a mature assessment of major and important actions taken in their name.
A parity of esteem for suffering and testimony is a prerequisite for focussing on the structural and cultural factors perpetuating the conditions likely to lead to violence. When the Kosovo bombing began in March 1999, saturation coverage of refugees fleeing ‘Serb ethnic cleansing’ across the Albanian and Macedonian borders was not matched by reports of displaced civilians heading north.
In April, an American Congressional delegation, led by senior Republican Jim Saxton under the auspices of the International Strategic Studies Association, visited Yugoslavia. They found that “some one-third of the Albanian and other refugees appear, in fact, to be fleeing further into Serbia, to avoid the Kosovo Liberation Army… There is no doubt that the Nato bombings have contributed heavily – perhaps overwhelmingly – toward the outflow.” RTS Television Serbia, derided by Nato leaders for the crude propaganda interspersed with its news, did carry pictures of refugees arriving in Belgrade, explaining them as having fled the KLA and Nato bombing. Shortly afterwards the station was bombed and its transmissions blocked by EUTELSAT.
The reports may have been important enough to warrant an attack because these images were filtering through into Western news bulletins as well, thus affecting what Downing Street spokesman Alastair Campbell called “the only battle that Nato might lose – the battle for hearts and minds.” They went to the nub of one of the most difficult issues for Nato – namely, whether its bombing campaign was bringing the stated objectives nearer, or moving them further away.
The initial aim, described by then British Defence Secretary George Robertson as “averting a humanitarian catastrophe” was subsequently finessed to “reversing” the same. Was this catastrophe – the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo – the cause or consequence of the bombing? The existence of refugees fleeing, they said, Nato bombs, suggests the answer is at least partly the latter. In basing the coverage of refugee outflows exclusively at the southern borders, and appointing one set of ‘worthy victims’, the reports missed something important for audiences to know – information relevant to an ongoing judgement about the wisdom and likely effectiveness of their leaders’ responses.
Some journalists who did look beyond the cliches about historic enmities between ethnic groups managed to dis-aggregate the parties involved in the conflict. In the edition of Newsnight screened on June 16, 1999, the piece discussed above was directly preceded by one from the programme’s Diplomatic Correspondent Mark Urban.
This told “the extraordinary story of how a group of Serbian monks stood up to the men of violence” at an ancient monastery in Decani. This, Urban declared, was “one of the few places here where the story of ethnic hatred between Serb and Albanian was checked by a barrier of faith and common humanity.”
The Abbot explained that, as Serbian paramilitary gangs went looting and extorting money in nearby towns and villages, his 21 monks had offered “food, medicines, support and especially we were speaking to the officials, to the police and army, to protect those Albanians who stayed.” One Albanian, Agim Morani, told Urban about an incident where the Abbot had intervened personally to save local Albanians from the paramilitaries, escorting them to the safety of a nearby Orthodox church. “If he hadn’t come, it is 100% certain we would be dead,” Mr Morani declared.
Urban explained that thousands of Serbian civilians were now fleeing “retribution” from returning Albanians. The piece showed Italian K-For peacekeepers guarding the monks, “but now their prayers are needed by those of their own faith,” Urban explained. “The KLA have not yet established much of a presence here, but where they have, Serbs have fled.” Local Albanians were “determined to repay” the monks’ courage and kindness by protecting them, but “there is a real threat now from extremist Albanian armed groups – today the Serb bishop of a nearby town fled after one of his monks disappeared during the night. Elsewhere a monastery has been burnt down… Even if their [the monks’] acts have safeguarded their future, the wider Serb community is disappearing by the day.”
This was important in connecting with peace initiatives without waiting for them to emanate from official sources, one major missing factor in so much reporting of the conflict. By this stage its practical importance was as evidence of some willingness by people on the ground to live in the multi-ethnic society which Nato was aiming to establish. For a reporter to be able to detect such stirrings depended on dis-aggregation – an awareness, contained in the phrase, “the wider Serb community” that demonising those responsible for (some of) the violence as ‘the Serbs’ does the audience a disservice by presenting a distorted picture.
Assumptions Revisited
Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia enjoyed almost universal editorial support among London 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 far from 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 – ‘the Serbs’ were to blame for ‘starting 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 irrrationality, and it seems to make sense to coerce the party guilty of ‘starting 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 News from Nato headquarters in Brussels, I put questions at briefings, to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then Secretary-General 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 to their homes.
This was inspired in part by the epic correspondence in 1991 between Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then German Foreign Minister and an early advocate of breaking up Yugoslavia, and Javier Perez de Cuellar, last-but-one Secretary General of the United Nations. Warning against the uncoordinated 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 the adoption of three basic principles. Any further intervention must be conceived as part of a solution for the whole of Yugoslavia; no one party should be favoured; any plan must be acceptable to minorities.
Now, 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 the notion on its merits, that Operation Allied Force was driven by morality, makes the TRANSCEND plan, based on the Perez de Cuellar principles, worth reporting. If it is right &endash; not merely as a matter of politics, but morally right – that Kosovans be allowed to return to their homes, then the same moral right extends to Serbs. In order to connect with this it would be necessary to report with equal esteem for the needs and the suffering of both Kosovans and Serbs.
The KLA and the media
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 Futures Foundation, 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 K-For 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. It was reported shortly afterwards that the UCPMB had renounced violence and committed themselves to pursuing a political settlement of their grievances, although they did continue to crop up in news reports in connection with reports of murders of Serb civilians.
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 the tarmac at Banda Aceh airport was bedecked with huge slogans calling 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-Albanians from 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 ‘black-hat, white-hat’ map of the conflict. The approaches which Conflict and Peace Forums and others are developing are based on the need to transcend this discourse and, therefore, offer audiences a better service in informing them about a complex and dangerous world.
