by Mark Curtis
The Israeli viewpoint nearly always dominates. Palestinian bombings are usually reported to be ‘starting’ a series of events to which Israel ‘responds’. For example, one Newsnight piece asserted: ‘Dozens of Palestinians and Israelis have been killed in a relentless round of suicide bombings and Israeli counterattacks.’ Philo found no reports saying Palestinians ‘responded’ to Israeli attacks.
According to the GUMG report, Israelis were allowed to speak twice as much on TV news as Palestinians and there were three times as many headlines that expressed the Israeli view compared to the Palestinian. There was only muted criticism of Israeli violence, while the fact that there are powerful forces in Israel opposed to any peace settlement was rarely reported. Language such as ‘murder’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘savage cold-blooded killings’ were used to describe Israeli deaths, but not Palestinian. ‘This difference in the language is noteworthy’, Philo writes, since from the beginning of the intifada ‘nearly ten times as many Palestinians had in fact been killed as Israelis’.24
There are only a few exceptions to this general pattern of reporting on Israel. One outstanding exception is the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, who not only reports reality but also bravely takes on fellow journalists in failing to. Fisk has written that ‘we are reporting this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African whites against the blacks’. He notes that ‘rarely since the second world war has a people been so vilified as the Palestinians. And rarely has a people been so frequently excused and placated as the Israelis’.25
Fisk also writes that ‘the Israeli line – that Palestinians are essentially responsible for “violence”, responsible for the killing of their own children by Israeli soldiers, responsible for refusing to make concessions for peace – has been accepted almost totally by the media’. He cites as an example of distorted reporting that the BBC cannot even call it murder when committed by Israeli forces: according to one BBC report, undercover Israeli soldiers ‘shot dead a member of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction yesterday in what Palestinians called an assassination’.26
The Economist has noted that ‘violence is not one-sided. It has, in point of fact, been initiated by the Palestinians … Israel’s aim is to stop them’. This is the general framing. The same report also rejected the notion that the US role in the Arab-Israeli conflict has been ‘one-sided and excessive’. It concludes that the US record ‘is not the record of a superpower with no interest in peace and justice’. The article was entitled ‘the unblessed peacemaker’, referring to the US.27
That the US is regarded as an ‘honest broker’, a ‘mediator’ or even, as above, a ‘peacemaker’ is generally accepted and widely put across the mainstream. Where reporting does point out that the US is not wholly impartial, it is usually expressed in mild terms like US ‘bias’ towards Israel. Rarely is US policy directly seen as the major problem. Most criticism of the US is about Washington not engaging enough in the peace process. But the US has been seriously engaged for some time – giving a green light to Israeli aggression, supplying Israel with the arms to carry it out and ensuring international action is impossible by vetoing UN resolutions, etc.
But it is Britain’s role that has been given even more serious ideological treatment. Television news cannot mention the simple fact that Britain is in effect condoning violence by Israel (or anyone else), by definition. Neither can the press, so far as I can tell. The range of (growing) British trade links with Israel promoted by the government has been barely mentioned. Even the supply of British arms-related equipment has escaped much scrutiny and concern. There have been few mentions of the levers that could be used to pressure Israel, such as Britain’s bilateral links or multilateral levers like suspending the EU’s association agreement with Israel or boycotting goods exported illegally by Israel from the occupied territories.
In Kosovo, the media’s role was crucial in lending weight to the government’s policy of demonising Milosevic and undermining his regime through sanctions and finally bombing. With Israel, there is little demonising of Sharon in the media and few, if any, calls to undermine him through British policies.
6
KOSOVO: ANTI-HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION
We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured
Tony Blair, 12 April 19991
THE DECEMBER 1998 US and British attacks on Iraq were followed by weeks of bombings in a secret escalation of the war in the ‘no fly zones’ of northern and southern Iraq. Then Britain took to war again. In March 1999, NATO forces, primarily British and American, began pounding Yugoslavia and Kosovo from the air. The bombing lasted eleven weeks until June, causing massive damage not only to Yugoslav military forces but also the country’s civilian infrastructure. The official reason for the war against Yugoslavia was ‘to curb Milosevic’s ability to wage war on an innocent civilian population’ in Kosovo, and to ‘prevent an impending humanitarian disaster’, Tony Blair explained.2
The war against Milosevic’s Yugoslavia has been the subject of huge debate in the political mainstream, due to the government’s framing of the war as a new kind of military action taken to defend humanitarian values. The liberal press – notably the Guardian and the Independent – backed the war to the hilt (while questioning the tactics used to wage it) and lent critical weight to the government’s arguments.
The Kosovo war to me revealed the extraordinary nature of British mainstream political culture and how willingly deceived it generally is by government rhetoric on its moral motives. In my view, the claim that the war was fought in defence of human rights is so absurd as to defy belief. This was already clear at the time, but it is even clearer now. This important episode needs to be reviewed not only because it further highlights British contempt for international law and ethical standards, but also because one aspect of the Kosovo war was indeed new – Western leaders discovered anew that ‘humanitarianism’ could be a successful pretext for military intervention and that the mainstream political culture would buy it.
Precipitating humanitarian disaster
The claim that the war was fought for humanitarian purposes rests on the belief that the bombing prevented a humanitarian disaster. This claim is illusory, since it is clear NATO bombing precipitated, rather than halted, large-scale ‘ethnic cleansing’.
NATO leaders claimed before the bombing began that ‘genocide’ was taking place at the hands of Milosevic’s forces in Kosovo. Foreign Office minister Geoff Hoon claimed 10,000 Albanians had been killed; US Defence Secretary William Cohen even spoke of up to 100,000 military-aged men missing. Other figures in the tens of thousands were bandied around.
However, in the year before the bombing, according to NATO sources following the war, about 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo and several thousand had become internally displaced. A British government memorandum written after the NATO bombing says that 10,000 people were killed in Kosovo in 1999 – Foreign Secretary Robin Cook confirmed that only 2,000 of those deaths occurred before the bombing, meaning four times as many occurred after. These were deaths on both sides of the conflict between Yugoslav forces repressing ethnic Albanians, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).3
The mass deaths alleged to be taking place before the bombing seem to have been a NATO fabrication. Documents since released by the German Foreign Office and German regional administrative courts – used in deciding the status of Kosovar refugees in Germany – provide a completely different picture of Kosovo before the bombing. One report from February 1999 notes that ‘the often feared humanitarian catastrophe threatening the Albanian civil population has been averted’. In the larger cities ‘public life has since returned to relative normality’.
Most killings in Kosovo before the bombing were the result of fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, rather than ‘ethnic cleansing’. A German report exactly a month before the bombing stated that:
Events since February and March 1998 do not
evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity. The measures taken by the armed forces are in the first instance directed towards combatting the KLA and its supposed adherents and supporters.
UN special envoy Jiri Dienstbier has said that ‘before the bombing Albanians were not driven away on the basis of ethnic principle. [They were] victims of the brutal war between the Yugoslav army and the Kosovo Liberation Army.’
According to US diplomat Norma Brown, an aide to the Director of the Observer Mission in Kosovo, ‘there was no humanitarian crisis [in Kosovo] until NATO began to bomb … Everyone knew that a humanitarian crisis would arise if NATO started to bomb.’4
The mass refugee exodus from Kosovo began only after the bombing commenced. The British government has stated that before the bombing there were ‘over 200,000 internally displaced people in Kosovo and nearly 70,000 refugees (Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbs)’. These are already big numbers; it is clear that the situation was appalling for ethnic Albanians before the bombing as they faced severe repression and human rights abuses by Yugoslav forces and as a result of the war. But soon after the NATO bombing began, Milosevic implemented a campaign that forced more than 850,000 Kosovars over the borders, mostly into Albania and Macedonia.5
Yugoslav forces took advantage of the NATO bombing to implement this more terrifying campaign. It had begun on 19 March, but it was only with the NATO bombing that commenced on 24 March that the regime’s attacks were massively stepped up. A study by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) notes a ‘pattern of expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24’ and that ‘the most visible change in the events was after NATO launched its first airstrikes’. The study states that once the OSCE monitors left Kosovo on 20 March and in particular after the bombing campaign began, Yugoslav soldiers and paramilitaries ‘went from village to village and, in the towns, from area to area, threatening and expelling the Kosovo Albanian population’.6
General Naumann, Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee in 1999, said on Channel 4 that the humanitarian disaster ‘may have been accelerated by NATO, and definitely some of the atrocities which happened were caused by NATO bombs, since [these provoked] this vendetta feeling’. It is interesting that the indictment of Milosevic by the Hague war crimes tribunal refers to a long list of crimes committed by Milosevic, all of them after the beginning of the NATO bombing.7
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded in its inquiry into Kosovo that:
It is likely that the NATO bombing did cause a change in the character of the assault upon the Kosovo Albanians. What had been an anti-insurgency campaign – albeit a brutal and counter-productive one – became a mass, organised campaign to kill Kosovo Albanians or drive them from the country … The withdrawal of the OSCE monitors combined with the Serbs’ inability to inflict casualties upon NATO during the bombing campaign led to an intensification of the assault on the Kosovo Albanians.8
The Defence Committee concluded in an October 2000 report that ‘all the evidence suggests that plans to initiate the air campaign hastened the onset of the disaster’. It said that ‘whilst the strategy did in the end result in Milosevic withdrawing his forces from Kosovo, it did not achieve its aim of averting a humanitarian disaster’.
In its report, the Defence Committee criticises the British government for telling the public that a humanitarian disaster could be prevented solely by using air power. Indeed, this was the major criticism of NATO from within the political mainstream – that ground forces should also have been used, or at least not ruled out. But what the Defence Committee fails to realise is that by saying that the government failed to prevent the humanitarian disaster it is undermining the government’s whole rationale for launching the bombing campaign in the first place.9
The evidence also suggests that NATO leaders knew that Milosevic would launch such a campaign if they attacked, but still went ahead.
The Guardian reported on 28 April that ‘MI6 is understood to have warned that bombing would accelerate ethnic cleansing.’ Pentagon planners told the New York Times they had warned Clinton that Milosevic was likely to attack the Kosovars if faced with airstrikes. Pentagon spokesman Kevin Bacon said that ‘we were not surprised by what Milosevic has done’. ‘I think there is historical amnesia here if anyone says they are surprised by this campaign.’10
There is much more evidence from the media. The Washington Post of 1 April said that for weeks before the NATO bombing campaign, CIA Director George Tenet had been forecasting that Yugoslav forces might respond by accelerating ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The Sunday Times of 28 March reported the views of General Shelton, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, noting that ‘air strikes might provoke Serb soldiers into greater acts of butchery’. Airstrikes alone, Shelton stated, ‘could not stop Serb forces from executing Kosovars’. The report also said that ‘Britain’s ambassador to Belgrade had been making a similar argument in a flood of cables to London.’11
Indeed, three days into the bombing, on 27 March, the NATO Commander General Wesley Clark said that it was ‘entirely predictable’ that Serb terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing. Shortly afterwards Clark said: ‘The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt as well as the terrible efficiency with which he would carry it out.’12
During the bombing, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Cook refused to admit that NATO actions had escalated the atrocities, claiming that the ethnic cleansing had already begun. But he also said:
We anticipated, therefore, the spring offensive; that it would be accompanied by ethnic cleansing; we did not have any intelligence to suggest he was going to load up whole trains and run a shuttle train deportation from Pristina to the Macedonian border.
At the very least, Cook is admitting that the government was not surprised by Milosevic’s actions, only the scale of them. He added that if NATO had not begun to bomb, the Milosevic regime would likely have acted as it did anyway.13
The Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that ‘it does seem, therefore, that there were pieces of information which were available to the USA’ and which should have been available to Britain ‘that indicated that the internally displaced in Kosovo were about to become refugees’.14
On the basis of Cook’s evidence, alongside the press reports, it appears very likely that the government knew that Milosevic would launch such a campaign once NATO attacked. If so, the subsequent bombing campaign was in callous, perhaps even criminal, disregard for human suffering.
There is also the issue of ‘Operation Horseshoe’. Two weeks into the bombing, the German Foreign Office said it knew of a plan by Milosevic to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Kosovo. NATO leaders seized on this to justify the bombing and to say that the attacks and expulsions now taking place would have taken place anyway. The plan received widespread media coverage. But it appears that ‘Operation Horseshoe’ was a fabrication. A retired German Brigadier General and now OSCE consultant, Heinz Loquai, states in his book, The Kosovo conflict: The road to an avoidable war, that the German Foreign Office culled the story from Bulgarian intelligence reports and turned it into propaganda, even coining the name ‘Horseshoe’.15
There is another massive hole in the government’s argument that NATO was trying to prevent a humanitarian disaster: many military strategists and others openly said that this was not their policy.
In launching the bombing, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana said that NATO’s actions were ‘directed towards disrupting the violent attacks being committed by the Serb army and special police forces and weakening their ability to cause further humanitarian catastrophe’. But this was immediately contradicted by a source in Britain’s Ministry of Defence, who told the Guardian that ‘air strikes in this situation are a political weapon but it will not stop the Serbs killing Albanians in Kosov
o’. ‘It will not provide a military solution.’16
Three weeks into the bombing Wesley Clark said that ‘you cannot stop paramilitary murder on the ground with aeroplanes’. A week later, he said that the NATO operation ‘was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a means of waging war against the Serb forces in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea.’…17
Britain’s military commander, General Sir Charles Guthrie, also told the press that ‘NATO’s air assault was never likely to stop Serbian forces killing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.’ A year after the bombing US General Harry Shelton said that ‘the one thing we knew we could not do … we could not stop the atrocities or the ethnic cleansing through the application of our military power’.18
So the situation at the beginning of the bombing campaign appears to be that NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim that they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked. With bombing under way, military figures publicly refuted political leaders’ whole justification for the war, by saying that the military strategy could not prevent the humanitarian disaster.