Disinformation as Consensus History: Milosevic and the Balkans
From the time the U.S. government decided to target Milosevic and the Serbs as the root of Balkan evil in the early 1990s, the U.S. propaganda system began its work of demonization of the target, enhanced atrocities management, and the necessary rewriting of history. The integration of government needs and media service was essentially complete, and was beautifully symbolized by the marriage during the crisis years of State Department PR chief James Rubin and Christiane Amanpour, CNN's main reporter on the Kosovo war, whose reports could have come from Rubin himself. More recently, in connection with Milosevic's transfer to the Hague, Amanpour entertained Richard Holbrooke on the subject, and the two, speaking as old comrades-in-arms congratulated one another on a joint success, just as a policy-enforcing official might express mutual congratulations with a PR officer (Holbrooke applauded Amanpour's "fantastic coverage of the war throughout the last decade" [CNN Live At Daybreak, June 29, 2001]).
It should be noted that Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days before Croatia launched Operation Storm in August 1995, almost certainly talking over and giving U.S. approval to the imminent military operation, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's visit to Jakarta just before Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in September 1975. As Operation Storm involved a major program of killings and expulsions, with killings greatly in excess of the numbers attributed to Milosevic in the Tribunal indictment of May 22, 1999, an excellent case can be made that Holbrooke should be being tried for war crimes. We may also be sure that Christiane Amanpour's "fantastic coverage" of the wars in Yugoslavia did not deal with Operation Storm or mention Holbrooke's and the U.S. role in that butchery and massive ethnic cleansing.
As NATO prepared to go to war, which began on March 24, 1999, the media followed the official lead in focusing heavily on Serb atrocities in Kosovo, with great and indignant attention to the Racak massacre of January 15, 1999. The failure of the Rambouillet Conference they blamed on Serb intransigence, again following the official line. During the 78-day bombing war the media focused even more intensively on atrocities (Serb, not NATO), and passed along the official estimates of 100,000 Kosovo Albanian murders (U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen), and other estimates, smaller and larger. They also accepted the claim that the Serb violence that followed the bombing would have taken place anyway, by plan, so that the bombing, instead of causing the escalated violence was justified by its occurrence ex post.
In the post-bombing era a number of developments have occurred that have challenged the official line. But the mainstream media have not let them disturb the institutionalized untruths. Let me list some of these and describe the media's mode of deflection.
1. RACAK MASSACRE. The only pre-bombing act of Serb violence listed in the Tribunal indictment of Milosevic on May 22, 1999, was an alleged massacre of Albanians by the Serbs at Racak on January 15, 1999. The Serbs had carried out this action with invited OSCE representatives (and AP photographers) on the scene, but on the following day, after KLA reoccupation of the village, some 40 to 45 bodies were on display for the U.S.-OSCE official William Walker and the media. The authenticity of this massacre, which follows a long pattern of convenient but contrived atrocities to meet a PR need--well described in George Bogdanich's and Martin Lettmayer's brilliant film "The Avoidable War"--was immediately challenged by journalists in France and Germany, but no doubts whatever showed up in the U.S. media. Christophe Chatelet of Le Monde was in Racak the day of the "massacre," and left at dusk, as did the OSCE observers and Serb police, without witnessing any massacre. The AP photographers and on-the-scene OSCE representatives have never been available for corroboration or denial, and the forensic report of the Finnish team that examined the bodies at the behest of the OSCE has never been made public. The issue is still contested, but a very strong case can be made that the Racak "massacre" was a staged event (see, Chatelet, in Le Monde, Jan. 19, 1999; Professor Dusan Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in the autopsies], "The (Ab)use of Forensic Medicine," ; J. Raino, et al., "Independent forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: investigation of the victims from Racak, Kosovo," Forensic Science International 116 [2001], 171-85).
But the strong challenging evidence has been effectively blacked out in the U.S. mainstream media, and the "massacre" is taken as an established and unquestioned truth (e.g., Amanpour and Carol Lin, CNN Live at Daybreak, July 3, 2001; Steven Erlanger in his July 12 interview with Terry Gross). Why didn't the Serb army remove the incriminating bodies, as the propaganda machine claimed then and now that they were doing as a matter of policy directed from above? As in the case of the analyses and evidence in the 1980s that Agca might have been coached to implicate the Bulgarians and KGB, the U.S. mainstream media refuse to burden a useful party line with inconvenient questions and facts.
Also, while giving heavy, uncritical and indignant attention to Racak, the media have never allowed the far larger and unambiguous massacre of civilians at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999--three months after Racak--to reach public consciousness. This was a massacre by the U.S. ally Indonesia, U.S. officials did not feature it, and the media therefore served national policy by giving it short shrift.
2. U.S. AND NATO OPPOSITION TO SERB "ETHNIC CLEANSING" AND "GENOCIDE" AS THE BASIS OF THE NATO BOMBING. The official and media propaganda line is that the United States and NATO powers were deeply upset by Serb violence in Kosovo and eventually went to war to stop it. But there are problems with this view. For one thing, evidence has turned up showing that Washington, through its own agencies or hired mercenaries, actually aided and trained the KLA prior to the bombing, and in this and other ways encouraged them in provocations that stimulated Serb violence (Peter Beaumont et al., "CIA's bastard army ran riot in Balkans," The Observer [London], March 11, 2001). The postwar publication by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Report: Kosovo Aftermath, noted that "Under the influence of the Kosovo Verification Mission the level of Serbian repression eased off" in late 1998, but "on the other hand, there was a lack of effective measures to curb the UCK [KLA]" which had an interest in "worsening the situation." In short, U.S. policy before the bombing encouraged violence in Kosovo. The evidence for this has been made public abroad, but it has not yet surfaced in the U.S. mainstream media.
A second problem is that NATO supplied greatly inflated estimates of Serb killings and expulsions in Kosovo, quite obviously trying to prepare the ground for bombing. The claim that Serbian policy constituted "ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide" has long been confuted by OSCE, State Department, and human rights groups' findings of limited and targeted Serb violence, and by disclosure of an internal German Foreign Office report that even denies the appropriateness of the use of "ethnic cleansing" to describe Serb behavior ["Important Internal Documents from Germany's Foreign Office,"]. These contesting points of evidence, even though coming from establishment sources, are not only off the screen for the mainstream media, they are ignored and the old lies are repeated by Christopher Hitchens in The Nation ("Body Count in Kosovo," June 11, 2001) and Bogdan Denitch in In These Times ("Citizen of a Lost Country," May 14, 2001).
A third problem is: how could this humanitarian motive be driving Clinton and Blair in Kosovo when they had both actively supported Turkey's far larger- scale ethnic cleansing of Kurds throughout the 1990s? The mainstream media dealt with this and similar problems by not letting the issue be raised.
3. NATO REASONABLENESS, SERB INTRANSIGENCE AT RAMBOUILLET. On the question of negotiations versus the use of force, the official line has been that the NATO powers made reasonable negotiating offers to the Serbs, trying to get "Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians to come to a compromise" (Tim Judah), but that the Serb refusal to negotiate led to the bombing war. This line was demonstrated to be false when it was disclosed that NATO had inserted a proviso demanding full occupation by NATO of all of Yugoslavia, admitted by a State Department official to have been a deliberate "raising of the bar" to allow bombing (George Kenney, "Rolling Thunder: The Rerun," The Nation, June 14, 1999). This disclosure has been comprehensively suppressed in the mainstream media, allowing the propaganda lie to be repeated today (Judah's repetition of the lie was on June 29, 2001).
4. SERB GENOCIDE BY PLAN DURING THE NATO BOMBING. Three big lies expounded during the NATO bombing war were that (1) the Serbs were killing vast numbers; (2) they were doing this and expelling still larger numbers in a process of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide;" and (3) that they had planned mass killing and expulsions anyway, so that these could not be attributed to the bombing war or the kind of fighting and atrocities characteristic of a brutal civil war. It is now clear that while large numbers did flee, this included at least an equal proportion of Serbs, and that many fled without forcible expulsion; and it is also clear that while there were brutal killings, these fell far short of the 10,000-500,000 claimed by NATO. It is also now on the record that NATO and the KLA were engaged in joint military actions during the bombing war, and that expulsions were concentrated in areas of KLA strong support, pointing to a military logic to Serb actions (Daniel Pearl and Robert Block, "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31, 1999). The claim that the Serbs intended to do this anyway has never been supported by any evidence.
In Guatemala after 1947 the search was on for communists; in Kosovo during and after the bombing war the search was on for dead bodies (whereas there was no interest in or search for dead bodies in East Timor after the Indonesian massacres of 1999, in accord with the same propaganda service). The bodies found in Kosovo received great publicity, but the fact that this immense effort yielded only 3-4000 bodies from all causes and on all sides, and the fact that it fell far short of the NATO-media propaganda claims during the bombing war, has received minimal attention. However, with Milosevic now transferred to The Hague, and a fresh demand arising for bodies whose deaths can be attributed to him, once again the media are coming through with fresh claims of bodies transferred from Kosovo under the villain's direction.
5. WAR A SUCCESS, REFUGEES RETURNED TO KOSOVO. But the refugees were produced by the NATO bombing policy itself, and they returned to a shattered country. Furthermore, after the NATO war there was a REAL ethnic cleansing--in percentage terms the "largest in the Balkan wars" according to Transnational Foundation for Peace director Jan Oberg--with some 330,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Turks and others driven out of Kosovo, while some 3,000 people were killed and disappeared. However, as this has taken place under NATO auspices, the mainstream media, insofar as they mention the real ethnic cleansing at all, have treated it as a semi-approved "vengeance." But they have mainly dealt with the subject, as they did the post-Arbenz REAL terrorism, by eye aversion.
6. MILOSEVIC AS THE SOURCE OF BALKAN CONFLICT. In virtually all mainstream accounts, it was "Milosevic's murderous decade" (Nordland and Gutman in Newsweek, July 9, 2001), Milosevic who "set Yugoslavia to unraveling" (Roger Cohen, New York Times, July 1, 2001), "the man who had terrorized the turbulent Balkans for a decade" (Time, April 9, 2001). The wars were a "catastrophe that Slobodan Milosevic unleashed" (Tim Judah, The Times [London], June 29, 2001). This is comic book history, that follows the standard demonization process, and is refuted by every serious historian dealing with the area (Susan Woodward, Robert Hayden, David Chandler, Lenard Cohen, Raymond Kent, Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup).
Serious history takes into account, among other matters: (1) the fact that long before 1990 Yugoslavia had persistent "deep regional and ethnic cleavages," with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo "all areas of high ethnic fragmentation" (Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic), whose suppression required a strong federal state; (2) the effects of the Yugoslav economic crisis, dating back to 1982, and the IMF/World Bank imposition of deflationary policies on Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, and their consequences; (3) the post-Soviet collapse ending of Western support for the Yugoslav federal state, and German and Austrian collaboration in encouraging the Croatian and Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia without any democratic vote and without any settlement on the status of the large Serb minorities; (4) the West's and Western Badinter Commission's refusal to allow threatened ethnic minorities to withdraw from the new secession states; (5) the U.S. and Western encouragement of the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina to hold out for unity under their control in the face of Serb and Croatian fears and opposition; (6) the U.S. and NATO support of Croatia and its massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina.
The media rarely mention these extremely important external, NATO-inspired causes of ethnic cleansing, or the fact that Milosevic supported many diplomatic initiatives such as the Owen-Vance and Owen-Stoltenberg plans, both unsuccessful because of U.S. encouragement of the Muslims to hold out for more. Heavy German and U.S. responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia; the NATO governments' help in the arming of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the KLA; and the U.S. sabotaging of efforts at negotiated settlements in the early 1990s, are all well documented in Bogdanich's and Lettmayer's "The Avoidable War." The film was shown on the History Channel on April 16, but has otherwise been ignored in Propaganda System Number One for good reason: it not only shows dominant NATO responsibility for the Balkan disaster, it makes the mainstream media's supportive propaganda role crystal clear.
7. MILOSEVIC'S NATIONALIST SPEECHES OF 1987 AND 1989. It is now rote "history" that in April 1987 Milosevic "endorsed a Serbian nationalist agenda" at Polje in Kosovo, and did the same there on June 28, 1989-- supposedly heralding his project of Greater Serbia and the coming wars to achieve it. People like Roger Cohen and Steven Erlanger who cite these as "inciting Serb passions" almost surely never bothered to read them (nor did Joe Knowles, who mentions Milosevic's "infamous" speech of June 28 in In These Times [Aug.6, 2001]). In both speeches, Milosevic actually warns against the dangers of nationalism, and while he promises to protect Serbs, he is clearly speaking of the citizens of the Republic of Serbia, not ethnic Serbs; and he describes "Yugoslavia" as "a multinational community...[that] can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it" (June 28, 1989).
8. MILOSEVIC AS DICTATOR. The June 28, 2001 amended indictment of Milosevic notes that he was "elected" president of Serbia on May 8, 1989, was elected again "in multi-party elections" held in December 1990, was "reelected" in December 1992, was "elected president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" on July 15, 1997, and was defeated and ousted from power in an election in September 2000. But as Milosevic is on the U.S. hit list, he is referred to repeatedly in the media as a "dictator," a word they were extremely reluctant to apply to Suharto during his 32 years as a prized U.S. client. The designation of dictator created a problem for the media because they also found, and continue to find, the Serb populace guilty as "willing executioners" who were properly punished by bombing and who need to acknowledge their guilt. How a people suffering under a dictatorship and dictator-controlled media could be guilty of crimes committed elsewhere is unexplained, but in the U.S. mainstream media the contradiction remains unchallenged.
9. THE DICTATOR AS RESPONSIBLE KILLER. In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky and I showed how in the case of the murder of Jerzy Popieuszko in communist Poland the media repeatedly sought to prove that the leaders of Poland knew about and were responsible for the killing, whereas in cases where our own leaders or clients are involved, the media are not interested in high level knowledge and responsibility. It was therefore a foregone conclusion that the media would jump on every claim that Milosevic was behind the deaths in the Balkan wars, and as the Tribunal has to confront the need for such proof to convict the demon, the media are working this terrain with vigor. Some of the alleged new evidence is clearly being leaked from the Tribunal itself (e.g., Bob Graham and Tom Walker, "Milosevic Ordered Hiding of Bodies," Sunday Times [London], July 8, 2001), a form of propaganda once again revealing that it is not a judicial body but a political instrument. This evidence, which cites the very words used by the dictator in Belgrade in March 1999 instructing his subordinates to commit crimes ("all civilians killed in Kosovo have to be moved to places where they will not be discovered," in ibid.), has the odor of NATO-bloc disinformation and should be treated with the utmost scepticism. And we may be sure the media will never ask why, with this instruction, "45 bodies" were left on the ground in Racak for the convenience of William Walker and other NATO propagandists.
Concluding Note
The U.S. propaganda system is at the peak of its powers in the early years of the 21st century, riding the wave of capitalism's triumph, U.S. global hegemony, and the confidence and effective service of the increasingly concentrated and commercialized mainstream media. It is a model propaganda system, its slippages and imperfections adding to its power, given its assured service in times of need. And as described above, in such times its ability to ignore inconvenient facts, swallow disinformation, and work the public over with propaganda can easily compete with--even surpass--anything found in totalitarian systems.
