Must read
Making the news
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Western war reporting is selective and the
real stories of the Kosovan crisis remain
largely untold
John Pilger
Tuesday August 24, 1999
The Guardian
newsunlimited.co.uk
Last week, 14 members of the same Iraqi family were reportedly
killed when their house was hit by a missile. There were no
military installations nearby. On August 11, an unconfirmed
number of people died when a 4th-century Christian monastery
was bombed as they gathered to watch the solar eclipse.
In May, a friend travelling in northern Iraq came upon the
remains of a flock of sheep with blast injuries. A shepherd
and his family of six had been bombed to death on one day,
his sheep the next. Apart from a news-in-brief item in the
Guardian, this was not news in Britain.
Such acts of murder are routine, carried out by US and British
pilots over Iraq. "We do not target civilians" and "pilots are
defending themselves", say the foreign office. It is a deceit
reminiscent of the long-running lie that Hawk aircraft were not
operating in East Timor. Mostly, lying is unnecessary, as Orwell
pointed out in the preface to Animal Farm, when "inconvenient
facts [are] kept dark". A recent Unicef report that child deaths
in Iraq had doubled to half a million briefly broke the silence,
presumably because it was "measured" - that is, it usefully
shifted the blame a few centimetres from the Anglo-American-led
sanctions to the Iraqi regime.
Numerous other studies on the suffering of the civilian
population of Iraq have been ignored or buried. A Unicef report
in 1997, which left no doubt that the malnourishment of a million
children was caused by "the impact of sanctions", was confined
largely to an article in the Economist. In 1995, the UN Food and
Agricultural Organisation concluded that "the moral, financial
and political standing of the international community intent on
maintaining economic sanctions is challenged by the estimate
that since August 1990, 567,000 children in Iraq have died as
a consequence." That is four times the number of children who
died at Hiroshima.
According to the Guardian's data base, it was reported in two
paragraphs in this newspaper and the Times, and in one sentence
in the Financial Times. There was no political debate, and there
is none now. The prime minister is never required to defend
policies which, by the definition of various international
conventions, are genocidal.
Unpeople are a common phenomenon in the media age.
Victims are deemed worthy or unworthy, depending on the
degree of western culpability. Since the "just war" in the
Balkans, more than 170,000 Serbs have been "ethnically
cleansed" from their homes in Kosovo in the same way that
ethnic Albanians were driven out.
This is equal to the number of Serbs forced out of Krajina seven
years ago by the Croatian regime and its US state department
backers. Many Serbs fleeing Kosovo are survivors of the Krajina
atrocity. Now they are as much victims of Nato's ethnic hate
campaign as they are of Albanian gangs, whose intimidation
and murder extends to Montenegrins and Roma.
Is this news? Sort of. Several exceptional pieces of reporting
come to mind. Otherwise, it is well on the way to news-in-brief.
The drum-beaters are long silent, having testily assured the
prime minister's press spokesman that they did as good a job
of propaganda as he did.
Silent, too, is the effete bomber himself, whose "moral crusade"
was dutifully elevated from the crapulous to every front page and
BBC bulletin and whose "new internationalism where the brutal
repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated" is
now revealed to be fake as Nato presides over precisely that
repression in Kosovo.
The truth behind all this, which Harold Pinter calls "the depth
of shame", is that untold thousands of innocent Serbs and ethnic
Albanians, victims of Nato's "war," would be alive today had
western leaders pursued three outstanding opportunities for
peace. Two were at the Rambouillet talks: in February when Robin
Cook boasted to parliament of agreement on 90% of peace terms
which the Serbs were prepared to sign, then in March, when the
Serbs were again willing to sign - until a secret appendix was
handed to them on the last day, demanding, in effect, they
surrender all of Yugoslavia to Nato's occupation.
On top of this, the elected Yugoslav parliament, on March 23,
called on the UN to negotiate a diplomatic solution leading
"toward the reaching of a political agreement on a wide- ranging
autonomy for Kosovo." Almost all of this remains unknown to the
British public. Neither was the complete list of Nato targets hit
ever published or broadcast. This shows not "blunders" but an
unmistakable pattern of civilian terrorism: hospitals, schools,
nurseries, housing estates, power sources, markets, farms,
churches, monasteries, against which horrific "anti-personnel "
cluster bombs were used.
A group of prominent international lawyers argue that if the
recent indictment of Slobodan Milosevic is to be credible, not
merely victor's justice, then the evidence against all prima
facie war criminals should be heard. They have prepared a
compelling indictment of Nato's leaders, including Blair,
Robertson and Cook. That is the news.
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