Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis [Paperback]

The subjects the authors analyze include, the Western intervention that was the primary cause of the Balkan wars in the first place; the extreme pro-Nato bias of the so-called International War Crimes Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia; the efforts of the U.S. military to "work with" the mass media; the effort to "nazify" the Serbs in the Western media; and the evolving nature of warfare in the West.

Probably the best chapters are by Jim Naureckas and Seth Ackerman of Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and Edward S. Herman and David Peterson on the American media's coverage of the war (Herman and Peterson concentrate on CNN's coverage) and John Pilger and Philip Hammond on the British media's coverage of the war. The subjects discussed in these chapters include, New York Times articles from the 1980's describing mass atrocities in Kosovo by Albanians against Serbs, stories that the Times, along with the rest of the media, forgot as they portrayed the Kosovo conflict as a black and white story that was nothing more than Milosevic, when he came to power in the late 80's, inflicting his barbaric racism against defenseless Albanians; the fact that atrocities and the misery of Kosovar Albanians vastly increased in Kosovo after the bombing began on March 24th; the hysterical anti-Serb racism of the British and American media along with their typically puerile self-righteousness as they urged Nato to attack Serb civillians and civillian infrastructure so that the Serbs's would get a taste of the unique atrocities that their leaders had inflicted upon other people's of the region; the unwillingness of the media to report details about these Nato war crimes; the fact that the Western media paid no attention to the fact that Nato inserted a clause in Appendix B of the Rambouillet accords which called for an exclusively Nato occupation force for Kosovo that would have unlimited access to the rest of Yugoslavia, terminating that nation's sovereignty (all this caused a brief stir in the German media before being quieted by foreign minister Joschka Fischer, as Thomas Deichman shows in his chapter on Germany's reaction to the war); the fact that George Kenney, former chair of the Yugoslav desk at the State Department during the Bush administration, ignored by the media, reported that a state department official had told him that Nato deliberately had deliberately sabotoged the Rambouillet accords; the fact that the Serb parliament had passed a resolution the day before the bombing began, that received scattered attention in the U.S. media, agreeing to an international security presence in Kosovo that would include neutral elements like the United Nations, as opposed to the exclusively Nato occupation force that the U.S. insisted upon; the fact that tens of thousands of Serbs, gypsies, Jews, and other non-Albanians have been ethnically cleansed by the Kosovo Liberation Army since the bombing ended; the fact that war crimes investigators have not been able to find more than between two thousand to three thousand bodies since the war ended, placing serious doubt on Nato's claims of "genocide" and its 10,000 dead figure (or 11,000, Bernard Kouchner's figure).

The rest of the book contains some good chapters on the reaction of the media the to the war in Germany, Russia, India, Norway and Greece, where the vast majority of the population opposed the war. Diana Johnstone analyzes the likely imperial motivations for the war and analyzes the media reaction to the war in France, where liberals, like Bernard Henri Levy, were obsessed by the alleged "multiculturalism" of Bosnian Moslems and their city, Sarajevo, in contrast to the barbaric racism of the Serbs, a centerpiece of their drive to distract attention from the harmful economic effects of further European integration and focus on an ideology of anti-racism, anti-chauvanism, anti-isolationism,etc. and smear any opponents of the European Union as automatically being in the same league with Jean Marie Le Pen, the fascist party leader.

On the whole, this is an excellent collection of essays. Not all of them are particularly well written. If you want a more succinct summary of the Kosovo War, try Noam Chomsky's "The New Military Humanism."

This was NATO's first war, and it attacked a sovereign country with no UN authorisation. It showed itself as an alliance with no legal or geographic limits, in which the USA and Germany quarrelled like rats in a sack. To trigger the war, the US government demanded that NATO forces occupy the whole country. As a US official said, "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get."

It was also the EU's war. From 1990, the EC intervened in Yugoslavia's internal affairs, aiding those seeking to secede. Its recognition of Yugoslavia's seceding republics breached international law, precipitating war. The EU's social democratic governments embrace capital, `the market' and big business: their enemy is nationalism, politics, demonised as the source of all evil.

Germany, the USA, Austria and Albania armed the Kosovo Liberation Army. In early 1998, the KLA's first major attack provoked a Serb crackdown. NATO claimed that the Serbs killed 100,000 people. Later the International Criminal Tribunal of The Hague counted 2,500 dead. The NATO bombing killed 2,600 people. Who should be tried for war crimes?

After the war, the US Congress voted $100 million to `independent' forces in former Yugoslavia, seeking its further disintegration. NATO was supposed to disarm the KLA and to protect Serbs and Roma Gypsies in Kosovo. But it has allowed the KLA to kill more than 200 Serbs and to expel 240,000 Serbs and 90,000 Roma.