Life and death on a deadline

Citation

Prentice, E.-A. (2002), "Life and death on a deadline", European Business Review, Vol. 14 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2002.05414bab.008

Life and death on a deadline

Eve-Ann Prentice

There cannot have been many human beings on the planet who did not gaze in disbelief, then horror, as plumes of smoke belched from the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September. Aircraft swooping out of a clear blue sky became the deliverers of death to thousands.

For those, including me, who lived through the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, there must have also been a bitter sense of déjà vu. In the minutes before the 1,300-foot high citadels of capitalist power crumpled to dust, it was hard not to have flashbacks to the burning Party headquarters opposite the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade as flames shot from the high-rise building following a cruise missile strike. Or we might have cast our minds back to the sight and smell of smoke from another tall building in Belgrade, the state television centre, in which scores of mostly young technicians and make-up girls perished in another Alliance air raid. A human hipbone was later found on the roof of a jazz club about 1,000 yards away.

After six weeks of watching buildings and humans being smashed apart, I came to regard aeroplanes as instruments of death. The scale and after-effects of the World Trade Centre terror attacks are likely to be far more widespread, but they are probably not unrelated. The immediate prime suspect for the New York cataclysm, Osama bin Laden, is widely suspected by many throughout the Balkans of having recruited and trained Mujahideen Islamic fighters in Bosnia in the 1990s, and again in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. Furthermore, America probably knew about his interest in the Balkans but at least turned a blind eye. This was because to Washington "my enemy's enemy is my friend", and anyone who stood against the Serbs during the Balkan wars of the past ten years was acceptable.

I am a private pilot, but the destructive power of aircraft was brought home most graphically to me on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon in late May, 1999. I was on a narrow, winding mountain road in southern Kosovo, when two NATO jets swooped from on high and released their bombs. My interpreter was killed, and I and four other Western journalists were slightly injured.

On the same day, an old people's home in southern Serbia was bombed and several people were reported to have been killed and injured. While it was a decidedly frightening moment when our group of journalists found ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, I always try to remember that correspondents in a war zone are there by choice, unlike civilians in conflict-afflicted countries. According to the United Nations more than half the civilians killed or injured in Yugoslavia during NATO's campaign to force the troops of Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo were children and women.

Fast forward to August 2001. NATO troops are back in the Balkans, this time in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Only now it is going to be different; a peaceful mission is under way to collect weapons from ethnic Albanian rebels waging a worrying campaign against the Slav-dominated government in Skopje. Within days, a young British soldier has been killed when a slab of concrete is hurled through the windscreen of the vehicle he is in. The young man's father proclaims that his son should never have been sent to Macedonia because this is a civil conflict – unlike the war in Kosovo two years earlier.

The grieving father was understandably distraught, but mistaken. Both the conflicts have been civil wars. Both have been based on the determination of ethnic Albanian leaders to forge a greater Albania and the equal determination of Slavs from Serbia, Montenegro and now Macedonia to stop them. As in most civil wars – Northern Ireland is no different – the causes have been rooted and nurtured over hundreds of years. Death has been meted out by all sides.

This is true of all the bloody conflicts in the Balkans during the past decade yet this is not the picture that Western politicians have propagated.

When the NATO campaign first began in Kosovo during March, 1999, the world recoiled in horror at reports of Serb attacks on ethnic Albanians. This was a campaign of good against evil, to save innocents from the oppressor. Since then, many people have been forced to think again. The picture presented by NATO, and broadcast by a depressingly unquestioning press, has become distorted. It is no longer black and white, but there are subtle shades of grey.

The reason NATO manipulated the public's image of the Balkans is that it took sides in a civil war. And in taking sides, I believe that the West has not helped contain conflict in the region. At best, human suffering is on a similar level today as it was when the bombing campaign began. At worst, more people have died across the region than would have done if the West had stayed away; relations between the West and Russia and China have been destabilised; refugees from the region have swelled the numbers seeking asylum in Western Europe; and porous frontiers around Kosovo have led to a huge rise in drug-dealing and other organised crime.

Slobodan Milosevic has been forced from power, it is true, and now awaits his fate in The Hague. But his days were almost certainly numbered anyway and some in Serbia believe his dictatorial rule was lengthened rather than shortened by NATO's actions. The bombing campaign united rather than divided the country.

Late in the year 2000, Vojislav Kostunica, the man who replaced Slobodan Milosevic as Serbian leader, gave an interview to a Slovakian newspaper. In it he said: "The NATO intervention was only possible because of media manipulations and lies, and due to the creation of a false picture of the Serbs in the world. I know that we have a lot of work to do to change this picture". He went on: "Today, it is clear that NATO's so-called humanitarian intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was not justified politically, legally, or factually. It was precisely that intervention that caused a humanitarian disaster, whose consequences will be felt for a long time. I think that even Bill Clinton himself would no longer call the 19 NATO member states' intervention necessary and fair."

At around the same time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, said that, while she supported in principle the Serbs' return to Kosovo, the current security situation in the province did not allow for their immediate return in safety.

Bearing in mind what Kostunica said: did the Western media lie and mislead the public at the time of the Kosovo conflict? Listening to the UN's refugee supremo, does it make you wonder why Kosovo is still not safe for all more than two years after NATO's proclaimed victory of right over wrong?

As a writer for The Times, I had personal experience of the power of propaganda following the mountain road bombing in which my 38-year-old interpreter perished.

Those of us who survived the initial blasts were trapped, our car blown to smithereens and with the road ahead and behind reduced to rubble. Our lives were probably saved by Yugoslav Army soldiers who braved the continuing bombardment to come and pull us out of ditches and crevices and then take us to the relative safety of their camp in a village higher up the mountain.

When the outside world was told that a group of Western journalists had been injured in Kosovo, what did NATO say? They didn't exactly lie, but they did the next best thing. Jamie Shea told reporters in Brussels that he was not aware of any bombing activity in that area at that time. The implication, of course, was that we had been shelled by Serb forces.

Other journalists who tried to question NATO were often lambasted as near traitors – the BBC's John Simpson was criticised when he described the effects of bombs falling in central Belgrade.

It is important to think about how the war was covered in the Western media because journalists can and do affect public opinion back home. Public opinion can in turn help encourage governments to pursue wars – or persuade them to pull back.

To understand the media coverage of last year's campaign and the power of NATO's propaganda machine, you have to think back nine years to 1991 and the beginning of the end for Tito's Yugoslavia. At that time, few people in the West were familiar with the term ethnic cleansing. Nowhere have these words been used to evoke more passion and revulsion than in the Balkans. Think about how the term has been employed as part of the West's portrayal of the Serbs in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. You rarely if ever heard the term ethnic cleansing used to describe the actions of Croats or Muslims – yet that is precisely what they did. Every side was as vicious as it was physically able to be.

By the start of NATO's Kosovo campaign, we were told the bombing was for humanitarian reasons. The then US Under Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke, said 10,000, even 100,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed by Serbs in Kosovo. Now these tolls are estimated at between 3,000-5,000 – including those killed by NATO bombs.

Over the past decade, ethnic cleansing came to be understood as a campaign by one ethnic group to clear an area of people representing another ethnic group.

It is important to note that in Croatia and Bosnia there was and is no ethnic difference between the Serbs, Muslims and Croats – they are all Slavs. The difference is cultural and religious. Bosnian Muslims, for instance, were Slavs who converted to Islam during the Ottoman rule largely in exchange for economic benefits from the Ottomans. It was different in Kosovo where there is an ethnic difference between the Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs. They are from different races. So with some justification the Serbs now accuse Americans of ethnic cleansing against American Indians in the nineteenth century.

In East Timor just weeks after NATO entered Kosovo, Indonesian forces embarked on a vicious campaign to terrorise, kill and frighten away local people who wanted independence. This could have been called ethnic cleansing – but it did not evoke a bombing campaign against the government in Jakarta. If the Western powers – and the USA in particular – want to be the policemen of the world, shouldn't the rules be the same across the globe, the Serbs asked.

The term ethnic cleansing became popular when the wars broke out in Croatia and then Bosnia-Herzegovina as Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s. Ethnic cleansing was a phrase which evoked mass killing in the minds of many ordinary people.

It kindled images of the Holocaust during the Second World War. It was also almost invariably used to describe the actions of the Serbs, even though all sides in former Yugoslavia carried out vicious military attacks against one another at various times – the Croatian pulverisation of Mostar in Bosnia is a case in point.

Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia do all have one thing in common – they have all been involved in civil wars where the non-Serb side has been fighting for independence from Belgrade. Each side also carried out as much killing as they were physically able to. The Serbs, starting from the point of being in charge of the whole of former Yugoslavia, had the military advantage of controlling the Yugoslav Army's weapons and forces, so they were generally able to carry out more killing than the other sides.

But the very fact that there were fierce battles in Croatia, Bosnia, and in Kosovo shows that unquestionably all sides had armies. If the Serbs were killing and terrorising only innocent civilians, there would have been no battles – only instant victory for Belgrade. That is not to say there were not atrocities. There undoubtedly have been massacres of innocents across the region in the past nine years. Serb Special Forces, especially those such as the Tigers led by the assassinated Arkan, were allowed and even tacitly encouraged by Slobodan Milosevic to ignore all the usual rules of engagement set down in the Geneva Convention.

However, demonising the Serbs as a whole merely gave credence to Milosevic among his own people. Moderate Serbs who began by criticising the use of paramilitaries were quickly persuaded that the West hated all Serbs. This helped dissipate democratic opposition to Milosevic in the late 1990s and again during the weeks that followed NATO's triumphant entry into Kosovo. There was widespread condemnation across the world each time Serbs killed Croats in Vukovar or Muslims in Sarajevo. Yet there was far less uproar when Croat forces reduced the Muslim quarter of Mostar in Bosnia to rubble. Or when Muslim forces started killing one another in the Bihac region of northern Bosnia after a rift in the Muslim-led government in 1994 and 1995. Even the British commander of UN troops in Bosnia, General Sir Michael Rose, said it was not helpful of the USA to push for the bombardment of Bosnian Serbs at Pale in 1995.

Fighting between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims of Croatia and Bosnia broke out as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Tito, a Croat by birth, had held the federation together by making sure that the borders of the republic were drawn in such a way that people from all backgrounds lived together. He tried to minimise the influence of the majority – the Serbs. After he died in 1980, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the country's disintegration was inevitable. What the Western press and politicians failed to explain, or perhaps even to understand, was the viewpoint of the Serbs. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia suddenly found themselves with the prospect of living in a foreign country, cut off from Belgrade. They were sometimes a minority and often suffered from sensing old Second World War hostilities resurfacing among their neighbours.

By failing to understand the views of all sides, the public in the West was led to believe that Serbs were generally all rampaging monsters bent on destroying non-Serbs almost for the hell of it.

The situation in Kosovo was different. A civil war had been raging there on and off for 40 years by the time NATO intervened. Here, again, little press coverage was given to the attacks periodically launched against Serbs by Kosovo Albanians. The impression in the Western mind was that peaceful ethnic Albanians were being wiped out by heavily-armed Serbs.

Again, the Serbs, particularly special paramilitary forces, were responsible for terrible campaigns of killing and terrorism. However, these were often carried out as revenge attacks following raids by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In December, 1998, for instance, KLA gunmen burst into a café near Kosovska Mitrovica and shot dead about ten Serbian teenagers who were drinking coffee after playing football. The incident was, as far as I know, not reported in the Western press. The reprisal raid on known KLA homes nearby when four men with guns in their hands were shot dead was reported in Western newspapers.

Some parts of central Kosovo had been no-go areas to Serb civilians for years, with the KLA in complete control of roads and villages. The Albanian community in Kosovo had also had a parallel education and finance system in the province for over ten years before NATO intervened. This did not stop many Albanians using Serb-provided subsidised state electricity and water supplies – which they did not pay for. These services were rarely cut off to those who failed to pay, largely because the system meant that individual homes were physically difficult to isolate from the grid.

Yet this historical background to the Kosovo conflict was barely understood by the public in the West. I even came across several ordinary people in London in the weeks before the NATO bombing campaign who believed that Milosevic's forces had invaded Kosovo – that the province was a country outside Serbia.

By the time of the Kosovo conflict, the international public perception of the Serbs was as a nation of near-monsters. Little if any differentiation was made between the government of Slobodan Milosevic – which was undoubtedly guilty of state terrorism – and the majority of the 11 million ordinary Serbs. The campaign to portray the entire Serbian nation as belligerent extremists was carried out by many Western politicians, and by large sections of the Western press.

Here we come back to the press's role. When Yugoslavia began to fall apart in 1991, many brave but very young journalists had recently made their names by covering the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Some thought the fall of Yugoslavia would follow a similar pattern, and they failed to understand the essential difference between the Warsaw Pact countries and Yugoslavia. The mostly peaceful collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe required no more than colour writing, descriptions of crowd scenes and so on.

Sage, history-minded journalists who had usually commented on Yugoslav affairs tended to be too old, or sensible, to want to gallivant round the Balkans in what they knew would be a messy conflict, so they generally stayed away. The younger, brave reporters who flooded into the Balkans often had little

knowledge of the history of the region and were easy prey for the propagandists of West European governments. So the West was not questioned about its motives as much as it might have been at the beginning of the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.

Why did the West take sides? Partly because of glee at the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism. Partly, perhaps for strategic reasons – wanting to have a military presence on the eastern side of Europe.

Did the Western media deliberately lie? From my experience it has been more a lack of questioning those who led the bombing. The old adage sums it up:

You cannot hope to bend or twistThe honest British journalist,For seeing what unbribed he'll doThere really is no reason to.

Churchill said that the Balkans produce more history than they can digest. NATO's intervention in Kosovo may well have made this a chronic condition that will bring years of misery.