BACKGROUNDING THE NEWS--OR LACK OF IT:
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Did We Have To Bomb Serbia? Analyst, Congressman: “No”
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DID NATO have to bomb Serbia to end the violence in Kosovo? Has the bombing accomplished its goals?
Seth Ackerman, a representative of the nonprofit New York City-based media watchdog organization called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), both believe the bombing was an ill-advised power play that not only hasn’t brought peace to Kosovo, but may have been a violation of U.S. war powers.
The two were speakers at a forum called “Foreign Policy and the Media: Some Lessons from Kosovo,” held on October 18 at Goucher College. Sponsored by The Baltimore Coalition Against War in the Balkans, the event attracted about 100 people.
Ackerman reviewed the steps that led up to the bombing of Serbia. Most of the information he related, he said, was widely reported at the time in the European press, but much of it was not covered in the U.S. press, especially as war escalated.
The key to understanding how the bombing came about, he said, was to look at the two-week-long Rambouillet Conference held in France in February. Its goal was to arrive at a settlement that would bring peace to Kosovo. The U.S., Russia, England, France, and Germany took part in negotiations with Serbian and Kosovar leaders.
In advance of the conference, certain principles were agreed upon by the participants: Kosovo would not be allowed to secede; Kosovo would get back its political autonomy; there would be a ceasefire; and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) would be demilitarized.
Though the Serbs and many Kosovars agreed to the principles, the KLA did not just want autonomy, it wanted, said Ackerman, “an ethnically pure country that maybe could join someday with Albania.”
“Initially, considerable progress was made,” said Ackerman. “But the U.S. made it clear they wanted a NATO peacekeeping force only.” The Serbs, recalling Cold War enmities, did not want NATO troops.
By February 20, a compromise was proposed: the peacekeeping force would answer to the United Nations, not NATO. “The Serbs indicated a willingness to go along with that,” said Ackerman. “But then the U.S. diplomacy machine went into high gear. [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright said it has to be a NATO-led force.”
Two days later, U.S. negotiators introduced a new document that had never been seen before by conference participants. “It was a detailed plan for military enforcement,” said Ackerman. “It called for a purely NATO force with 30,000 members, with no appeal mechanism. NATO soldiers could go throughout the Yugoslav republic, not just Kosovo, and they would have the right to arrest any person.” The document contained many other non-negotiable provisions that the Serbs could not accept, such as stating that NATO troops could not be held liable for war crimes regardless of what they did.
“With eighteen hours to go [in the Conference], no major U.S. media reported on this,” said Ackerman, who said FAIR has a comprehensive searchable media database to determine such coverage. He pointed out, “You’re supposed to exhaust diplomatic options before going to war,” and said the fact that the U.S. did not do that was a big story that largely went unreported.
The Russian foreign minister, furious, immediately held a press conference to condemn the U.S. all-or-nothing position: the Serbs must accept the NATO terms or face the consequences. “They [the Serbs] had to either sign or be bombed,” said Ackerman. “It was a diplomatic outrage.” And again, it generally went unreported.
On the night of February 23, the Serb parliament met in emergency session and passed a resolution that said, essentially, ‘Please don’t bomb us. Here’s our offer.’ According to Ackerman, “This was not covered by a single U.S. newspaper or network. The way our media covered it was absolutely Orwellian. Prior to the Rambouillet failure, the press was generally reasonable in its reporting, but then it beat the drums for war.”
He encouraged the audience to access the FAIR website at www.fair.org to follow what happened at the Rambouillet Conference, and what reporting was done, and not done, in the U.S. and abroad. He said the Internet continues to be the best source of public information about the conflict in Yugoslavia.
Strife in Kosovo is far from over, Ackerman said. Two hundred thousand non-ethnic-Albanians have been expelled from the province, which is double the size of Delaware. The KLA, still militarized, is taking control.
Asked if he thought the U.S. press is part of some kind of conspiracy to suppress information from the public, Ackerman said no. “They don’t need to have a conspiracy. You [the reporter] end up doing what the boss expects of you.”
He pointed out that reporters too often are billed as “correspondents” of branches of the government but in fact they act more like spokespersons. “Compare the online press releases of the State Department with news reports,” he challenged. “You know ‘the story of the day,’ ‘the line of the day.’ If you look a little bit behind the curtain, you hear about it [from your bosses].”
Asked why the news focus during the war was on Milosevic, Ackerman asserted that such demonization “is at the heart of propaganda--angels on one side, devils on the other.”
Another audience member asked if the U.S./NATO handling of the Kosovo situation didn’t send a message of ‘We rule the world.’ Ackerman responded that this could reasonably be the interpretation. “NATO lost its reason for being when the Cold War ended,” he pointed out. “Now it has 50,000 troops in Bosnia and another 50,000 in Kosovo.”
CONGRESSMAN KUCINICH
Dennis J. Kucinich, a U.S. Representative from the Cleveland area who is of Croatian heritage, was one of the few members of Congress to oppose the war against Serbia. He recounted his mounting realization that the Kosovo situation did not merit bombing Serbia. “It was like a fog settled over Washington,” he said. “I saw many go along with the idea of war because conditions seemed to be out of control. ‘Seem’ is the operative word.”
Once the idea of war took hold in Congress, things happened fast. In that haste, Kucinich said, “There was no action in Congress that made it legal. When ‘group think’ takes over, look out.”
Answers to his questions on the Balkans were hard to come by. “I saw a real danger that the escalation of hostilities could have triggered a war with Russia,” which opposed NATO’s involvement. He wrote an op-ed piece, “Why Bomb Belgrade?,” that was published in The New York Times. That propelled him to leadership in the growing opposition.
After the Senate passed Resolution 21, giving President Clinton authority to authorize ground troops in Kosovo, Kucinich helped defeat the companion measure in the House. It lost by only one vote. “That’s how close we came to issuing a blank check for the war,” he said.
Some members of Congress, over State Department objections, met with Russian leaders to set up a framework for peace. “This brought the war to a different phase. We reached a cessation of most of the bombing,” said Mr. Kucinich.
He observed that the U.S. did not support the democratic movement in Serbia to oust Milosevic before the war. “Now, in the name of freeing that nation, we have decimated it,” he said. “Milosevic commits violence against Kosovo, so it’s okay for NATO to commit violence on Serbia?”
“I love my country enough to speak up if I see it taking a path that is not moral,” he said. “I think we can simultaneously recognize the violations of Milosevic and still recognize the humanity in the people of Serbia.”
He called on the audience to take control of the nation’s destiny. “We have to reclaim our intellectual integrity, and we have to speak out,” he said. “We have to see peace as inevitable, not war. The U.S. can set an example as a nation. For all its flaws, it’s still the greatest in the world, but it can only live up to its potential if it’s able to look at new potentialities.
“We need to see if there isn’t some way the thought processes that develop the Department of Defense, and destroyed the test ban treaty, can be transformed.”
Mr. Kucinich said he was working on a proposal to create a Department of Peace, “not only as a response to international matters, but also to look at all the violence that takes place in our society. We should start thinking about conflict resolution.”
As it is now, he said, war is almost inevitably the U.S. response to perceived threat. “With a $270 billion defense budget, how could we not ‘think war’?” he demanded. “We talk about gun control, but what about this?”
He challenged the audience to join him in working for peace, as well as for campaign finance reform and improved public schools.
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This story was published on November 3, 1999.