-Caveat Lector-
>From Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald
Saturday, April 24, 1999
BALKANS: THE CONFLICT
Flawed foray, weasel words
By SIMON MANN, Herald Correspondent in London
You say Kosovo, we say Kosova. You say criminal blitz, we say surgical
strikes. You say Milosevic household, we say Serb army command centre. You
say defence against Albanian terrorism, we say ethnic cleansing. You say
market garden, we say mass graves. You say refugee convoy, we say military
column ...
Err, hang on, we say refugee convoy too.
Suddenly, the wheels had come off the well-oiled NATO propaganda machine.
And in Brussels, the alliance's chief spokesman, 45-year-old Jamie Shea, the
face that justifies daily the campaign of the self-proclaimed alliance "for
peace and stability", started to founder.
Soon, the rhetoric of the silver-haired NATO career man with the Cockney
accent and sharp delivery was shifting. From "NATO doesn't attack civilian
targets - full stop" to the following day's "the pilot dropped his bombs in
good faith", to finally, five days later, "NATO deeply regrets the loss of
life of civilians".
The admission that alliance jets had in fact been responsible for that
convenient and most clinical of euphemisms, "collateral damage" (that is,
the deaths of possibly 60 Albanian refugees in a convoy that included
tractors), came on Monday.
By Tuesday, however, things were rapidly changing in NATO HQ. For a start,
Tony Blair had sent Downing Street's Number One spin doctor to Brussels to
offer a helping hand and, whether by consent or personally perceived
political imperative, the British Prime Minister suddenly took charge of the
propaganda battle himself.
Within moments of NATO having come clean on the convoy bombing, he was
moving to trump up, and reinforce, the alliance's primary message.
"We are not going to take any lessons from [Slobodan] Milosevic about care
for refugees when these refugees are actually in a convoy because they are
fleeing from the butchery, the savagery, the rape, the torture, the
mutilation of ordinary, innocent people."
Nevertheless, the lesson was painfully clear. What a red-faced NATO cannot
afford in this increasingly drawn-out conflict are too many more public
relations blunders that will further unsettle wavering members of the
19-nation alliance and their deeply sceptical publics.
Serbia claims 500 civilian casualties in the 29-day conflict, though the
West smartly dismisses the claim as garbage. Yet there have been niggardly
incidents. For example, the bombing of houses in the Serb town of Aleksinac
and the bombing of flats in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, which are thought
to have resulted in more than a dozen deaths; the missile hit on a train
near Leskova which killed 10; and the convoy attack.
"What's obviously alarming from a NATO point of view is that it hasn't won
by a knockout both in terms of its military objectives and also in terms of
its propaganda war," says Dr Mark Almond, a Balkans expert at Oxford
University.
"I think part of the problem for NATO is going to be that the political
leaders have been so explicit, saying for example that it's not a war over,
in the classic sense, some national interest like oil, but rather it's a
humanitarian war, a purely principled war.
"And that raises the stakes for any kind of black propaganda on the NATO
side, that if it's caught out it's going to be much more damaging."
Interestingly, the speed at which news agencies got wind of the convoy
bombing appeared to catch NATO off-guard despite what the world has learned,
courtesy of the Gulf War, about the interplay between modern warfare and
modern media.
While it had come clean about the accidental train bombing immediately,
defusing much criticism and seemingly winning plaudits for its willingness
to engage, NATO's news management of the second, more damaging incident fell
well short of its target.
Commentators are split about the reasons for NATO's muddled response to the
convoy tragedy.
"I'm a great believer in chaos theory rather than conspiracy theory," says
Simon Haselock, a media adviser involved in the Bosnian conflict. "I think
one of the problems that NATO has is the fact that sometimes it takes a
great deal of time to actually get to the bottom of information."
But the writer Phillip Knightley disagrees. "I think NATO probably knew
within hours what had really happened and it's in their interest to
obfuscate a bit themselves ... And the longer it takes to come out the less
actual effect it has on the public when it does finally emerge."
This propaganda war is being fought from the sublime to the ridiculous, from
carefully crafted and regularly reinforced imagery and florid description
(such as Shea's likening of the exodus from the town of Pec in Kosovo to the
Khmer Rouge assault on Phnom Penh in 1975), to the crude fabrication on the
part of the Serbs of NATO cockpit conversations that allege to show
Hollywood-style "Top Gun" pilots being commanded from afar to attack
civilian targets.
In the electronic era, Belgrade claims to have taken many more hits on
Government web sites than from NATO F-16s. And its message has been
constantly reinforced by Yugoslav radio and TV, according to the BBC's
international monitoring service, emphasising damage to Serb infrastructure,
the suffering of civilians and negative foreign reactions to the NATO
campaign.
With NATO having successfully targeted radio and TV transmitters in bombing
raids, many Yugoslavs have found their Serb diet of propaganda disrupted.
Instead, NATO is serving up its own menu via signals beamed from a converted
Hercules military transport plane, while European broadcasters have
apparently placed an additional five mobile transmitters along the Serb
border to transmit Serbian, Bosnian, Croation and English language news
programs.
Dr Almond says NATO's propaganda effort is driven partly by a two-fold
motive. First, because it launched its campaign without making proper
provision to protect the very people it sought to liberate, it needed to
cover its "dereliction" by pushing hard the line of injustice and
atrocities.
And also: "Self-righteous people do very often feel that it's not a sin for
them to tell untruths because it's in a good cause ... I suspect that people
within NATO say that 'Because there are no pictures of what's really going
on in Kosovo we have to tell people'. And so the temptation is to say 'We
know [the Serbs] are awful, we know they've been awful in the past so they
must be being awful now although we don't know exactly what they're doing,
so let's reach into the drawer of atrocities from previous wars and find the
worst we possibly can'."
And he notes another side to the propaganda battle in which objectivity is a
casualty of convenience. For example, the portrayal of Montenegro as a
democratic ally.
"Montenegro is simply a despotism that's on our side," he says. "It's just
that [President Milo Djukanovic] happens to be against Milosevic. There's no
doubt that's somewhat more preferable than being on his side, but it doesn't
make you an angel and to an extent Djukanovic in Montenegro is like some
Latin American dictator with regard to Cuba. As the Americans would say
'He's a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch'."
Saturday, April 24, 1999
BALKANS: THE CONFLICT
Peak problem a headache for military minds
By DAVID LAGUE, Herald Correspondent in Skopje
NATO's best military minds are grappling with plans for a ground assault on
the Yugoslav Army now dug in on Kosovo's soaring peaks.
Despite an overwhelming advantage in firepower, technology, numbers and
intelligence, NATO troops will face literally an uphill battle if the order
to begin a ground war is given.
This raises the prospect of warfare of an intensity that hasn't been seen in
Europe since the Russians and Allies fought house-to-house into Germany more
than 50 years ago.
That's what United States Secretary of State, Dr Madeleine Albright, meant
when she said on Thursday: "We do not favour the deployment of ground forces
into a hostile environment in Kosovo."
That's what a NATO officer in the Macedonian capital Skopje, within sight of
Kosovo's imposing mountains, had in mind when he pondered over dinner on
Wednesday night: "I wonder what they will say when the body bags start
coming home."
There is no evidence that a month of air strikes has seriously damaged the
battleworthiness or the morale of the 100,000-strong Yugoslav standing army
or the reservists and paramilitaries that are reported to have been
mobilised.
The Yugoslavs still have the most of their 1,000 tanks, their artillery,
their surface-to-air missiles and the network of defensive positions and war
stocks of fuel and ammunition.
The lack of progress in the face of an accelerating humanitarian crisis is
the reason why the NATO leadership this week began to open the door for the
first time to the prospect of a ground war after earlier categorically
ruling out any such move.
The ground began to shift on Wednesday. It was then that NATO
Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, revealed that he had instructed his
military planners to revise the contingency plans they had drawn up late
last year for a land invasion of Kosovo.
NATO planners have calculated the most obvious and practical launch-pad for
an assault is Macedonia on Kosovo's southern border.
An invasion force of about 100,000 troops and their heavy equipment would
need to be landed at the Greek port of Thessalonika, the only major port
close to the battlefield.
These forces would then be moved up the modern highway linking Greece with
Macedonia, where they would be deployed close to the border.
However, it would carry considerable political risk because public opinion
in Greece is hostile to attacks on their fellow orthodox Christians in
Yugoslavia or any military outcome that would deliver a victory to ethnic
Albanians.
Macedonia's Government is also opposed to any attack on Yugoslavia being
mounted from its territory.
The other obvious staging point for an attack on Kosovo is Albania, but the
backwardness of Europe's poorest country is a major hurdle for NATO.
Albania's ports are primitive and there are few roads that are more than
dirt tracks.
The other obvious route for an attacking army would be from Hungary to the
north, where the approaches to Yugoslavia would be much more favourable for
the alliance's tanks and mechanised forces.
Commentators have noted that NATO could attack across the Pannonian plane
into northern Yugoslavia, but they would then need to fight down the length
of the heavily defended country to reach Kosovo.
Whatever plan is eventually adopted, the major challenge for the alliance is
that the mountainous terrain will make it difficult to field the
overwhelming forces needed to minimise casualties.
If the Yugoslav forces are well prepared and well led, their familiarity
with the terrain and use of prepared positions could force NATO to pay a
heavy price in an invasion.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A<>E<>R
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
