Alarm Over Kosovars Who Didn't Flee
Trains jammed with refugees have arrived at the Macedonian border from Pristina, the Kosovo capital, and many say they were forced to leave at gunpoint. But NATO senior officers say that reconnaissance photographs reveal an even more harrowing situation in Kosovo for as many as 70,000 ethnic Albanians in Pagarusa Valley, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of Pristina. Three brigades of Yugoslav government troops have surrounded the refugees and have been raining artillery shells on them, according to General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander.
He said in Brussels that one of his most pressing priorities would be to call in air strikes on the military units that are shelling the refugees.
Refugees trapped in Kosovo are facing not only artillery batteries but also cold, hunger and illness. Those who have fled the province have provided chilling accounts of tens of thousands of people stranded in the hills. Some say that government troops separated men and teenage boys from their families, apparently to be executed or relocated to one of three detention camps. The existence of such camps has not been independently confirmed.
''In many respects, the 150,000 refugees who have left Kosovo over the past week are the lucky ones,'' said a NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea. ''The vast majority left behind face an unbelievably miserable situation. There are tens of thousands of internally displaced Kosovars who are living in woods and on mountain slopes. They have no food, no water and no shelter.''
The Clinton administration said it was considering a request by ethnic Albanian insurgents for airdrops of relief supplies inside Kosovo. After speaking by phone with Hashim Thaqi, a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the State Department spokesman, James Rubin, said, ''They clearly are looking for humanitarian support, including airdrops.''
Mr. Rubin said the request was under consideration by an interagency group that includes the Defense Department but that major obstacles must be overcome. A senior administration official said later, ''We haven't made any decision to do it.''
More than 164,000 people have been forced from Kosovo since March 24 - when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began its air offensive against Yugoslav military targets - as part of what Western officials charge is a deliberate effort by the Belgrade government to alter the ethnic makeup of the province. Before the purge, ethnic Albanians outnumbered Serbs 9 to 1 in the province of 1.8 million people.
Officials of a United Nations relief agency described scenes at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia as ''reminiscent of the last days of World War II when Europe was awash with refugees,'' an agency bulletin said.
In Macedonia, women, children and elderly men wandered around with their few remaining possessions, ''many of them deeply traumatized,'' the report said.
''The people of Kosovo are now subject to the worst violations of body and soul that can be described,'' said Carol Bellamy, the director of Unicef. ''All of this is happening without humanitarian workers to alleviate the suffering.''
Catherine Bertini, executive director of the UN World Food Program, noted that the last food rations in Kosovo were distributed March 23, just before relief workers left the province only hours ahead of the first NATO air strikes. ''Within 7 to 10 days, those people may be malnourished and starving,'' she said. ''And it is impossible to reach them at this time.''
The policy pursued by Yugoslav Army troops and Serbian paramilitary units since March 20 has been to cut off all major channels of food supplies to Kosovo's remaining ethnic Albanian population.
TV Screens Offer Us Illusions Of War
By Norman SolomonWhile bombs keep exploding in Yugoslavia, a fierce media war is raging on television.
The real war has little to do with the images squeezed into the TV frame. On the ground, in Yugoslavia, the situation is all about terror, anguish and death. On the screen, the coverage is far from traumatic for the viewing public -- despite the myth that television brings the horrors of war into our living rooms.
A war "is among the biggest things that can ever happen to a nation or people, devastating families, blasting away the roofs and walls," media critic Mark Crispin Miller wrote many years ago. But TV viewers "see it compressed and miniaturized on a sturdy little piece of furniture, which stands and shines at the very center of our household."
TV news programs sometimes claim to be showing us what war is all about, but that's an absurd pretense. While television "may confront us with the facts of death, bereavement, mutilation," Miller commented, "it immediately cancels out the memory of that suffering, replacing its own pictures of despair with a commercial, upbeat and inexhaustibly bright."
In the all-out propaganda war now underway, the Clinton administration's strategists have played catch-up. "The problem is they didn't start the communications until the bombs started falling," says Marlin Fitzwater, who spoke for President Bush during the Gulf War. "That's not enough time to convince the nation of a course of action."
Top U.S. officials have made up for lost time -- blitzing the media with endless briefings, grainy bomb-site videos and live TV interviews as the missiles continue to fly. Even after it became clear that the NATO bombardment was greatly intensifying the humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo decried by the White House, the warriors in Washington were sticking to their very big guns. As the second week of bombing began, just about the only worry they seemed willing to acknowledge involved a possible shortage of cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported last Wednesday, both the U.S. and Yugoslav governments have a stake in downplaying the carnage from the bombing. "The citizens of the NATO alliance cannot see the Serbs that their aircraft have killed," the British newspaper noted. "Serbia's state-run television, while showing ruined civilian homes, shields its viewers from bloodied corpses that might spread panic among an already highly strung population."
Traditionally, American television networks like to show U.S. bombers taking off but decline to show what the bombs on board end up doing to human beings. So, American firepower appears to be wondrous but fairly bloodless.
As for history, ancient and recent, it is usually rendered murky by the TV networks. The latest coverage has run true to form. "Distortion of important background by Western broadcasters, whether intentional or not, has also helped NATO's cause," the Financial Times observed.
"The stated aims of NATO's bombing campaign have also been muddied, by both heads of government and the Western media," the newspaper added. "A common phrase heard on the lips of correspondents of CNN ... is `forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to return to the negotiating table.' Yet Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of state, and Robin Cook, British foreign minster, made it clear after the breakdown of peace talks ... that the autonomy deal offered by the West -- and signed by the Kosovo Albanians -- was no longer negotiable. There was in reality no table to return to."
Skewed facts and selected images on television make it easier to accept -- or even applaud -- the bombs funded by our tax dollars and dropped in our names.
The bombing has brought about the collapse of internal opposition to the Yugoslav regime, opposition that was previously quite strong. NATO has done what Milosevic had been unable to accomplish on his own -- decimate the ranks of Serbians resisting his tyranny. Even now, the tragic realities of that process are getting little mention in American news media.
Norman Solomon's book "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media" will be published in April by Common Courage Press.
The Myth and Milosevic
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See below for background and related information. <<At site>>Whoever does not fight at Kosovo...
May nothing bear fruit that his
hand sows.
--Serb epic
Contrary to US expectations, a Kosovo peace agreement isn't going to be signed after a few weeks of bombing, and maybe not ever. To understand why Slobodan Milosevic decided to fight NATO instead of conceding, one must understand the contemporary role in politics played by the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. Milosevic is re-enacting the Serbian central myth of the leader who lost the medieval battle against superior Turkish forces and became a martyred nationalist hero. He is trying to keep his power by casting himself as the reincarnated defender and shifting the public's anger over the possible loss of Kosovo from himself to the evil West.
There are many forces in his once small political base prompting Milosevic's defiance. Their continued support for the president is critical to him now, but they are too peripheral to gain power were he to be ousted. One group pressuring him is the ultranationalist Radical Party, which won only sixteen seats in the federal Parliament. Vojislav Seselj, its leader, might have pulled his party out of the ruling coalition and weakened the government if Milosevic had agreed to NATO troops. He could have painted his president as a traitor to Serbian interests. Seselj's popularity grew while he urged a war with NATO and delegates at the Rambouillet peace talks considered caving in to the West. To undercut his rival, Milosevic had to adopt Seselj's positions.
Another factor is the nationalist military officers Milosevic appointed after firing the military brass who tried to restrain his actions in Kosovo this past fall. These new officers seemed to be implicitly threatening a coup when, according to the European press, they told him that allowing NATO troops into Kosovo would be the beginning of the end of his power. Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic said the current military leadership believes that sacred Kosovo must be defended at all costs. Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, the supreme commander, speaking in the language of the myth, told his soldiers to "prepare for martyrdom."
Belgrade political analysts say the Yugoslav president fears the public, which holds the Kosovo myth at the heart of its identity. He worries about being killed by an angry mob, like Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu. To guard against that fate, he silences every critic who could stir up riots or electoral opposition. He purged not only the military but the universities. Death threats against students continue. There is an escalated closing of independent media and jailing of journalists. Serbian journalists expect him to follow Seselj's urging and crack down on the judiciary and the anti-Milosevic government in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.
His self-protective propaganda campaign plays on the Serbs' sense of themselves as a persecuted people, which goes back to the fourteenth-century Turkish occupation and runs so deep that some Christians wear a Jewish star to identify with another historical victim. In recent broadcasts, World War II movies were run as a reminder of what the Germans did to Serbs, and claims were made that Madeleine Albright hates all Serbs and that the Kosovo Liberation Army had planted plastic dolls to fake a report about Serbs killing children. State TV endlessly repeats the Serbs' mythic claim to Kosovo, despite the fact that until 1989 it had been legally theirs for only about sixty of the past 600 years.
There is no check on Milosevic's propaganda or policies from the democratic opposition. It has become weak, discredited by its petty power struggles and the co-optation of its most charismatic figure, Vuk Draskovic, into Milosevic's government. It is cowed by repression that has created such fear that many are focused only on individual survival. One dissident said, "I am not afraid of the war but of what comes after it. There will be no chance for democracy in Serbia."
Many in the opposition and general public who detest Milosevic aren't opposed to fighting NATO in Kosovo. The main public opposition to that battle comes from mothers demonstrating against their sons' military mobilization. Some reservists, like some 200 in Leskovac, are staging protest rallies outside military barracks, and many draft resisters are going into hiding. They see through Milosevic's strategy and believe that he has already sold out Kosovo but is forcing soldiers to die so he can survive his eventual surrender of the province.
Except with the conscripts and their families, Milosevic's decision to re-enact a version of the medieval battle has strengthened him. Earlier this year his approval ratings were only about 20 percent, because he has devastated the economy and lost three wars, but by early March a poll showed 37 percent of the Serbs willing to defend Kosovo with force, with more uniting behind him. Even members of the opposition are entranced by the myth of the Serbian knights in the Field of Blackbirds, by the tales of glory, courage and sacrifice that are part of their folk songs and history books. Like actor Milanko Zablacanski, who was among the tens of thousands protesting against Milosevic in 1997, many feel honor-bound to support a leader they loathe against foreign soldiers occupying Kosovo as the Turks did.
Milosevic can wait out NATO bombings while "cleansing" enough Kosovars from the mineral-rich north and central regions to make partition into a Serbian and Albanian sector a realistic exit strategy for the West. If that half-victory isn't achieved, he can explain his loss of Kosovo as the myth does, saying the Serbs' brave battle against NATO was not a defeat but a moral victory.
Marlene Nadle
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Marlene Nadle is a journalist formerly based in Yugoslavia and an associate of the Central and East European program of The New School.
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