-Caveat Lector- -------- Original Message -------- Subject: ZNet Commentary: Yugoslavia elections (Edward Herman) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 23:36:29 -0500 (CDT) From: Sanjoy Mahajan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: ? To: undisclosed-recipients:; ZNet Commentaries are sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet. See http://www.zmag.org or the ZNet Sustainer Pages at http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm -- maybe you'd like to consider donating to them, thereby supporting the writers and website. ==== UNCLE CHUTZPAH AND HIS MEDIA MINIONS ON THE YUGOSLAV AND OTHER ELECTIONS By Edward S. Herman There is no better place than foreign elections to observe the brazenness of U.S. interventionism abroad, its crude double standard as between targets and client states, and the mainstream media's propaganda service in support of their country's imperial policies. One feature of this service is the media's rush to focus attention on elections that officials declare important. Thus when the Reagan administration was trying to validate its intervention in El Salvador by an election to demonstrate that Salvadorans approved our local political instrument, some 700 journalists attended that election in 1982; and attention to Salvadoran elections only ended after the United States had accomplished its purpose there of ending a radical threat and installing a neoliberal regime. With the leadership of Yugoslavia now a target of U.S. destabilization policies, once again the media jump to attention. Of critical importance, also, is the fact that not only is the direction of attention determined by the official agenda, that agenda also dictates the character and specific content of media coverage. As their government assumes the right to intervene in foreign elections, the media also take this as a given, and rarely if ever mention the fact that foreign money pumped into U.S. election campaigns is prohibited by U.S. law. This was never discussed during the intensive U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan elections in the 1980s, nor has it been mentioned in connection with the open expenditure of at least $77 million in the Yugoslavian election this month. This silence represents a media internalization of official imperial arrogance and privelege. Both the EU and United States have promised that sanctions would be eliminated if Slobodan Milosevic is ousted by Yugoslav voters. The United States and Nato have also engaged in sabre rattling, with reinforcement of military forces in the Mediterranean and troop exercises in neighboring states like Croatia. This is justified on the ground of the threat of an unlevel playing field and possible fraud by Milosevic, but of course these interventions could be said to make the playing field unlevel, and the policy of conditioning the removal of sanctions on a specific election result is a form of blackmail. When George Bush did the same in 1990, promising to lift sanctions and call off the contras only if Nicaraguan voters voted the Sandinistas out of office in favor of the U.S. choice, the mainstream media never once suggested that this threat was blackmail and perhaps immoral and vicious. And here again in the case of the Yugoslavian election, a blackmail threat and other forms of intervention are seen as perfectly reasonable. In covering the Yugoslavian election the U.S. mainstream media have repeatedly voiced the fear of U.S. officials and opponents of Milosevic that the election was being rigged and that the demonized leader threatened to steal the election by fraud (e.g., Erlanger, "Fears Deepen Milosevic Will Rig Vote," NYT, Sept. 24; Fleishman, "Under the world's scrutiny, Yugoslavs go to the polls: Some fear Milosevic will try stealing the election," Phila. Inquirer, Sept. 24). This is a possibility, but was based on no evidence offered in the media or on the scene in Yugoslavia. Two Canadian observer delegates found the electoral conditions there as open and free of any police interference as in any Western elections, and delegate observers were free to visit any polling places and representatives of all parties were active at such polling places. The basic conditions of a free election were much more closely met in Yugoslavia than in El Salvador in 1982 or 1984 or in Russia in 1996 and 2000. In El Salvador, transparent voting boxes and the need to sign in for numbered ballots compromised ballot secrecy in a society where the army was killing 800 civilians a month, and the left was off the ballot by virtue of straightforward state terror and death threats--but the U.S. mainstream media never noticed, and found these elections a "step toward democracy." The case of Russia is equally revealing. The Yeltsin victory of 1996 was accomplished by serious violations of the rules on campaign spending, bribery of journalists, media bias and one- sidedness favoring the incumbent far more serious than anything in Yugoslavia, and possible fraud in counting. But in this case Western intervention was on the side of the incumbent, so the mainstream media here never spoke of fraud and rigging and found once again that this was "A Victory for Russian Democracy" (NYT ed., July 6, 1996). The same happened in Putin's election in 2000. As the appointed heir of Yeltsin and a "reformer" (in the special Western meaning--favoring market openings and privatization at whatever social cost) he was approved by the United States and its allies. The fact that he was a former KGB operative and had achieved his popularity by killing many more Chechen civilians than Milosevic did Albanians in Kosovo was therefore irrelevant. Once again, therefore, the U.S. media did not get agitated over either the ethnic cleansing or the dubious features of the electoral process--no headlines about the threat of rigging or fraud. This was a "reformer"! On September 9, 2000, the Moscow Times published a massive expose of the Putin election triumph based on a six-month investigative effort ("And the Winner Is?"). Their reporters traveled through the provinces talking to officials and comparing official voting figures with those released by the federal government. In a number of cases this yielded solid prima facie evidence of fraud, which was supplemented by much anecdotal evidence of stuffed and destroyed ballots. They noted a 1.3 million inflation of voters within a few months just prior to the election, a set of voters they termed "Dead Souls" after Gogol's famous story, but they noted that Gogol's were real though dead people, whereas Putin's were just imaginery. This sensational article was reported only in the Los Angeles Times, which did so under the revealing title "Russia Election Chief Rejects Fraud Claims in Presidential Vote." In other words, the paper does not put the findings of this detailed study first, it gives priority to an official Russian disclaimer. But this was the relatively honest paper--the others that had found Putin's election another step toward democracy preferred the black hole treatment for this inconvenient news. As one relevant sidelight, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had sent several hundred observers to watch both the Yeltsin victory of 1996 and the Putin election contest, both of which they declared free and fair, although imperfect, and in the case of the Putin election they asked Russian authorities to look into the possible flaws! The Russian media the OSCE found "pluralistic and diverse." Matt Taibbi points out in his "OSCE--The Organization for Sanctioning Corrupt Elections" (The Exile, Issue #18/99, Sept. 14-28, 2000), that the OSCE even issued apologetics for the December 1999 Uzbeck parliamentary election, with its 93 percent vote in favor of the state parties, a 98 percent turnout, and a "genuinely Soviet statistical profile" (Taibbi), but which OSCE found "fell short" (not "fell far short") of democratic standards. On the other hand, the OSCE found that the Serb election of 1997 was "fundamentally flawed," and that State TV there showed a "clear and consistent bias," although "there was a commendable effort to provide all the candidates with free political advertising, in proportion with their representation in parliament," and an opposition radio and TV stations did exist. On the OSCE contention that "the media in the Russian federation remain pluralistic and diverse," Taibbi comments that "If you lived here in Russia during the past year and a half or so, you know that state television and radio programming not only campaigned exclusively in favor of the Putin regime, but actively assassinated its political opponents..." Furthermore, "there was no 'commendable effort' of any kind to provide other candidates with free political advertising." In fact, these candidates were kept hidden. And outside of the big cities "the press in the Russian regions could hardly be farther from being 'diverse and pluralistic.'" Taibbi notes also that in discussing the Serb election of 1997, OSCE was much focused on discrepancies in the vote count. No such concern was displayed in its report on the Putin election, and the numerous obvious fraudulent elements disclosed in the Moscow Times report entirely escaped them. Looking at their treatment of the 1997 Serb election and Putin's election, Taibbi says "it's hard to come to any conclusion that does not involve a conscious effort on the OSCE's part to whitewash a dirty election." In short, the pattern of systematic bias and propaganda service applicable to the U.S. mainstream media in dealing with foreign elections like those in Yugoslavia and Russia also characterizes the U.S. and Nato dominated OSCE, which with the aid of William Walker, the U.S.-appointed head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, who in early 1999 helped create the ground for the Nato bombing war and arranged for KLA-Nato liaison and cooperative operations during the bombing that ensued. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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