Serbs must show Western TV news or be bombed: NATO
Source: AAP | Published: Friday April 9 6:58:28 AM
What do you call viewers so incensed at what a television station is
broadcasting that they threaten to bomb it?
In the third week of the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, you call
them peeved NATO officials, who said today that they will consider RTS,
Serbian government television, a military target unless it starts
broadcasting six hours a day of Western reporting on the conflict.
The officials even offered recommended scheduling times.
"Serbian radio and television is an instrument of propaganda and
repression," said David Wilby, a clipped, very correct British air
commodore who serves as a NATO military spokesman.
"It has filled the airways with hate and lies over the years and especially
now. It is therefore a legitimate target in this campaign."
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said that because RTS' transmitters
are linked to the Serbian defence system, it is "fair to consider it a
military target".
France's chief of staff, General Pierre Kelche, indicated that Serb TV is
high on his hit list.
"We consider it an extremely dangerous tool which is warping Serbian
opinion," Kelche said in Paris.
"We are going to blast their transmitters and their relay stations. We are
not aiming at journalists."
No sooner had the threats been issued, however, than some NATO officials
began backpedaling.
"It's just not true," insisted Solana's chief civilian spokesman, Jamie Shea.
"Serb TV is not a target."
An official at the headquarters of US Army General Wesley Clark, NATO
supreme allied commander, said he couldn't explain the bellicose French
statement, but that Wilby clearly had jumped the gun.
Serb TV, said the official, who asked not to be named, is a "proposed
target, not an approved target."
Air Commodore Wilby gave RTS one last chance to avoid laser-guided censorship.
If Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic instructs the state network to
rebroadcast Western news programs - uncensored and in two blocks of three
hours each - then NATO will consider Serbian TV an "acceptable instrument
of public information" and refrain from bombing it.
Despite such forbearance, NATO's displeasure with Belgrade TV has been
palpable in recent days. Just what was the last straw was not immediately
clear.
Since the start of the air campaign on March 24, RTS has reported almost
daily downings of NATO warplanes - seven on one day alone. So far, NATO has
acknowledged only one loss, an F-117 stealth fighter-bomber whose pilot was
rescued.
The Serbs also reported that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were
streaming out of Kosovo - not because of brutal ethnic cleansing by Serbian
forces, but to escape allied bombing.
A Serbian TV report last Friday that 1,500 German troops had 'defected' to
Greece from a base in Macedonia - where no German troops are deployed -
left some NATO officials puzzled and others guffawing.
NATO and the Pentagon, however, have been waging their own propaganda war,
providing only the sketchiest reports on the allied bombing campaign and
occasionally making claims that have turned out to be wrong.
For example, several Kosovar Albanian leaders who NATO officials said had
been murdered by Serbian forces later turned up in Macedonia, very much alive.
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