Why NATO bombed Serb TV
The Spectator (UK)
December 06, 2005

Did George W. Bush make a tasteless gag about bombing al-Jazeera? Did Tony 
Blair dutifully laugh? How could two leaders of the free world think it 
appropriate to jest about whacking pesky Arab journos while a nation Iraq 
burned under their watch? These are the questions being asked by British 
journalists who are shocked by rumours of a conversation that allegedly took 
place between Bush and Blair in April last year. I have a different question: 
why do these journalists seem more outraged by this President's alleged 
scurrilous aside about bombing a TV station than they were by an earlier 
president's actual bombing of a TV station?

Six years ago President Bill Clinton sent cruise missiles to destroy a TV 
studio and knock off some media workers, and it was no joke. At 2.20 a. m. on 
23 April 1999, at the height of the Kosovo campaign, the Nato alliance led by 
Clinton and Blair destroyed the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) 
in central Belgrade. The missiles destroyed the entrance and left at least one 
studio in ruins. More than 120 people were working in the building at the time; 
16 were killed and another 16 were injured all of them civilian workers, mostly 
technicians and support staff.

The BBC's John Simpson described seeing 'the body of a make-up artist lying in 
a dressing room'. That was 27-year-old Yelitsa Munitlak, burned to death in the 
small room where she applied make-up to the station's newsreaders. She was so 
badly disfigured that her body could be identified only by the rings she was 
wearing. One of the RTS technical team, trapped between two collapsed concrete 
blocks, had to have both his legs amputated at the scene. He died later in 
hospital.

Today journalists wonder whether Blair laughed at Bush's joke about al-Jazeera, 
or perhaps even talked the President out of a serious 'plot' to bomb the Arab 
channel.

Never mind all that. Here is what Blair said after the targeted killing of 
media workers in Yugoslavia: the media 'is the apparatus that keeps Slobodan 
Milosevic in power and we are entirely justified as Nato allies in damaging and 
taking on those targets'.

He was backed by Clare Short, who today poses as an anti-war warrior but who 
six years ago was Blair's cheerleader-in-chief for bombing Yugoslavia. After 
the attack on RTS she said, 'The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and 
it's a legitimate target.' Tell that to the family of Yelitsa Munitlak.

To add insult to grotesque injuries, Nato officials later tried to deny that 
they had purposefully targeted a studio packed with civilian workers, instead 
claiming they had meant to bomb the TV transmitter next door. Yet according to 
the final report of the UN committee to review the Nato bombing campaign 
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 'Nato intentionally bombed the 
central studio of the RTS broadcasting corporation.' And as Amnesty 
International pointed out, 'intentionally directing attacks against civilian 
objects is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal 
Court'.

How did British journalists react to this 'war crime'? Not very honourably; 
certainly with far less rage than they have directed against Bush and Blair for 
their alleged chat about al-Jazeera. Some in the media who supported the Kosovo 
campaign kept shtoom about the attack. The broadcasting union Bectu did not 
even comment on it.

There was almost a celebratory tone in the Guardian's initial coverage of the 
bombing of RTS. In its first report on the attack (written by Martin Kettle and 
Maggie O'Kane, both of whom supported 'punishing' the Serbs) the paper repeated 
Nato's justifications for the attack without question: 'Nato targeted the heart 
of . . . Milosevic's power base early today by bombing the headquarters of 
Serbian state television, taking it off the air in the middle of a news 
bulletin.' It failed to say how camera operators, soundmen and makeup girls 
were central to Milosevic's 'power base'. Some journalists criticised the 
bombing of RTS not because it was criminal but because it provided a 'gift to 
Nato's critics'; in short, it made their 'good war' look bad.

There were honourable exceptions to all this. The National Union of 
Journalists, for example, vigorously opposed the attack. But too many 
journalists tried to squeeze this bombing of media workers into their view of 
the Kosovo campaign as a 'humanitarian' war. Yet the idea that you can burn to 
death a make-up girl in the name of 'humanitarianism'
is surely as perverse if not more so than the thought of Bush and Blair talking 
about bringing freedom to Iraq (which presumably includes freedom of speech) 
while talking about blowing up journalists.

By: Brendan O'Neill
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article_archive.php?id=7013&issue=2005-12-03


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