Brock Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting

Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-1-882383-87-0
Verlag: GM Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 325 Seiten

Five years in exhaustive preparation and writing, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, is the blockbuster book by American journalist Peter Brock that exposes the shocking record of the Western media's war reporting in the breakup of Yugoslavia and their collusion that deceived the world during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brock, Peter

Leseproben

Introduction
Vukovar, Eastern Slavonia—July 1998
What started in Vukovar in 1991 did not end in Kosovo. Some would say that someday it will all ...end. It will all end in the Balkans, the bloody, bloody Balkans ...despite confidences in interims of enforced “peace.” But the “domino theory” in the Balkans still has a long way to go. And the “domino theory” was always the correct theory, the predictable theory, and the only reliable theory to cover up a catastrophic sequence of American and European foreign policy blunders. When Kosovo re-ignites, the long-awaited tumult could spread to the adjacent Sandjak region, a heavily Muslim area in southwestern Serbia. Would Bosnia explode again? The answer to when Bosnia will erupt is probably a generation away—but maybe sooner. Warnings of earlier resumptions of fratricidal chaos accompany fears that American troops under NATO would be involved. Then, Macedonia erupts at some point, and that spillover inflames the jittery Greeks. American troops initially forayed into Macedonia long before the start of KFOR occupation of Kosovo in 1999, when the U.S. government refused to say how many body bags accompanied the “peacekeepers” into the Balkans. And, if Greece, then Bulgaria and Turkey? Maybe Vojvodina in northern Serbia will destruct, too. And, who knows when Croatia would implode again? Strange names of strange places, most of these. Part of the New World Disorder in which the United States is perfecting its most devastating genocidal weapon to date against any sovereign upstart that defies its global diktat. The Serbian model began with economic sanctions, then political and social dismemberment and, ultimately, military attack and occupation. Such is the fate of the former Yugoslavia. And, in 1998, the falling domino was Kosovo. And, the politicians and “war reporters” never could or would get the names and numbers right. Forget sorting out the names. Kosovo-Serbs? Muslim-Kosovars? Even after a blood-soaked decade, the journalists couldn’t get it right. Why? For instance, a reporter for Reuters who covered the Yugoslav wars for several years wrote about a man named “Zarko Spasic” who disappeared near the village of Sipovac in Kosovo,1 one of two “autonomous provinces” in Serbia. Finally, in the eleventh paragraph of the report, readers could figure out that Zarko Spasic was a Serb who was kidnapped and murdered by Albanian Muslims in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). “Zarko” and “Spasic” are recognizably enough Serbian names. But, most people who read the article, including American news editors, did not speak Serbo-Croatian and could not make any distinction. And, chances are that readers never found out because rarely did such a story include explanations that were readily “edited” or “chopped.” Most newspapers were “tight on space,” and “readers have short attention spans.” Besides, it was like every second, third or hundredth story that came out of “the war.” But, the reporter knew what he was writing. Maddeningly, journalists used this method of allowing presumption and mistaken inference to occur until deep into the narratives of thousands of such accounts—and long after copy editors had excised the most critical information—throughout the war reporting of the 1990s! And, the Kosovo “liberation army”?! An embarrassment for democratic apologists in the West that such an obsolete “communist” term self-identified a rabble of Islamic terrorist/secessionists propped up by the international press as freedom-fighting, democracy-loving “patriots.” The same reporter wrote another story a month later on June 26, 1998: “(H)undreds of people have been killed since February when the police killed more than 80 people, including 25 Albanian women and children, in assaults on suspected strongholds of armed insurgents of the Kosovo Liberation Army.” The numbers do say something. Supposedly, fifty-five Albanian Muslim rebels made up the balance, it could be calculated. Then, who were the rest of the “hundreds of people”? Who were these other “people”? The reporter did not or would not say. But two days later, a report by the Associated Press described “a Serb police offensive against secessionist ethnic Albanian militants” who in March had “killed 300 people.”2 So, there were at least 220 other “people” who were killed! Who were they? Obviously, they were Serbs. Does it matter? That’s the way the Yugoslav wars were reported for most of the decade. There were originally two million or so Muslims—of Albanian ancestry, supposedly—in Kosovo. They were portrayed as an “oppressed minority” by the media. There were less than 200,000 resident Serbs there characterized as their oppressors. Maybe someone would sit down in the cold ashes and dusty rubble when it was all over and try to figure out the numbers. Which numbers? The right numbers, that is. It should matter. They ought to try to figure it all out from the numbers. Because the words and pictures didn’t get the job done, and nothing else will matter except that sickening Balkan rottenness of death by the numbers. Does it really matter where it officially started or who started it and who kept it going, officially? And, why would somebody write a book about it? Vukovar is as good a place as any to begin. It was one of the most over-reported though factually disjointed and most damning stories about the dismantling of Yugoslavia. Preposterously, some of the more romantic sensationalists in the Western press in 1991 tried to call the three-month shelling of Vukovar the modern-day successor to the infamous two-year siege of Stalingrad. That’s because they were never at Stalingrad a half-century earlier or they never read the history of Stalingrad where hundreds of thousands of Russians and German troops perished in World War II. However, “Stalingrad” looked surrealistically good in headlines about Vukovar—which few in the West ever knew existed. Actually, Kosovo was the predictable sequel to the previous seven years of tragedy and catastrophe which began at, among other places, Vukovar. It doesn’t matter after the long years of American-coerced economic sanctions by the United Nations that inflicted Third World poverty and resurrected medieval suffering for millions of innocent victims in Serbia and Kosovo—Serb and Muslim alike. Thus, a “new” global totalitarianism in the guise of NATO and thousands of occupying troops instituted an international police state, aided and abetted organized crime and black-marketeering, manipulated outlawed shipments of sophisticated weapons (with chemical and biological capabilities), and incited religious and civil war, revolution, terrorism and genocide in the Balkans—which until recent years had existed in relative peace and slowly emerging prosperity. That all ended when the so-called “peace agreements” of the extorted Dayton Accords in 1995 guaranteed further bloody outbreaks and carnage—throughout future generations, as well—in what was called too glibly the “former Yugoslavia.” To most Western politicians and journalists, who a decade earlier had no competent understanding of the region and its people, the self-fulfilling ends justified the criminal means that were instigated far from the bloody battlefields, the refugee collection centers, vile detention camps, mass graves, and the ruthless and cruel displacement of civilians. The civilized hypocrisy of war crimes trials, so-called, at The Hague is itself an illegal exercise of selective prosecution to demonize, generally, one group of belligerents, while the political masterminds, international corporate and diplomatic mercenaries, their slavish media operatives and strategists in Washington, D.C., New York City, Bonn, London, Paris and the Vatican—war criminals all—are untouched and concealed from an uninterested public. Ever so rare was that lone and outraged voice of journalistic conscience: “The ‘international community’ has prolonged the war, has added to the number of deaths by the thousands. And, if there were ever any real celestial war crimes trials, then people like Chancellor Kohl of Germany, the then-foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher of Germany, who pushed for the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia all through the summer and fall of 1991, should be in the dock as war criminals. And I think you’d have George Bush and James Baker in there as war criminals for recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina ...(T)hey are at least as guilty for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Serbs and Croats.”3 The “beginnings” of this fratricide were especially vexing for Western journalists and media. Especially, to American memories, Pearl Harbor or the more recent “wars” in the Persian Gulf and other expeditions for partial conquest had, apparently, emphatic enough beginnings. Americans believed that they “won” World War II, and assumed “victory” against Iraq under George Bush Sr.4 But wars are never really won; they are only ended by exhaustion, depletion and the temporary amnesia for recalling why and how it...