Nexus - 0705 - New Times Magazine-pages

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THE MEDIA AND THEIR ATROCITIES THE MEDIA AND ATROCITIES THEIR The first casualty in war is always truth, and the mass media have perpetrated many lies on behalf of their masters during the Balkans conflicts. or the better part of a decade, the US public has been bombarded with a media campaign to demonise the Serbian people and their elected leaders. During that time, the US Government has pursued a goal of breaking up Yugoslavia into a cluster of small, weak, dependent, free-market principalities. Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sec- tor economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was—and, what's left of it, still is—charting an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order. Of the various Yugoslav peoples, the Serbs were targeted for demonisation because they were the largest nationality and the one most opposed to the break-up of Yugoslavia. But what of the atrocities they committed? All sides committed atrocities in the fighting that has been encouraged by the Western powers over the last decade, but the reporting has been consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents of Croat and Muslim atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the US press, and when they did they were accorded only passing mention.' Meanwhile, Serb atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabri- cated, as we shall see. Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and elsewhere. Where were the US television crews when these war crimes were being committed? John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, asks: "Where were the TV cameras when hundreds of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?"? The official line, faithfully parroted in the US media, is that Bosnian Serb forces committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica. Are we to trust US leaders and the corporate-owned news media when they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the 500 premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait? This story was repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication years later. During the Bosnian war, in 1993, the Serbs were accused of pursuing an official policy of rape. "Go forth and rape", a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that story never could be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far as we know, no such utterance was ever made. Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that "the existence of 'a system- atic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved".* Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 Muslim women; the stories varied. The Bosnian Serb Army numbered not more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desper- ate military engagements. A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible supporting evidence. Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with the utmost scepticism—and not be used as an excuse for an aggressive and punitive policy against Yugoslavia. The "mass rape" propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify the continued NATO slaughter of Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner (April 26, 1999) tells us: "Serb Tactic Is Organized Rape, Kosovo Refugees Say". No evidence or testimony is given to support the charge of organised rape. Only at the bottom of the story, in the nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) found no such organ- ised rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens, "and not many dozens" by Michael Parenti, PhD © 2000 Michael Parenti Political Archive Website: www.michaelparenti.org/ by Michael Parenti, PhD © 2000 Michael Parenti Political Archive Website: www.michaelparenti.org/ NEXUS 21 TARGETING THE SERBS AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2000