I am seriously uninterested in who did what to whom first in Kosovo or elsewhere. That
always leads to the argument that it is OK for the first victim to do the same thing
back, a notion that I, geneally unsuccessfully, continually try to disabuse my kids of.
Kosovars are not innocent helpful victims. Serbs are not monsters of quasi-Nazi
brutality. I grant you. That is a very primitive level of discussion. None of it
affects the character of the Milosovic regime, which cannot evade the judgment of
hsitory for its crimes against human rights and the working class merely because many
of its enemies are no less contemptible and awful.
--jks
In a message dated Mon, 25 Sep 2000 3:48:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Yoshie
Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<< >Justin:
>"Whatever was socialist in the Yugoslav economy is gone, except for some
>ideological window dressing that no one even pretends to believe any more.
>Moreover, the M regime that participated in the partition by force of
>Yugoslavia, supported the Bosnian serbs in the Bosnian war, and engaged in
>ethnic cleansing on a grand scale (though not, it now appears, systemaic
>mass murder) in Kosovo, cannot be characterized as other than thuggish at
>best. It's true it hasn't been as awful to the domestic opposition as it
>might have been, but that is hardly a reason to support it."
>
>LP: Actually there is more socialism in Yugoslavia today than there ever
>was in Nicaragua. All the rest of what Justin writes is unfounded
>assertions that are hardly worth answering. I will however remind Justin
>that, according to the liberal watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Media, the
>first instance of the term "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia occurred
>(according to a Lexis-Nexis search) was in the context of Albanians driving
>Serbs out of Kosovo.
***** Extra!
May/June 1999
Rescued from the Memory Hole
The Forgotten Background of the Serb/Albanian Conflict
By Jim Naureckas
In times of war, there is always intense pressure for media outlets
to serve as propagandists rather than journalists. While the role of
the journalist is to present the world in all its complexity, giving
the public as much information as possible so as to facilitate a
democratic debate, the propagandist simplifies the world in order to
mobilize the populace behind a common goal.
One of propaganda's most basic simplifications is to divide
participants in a conflict into neat categories of victim and
villain, with no qualification allowed for either role. In the real
world, of course, responsibility cannot always be assigned so neatly.
Both sides often have legitimate grievances and plausible claims, and
too often genuine atrocities are used to justify a new round of
abuses against the other side....
In order to eliminate any moral ambiguity from the NATO intervention,
media attempts to provide "context" to Kosovo generally start the
modern history of the conflict in 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic began
using Serb/Albanian tensions for his own political ends. A New York
Times backgrounder (4/4/99) by Michael Kaufman basically skips from
World War II until "1987, when Slobodan Milosevic, now the Yugoslav
president, first began exploiting and inflaming the historical
rivalries of Albanians and Serbs." In Kaufman's account, "the
conflict was relatively dormant until Mr. Milosevic stirred up
hostilities in 1989 by revoking the autonomous status that Kosovo had
enjoyed in Serbia."...
But the decision to end Kosovo's autonomous status did not come out
of nowhere, or out of a simple Serbian desire to oppress Albanians.
To get a more complicated picture of the situation in Kosovo in the
'80s, Kaufman would only have had to look up his own paper's coverage
from the era.
Origins of "ethnic cleansing"?
New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982
(11/28/82): "In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots
of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds
injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson,
pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive
Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs--Serbs and Montenegrins--out of
the province."
Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy,
Binder reported (11/9/82): "Such incidents have prompted many of
Kosovo's Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to
fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian
Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and
Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots."
"Ethnically pure," of course, is another way to translate the phrase
"ethnically clean"--as in "ethnic cleansing." The first use of this
concept to appear in Nexis was in relation to the Albanian
nationalists' program for Kosovo: "The nationalists have a two-point
platform," the Times' Marvine Howe quotes a Communist (and ethnically
Albanian) official in Kosovo (7/12/82), "first to establish what they
call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with
Albania to form a greater Albania." All of the half-dozen references
in Nexis to "ethnically clean" or "ethnic cleansing" over the next
seven years attribute the phrase to Albanian nationalists.
The New York Times returned to the Kosovo issue in 1986, when the
paper's Henry Kamm (4/28/86) reported that Slavic Yugoslavians "blame
ethnic Albaniansfor continuing assaults, rape and vandalism. They
believe their aim is to drive non-Albanians out of the province." He
reported suspicions by Slavs that the autonomous Communist
authorities in Kosovo were covering up anti-Slavic crimes, including
arson at a nunnery and the brutal mutilation of a Serbian farmer.
Kamm quoted a prescient "Western diplomat" who described Kosovo as
"Yugoslavia's single greatest problem."
By 1987, the Times was portraying a dire situation in Kosovo. David
Binder reported (11/1/87):
Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated public funds and
regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. Slavic Orthodox
churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells
have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed,
and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to
rape Serbian girls.
As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic
Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially
strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in
1981--an ''ethnically pure'' Albanian region, a ''Republic of Kosovo"
in all but name.
This is the situation--at least as perceived by Serbs--that led to
Milosevic's infamous 1987 speech promising protection of Serbs, and
later resulted in the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy. Despite being
easily available on Nexis, virtually none of this material has found
its way into contemporary coverage of Kosovo, in the New York Times
or anywhere else.
Consistent skepticism
It may be, of course, that some of the charges levied against
Albanian nationalists during the '80s were exaggerated or even
fabricated by politically motivated Serbs. Those who are tempted to
dismiss these accounts based on this possibility, however, should be
careful to apply the same critical standards to media coverage of
anti-Albanian atrocities in the '90s. The current coverage of Serbian
crimes, if anything, should be viewed with even greater skepticism,
since Yugoslavia has now become an official enemy of the U.S, and
establishment reporting generally shows a strong bias against such
countries. (See Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky.)...
See also "Articles Written When Kosovo Was Not Famous," a compilation
of pre-crisis reporting from various news outlets.
<http://members.tripod.com/~sarant 2/ksm.html>
More on the Kosovo War.... <http://www.fair.org/international/yugoslavia.html>
FAIR | Extra! | Subscribe | Media Files | Search | Contact
<http://www.fair.org/extra/9905/kosovo.html> *****
Yoshie
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