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Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and news reports
MEDIA ADVISORY:
Macedonia War Gets the Kosovo Treatment-- In Reverse
April 13, 2001
At the outset of NATO's Kosovo bombing campaign in 1999, FAIR urged
journalists not to oversimplify the conflict. At the time, U.S. coverage
took a propagandistic tone-- blaming a long-standing, multi-faceted
conflict almost entirely on the Serbs, or even solely on one man, Slobodan
Milosevic. FAIR pointed to the region's complex history of ethnic
confrontation, including the chronic turmoil of the 1980s, when it was the
Albanian majority, then enjoying broad political autonomy, that was accused
of discrimination and abuses aimed at driving out the Slavic minority.
In the jingoistic atmosphere of the NATO war against Yugoslavia, much of the
media portrayed the conflict as little more than a racial pogrom
orchestrated by the Serbs for the simple purpose of satisfying their own
consuming hatreds. The fact that Serbian atrocities were taking place in the
context of a full-scale armed Albanian guerrilla insurgency was often
strangely missing.
Now an almost identical ethnic clash has erupted in neighboring Macedonia,
but the press's coverage is almost a reverse mirror image of its Kosovo
reporting. In each case, reporters and pundits have deferred to U.S.
officials' view of the situation: While the war in Kosovo was blamed on the
Serbian authorities (rather than the Albanian guerrillas), blame for today's
clashes in Macedonia is placed mostly on the shoulders of the Albanian
insurgents rather than the pro-NATO government. Whereas in Kosovo, Serbian
repression and human rights abuses were the main focus of attention, today
Macedonia's repression of Albanians is being downplayed.
In October 1997, when the Kosovo Liberation Army first began shooting at
Serbian police and civilian officials, New York Times editorialists
(10/23/97) blamed the Serbs. They wrote that the disturbances proved "the
adage that those who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent ones
inevitable." Since 1989, the editorial explained, Albanians had been
peacefully campaigning for a restoration of Kosovo's political autonomy, but
"recently some Albanians, frustrated that politics is getting them nowhere,
have turned to attacks" on the Serbian government.
The editorial condemned the Serbs' response as "indiscriminate repression"--
though by that point, very early in the conflict, Serbia's heavy-handed
police maneuvers had caused few civilian deaths-- and called on Washington
to "increase the pressure on Belgrade" to carry out reforms and allow
international monitors. No pressure or demands on the Albanian militants
were urged.
Contrast that with a recent Times editorial (3/13/01) on the sudden wave of
Albanian guerrilla attacks in Macedonia. Far from accusing the Macedonian
government of provoking Albanians' anger, the editorialists declared that
"the West must make clear to this militant [Albanian] fringe that they will
not be allowed to set off another Balkan war.... Macedonia itself must
summon the political and military strength needed to blunt this
challenge.... Responsible Albanian political leaders in Kosovo must now be
equally forthright in isolating the armed militants.... If they cannot do so
effectively, NATO may have to increase its military pressure on the
guerrillas."
Yet just like the Kosovars, the Albanians of Macedonia have taken up arms
after disillusionment with years of what they see as fruitless political
dialogue amid constant Slavic police brutality. Kim Mehmeti, a prominent
Albanian-language journalist and director of an NGO promoting inter-ethnic
cooperation in Skopje, explained this disillusionment in a recent commentary
for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting ("Futile Dialogue Exposed,"
3/21/01). He wrote that the rebellion is "forcing the country to look itself
in the mirror and to realize that inter-ethnic talks over the past 10 years
have taken place against a backdrop of police repression of the Albanian
community."
Macedonian abuses against ethnic Albanians have garnered little attention in
the U.S. This is in marked contrast to neighboring Kosovo, where Serbian
brutality was virtually the only aspect of the province's political
situation that caught the U.S. media's interest. Yet while Kosovo may have
featured more frequent nationalist flare-ups than Macedonia-- accompanied by
more frequent police repression-- human rights organizations and activists
like Mehmeti have documented a long and persistent record of ethnic abuses
by the Macedonian authorities since the republic's founding in 1991 that
have been all but ignored in the U.S.
For example, in 1992 a group of Albanian intellectuals sought to reopen the
Albanian-language teachers' college that had been closed since a 1986
crackdown. After two years with no response from the Macedonian government,
they opened Tetovo University on their own. According to Mehmeti, "While
'democratic dialogue' continued over the future of the institution, police
were dispatched to forcibly shut down the university. This dialogue," he
noted bitterly, "ended in the death of one Albanian [and] the detention of
some of the university's organizers.... The Macedonian state has yet to
recognize the institution."
In 1997, police intervened in the Albanian village of Gostivar to remove an
Albanian flag from a municipal building. According to Human Rights Watch,
"at least two hundred people were injured.... The police shot dead two men
and beat a third to death." Gostivar's mayor was arrested and charged with
"organizing an armed resistance." Police "continued to detain, interrogate,
and abuse ethnic Albanians" for weeks, including several Albanian political
activists who were "beaten and then released without any formal charges
having been made against them." HRW added that the police contingent
included "special forces trained by the United States."
In January 2000, a wave of police repression targeted the Albanian village
of Aracinovo after the murder of three Macedonian police officers there.
According to Amnesty International, "dozens of people-- all of them ethnic
Albanian--...were tortured, beaten, or otherwise ill-treated.... Many men
were held incommunicado for up to 11 days.... One man had his jaw broken,
reportedly with a rifle butt," and there were "strong indications" that one
man who died in custody "may have been extrajudicially executed."
International monitors recently reported the killing of a 16-year-old ethnic
Albanian boy returning home to tend to his sheep, as well as the "arrest and
beating of scores of ethnic Albanian civilians, and the vandalizing of
dozens of houses" (London Guardian, 4/10/01). In an ominous move reminiscent
of the Serbian crackdown in Kosovo, dozens of Albanian teachers, lawyers and
other community leaders have recently been rounded up and arrested by
Macedonian authorities on vague charges of "terrorism" ("Arrests Panic
Albanians," IWPR, 4/5/01).
These incidents received virtually no coverage in the U.S. media, and
reporters writing about the current rebellion have largely tiptoed around
the subject. In a piece about the mobilization for war among ethnic Albanian
expatriates in the U.S., the New York Times' Chris Hedges (3/19/01) tersely
noted that Albanians in Macedonia "complain of discrimination and harassment
from Macedonia's Slav majority."
Yet during the Kosovo war, Hedges spoke passionately about pre-war abuses in
Serb-ruled Kosovo, calling it "a phenomenally repressive and brutal
government," and argued that "the Serbs forfeited their right to rule Kosovo
by that kind of behavior" (NPR's Talk of the Nation, 6/7/99).
What explains the media's reluctance to condemn abuses in Macedonia as
forcefully as they did the Serbian crackdown in Kosovo? As usual, reporters
and editors seem to be taking their cues from U.S. policymakers. In the
Kosovo conflict, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and her aides were
determined to paint the Yugoslav leadership as the main culprit behind the
war in order to prepare the ground for NATO intervention on "humanitarian"
grounds. "Our first priority," one of Albright's top deputies has written,
"was to unite the Europeans behind air strikes by clearly defining the
aggressor and the victim" (James Rubin, Financial Times, 9/30/00). At every
opportunity, these officials worked to draw attention to Serbian abuses and
were reticent about KLA provocations.
By contrast, Macedonia is viewed by U.S. policymakers across the political
spectrum as a loyal regional partner of NATO and a bulwark against
instability. Far from hoping to launch "humanitarian" airstrikes against the
country, U.S. and European officials have acted to shore up the shaky
Macedonian government. "Instead of criticizing human rights violations,"
Human Rights Watch has written, "the international community has rewarded
the Macedonian government for being a 'factor of stability' in the region."
But journalists should not let the calculations of policy planners influence
their coverage of human rights issues in the Balkans. Violence on both sides
must be reported, and the grievances of each side examined. Just as the
media were irresponsible in framing the Kosovo war as a simple story of
Serbian violence against Albanians, they should not play down the very real
abuses being committed against Albanians by the pro-NATO government of
Macedonia.
To view FAIR's Yugoslavia coverage, see:
http://www.fair.org/international/yugoslavia.html
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