War in Yugoslavia: Nato's media blunders

by Reporters sans frontieres

Kosovo is being used as a pawn in a media war planned by strategists on both sides. The workings of the propaganda machine hold no secrets for the Serbs: the Belgrade government is fundamentally opposed to press freedom and does not hesitate to "eliminate" dissenting voices. Serbian Radio and Television (SRT), Serbian citizens' main source of news, has for the past ten years been under the complete control of people close to the government and is used as a weapon in the war. After passing a particularly restrictive information law in October 1998, the Serbian government took advantage of the start of the Nato air strikes to silence independent media in the country and to keep foreign journalists out of Kosovo (see the report "Yugoslavia: A State of Repression" published by Reporters Sans Frontières in May 1999). Nonetheless, the "communications strategy" used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato is made up of 19 democratic countries) since the start of the conflict has also given rise to a number of questions both from western correspondents and from independent Serbian journalists. Veran Matic, editor of the radio station B92, which has been banned by Belgrade since the start of the bombings, wrote on 2 April: "As a representative of the free media, I am only too aware of the need for information, whatever side you are on in the conflict. People inside the country should be kept up to date with international debate as well as with what is happening at home. Those abroad ought to be told the truth about what is going on here. But instead of detailed, uncensored facts, all we hear is war propaganda, including western rhetoric."

The reporting of rumours and exorbitant figures that are impossible to check by certain western political and military officials, and their use of aggressive vocabulary, have strengthened doubts about their goodwill. "Nato should drop this information strategy", Pascal Boniface, director of the Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations, said on 29 March. Other observers have been even more critical, putting the blame squarely on both sides. "What the Serbs and their television are currently doing is absolutely repulsive", said an analyst with the Mass Media Research Centre at the University of Leicester, England, "but the propaganda put out by Nato is scarcely better."

Many journalists who have attended the Nato press conferences in Brussels are also very sceptical about the truth and accuracy of the informations supplied by officials of the organisation. "What London and Brussels offer to journalists as facts are usually only rumours", Kevin McEderry of the French news agency AFP wrote on 22 April. On the same day the French daily Libération summed up the situation as follows: "Since the start of the air strikes, at press conference after press conference, Nato officials have put out false reports and rumours."

What is the truth of the matter? Has Nato made blunders attributable to confusion and haste, or have there been deliberate attempts at disinformation? In a propaganda leaflet issued in Yugoslavia, showing a B52 bomber dropping bombs from a high altitude and aimed at encouraging Serbian soldiers to desert, Nato refers to: "Thousands of bombs... and the determination, force and support of the whole world to continue to drop them on your units." To make sure of this "support", which in democratic societies depends on public opinion, might Nato officials have taken a few liberties with the truth? Using some examples of these "media blunders", Reporters Sans Frontières will try to get to the root of the matter.

General Wilby's "very reliable source"

On 29 March 1999, a few days after the start of the military operation against Yugoslavia, Nato announced in Brussels that the chief adviser to Ibrahim Rugova, Fehmi Agani, and five other well-known Kosovo Albanians, had been murdered by Serbian troops. They included Baton Haxhiu, the young editor of the Albanian-language Pristina daily Koha Ditore. Earlier that day, the managing editor of the daily, Veton Surroi, had been included in the list, but his name was later withdrawn. The day before, Nato had said that Rugova himself was in hiding and that his house had been burned down.

Such reports caused widespread consternation and indignation among both journalists and the public at large: Fehmi Agani, a professor of sociology aged 66, is regarded as one of the most moderate and respected Albanian officials in Kosovo. The report of the murders made the front pages of the international, and particularly American, press (see the International Herald Tribune, 30 March). British and Italian dailies published praise-filled obituaries of the victims. Yet many high-ranking European diplomats had expressed surprise about the report and refused to confirm the murders. The French foreign ministry spokesman said he was afraid they might have taken place, but could not be sure. British general David Wilby, questioned at Nato headquarters about the circumstances of the murders, said the report came from a "very reliable source" in Kosovo, which his department had checked carefully. The killings had apparently taken place after the five intellectuals attended the funeral of an Albanian lawyer, Bajram Kelmendi, who was murdered along with his two sons by Serbian soldiers (or paramilitaries) during the first night of the air strikes, the general added.

AFP correspondents in Kosovo were unable to confirm the Nato announcements. The independent Belgrade news agency Beta reported strong denials by the Serbian authorities. A journalist posted to Belgrade told Reporters Sans Frontières: "If they had any responsability in this matter, Serbian officials would have blamed the murder on the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] or kept quiet about it, as they usually do." On the Albanian side, no-one was sure of the facts either. Journalists in Tirana learned the news from the American news channel CNN, Kosovan political leaders in Europe referred to the Nato report without giving further details. When the report was checked, General Wilby's "very reliable source" turned out to be the London-based Kosovo Information Centre, which is run by Kosovan exiles. One of them, Hafiz Gagica, had said the same day that Ibrahim Rugova had been wounded and his whereabouts were not known.

Two days later Ibrahim Rugova spoke to foreign correspondents from his Pristina home, saying he was in good health and his house had not been damaged. SRT broadcast news of his "cordial" meeting with Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. Thus, by exploiting the weaknesses in Nato's communications policy, the Serbian president staged a media coup, showing himself with the leading Kosovan advocate of a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Renate Flottau, correspondent of the German weekly Spiegel, who spent a week with Rugova in Pristina in early April, spoke about the pressure to which the Kosovan leader had been subjected by the Serbian authorities: he was being held hostage in Pristina and he was virtually kidnapped to be taken to Belgrade. But nothing that Nato had said about him was true either.

The report of the murder of the five Albanian intellectuals also turned out to be incorrect. Baton Haxhiu learned of his death on the radio. Passing through London on 7 April, and later in Paris, he told how he had fled to Macedonia and said the other four people reported dead were in good health. Fehmi Agani was in fact killed three weeks later by the Serbian army, in circumstances that are still not clear, as he was trying to flee from Kosovo with his family. The Serbian government immediately blamed the killing on the KLA, while Nato officials never mentioned the subject again. Nor did they ever deny the initial report. Making a rumour official in this way, during the first week of bombing, would appear to be less the result of a mistake than of a deliberate decision: to tip the balance in favour of Nato air strikes on Yugoslavia at a time when public opinion was still very sceptical about their effectiveness.

Blunders by the military... and the media

The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on 8 May left western leaders seriously embarrassed. The building was hit by three missiles fired by Nato planes, leaving four people dead, including three Chinese journalists, and several injured. On 10 May US president Bill Clinton apologised to the Chinese government, describing the attack as a "tragic accident". Meanwhile, the Nato spokesman tried to explain to reporters that "a system, not an individual" was to blame. In Washington, defence secretary William Cohen and the head of the CIA, George Tenet, said an inaccurate piece of information had caused an error in the targeting of the building. To put it more clearly, they were admitting that the CIA had not bothered to record that the Chinese embassy had moved to a different building several years earlier, even though the new address is listed in the Belgrade telephone directory.

China rejected this explanation. An official said: "The western media themselves wondered how the intelligence service of the world's leading power had failed to recognise a huge diplomatic building, with a courtyard, a nameplate on the door and a flag." On 11 May, Nato secretary-general Javier Solana promised a "formal investigation", the results of which would be annonced as soon as possible. So far they have not been published.

The bombing of a convoy of journalists on 30 May provided a further challenge to Nato's communication skills. Two vehicles carrying journalists were targeted by Nato bombers on the road from Prizren to Brezovica, in Kosovo. The correspondent of the British daily The Times, Eve-Ann Prentice, a journalist with Portuguese national television, Elsa Marujo, and a French author, Daniel Schiefer, were injured in the attack, and one of their drivers was killed. Eve-Ann Prentice told her newspaper how the raid had taken place. (Nato officials said on 31 May that despite checks they had "no information" about it). Nato spokesman Jamie Shea commented: "Of course, we cannot guarantee the safety of journalists or individual vehicles in Kosovo."

The attack on a convoy of Albanian refugees on 14 April, the biggest military blunder so far, highlighted the limits of Nato's attempts at justification. Nato planes bombed two groups of refugees in the Djakovica region of south-western Kosovo, killing 75 people, according to Serbian sources. At first the German defence minister, Rudolf Sharping, accused Serbian planes of the bombing. The next day, in a press release issued by its Brussels headquarters, Nato acknowledged that it had bombed a civilian vehicle by mistake: "Following a preliminary investigation, Nato confirms that apparently one of its planes dropped a bomb on a civilian vehicle travelling with a convoy yesterday." Nato said the attack was made because military vehicles were presumed to be in the area. "Serbian police or army vehicles might have been in or near the convoy", the press release added.

On the same day the AFP correspondent in Kosovo, Aleksandar Mitic, the correspondent of the daily Los Angeles Times, Paul Watson, and two Greek television crews were able to go to the scene of the bombing. They found scenes of disaster, with "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." According to Mitic's report, two convoys, one to the north and one to the south of the town of Djakovica, were the target of the bombings. He quoted one refugee as saying the groups had been bombed three or four times, "the planes circling overhead as if they were following us".

On 16 April, Nato spokesman Jamie Shea and military leader General Giuseppe Marini insisted several times that "in one case and one only, we have proof of civilian loss of life. Otherwise, we are sure that we targeted military vehicles." The media were already talking about "Nato's biggest blunder" and underlining the "confusion" in the Nato press release. Public opinion, shocked by film of the bombings, was so outraged that the London government was quick to stress that the bombs used were not British. It was only on 19 April that Nato changed its version of events, admitting that it had hit two convoys with the help of about a dozen planes that dropped a total of nine bombs. It made public a recording of one of the pilots responsible for bombing the first convoy, who said the vehicles in question were "of a military type". As for the second convoy, Nato claimed it had been targeted because its "pace and formation were of a typically military nature". On the same day the British Daily Express revealed that one of the American pilots responsible for the bombings had been warned by a British pilot that the convoy included civilians. Two days later, Nato officials admitted that the recording made public on 19 April had no connection with the bombing of the convoys. Belgrade rubbed salt in the wound by broadcasting a supposed recording of a conversation between an American pilot and an AWACS radar plane, encouraging the pilot to continue with the bombing despite his suspicions that there were civilians in the convoy. Nato immediately condemned the tape as a fake.

Where western communication went awry

Nato officials apologised for the bombing of the convoys near Djakovica and said they regretted the death of civilians. They even apologised for having given inaccurate information. On 16 April, for example, Rudolf Sharping told the press that he had "at best, spoken too soon" about the incident. He had at first accused the Yugoslav armed forces of being behind the bombings on the basis of "the information available at the time". In fact, the minister was repeating the words of General Wesley Clark, who had referred to accounts by refugees claiming the convoys had been attacked on the same day by Yugoslav bombers. "A monstrous lie", the Yugoslav foreign ministry spokesman retorted.

But while acknowledging their "mistakes", western officials systematically emphasised that the government of Slobodan Milosevic was "entirely responsible" for the incidents. This gave them the opportunity to make daily mention of violence committed by Serbian troops, the Albanians' flight from Kosovo and the nature of the Milosevic government. Roger Silverstone, a media specialist with the London School of Economics, subsequently commented that Nato officials had "so far led a good propaganda war, highlighting ethnic cleansing operations by the Serbs to cut short their critics". In this respect too, the information supplied by Nato seems not to have been carefully checked. "Villages attacked by artillery", "towns razed to the ground", "human shields" and "mass graves" were all reported without any evidence of their existence being given. Naturally, the Serbian authorities were delighted to show film proving that the Nato allegations were wrong, scoring valuable points in the news war. When Nato was caught red-handed blundering - or lying - it was quick to recall the lack of independence in the Serbian media. On 18 April, shortly after the "media disaster" of the bombed refugees, Nato spokesman Jamie Shea made a long statement condemning the Milosevic government's stranglehold on the press. "Night and day, I am under pressure from journalists to justify Nato's actions, but I am struck that Slobodan Milosevic is not asked to justify anything", he complained, adding: "Milosevic is unaware of the constraints connected with the media."

Military officials also hit out at the Serbian media, accusing them of conducting disinformation campaigns: on 19 April, as Nato admitted to bombing the two convoys near Djakovica, the organisation's spokesman in Skopje, Commander Eric Mongnot, denied reports of deaths among the Nato forces put out by the Serbs, and accused them of "lying propaganda".

Others features of western communication are approximate figures, debatable historic references and the use of vocabulary that has the aim of making the adversary appear monstrous. For instance, Jamie Shea described Slobodan Milosevic as "the organiser of the greatest human catastrophe since 1945" and also as "the instigator of a flight similar to the evacuation of Phnom Penh by the Khmers Rouges". Rudolf Sharping said on 28 March that "genocide" was going on in Kosovo, while Jamie Shea reported that 500,000 people had been driven out of Kosovo - conveniently omitting to mention that this figure covered a full year of clashes in the province and not the period of the Nato military campaign. The term "genocide" has been used systematically by British prime minister Tony Blair, and in Germany officials have compared the Milosevic government to that of Hitler. These historical references have led to protests from experts. Historian Wolfgang Benz, the director of the Research Centre on Anti-Semitism, speaking in Bonn on 22 April, warned against comparing the Belgrade regime with Nazi Germany. He condemned the "indiscriminate and fateful use of the word Holocaust" and accused western politicians of "dipping at random into a mixed bag of historical terms". Shortly beforehand, British foreign secretary Robin Cook had referred to a "final solution" being implemented in Kosovo by Slobodan Milosevic.

From 30 March onwards, the British government adopted an even tougher tone in its "communication" to counter "the propaganda of the Yugoslav army and its thugs", in the words of Robin Cook. Defence secretary George Robertson described Slobodan Milosevic as a "butcher" during his daily press briefings in London. Other British ministers depicted the Yugoslav president as a "diabolical lout", aided by "corrupt and sadistic henchmen". Serge Halimi of the French monthly supplement, Le Monde diplomatique, said these expressions were deliberately thought up to make the front pages of the British tabloids.

Kosovan leaders in exile were invited to London to explain the Nato air strikes and call for them to continue. More discreetly, government sources accused British journalists of giving too much weight to "Serbian propaganda" and of "doubting too systematically the validity of the Nato armed operation". The comment was directly aimed at the BBC's correspondent in Belgrade, John Simpson. The daily The Times said on 16 April that he had been accused by British government officials of "passing on Serbian propaganda indiscriminately in his coverage of the Nato bombings." He was also accused of "over-simplification" and even latent pro-Serbism, for claiming that the conflict had succeeded in rallying the Serbian people behind their president. Unofficial government sources have hinted that an official complaint could be filed against the BBC. The corporation's deputy director, Richard Ayre, defended the journalist, saying: "I pay tribute to the courage of John Simpson and the objectivity of his reporting. (...) It is essential that the public should be able to hear a true account of the atmosphere in Belgrade and not simply what Nato governments would like people to hear."

Conclusion: Has Nato lost this war?

Reporters Sans Frontières has collected many statements from journalists who are indignant about Nato's communication strategy. Alexandra Schwartzbrod, of the French daily Libération, believes that communication about the bombing of the two convoys was "scandalous", and has a general recollection of "confused", if not deliberately false, information being put out by Nato. "They gave the impression that they didn't really know what they were talking about", she said. Moreover, since the end of April, her newspaper has not seen any point in keeping a permanent correspondent at Nato headquarters in Brussels.

On 27 April Nato officials themselves admitted - although not in so many words - that their communication strategy had failed. They said communication policy should be "thoroughly reviewed (...) particularly in the light of the disaster of the bombing of convoys of refugees". London then sent some of its leading specialists in press relations to Nato headquarters, including Tony Blair's chief adviser, Alastair Campbell, who was one of the main architects of New Labour's election victory in the May 1997 elections.

In an internal report to the organisation, revealed in the Spanish daily El Mundo on 31 May, Nato recognised that "Nato headquarters does not have the mechanisms, resources or experience necessary to conduct an information campaign in wartime". The report said that public opinion should be prepared for three possible scenarios: "a long period of air raids; more intensive raids, not solely against military targets; and a land invasion", and recommended the use of "all possible channels" to improve communication, including non-government organisations and the media. It is to be feared that the strengthening of Nato's communication system is aimed at increasing manipulation of the media rather than improving the quality of information.

In the third month of their military campaign, Nato officials have made practically no mention of "collateral damage" - only of "legitimate targets" such as television buildings and relay stations, post offices, power stations and bridges - without provoking any major movements of protest or indignation. But at what price? While remaining the defender of a "just cause" in the eyes of western public opinion, Nato has not shown goodwill in its relations with the media and has distorted the truth on several occasions. The officialisation of the rumour about the killing of Albanian intellectuals and more or less deliberate attempts to confuse the media about the bombing of civilians have severely damaged the organisation's credibility. The British government's pressure on the BBC's Belgrade correspondent is a violation of the freedom to inform. The bandying about of historical references and use of aggressive expressions are unworthy of officials of democratic countries.

It is obvious that in time of war, the information provided by one side or the other may be liable to be used as a propaganda tool. Just as inevitably, communication can also be used as a weapon, be it political or commercial. But it could still be hoped that a coalition of democracies, which claims to have right on its side, would behave with more integrity than the dictatorship it is fighting against.

Alexandre Levy
Europe desk researcher
Reporters sans frontieres
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