MEDIA STUDIES
The Serbs are still being presented as the bad guys.
So what's new in the news from Kosovo?
STEPHEN GLOVER
Ten days ago up to 60,000 or 70,000 Albanians marched to the divided city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo. They came from Pristina, the capital, and other parts of the province to the bridge in Mitrovica. As the press put it, they wanted to protest against the refusal of Serbs in the northern part of the town to allow Albanians to return to their houses there. Some 150 yards in front of the southern end of the bridge were 220 soldiers of the Royal Green Jackets, without weapons of any kind or any protection, waiting to meet them. Their object was to deter the marchers from passing over the bridge.
To read most of the press you would cer- tainly get the impression that the Albanians were the ones with justifiable grievances. Much was made of the Serbs having pre- vented them from getting back to their homes. No one suggested that it must have been rather scary for the few thousand Serbs in northern Mitrovica to have tens of thousands of Albanians heading their way. The comments of the American envoy Richard Holbrooke — he accused Serbia of fomenting trouble in Mitrovica — were widely quoted. In short, the Serbs in Mitro- vica were generally represented as the bad guys. So what's new?
Although newspapers rightly stressed the heroic role of the Green Jackets in holding back the marchers, few of them revealed that the British soldiers broke under the weight of the advancing Albanian crowd and retreated 150 yards before re-forming hastily on the bridge. No paper gave due credit to French and Danish riot police, who swooped in from the northern, Serb end of the bridge and fired teargas over the heads of the hard-pressed Green Jackets (some of whom admittedly suffered the consequences) towards the mob. Without this prompt action the Albanian marchers might well have broken the British line for the second time and been able to pass over the bridge to the Serbian side.
Since Nato 'liberated' Kosovo last June, some 200,000 Serbians, Bosnians and gyp- sies have been driven out of Kosovo, or have left of their own accord. This number is dis- puted — everyone is in the business of twist- ing figures — but most Serbs have undeni- ably gone. The British Army estimates that in Pristina there are 800 Serbs out of a Ser- bian population of some 40,000 before the war. Of course, this ethnic cleansing has been widely reported in the media, but who can doubt that there would have been a lot more outrage if Albanians had been on the receiving end? It is rarely pointed out that in Mitrovica, where there is one of the last remaining Serb enclaves, Serbs won't pass over the bridge to the Albanian side for fear of their lives, and that only some 15 have set- tled in their old homes there. Nor — though there are exceptions, such as a recent bril- liant account by Tim Judah in the Observer — have many newspapers reminded their readers that the troubles in Mitrovica began after Albanian terrorists killed two elderly Serbs on a bus.
Most reporting from Kosovo still tilts towards the Albanians and against the Serbs even though, for many months, the real story has been about Nato's failure to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. Why should this be? One reason is that many of the reporters in Kosovo are old Balkan hands who first reported Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and then Serbian excesses in Kosovo. They are hugger-mugger with Albanian intellectuals such as the journalist Veton Surroi. Their mindset is such that they find it very difficult to see the Serbs as victims. In a sense they are reporting the last war rather than what is going on now.
Reporters also depend upon Nato for a great deal of their information, and events have put Nato inextricably on the side of the Albanians. The British Army is particularly good at media relations; its spokesmen seem frank, open and friendly. They are at pains to point out that the marchers were `not bad boys' even though the more extreme among them hurled missiles at the Green Jackets, injuring ten of them, one quite badly. My admiration for the British Army is boundless but it is a fact that its senior officers are following a political agenda which cannot allow the Albanians to be seen in a bad light.
The French army, by contrast, is utterly hopeless at media relations, appearing secre- tive, devious and unfriendly. The French and the British are at daggers drawn over what should be done in Mitrovica; the French hav- ing kept Serbs and Albanians apart, the British preaching the virtues of integration. Senior British officers freely rubbish the French off the record. When I was in Mitro- vica last week, a French lieutenant-colonel spun me the implausible line that relations were hunky-dory and that `zere 'ees only one Nato'. With chumps like these it may be no wonder that French soldiers in Kosovo have got such a bad press in Britain. It doesn't seem to occur to many reporters that the much-maligned French policy in Mitrovica has at least kept Serbs from being ethnically cleansed, as they have been in most of the rest of Kosovo. If Albanians are now allowed back into northern Mitrovica — and it is like- ly they will be, as a result of Nato pressure on the French — the outlook for Serbs there will not be at all bright.
Of course there are some journalists who are prepared to go against the grain, though these are usually written off by the old Balkan hands who follow the Nato line. Rdbert Fisk of the Independent has consis- tently criticised Nato, to my mind in bril- liant fashion. He is held by many fellow reporters to be a loose cannon who does not know his Balkan history. Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times also comes in for a considerable amount of stick. Mr Watson was the only Western journalist to remain in Pristina throughout Nato's bombing, which seems an outstandingly courageous thing to have done. However, some of the Balkan pack aver that he was compromised because he was prevented by the Serbs from reporting events fully. Perhaps so, but wasn't it better to be writing something from Pristina rather than nothing at all? What they really object to may be Mr Wat- son's tendency to see both sides of the argument, and to portray Serbs as victims.
Will it ever change? There is a new con- sensus among the old Balkan hands that the United Nations administration of Kosovo is a farce. With the piles of rubbish on the streets, with the unmended roads, the elec- tricity cuts and the water shortages, with UN personnel sweeping past in their huge white jeeps, it would be difficult to conclude otherwise. This will be a big story over the coming months: how the peace is not work- ing thanks to UN incompetence. But disen- chantment with the UN will not turn into disenchantment with Nato, the allegedly pro-Serb French excepted. Far less will it lead these journalists to question the right- ness of Nato's war. It was their reporting of Serbian brutality which helped mould public opinion and enabled Nato, by which I prin- cipally mean the United States, to embark on its bombing campaign. These people were Nato's foot soldiers, and they can't turn back now.
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