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Titolo: The Forgotten Background of the Serb/Albanian Conflict

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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 presenting the background to the Kosovo conflict, U.S. news outlets
have focused overwhelmingly on the very real crimes committed by
Yugoslavian and Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians. In the
process, they have downplayed or ignored the ways that Albanian
nationalists have contributed to ethnic tensions in the region. These
one-sided accounts have reduced a complex dynamic that calls for
careful mediation to a cartoon battle of good vs. evil, with bombing
the bad guys as the obvious solution.
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."
The revocation of autonomy was a crucial decision, one which greatly
destabilized the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian system and contributed to
the country's breakup. The loss of autonomy was a grievance that
helped pave the way for the rise of an armed separatist movement, in
the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
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 Albanians…for 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.)
And if one suggests that the New York Times had a peculiar
anti-Albanian bias in the '80s, one still has to explain why similar
reports of proto-ethnic cleansing appeared in the Washington Post
(11/29/86) and the Financial Times (7/20/82, 7/22/86).
It would not be responsible journalism, of course, to imply that
crimes against ethnic Slavs justify assaults of even greater magnitude
against ethnic Albanians. The challenge of reporting on a cycle of
violence is to make sure that the wounds nursed by each side are not
presented as if they vindicate further violence. The Times' Binder
makes an attempt at this in his November 1, 1987 piece:
Many Yugoslavs blame the troubles on the ethnic Albanians, but the
matter is more complex in a country with as many nationalities and
religions as Yugoslavia's and involves economic development, law,
politics, families and flags. As recently as 20 years ago, the Slavic
majority treated ethnic Albanians as inferiors to be employed as
hewers of wood and carriers of heating coal. The ethnic Albanians, who
now number 2 million, were officially deemed a minority, not a
constituent nationality, as they are today.
Of course, it's not always the case that both sides are equally or
even partially at fault in an ethnic conflict: The Holocaust was not a
response to historic crimes committed by German Jews against German
Christians, and the people of East Timor did not provoke an Indonesian
invasion by anti-Javanese pogroms. The question of historical
responsibility is one that must be answered through careful research
and reporting. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. media have failed to do that
research, instead relying on a simplified, truncated official history
that serves NATO's propaganda purposes more than it serves the
citizenry's need for a complete and accurate context.
See FAIR's Archives for more on:
New York Times/Kosovo
The Balkans
Human Rights

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