Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Making The News: John Pilger

Making the news
Western war reporting is selective and the real stories of the Kosovan
crisis remain largely untold
John Pilger
Tuesday August 24, 1999
The Guardian
Last week, 14 members of the same Iraqi family were reportedly killed
when their house was hit by a missile. There were no military
installations nearby. On August 11, an unconfirmed number of people died
when a 4th-century Christian monastery was bombed as they gathered to
watch the solar eclipse. In May, a friend travelling in northern Iraq
came upon the remains of a flock of sheep with blast injuries. A
shepherd and his family of six had been bombed to death on one day, his
sheep the next. Apart from a news-in-brief item in the Guardian, this
was not news in Britain.
Such acts of murder are routine, carried out by US and British pilots
over Iraq. "We do not target civilians" and "pilots are defending
themselves", say the foreign office. It is a deceit reminiscent of the
long-running lie that Hawk aircraft were not operating in East Timor.
Mostly, lying is unnecessary, as Orwell pointed out in the preface to
Animal Farm, when "inconvenient facts [are] kept dark". A recent Unicef
report that child deaths in Iraq had doubled to half a million briefly
broke the silence, presumably because it was "measured" - that is, it
usefully shifted the blame a few centimetres from the Anglo-American-
led sanctions to the Iraqi regime.
Numerous other studies on the suffering of the civilian population of
Iraq have been ignored or buried. A Unicef report in 1997, which left no
doubt that the malnourishment of a million children was caused by "the
impact of sanctions", was confined largely to an article in the
Economist. In 1995, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation concluded
that "the moral, financial and political standing of the international
community intent on maintaining economic sanctions is challenged by the
estimate that since August 1990, 567,000 children in Iraq have died as a
consequence." That is four times the number of children who died at
Hiroshima.
According to the Guardian's data base, it was reported in two paragraphs
in this newspaper and the Times, and in one sentence in the Financial
Times. There was no political debate, and there is none now. The prime
minister is never required to defend policies which, by the definition
of various international conventions, are genocidal. Unpeople are a
common phenomenon in the media age. Victims are deemed worthy or
unworthy, depending on the degree of western culpability. Since the
"just war" in the Balkans, more than 170,000 Serbs have been "ethnically
cleansed" from their homes in Kosovo in the same way that ethnic
Albanians were driven out.
This is equal to the number of Serbs forced out of Krajina seven years
ago by the Croatian regime and its US state department backers. Many
Serbs fleeing Kosovo are survivors of the Krajina atrocity. Now they are
as much victims of Nato's ethnic hate campaign as they are of Albanian
gangs, whose intimidation and murder extends to Montenegrins and Roma.
Is this news? Sort of. Several exceptional pieces of reporting come to
mind. Otherwise, it is well on the way to news-in-brief. The
drum-beaters are long silent, having testily assured the prime
minister's press spokesman that they did as good a job of propaganda as
he did.
Silent, too, is the effete bomber himself, whose "moral crusade" was
dutifully elevated from the crapulous to every front page and BBC
bulletin and whose "new internationalism where the brutal repression of
whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated" is now revealed to be
fake as Nato presides over precisely that repression in Kosovo. The
truth behind all this, which Harold Pinter calls "the depth of shame",
is that untold thousands of innocent Serbs and ethnic Albanians, victims
of Nato's "war," would be alive today had western leaders pursued three
outstanding opportunities for peace. Two were at the Rambouillet talks:
in February when Robin Cook boasted to parliament of agreement on 90% of
peace terms which the Serbs were prepared to sign, then in March, when
the Serbs were again willing to sign - until a secret appendix was
handed to them on the last day, demanding, in effect, they surrender all
of Yugoslavia to Nato's occupation. On top of this, the elected Yugoslav
parliament, on March 23, called on the UN to negotiate a diplomatic
solution leading "toward the reaching of a political agreement on a
wide- ranging autonomy for Kosovo." Almost all of this remains unknown
to the British public. Neither was the complete list of Nato targets hit
ever published or broadcast. This shows not "blunders" but an
unmistakable pattern of civilian terrorism: hospitals, schools,
nurseries, housing estates, power sources, markets, farms, churches,
monasteries, against which horrific "anti-personnel " cluster bombs were
used.
A group of prominent international lawyers argue that if the recent
indictment of Slobodan Milosevic is to be credible, not merely victor's
justice, then the evidence against all prima facie war criminals should
be heard. They have prepared a compelling indictment of Nato's leaders,
including Blair, Robertson and Cook. That is the news.
© Copyright
Guardian Media Group plc. 1999

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