[PEN-L:4629] War & 'Public Relations,' or, 'Kuwaiti Babies Torn from Incubators'

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The break-up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent civil war are in part the
results of one of the most successful cases of propaganda in service of
creating the New Enemy. Americans are not to remember that there are people
in Serbia and Iraq besides Slobodan Milosevic & Saddam Husein. Never mind,
all of them are inherently evil and rapists to boot, according to
Washington and their paid and unpaid lackeys. Forget the fact that we don't
hear at all the voices of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians in Kosovo,
etc. who have not supported the break-up of Yugoslavia.

The supporters of the US/NATO bombings do not question at all the media
images of Serbs as mass rapists and ethnic cleansers, as those who
supported the Gulf War did not question the story of a Kuwaiti woman who
claimed to have witnessed Iraqui soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies from
hospital incubators. (The story was later revealed to be a fraud, and the
woman turned out to be the daughter of Kuwaiti's ambassador to the US. Too
late.)

The supporters of the US/NATO expansion into the Balkans conveniently
forget that it is the United States' encouragement and overt/covert
funding--see the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513--to
small, right-wing, nationalist parties that first helped to break up
Yugoslavia. A section of the same law cut off all aid, credit, and loan
from the US to Yugoslavia as well. Also, the law demanded separate
elections in each of the six republics and further stipulated that the
State Dept. approve of election procedures and results before aid would be
resumed. The above sanctions, of course, helped to create an economic
disaster, which could only further Croatian, Bosnian, Albanian separatist
groups that the US had already been building up.

In the subsequent civil war, atrocities were committed by all sides, but
the Western media insistently gave us a radically one-sided picture, the
picture meant to portray only Serbs as the aggressors who deserve to be
bombed by the US/NATO. The supporters of the KLA today continue to endorse
the agenda of the US/NATO by repeating the same propaganda. For the
critique of such media images, I refer you to, among others, _NATO in the
Balkans_, published by the International Action Center.

In an article included in _NATO in the Balkans_, Barry Lituchy writes:

***  Many of the stories on the Bosnian conflict that we read about and see
on TV are actually fed to the media by public relations firms. Jim Harff,
President of Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, the public relations firm
that handles the accounts of Bosnia, Croatia, and the Albanian opposition
in Kosovo, argues that modern wars cannot be fought and won today without
good public relations work. "In terms of persuading and convincing the UN
to take proper measures," says Harff, "it's even more important." According
to U.S. Justice Department records, Bosnia and Croatia pay Ruder Finn more
than $10,000 a month plus expenses "to present a positive image to members
of Congress, administration officials, and news media."
	The amount of covered "expenses" is many times greater than the
disclosed fee. Because of international economic sanctions imposed on the
Serbs by the UN--largely due to false stories in the media [e.g. using
photos of dead Serbs and labeling them "Muslim victims," as was the case
with the Jan. 4, 1993 issue of Newsweek and the story of a "concentration
camp" that was later debunked by Thomas Deichman to be utterly false]--the
Serbs, ironically, are barred from hiring a public relations firm.  ***

Here it is important the role that the public relations firm Hill and
Knowlton played in the Gulf War, feeding America and the world with the
aforementioned young woman falsely testifying before a congressional
committee about an 'atrocity' that never occurred--the story of the Iraqui
soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators.

We need to work on building our media literacy. The first principle is,
doubt everything that they tell you when they are trying to build support
for the US government's war efforts.

Yoshie