[PEN-L:4630] War & 'Public Relations,' or, 'Kuwaiti Babies Torn from Incubators'

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie wrote:
>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.)

Actually, the very shady outfit Human Rights Watch helped to spread this
story and is currently involved in turning out propaganda against Serbia.
The Lawyers Committe of this outfit receives sponsoring from garment
corporations and has helped to whitewash sweatshops in East Asia.

Here's Diana Livingstone's take on outfits like Human Rights Watch. Paul
Phillips posted the entire article in February and it is ESSENTIAL reading.
Check the archives or send me a note if you'd like me to email you the
whole thing.

===============

Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia is
the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18, 1997,
that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that the
Serbian elections to be held three days later "will be neither free nor
fair." This astonishing intervention was followed by a long list of
measures that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry- out or else", and that the
international community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia.
These demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory
standards of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not, obviously,
to everybody else, since they included new media laws drafted "in full
consultation with the independent media in Yugoslavia" as well as
permission meanwhile to all "unlicensed but currently operating radio and
television stations to broadcast without interference. Some 400 radio and
television stations have been operating in Yugoslavia with temporary
licenses or none at all. The vast majority are in Serbia, a country of less
than ten million inhabitants on a small territory of only 54.872 square miles.

Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to "deny Yugoslavia readmission
to the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in the country's human
rights record, including respect for freedom of the press, independence of
the judiciary, and minority rights, as well as cooperation with the
International Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia".

As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may wonder what
measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press freedom already
exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many other countries not
being served with such an ultimatum. There exist in Serbia quite a range of
media devoted to attacking the government, not only in Serbo-Croatian, but
also in Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2.319 print publications and
101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the number that
existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily newspapers. The
state-supported national dailies have a joint circulation of 180.000
compared to around 350.000 for seven leading opposition dailies".

Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than in
Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly much more so. As for "minority
rights," it would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where
they are better protected in both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia.
Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its citizens, and
not "of the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional provisions of Croatia and
Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian
Constitution guarantee extensive rights to national minorities, notably the
right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information
media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in
proceedings before a tribunal of other authority. These rights are not
merely formal, but are effectively respected as is shown by, for instance,
the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian minority and the large
number of newspapers published by national minorities in Albanian,
Hungarian and other languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all accounts better
treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the Balkans. Serbia has a large
Muslim population of varied nationalities, including refugees from Bosnia
and a native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern Kosovo,
known as Goranci, whose religious rights are fully respected, and who have
no desire to leave Serbia.

For those who remember history the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki ultimatum
instantly brings to mind the ultimatum issued by Vienna to Belgrade after
the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 as a pretext for the Austrian invasion
which touched off World War I. The Serbian government gave in to all but
one of the Habsburg demands, but was invaded anyway.

The hostility of this new Vienna power, the International Helsinki
Federation for Human Rights, toward Serbia, is evident in all its
statements, and in those of its executive director Aaron Rhodes. In a March
18, 1998, column for the International Herald Tribune, he wrote that
Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years under conditions similar to those
suffered by Jews in Nazi- controlled parts of Europe just before World War
II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free but politically
disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties".

The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the specific facts to
back it up are absent. They are necessarily absent, since the accusation is
totally false. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have never been "politically
disenfranchised", and even Western diplomats have at times urged them to
use their right to vote in order to deprive Milosevic of his electoral
majority. But nationalist leaders have called for a boycott of Serbian
elections since 1981 - well before Milosevic came on the scene -and ethnic
Albanians who dare take part in legal political life are subject to
intimidation and even murder by nationalist Albanian gunmen. The March 24,
1998 report of the International Crisis Group entitled "Kosovo Spring"
notes that: "In many spheres of life, including politics, education and
health-care, the boycott of Kosovars of the Yugoslav state is almost
total". In particular, "Kosovars refuse to participate in Serbian or
Yugoslav political life. The leading Yugoslav political parties all have
offices in Kosovo and claim some Kosovar members, but essentially they are
'Serb only' institutions. In 1997 several Kosovars accused of collaborating
with the enemy, /i.e., the Serbian State/ were attacked, including Chamijl
Gasi, head of the Socialist Party of Serbia in Glogovac, and a deputy in
the Yugoslav Assembly's House of Citizens, who was shot and wounded in
November. The lack of interest of Serb political parties in wooing Kosovars
is understandable. Kosovars have systematically boycotted the Yugoslav and
Serbian elections since 1981, considering them events in a foreign country.

The ICG, while scarcely pro-Serb, in its conclusions, nevertheless provides
information neglected by mainstream media. This is perhaps, because the ICG
addresses its findings to high-level decision-makers who need to be in
possession of a certain number of facts, rather than to the general public.

Gasi was not the only target of Albanian attacks on fellow Albanians in the
Glogovac municipal district, situated in the Drenica region which the
"Kosovo Liberation Army" tried to control in early 1998. Others included
forester Mujo Sejdi, 52, killed by machine-gun fire near his home on
January 12, 1998; postman Mustafa Kurtaj, 26, killed on his way to work by
a group firing automatic rifles; factory guard Rusdi Ladrovci, ambushed and
killed with automatic weapons apparently after refusing to turn over his
official arm to the KLA; among others. On April 10, 1998, men wearing
camouflage uniforms and insignia of the Army of Albania fired automatic
weapons at a passenger car carrying four ethnic Albanian officials of the
Socialist Party of Serbia including Gugna Adem, President of the Suva Reka
Municipal Board, who was gravely injured; and Ibro Vait, member of the
National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia and President of the SOS
district board in the city of Prizren. Numerous such attacks have been
reported by the Yugoslav agency Tanjug, but Western media have shown scant
interest in the fate of ethnic Albanians willing to live with Serbs in a
multi- ethnic Serbia.

In order to gain international support, inflammatory terms such as "ghetto"
and "apartheid" are used by the very Albanian nationalist leaders who have
created the separation between populations by leading their community to
boycott all institutions of the Serbian State in order to create a de facto
secession. Not only elections and schools, but even the public health
service has been boycotted, to the detriment of the health of Kosovo
Albanians, especially the children. In March 1990, during a regular
official vaccination program, rumours were spread that Serb health workers
had poisoned over 7,000 Albanian children by injecting them with nerve gas.
There was never any proof of this, as no child was ever shown to suffer
from anything more serious than mass hysteria. This was the signal for a
boycott of the Serbian public health system. Ethnic Albanian doctors and
other health workers left the official institutions to set up a parallel
system, so vastly inferior that preventable childhood diseases reached
epidemic proportions. In September 1996, WHO and UNICEF undertook to assist
the main Kosovar parallel health system, named "Mother Theresa" after the
world's most famous ethnic Albanian, a native of Macedonia, in vaccinating
300,000 children against polio. The worldwide publicity campaign around
this large-scale immunization program failed to point out that the same
service has long been available to those children from the official health
service of Serbia, systematically boycotted by Albanian parents. Currently,
the parallel Kosovar system employs 239 general practitioners and 140
specialists, compared to around 2,000 physicians employed by the Serbian
public health system there. Serbs point out that many ethnic Albanians are
sensible enough to turn to the government health system when they are
seriously ill. According to official figures, 64% of the official Serb
system health workers and 80% of the patients in Kosovo are ethnic Albanians.

It is characteristic of the current age of privatization that the
"international community" is ready to ignore a functional government
service and even contribute to a politically inspired effort to bypass and
ultimately destroy it. But then, Kosovo Albanian separatists aware of the
taste of the times, like to speak of Kosovo itself as a "non-governmental
organization".

These facts are contained in the "Kosovo Spring" report of the
International Crisis Group.

Human Rights Watch blanket condemnation of a government which like it or
not was elected, in a country whose existence is threatened by
foreign-backed secessionist movements, contrasts sharply with the
traditional approach of the senior international human rights organization,
Amnesty International.

What can be considered the traditional Amnesty International approach
consists broadly in trying to encourage governments to enact and abide by
humanitarian legal standards. It does this by calling attention to
particular cases of injustice. It asks precise questions that can be
answered precisely. It tries to be fair. It is no doubt significant that
Amnesty International is a grassroots organization, which operates under
the mandate of its contributing members, and whose rules preclude
domination by any large donor.

In the case of Yugoslavia, the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki approach differs
fundamentally from that of Amnesty International in that it clearly aims
not at calling attention to specific abuses that might be corrected, but at
totally condemning the targeted State. By the excessive nature of its
accusations, it does not ally with reformist forces in the targeted country
so much as it undermines them. Its lack of balance, its rejection of any
effort at remaining neutral between conflicting parties, encourages
disintegrative polarization rather than reconciliation and mutual
understanding. For example, in its reports on Kosovo, Amnesty International
considers reports of abuses from all sides and tries to weigh their
credibility, which is difficult but necessary, since the exaggeration of
human rights abuses against themselves is regularly employed by Albanian
nationalists in Kosovo as a means to win international support for their
secessionist cause. Human Rights Watch, in contrast, by uncritically
endorsing the most extreme anti-Serb reports and ignoring Serbian sources,
helps confirm ethnic Albanians in their worst fantasies, while encouraging
them to demand international intervention on their behalf rather than seek
compromise and reconciliation with their Serbian neighbours. HRW therefore
contributes, deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening cycle of
violence that eventually may justify, or require, outside intervention.

This is an approach which like its partner, economic globalization, breaks
down the defenses and authority of weaker States. It does not help to
enforce democratic institutions at the national level. The only democracy
it reorganizes is that of the "international community", which is summoned
to act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This
"international community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its
decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a
"community"; the initials could more accurately stand for "imperialist
condominium", a joint exercise of domination by the former imperialist
powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together
under U.S. domination with NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are
frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as their
rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be paid by
smaller and weaker countries.

Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great
Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of
"non-governmental organizations" - often linked to powerful governments -
whose competition with each other for financial support provides motivation
for exaggerating the abuses they specialize in denouncing.

Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism
and international relations, economically and politically by far the most
liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already been torn apart by
Western support to secessionist movements: What is left is being further
reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process. The
emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic
democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC
enforced by NATO.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)