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BACK TO : The Kosovo conflict 1999
Reporting Humanitarian Warfare by P Hammond 
Reporting 'Humanitarian' Warfare: Propaganda, Moralism and Nato's Kosovo War Philip Hammond Introduction: Propaganda Old and New When the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation launched a bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on the evening of 24 March 1999, news audiences could be forgiven for thinking they had seen it all before: in the 1982 Falklands conflict, for example, and in the Persian Gulf war of 1990 - 91. 'Clobba Slobba' exclaimed the front page of Britain's biggest-selling tabloid, the Sun, the morning after the bombing began, recalling its notorious 'Gotcha!' headline when British forces sank the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano on 2 May 1982. Royal Air Force crews were reportedly 'elated and awe-inspired', claiming it was an operation which, like the Gulf war 'turkey-shoot', 'ran on rails' (Daily Mail, 25 March).[1] As in previous wars, tabloids carried pages of personal messages to 'our boys'; headline-writers fired off gung-ho volleys, such as the Daily Mirror's 11 June 'In We Go' front page;[2] and reporters close to the action had a great adventure. In the Sunday Times, Mark Franchetti described entering Kosovo alongside Nato troops as 'a unique and thrilling experience', while the Independent on Sunday's James Dalrymple found 'it was a moment of exhilaration' (13 June). For television journalists on board Nato aircraft, the military hardware inspired poetic descriptions. Brian Hanrahan spoke of Cruise missiles which 'sail on through darkened skies' (BBC 9pm, 29 March), while in Kate Adie's homelier metaphor the AWACS surveillance plane became 'the queen bee at the heart of the hive of activity above Kosovo and Serbia' (9pm, 30 March). TV audiences saw more of the bomb's-eye-view video footage made famous in the Gulf, and heard the same euphemistic language of smart weaponry, precision bombing and collateral damage. At least some of the time, politicians too seemed to follow the usual script. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, posed in the cockpit of a Harrier, as did his Defence Secretary, George Robertson, who also bestrode a tank in order to have his picture taken. Both were evocative of Margaret Thatcher's famous photo-session atop a tank, which has since come to symbolise her 'Falklands factor'. We also heard the Churchillian refusal to 'appease dictators', which seems obligatory for any British politician going to war.[3] However, at the same time there was an effort to strike a different tone. When the bombing ended, Blair said he felt 'no sense of rejoicing' at Nato's victory. The phrase was calculated to sound a different, more humane note, through deliberate contrast with Thatcher's exhortation to 'rejoice' over the recapture of South Georgia during the Falklands war. Of course, there was no victory parade, as there was after the Falklands and Gulf conflicts.[4] Blair maintained throughout that he was 'reluctant' to go to war, and took 'no joy' in it. This was a more generalised phenomenon, since many of those who launched Cruise missiles against Yugoslavia were former peaceniks. The US Commander-in-Chief had protested against the Vietnam war; the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were former members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; their German counterparts had been in the peace movement; and the Nato Secretary General had once campaigned against Nato bases in Spain. It is difficult to say with certainty what the aims of the bombing were, since its stated purpose changed many times. According to British and US spokesmen, bombing was designed to force Yugoslavia 'back to the negotiating table', but this was later categorically denied. It was to get Yugoslavia to 'reduce' the number of troops in the province, then to 'degrade' the country's military capability, then to ensure a 'complete withdrawal' of Serb forces. It was to 'prevent', then to 'halt', then to 'reverse' a humanitarian catastrophe. However, one consistent thread which ran through these slippery official justifications was that bombing had been undertaken in the name of morality and humanitarianism.[5] In view of past experience, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the Nato attack on Yugoslavia represented any genuine departure in terms of what Foreign Secretary Robin Cook called an 'ethical foreign policy'. In the 1992 - 93 United Nations 'humanitarian mission' to Somalia, for example, up to 10,000 are estimated to have been killed by Western 'peacekeepers' who stand accused of looting and stealing from refugees, the beating, torture and indiscriminate killing of civilians (including children), sexual assaults and rape.[6] This intervention was also hailed, at the time, as evidence that a new set of 'ethical' concerns had come to rule Western foreign policy. Yet talk of a 'just war', fought for moral principles, may seem more plausible coming from Blair rather than Thatcher, Bill Clinton rather than George Bush. Given their political background, it should not be surprising if these leaders and their officials attempted a different tone. The Nato spokesman, Jamie Shea, later said he regretted using the term 'collateral damage' - a 'mean and awful phrase' (Sunday Times, 13 June). Robin Banerji, senior information officer at the Ministry of Defence, complained: People see all these shots of bombs dropping in the sanitised environment of the press conference, but there are people in Macedonia who have been kicked out of their homes. We need to draw a line to stop the reality of war becoming a video game. (PR Week, 30 April) Such protestations must be regarded with suspicion: after all, Shea did repeatedly use the term 'collateral damage', and the MoD was a main purveyor of 'video game' footage. But it is nevertheless disarming to find the MoD themselves bemoaning the presentation of the conflict as a sanitised 'video game' - the sort of criticism raised by opponents of the Gulf war. It is pertinent to ask now whether there really was anything new and distinctive about politicians' public presentation of the war, and the media's coverage of it. Some commentators remarked on the slickness of the PR operation, contrasting Shea's fluent cockney charm with the haltingly formal style of the MoD's Falklands spokesman, Ian McDonald. Others emphasised the scale of the propaganda offensive compared with past operations: John Pilger wrote that in over 30 years' experience he had 'known nothing to compare with the sheer intensity of this propaganda dressed as journalism' (New Statesman, 12 July). Alastair Campbell, the British Prime Minister's Press Secretary, argued in a 9 July speech that the media had been central to the war effort - holding the Nato alliance together, carrying public support, and even convincing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate.[7] Campbell's remarks pointed up how image and presentation seemed to be prime considerations in the planning and execution of the air campaign. Yet apart from differences of scale or intensity, or relatively superficial stylistic and technical changes, there has been little comment on what was distinctive about the Kosovo media war. It is not that everything has changed, and it is worth examining the continuities. However, it is also important to grasp how Kosovo represented the culmination of a number of recent trends in conflict reporting. Below I look firstly at the more 'traditional' problems of propaganda and news management which were evident in Kosovo. I then go on to examine some themes which have been identified as specific to post-Cold War conflicts, and finally assess the significance of 'humanitarian' justifications for war. My argument about the coverage is that it combined the all too familiar problems of war reporting with some newer features for which there is a precedent in the reporting of other post-Cold War conflicts and interventions, most significantly Bosnia. It is these newer elements which are most important in selling the idea of 'humanitarian' (military) intervention to the public. 1. News Management It would have been remarkable if Western news coverage of Kosovo had not been characterised by propaganda. Yet Nato frequently contrasted Yugoslavia's state controlled media with the freedoms enjoyed in the West. As Blair put it in a 10 May speech: 'We take freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for granted&.The Serb media is state-controlled. It is part and parcel of Milosevic's military machine'. Such claims were themselves part of the Western propaganda effort, and in view of Nato news management, entirely hypocritical. 1.1 Targeting the Enemy Nato attacks were not merely rhetorical: they also bombed Yugoslav television, hitting 17 (of 19) transmitters, the Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS) television building in Belgrade on 23 April, and another TV building in Novi Sad on 3 May. The Belgrade attack, described by Blair as 'entirely justified', killed an estimated 12 civilians and injured dozens more. Nato announced on 8 April that Serbian state television would be bombed unless it carried six hours a day of Western news, but retracted the threat the next day, and explicitly assured the International Federation of Journalists that media workers would not be targeted. More than two months after the end of the war, recounting 'the untold story' of Kosovo, the BBC 'revealed' that the attack on the RTS building was part of an intensification of Nato bombing, whereby the target list was widened to include non-military objectives (Newsnight, 20 August). In fact this escalation had been widely reported at the time, but packaged in such a way as to obscure its significance. For example, on 3 April, when the strategy had already been implemented with the bombing of the Serbian and Yugoslav Interior Ministry buildings in central Belgrade, the Times reported the new 'no holds barred' approach, and the Sun detailed how General Wesley Clark had been told to 'take off the gloves'. The buildings were empty, but stood next to Belgrade's maternity hospital. Evidently the intended effect was psychological rather than military, yet the attack was presented as hitting 'Serb military strongholds' (Sun), and the 'Milosevic power base' (Times). It was as part of this new targeting regime that Nato later destroyed the RTS building, knowing civilians would die. The only reason the BBC could present old news as an 'untold story' was that at the time journalists obediently stuck to Nato's line that they only hit 'legitimate military targets' and were careful to 'avoid collateral damage'. Nato also lied to the Western public about the nature of the Yugoslav media, conjuring up images of a totalitarian state concealing truths revealed by Western sources. Yet as Diana Johnstone (1999a) commented: I cannot think of a Western city where scathing criticism of the government is available in print day after day at newsstands all over town the way it is - or has been until Nato began to bomb - in Belgrade. Even during the bombing privately-owned media companies continued to operate, such as Studio B television (featuring clips from Nato briefings), or the Beta press agency (carrying material from Western news agencies); and newspapers critical of the government, such as Blic, continued to publish. People in Yugoslavia also had access to Western news via satellite and the Internet, and it might be noted that many thousands outside the country organised protests against the bombing, despite having been enlightened by the BBC and CNN. While claiming propaganda was confined to the enemy side, Nato engaged in its own furious propaganda effort aimed at Yugoslavia. In the Falklands war the MoD commandeered a BBC transmitter on Ascension Island to broadcast to Argentine troops (Harris, 1983:119). In Kosovo, they spent 'a small fortune&on leaflet drops and powerful new transmitters to get radio messages through' (Campbell, 1999). A US Hercules plane was also used to beam 'The Voice of Nato' to Yugoslav television viewers, carrying news reports, speeches by Nato leaders and pop music (New York Times, 26 May). The precedent set by Bosnia bodes ill for the future of Kosovo in many respects (Chandler, 1999b), including media freedom: during the bombing, broadcasts by Bosnian Serb TV were suspended on the orders of the Western governor of the protectorate (Chomsky, 1999:130).[8] The European satellite broadcasting body Eutelsat, acting in concert with Nato's policy, stopped RTS broadcasting by satellite from 27 May. After the bombing ended, Nato continued to use radio towers near the Yugoslav border to transmit programmes from the BBC, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, despite protests from Belgrade that these were interfering with their own broadcasting, and within Kosovo the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe established a new TV and radio broadcaster, appointing a Westerner as its director. Nato's attempt to control information meant trying to prevent news coming out of Yugoslavia, whilst pumping as much Western media into the country as possible. 1.2 Flak If the point of bombing RTS was to bring the war home to Serbia's civilian population, the purpose of Nato's wider attack on Yugoslav propaganda was to discourage Western journalists from giving credence to enemy claims. It was undoubtedly difficult to impose a news blackout on the Kosovo war (as in Panama), or to control completely the flow of information (as in the Falklands). Correspondents in Belgrade had access to the Yugoslav version of events, and the Internet made alternative sources of news and commentary available. Consequently, criticising journalists - what Herman and Chomsky (1988:26 - 28) call 'flak' - was a key method of news management. The contrast drawn between Western media freedom and Yugoslav propaganda was not flattery but a stick to beat British reporters, said to be too credulous of Yugoslav claims because of what Campbell later called an 'unhealthy relationship between some Western journalists and Serb spokesmen'. This is standard practice for British governments at war, and repeats the pattern of Conservative attacks on the BBC for treating Argentine and British claims too even-handedly in the Falklands (Harris, 1983:75), and for becoming the 'Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation' in the Gulf (Keeble, 1997:168). The chief complaint voiced by Campbell and Blair was that today's news is too picture-driven, and since Western reporters had been expelled from Kosovo by the Yugoslav authorities, editors seized on any footage supplied by Belgrade. This was a thoroughly disingenuous argument. Again, similar criticisms were made during the Falklands war, when 'technical' delays in getting pictures back from the south Atlantic were said to have made the British media too reliant on Argentine TV pictures. In fact the British authorities deliberately delayed the transmission of pictures in 1982, and censored them once they arrived (Harris, 1983:59). In Kosovo, politicians disliked 'photo-opportunities' arranged by the Serbs simply because they showed the devastating effects of Nato bombing. Neither was it true that all Western journalists were expelled from Kosovo, or that no pictures were available other than those provided by the Serbs. At least some of those journalists who left Kosovo did so voluntarily, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times remained in Kosovo throughout the war, and Greek TV journalists reported regularly from Pristina. British editors simply ignored such sources. The government also made a series of attacks on individual journalists: John Pilger, John Simpson, Robert Fisk and John Humphrys were all forced to react to on- and off-record censure by politicians and their spokesmen. The often personalised criticism had three wider motives. First, politicians were worried by suggestions that the Serbian people were united against Nato. Robertson suggested implausibly on 28 March that if an opinion poll were conducted in Serbia it would not show the unanimous opposition Simpson had reported. Second, they disliked interviewers questioning the success of Nato strategy. Development Secretary Clare Short appeared on GMTV (25 April) sarcastically imitating the 'clever dick' questions asked by BBC radio's Humphrys. Third, they were rattled by reports of civilian damage and death caused by Nato, which started coming in as soon as the bombing began. 'We don't trust any of these pictures of casualties', said Campbell (Express, 26 March). Some journalists were angered by government criticism, but news organisations reacted with intense servility, sometimes even refusing to believe their own correspondents on the spot if they contradicted Nato's version of events. In the Gulf, when the Western allies bombed a civilian shelter, incinerating those inside, the BBC refused to believe its own correspondent at the scene and stuck obstinately to the official line that the bombsite had been a military installation (9pm, 13 February 1991). Similarly, when Simpson reported from the site of a downed US Stealth F117 in Serbia, its debris riddled with bullet holes, his colleagues in the studio could only insist that Nato had not yet confirmed the plane had been shot down (BBC Breakfast, 28 March). One could be forgiven for asking why the BBC bothers having foreign correspondents, if all that matters is official press statements. 1.3 Nato's Stenographers Most Nato claims were met with extreme credulity, though many soon turned out to be false. When Channel Four's Alex Thompson introduced some Nato cockpit video footage by remarking pointedly that it was 'impossible to verify independently' (26 March), his self-consciously even-handed use of this phrase was striking precisely because it was a departure from the norm. Routinely, it was the Yugoslavs who merely 'claimed' things which were 'unverified', while Nato 'confirmed' information. Nato announced on 29 March that according to 'reliable sources' the Kosovo Albanian leader Fehmi Agani had been 'executed' by the Serbs. The story was carried widely, but by 1 April Nato were obliged to admit he was alive. It transpired that the 'reliable source' had been the London Kosovo Information Centre, run by ethnic Albanian exiles.[9] On 1 April, the Independent carried an obituary for ethnic Albanian journalist Baton Haxhiu, said to have been executed by the Serbs, though on the same day the Guardian reported that US sources had admitted he was actually alive. Nato also said another Kosovo Albanian leader, Venton Surroi, had been murdered, but had to concede he was alive after a senior British official met him in June (Boston Globe, 17 June). We were told the unofficial 'president' of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, was dead, missing or under house arrest, before he turned up on Yugoslav TV, and Watson revealed that the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Adem Demaci, also widely presumed to be dead, was 'alive and well' in Pristina, where he 'walks the streets each day' (Los Angeles Times, 26 May). These inconsistencies led Reporters Sans Frontiers to say Nato's 'officialisation of the rumour about the killing of Albanian intellectuals' had 'severely damaged the organisation's credibility'. Such contradictions did not appear to worry British newspapers, however, which ran whole articles based on Nato press releases, often complete with pictures supplied by the MoD. For instance, Robertson announced at his 28 March briefing: 'the notorious paramilitary leader known as Arkan has been operating with the Siberian [sic] forces in the region of Pristina. We have a photograph of Arkan on the screen now and it will be in your press pack.' Sure enough, the following day stories about Arkan appeared in the Express, Star, Mirror, Times, Independent and Telegraph.[10] Robertson insisted: 'We know he is there, that is information which is solid'. Unfortunately for the credibility of the story, however, Arkan appeared on BBC TV next day, being interviewed by Simpson in Belgrade. In the following day's briefing, Cook outlined an unlikely scenario: Arkan had been 'concerned' by Roberson's claim, and had therefore dashed to Belgrade to discredit the MoD. A week later, the Independent on Sunday (4 April) reported: Officials now admit that this was a carefully constructed story which was designed to push the message forward for the British public on a day when there had been little live action because [of] the weather. Despite his TV appearances, reports about Arkan continued to feature prominently in news coverage, along with another ready-made story which Cook handed out at the 29 March briefing, where he showed slides of six Yugoslav leaders and hinted they were 'liable to face indictment before the International War Crimes Tribunal'. Again eager to 'push the message', the Times, Mail and Telegraph all wrote articles based on the briefing, as did the Independent, Guardian, Star and Mirror, who illustrated it with the pictures furnished by Cook. Before even an indictment had been made, each photo in the Mirror's 'Wanted for genocide' double-page spread was captioned: 'Guilty' (30 March). Campbell admitted 'winning the media battle required&[that] the military action had to be seen to be effective', but maintained: '&the idea that we exaggerated military effectiveness for propaganda purposes is one that I dispute'. Of course, they did exaggerate - the only question is: by how much? In September, Nato admitted to hitting 93 tanks, not 110 as stated at the time; 153 armoured personnel carriers, not 250; and 389 artillery and mortar pieces, not 450. The reliability of even these figures seems doubtful. In just the first stage of Serb withdrawal, observers logged 250 tanks leaving Kosovo, of the 300 estimated to have been deployed there, and journalists found little wreckage on the ground. Nato countered this by claiming that, despite aerial surveillance and round-the-clock bombing, the Serbs had been bringing in reinforcements - according to Nato figures, at least 40 tanks - and had removed almost all evidence of bomb damage. The Yugoslav authorities said only 13 tanks were lost, including many destroyed by the KLA, and the Telegraph (25 July) reported an internal RAF inquiry which put the number of tanks hit by Nato nearer to seven. On 12 June Nato were forced to admit 11 Yugoslav MiG-21 fighters had left Pristina unscathed despite weeks of bombing, and Fisk reported on 21 June that 'several' MiG-29s had also been concealed from attack, although according to Nato calculations they destroyed all but two of the aircraft. Nato's campaign was one of civilian terror, not military precision. 1.4 Handling Bad News The image Nato wished to present was of a successful military campaign - 'the most accurate bombing campaign in history', in General Clark's words - which involved a few unfortunate accidents. When civilian casualties were reported, Nato therefore struck a pose of righteous indignation. As Campbell put it: 'the Western media got itself into a mindset that the only show in town was "Nato blunders"'. According to the Swedish Transnational Foundation (Oberg, 1999), Nato destroyed 300 factories and refineries, 190 educational establishments, 20 hospitals, 30 clinics, 60 bridges, and five airports, killing at least 2,000 civilians and wounding at least 6,000. They also hit numerous domestic heating plants and power stations. It strains credibility to suggest all these were either 'accidents' or 'legitimate military targets'. Certainly the killing of civilians in the RTS bombing was deliberate, and it seems likely other strikes involved intended, rather than 'collateral' civilian deaths too. For example, when Nato bombed a bus on 1 May, killing 47 people, the aircraft returned for a second strike, hitting an ambulance and injuring medical staff at the scene. Nato spin-doctors handled the string of disastrous 'accidents' according to a quickly-established protocol. First, Nato would deny responsibility and blame the Serbs, as they did over bomb damage to civilian areas of Pristina (8 April), the bombing of a refugee convoy near Djakovica which killed around 70 people (14 April), and the bombing of refugees at the village of Korisa, killing at least 87 and injuring around 100 more (13 May). At Djakovica, for example, Nato's line was that although one tractor may have been bombed, the Serbs were responsible for other deaths, and that RTS television pictures from the scene did not show the large crater damage one would expect from a Nato missile. This was the story dutifully repeated by the BBC (6pm, 16 April). ITN, however, whose reporter had visited the site with other Western journalists, reported a large bomb crater, marks from aerial cannon-fire, and shrapnel fragments with US markings (6.30pm, 16 April).[11] Unable to substantiate its claims, Nato would then present contradictory information and promise to 'investigate', in the hope the story would go away. As a Nato general later explained: We had a fairly effective tactic for dealing with errors&.Most frequently we knew the precise causes and consequences of such actions. But in order to calm the public we would say that we were conducting an inquiry, that there were many hypotheses. We would only reveal the truth a fortnight later, once it no longer interested anyone. Public opinion needs to be worked on, too. (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 July) Although Nato would belatedly admit some limited culpability in order to foster an image of honesty, spokesmen continued to hint that the enemy was at least partly to blame. At Korisa there was no military target according to Western reporters at the scene, yet the Pentagon's Ken Bacon suggested the refugees had been used as 'human shields', in order to embarrass Nato. Campbell later said there was some 'confusion' over what he called the 'convoy incident', but argued: 'By the time of the Chinese Embassy bombing, we'd all learned our lesson. Co-ordination was improved. We demanded the facts from the military, got them and stuck to them'. The bad publicity attracted by the Djakovica bombing led to Campbell being immediately drafted in to reorganise Nato's media operation. However, the result was not a new respect for 'the facts', but heightened spin and further confusion. Nato statements about the 7 May Embassy bombing were contradictory in the extreme. Nato claimed it had been targeting a different building close by, but the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade is set well apart from other buildings, in a residential area, on a large lawn. Nato also claimed it had struck the correct co-ordinates but used outdated maps, though this had earlier been emphatically denied. In any case, this explanation was also utterly implausible, since no other building had previously occupied the site. The aim appears to have been to manufacture some 'fog of war' to conceal the fact that the Embassy bombing was deliberate.[12] Considered within the framework of 'news management' - the manipulation and control of the media by those in authority - it seems reasonable to conclude that the main differences from past experience were ones of scale or intensity, though such things are difficult to measure. Another significant feature was that self-consciousness about media presentation affected how the war was fought, as Campbell suggested - though this meant avoiding Nato losses rather than civilian casualties. As in previous wars, the media proved largely uncritical in following the official line. 2. Reporting post-Cold War Conflicts In attempting to understand the more distinctive aspects of the reporting of Kosovo, it is useful to examine some key trends which have been identified as particular to post-Cold War conflicts and their media treatment: a new relationship between the media and the military; the 'journalism of attachment'; the 'manufacture' of warfare through the demonisation of enemies; and the mystification of 'ethnic' conflict. These trends came together in Kosovo, but important precedents were set earlier, particularly in coverage of the Bosnian war. Many journalists would acknowledge the problems of news management discussed above as typical of war reporting: after the Falklands and the Gulf reporters publicly regretted being manipulated. Yet in Bosnia, where for the most part Western censorship and restrictions did not apply, the received wisdom is that journalists acquitted themselves well. The issues raised below suggest this conventional view needs to be reassessed. Analysis of earlier coverage of Yugoslavia is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is possible to see how several problems with the Kosovo coverage can be traced back to Bosnia. 2.1 The Media and the Military The regulations issued to correspondents with the Falklands Task Force in 1982 summed up the relationship between the media and the military as one of irreconcilable antagonism: 'The essence of successful warfare is secrecy. The essence of successful journalism is publicity' (Harris, 1983:16). However, Stephen Badsey, a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, argues this 'cliché' is now 'manifestly untrue'. Instead, he suggests, in 'many modern forms of military operations&the objectives of the media and the military frequently run in parallel, and may often converge' (1994:21). The perception, from Badsey's military perspective, of a more cooperative relationship, is apparently shared by some journalists. Gowing (1994:15) describes how in Bosnia Western reporters 'willingly submitted to a UN pool system', in contrast to the 'principled complaints by journalists of pool arrangements and news management during the Gulf war'. There were also pool arrangements in Kosovo. The Independent (18 May) noted how, for US reporters in Albania, 'the press pool has become a channel by which American military press officers are able to influence what is written and even by whom'. Similar restrictions on British journalists as they entered Kosovo alongside British paratroopers on 12 June resulted in near-identical stories appearing in the following day's Sunday editions. Yet this time the Independent, in common with other UK news organisations, apparently saw no problem with the pool system. Even its existence barely merited a mention: it was only referred to by one TV news bulletin (Channel Four, 11 June), in contrast to the way every dispatch from correspondents in Belgrade carried the warning that it had been 'monitored by the Serb authorities'. The press did not mention the restrictions reporters were under at all. Instead, re-written versions of the same article were presented as the unique eye-witness testimony of individual journalists (Hammond, 1999). Neither were there many 'principled complaints' about Nato news management more generally. Observing their obsequious behaviour at Nato press conferences, Fisk contemptuously dismissed his fellow reporters as 'sheep' (Independent, 7 July). Gowing suggests the reason for the change of attitude between the Gulf war and Bosnia was the physical danger reporters faced in the latter conflict. No doubt journalists rationalised their behaviour in terms of the security provided by UN troops, but what is really at stake is a broader shift in the perception of the Western military. The most incisive comment in this respect was made by the historian of war reporting, Phillip Knightley, who wrote: It is interesting to note the complete reversal of the relationship between the media and the military since Vietnam. In Vietnam the media were reluctant to believe anything the military told them. In Kosovo the media tend to believe everything the military tells them because the military has stolen the moral high ground by claiming it is anti-war. (Independent on Sunday, 27 June) The change is easily overstated: as the comments of Badsey and Gowing indicate, there was already a more trusting attitude toward the military before Kosovo. Furthermore, as Woodger (1996:19 - 20) points out, in Vietnam the minority of journalists who refused to toe the line generally did so because they were against how the war was being conducted, rather than because they opposed it in principle, and many who did not believe official information repeated it anyway. Yet notwithstanding these qualifications, Knightley's remarks do capture something significant about the media-military relationship in Kosovo. What has changed in the post-Cold War era is not so much that reporters are credulous of the military, though this was certainly the case in Kosovo. Nor was it particularly surprising to find journalists brimming with admiration for Nato, although it was noticeable that, as discussed below, this often went beyond the familiar patriotic pride in 'our boys', encompassing a broader veneration of the West. However, the key point Knightley makes is that the military now seem to occupy the moral high ground. What is striking about coverage of more recent conflicts is that, for much of the time, the military are portrayed in a non-military fashion. Western soldiers are now popularly perceived as peacekeepers, humanitarians, aid workers and child-minders, rather than as a tough fighting force. The Sun's front-page photo on 7 April, for example, was of a British soldier bottle-feeding an orphaned baby in one of the refugee camps, captioned: 'I'll be your mum'. On television, Nato's role was frequently illustrated with pictures of soldiers playing with refugee children. After the war, a story about the discovery of a burial site at the town of Kacanik was accompanied - in the Sun, Independent, Telegraph, Mail, Mirror and Times (15 June) - with a picture of a young female soldier sorrowfully contemplating the graves. The portrayal of Nato as a collection of pretty girls, 'new men' and outreach childcare workers epitomised the moral superiority of the West. 2.2 The Journalism of Attachment To make sense of this perception of the Western military as a humanitarian organisation, it is necessary to place the media-military relationship in a broader political context. Again it is Bosnia which provides the key reference-point: it was his experience there which led former BBC correspondent Martin Bell to coin the phrase 'journalism of attachment' to describe a new style of reporting which would be openly partisan and engaged. In place of 'the dispassionate practices of the past', Bell (1998:16) advocates journalism which 'cares as well as knows' and does not 'stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor.' This is strikingly similar to Blair's explanation of Nato bombing as 'a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship' (Sunday Telegraph, 4 April). It certainly seemed that in Kosovo many journalists bought into the simplistic 'Good versus Evil' morality with which politicians framed the conflict. It should be emphasised that this style of journalism is not confined to comment pieces, but affects news reporting. Some reports, for example, were carefully designed to minimise any blame attached to Nato, such as the Guardian's version of a 30 May Reuters report about Nato's attack on the town of Varvarin, in which a crowded bridge was destroyed, killing at least nine civilians and injuring 17 others. The Reuters headline was 'Nato Bombing Wreaks Carnage on Serbian Town Bridge', but by the time it appeared in the next day's Guardian the article was titled: 'Planes buzzed overhead - and then death came'. The shift from active to passive construction deliberately obscured the connection between innocuously 'buzzing' planes and an abstract 'death' which simply arrived out of the blue. The Guardian also appended to the report an outlandish claim that Serbs were being forced to stand on bridges as human shields. Fisk reported the triumphant response of one CNN reporter to the bombing of Varvarin: '"That'll teach them not to stand on bridges," he roared' (Independent, 7 July). When it came time for the on-air reaction, CNN said there had been civilian casualties 'according to the Serb authorities', despite the fact that, as Fisk noted, 'CNN's own crew had been there and filmed the decapitated corpse of the local priest'. No-one forced the Guardian or CNN to report like this. It was not simply the result of manipulation or an uncritical attitude to Nato spin. Journalists actively took Nato's part. After an article by Fisk contradicted the claim that the Serbs had bombed Pristina themselves, for example, one British television correspondent stood up at the briefing in Brussels and urged his fellow reporters not to ask any awkward questions.[13] Echoing the rhetoric of Blair and Bell, the BBC's George Alagiah lamented the 'impartiality' of Nato troops in post-war Kosovo, asking: 'where is the middle ground between good and bad, right and wrong?' (9pm, 16 June). Of course, one should not be surprised that most mainstream journalists would take this view. The key feature of the journalism of attachment, however, is that many of its keenest advocates are the minority of critical, left-of-centre journalists from whom more might be expected. The Guardian's Maggie O'Kane, for example, has made a documentary denouncing the propaganda which accompanied the Gulf war. Yet she resented official criticism of media coverage of Kosovo because she felt politicians and reporters were on the same crusade: 'Campbell should acknowledge that it was the press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave his boss the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against Milosevic' (Glass, 1999). Fisk suggested CNN was complicit in the bombing of RTS, moving its staff from the building but inviting the Serbian information minister to go there for a live interview at the time when the missiles struck. The story is emblematic of media which act as an arm of Western power. Yet those journalists who, in line with Bell's perspective, urged tougher intervention in Bosnia, saw themselves as critics, not lackeys, of Western governments. The 'journalism of attachment' is part of a wider intellectual and political shift, whereby foreign military intervention has come to be seen as a liberal, even left-wing policy. Once again, Bosnia was central to this change. Martin Shaw, for example, writing in the New Statesman (15 January 1993), argued 'the new politics of peace' meant pressuring Western governments for 'a consistent agenda of economic, political and, alas, military intervention'. Across the Atlantic, Michael Walzer (1995:40) also found the question of Western intervention 'hard' but concluded: 'Old and well-earned suspicions of American power must give way now to a wary recognition of its necessity'. In parentheses, Walzer added: 'A friend comments: you would stress the wariness more if there were a Republican president. Probably so'. Now there is neither a Republican in the White House nor a Conservative in Downing Street, politicians have adopted precisely this tone of reluctant, ethical interventionism, and it is left-of-centre media commentators who are the most ferocious advocates of war. Media critics have tended to see the journalism of attachment in Bosnia as positive. Eldridge et al. (1997:118 - 120), after heavily criticising the 'promotion of the just-war concept' in the Gulf, have nothing but praise for those who ditched the traditional journalistic commitment to objectivity in Bosnia, and sought through their reporting to influence 'international policy and action'. Jean Seaton (1999:62) suggests that if only the politicians of what she calls 'the policing world' would be 'clearer about the politics and the goals of intervention', then 'the media will support them'. Since most politicians (of all parties) and journalists (of every news organisation) share a perception of who constitutes the 'policing world', it is not surprising that such support was indeed forthcoming in Kosovo. Yet there is no reason to welcome this. It meant, for example, that key events in the build-up to war were deliberately misrepresented by the media. One critical incident was the alleged massacre of over 40 ethnic Albanian civilians at the village of Racak on 15 January, which prompted Nato leaders to issue an ultimatum to Yugoslavia: either sign a Western-brokered 'peace deal' with the KLA, or face bombing. However, a French TV crew were filming in Racak on 15 January. Their footage, reported by both Le Figaro and Le Monde, contradicted the official line, indicating the casualties had resulted from a battle between Yugoslav forces and the KLA (Johnstone, 1999b). Yet even months after the end of the war the British media continued simply to repeat that there was a massacre of civilians at Racak. Similarly, the subsequent 'negotiations' at Rambouillet were presented as genuine attempts at mediation which broke down because of Serb intransigence. On 1 April Nato Secretary General Javier Solana described the Rambouillet Accord as a 'balanced and fair peace agreement', arguing its rejection by Milosevic had left 'no other option but to start military operations'. Yet at Rambouillet Cook openly invited the ethnic Albanian delegation to sign so airstrikes could be carried out; while the Yugoslav side were handed a 56-page addition to the draft 'Accord' only hours before the deadline expired, and asked to accept unrestricted access by Nato troops to the whole of Yugoslavia. A US State Department official admitted: 'We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get.' These words were taken down by US reporters, but not published (Ackerman, 1999). In Britain, the deliberately provocative character of the Rambouillet terms was acknowledged by the BBC only when it no longer mattered, on 20 August. At Racak and Rambouillet, the Serbs were deliberately set up, with the connivance of journalists. The style of reporting which developed in Bosnia meant many were predisposed to accept the simplistic moral framework offered by politicians in Kosovo, even when this meant ignoring the facts, and were positively eager to prosecute the war. The moral authority claimed by today's liberal politicians and journalists is hollow indeed. 2.3 The 'Manufacture' of Warfare If the West and its military apparatus is a force for Good in the world, the enemy must be Evil. Of course, demonising wartime enemies is nothing new, but Richard Keeble argues it has become central to the very rationale of contemporary conflicts, rather than simply a by-product of propaganda. He suggests contemporary 'wars' are not really wars in the traditional sense, pitting the overwhelming firepower of the West against 'puny' countries which pose no real threat and whose strength is 'grossly exaggerated' (Keeble, 1999:17). Rather than involving the mass-participation of people in Western societies, today's 'wars' are primarily media spectacles, fought to 'bring some sense of unity to deeply fractured societies', and to assert the global power of the US and its allies (1997:11). For Keeble the main precedent for Kosovo was the Gulf, and perhaps for this reason he tends to view the demonisation process as necessarily focussed on an individual (1997:64 - 5). Certainly, Milosevic was treated in a similar fashion to the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Within 24 hours of the start of bombing, the Yugoslav President had been described by the UK press as a 'Warlord', a 'Serb butcher', the 'Butcher of Belgrade', the 'Butcher of the Balkans', 'the most evil dictator to emerge in Europe since Adolf Hitler', a 'psychopath', a 'Serb tyrant', a 'psychopathic tyrant', 'evil', 'a man of no mercy', and a 'former Communist hardliner'. Casting around for insults, the Star added that he was 'dumpy'. In line with Nato briefings, Milosevic was compared to Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Pol Pot. Journalists also seemed to feel they had a duty to psychoanalyse Milosevic. Both Channel Four News and the BBC's current affairs flagship Panorama pondered 'The Mind of Milosevic' on consecutive days (28, 29 March). The Telegraph's Patrick Bishop described him as 'remote and isolated', with an 'absence of normal human responses', and seemed on the verge of offering counselling: 'Milosevic's emotional numbness makes him impervious to other people's pain' (26 March). In the Express, Jenni Murray suggested that 'both Milosevic and his wife are the product of dysfunctional families' (30 March), while the BBC's Brian Barron travelled to Montenegro in search of the 'troubled history' of the Milosevic 'clan' (9pm, 20 April). The clear implication of all this freelance psychology was that Milosevic is mad.[14] However, an important component of Kosovo coverage was that the Serbian people as a whole, not just Milosevic, were demonised. In the article quoted above, for example, Bishop went on to argue that because of Milosevic, '"Serb" is a synonym for "barbarian"'. The Sun (14 April) said 'Slobba's animals are an affront to humanity', advising: 'they deserve to be shot like wild dogs'. The Independent's Steve Crawshaw, writing in the New Statesman (31 May), asked: 'why have so many millions of Serbs become liars on a grand scale or gone mad, or both?'[15] Naureckas (1999) demonstrates how, in the US media, demonisation of Milosevic easily crossed over into demonisation of the Serbs, as the concept of collective guilt meant the 'entire ethnic group' was targeted for blame. This is presumably what Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman had in mind when he suggested a programme of 'thoroughgoing imposed de-Nazification' for post-war Serbia (29 April). Journalists and politicians used what Herman (1999) calls 'atrocities management' to present the Serbs as evil barbarians who were capable of anything. This was again possible because the reporting of Kosovo drew on a rich legacy from Bosnia. As Gowing (1997:25 - 6) notes: 'In Bosnia&there is more evidence than many media personnel care to admit that journalists embarked on crusades and became partial', siding with the Bosnian Muslim government and demonising the Serbs. Gowing describes this as 'the media's secret shame', since even to discuss it is 'usually seen as taboo and even heretic'.[16] It is the logical outcome of the journalism of attachment, and in some cases reporting drew directly on Bosnia to 'prove' the stories of atrocities in Kosovo. The BBC's Matt Frei, for example, reported: There can now be no doubt that Serbian security forces have been and may still be involved in the systematic rape of Kosovar women. We don't know the exact numbers, but if the Bosnian war, where the same thing happened, is anything to go by, the victims could be in their thousands. (Newsnight, 8 April) The figures of 20,000, or even 50,000 Muslim women raped by Serbs in Bosnia are regularly bandied about. Yet a UN Commission of Experts sent to investigate these claims could not substantiate such numbers. They first conducted a pilot study in Sarajevo in 1993, in which they interviewed only one victim. The team did obtain the files of the Bosnian government's War Crimes Commission, who had claimed to possess 20,000 well-documented cases, but on inspection there were 105 files purporting to relate to cases of rape, and even some of these turned out to contain only 'a newspaper article or a government statement'. The experts complained the documentation was 'neither as extensive nor as comprehensive as the team was led to believe', and said information available from both local and international sources was 'considerably less than "advertised"'. By the time of its final report in May 1994, the UN Commission had interviewed a total of 42 women from Bosnia and Croatia who had been victims of rape.[17] Frei also wrote in the Sunday Telegraph (18 April) of suspicions that 'there may be scores, perhaps hundreds, of rape camps inside Kosovo, just as there were in Bosnia'. Yet nobody ever found a single 'rape camp' in Bosnia, and a member of a European Community team sent to find such camps in 1992 resigned because the delegation interviewed only four victims before making its report that 20,000 women had been raped (Brouwer, 1997). Far from lending credibility to stories of 'systematic rape', the example of Bosnia throws them into question. It is worth noting that it was not just Nato who manipulated stories of atrocities in Kosovo. One key source was the KLA. Nancy Durham, reporting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, told the story of 19-year-old Rajmonda, who resolved to join the KLA after her sister was killed by the Serbs and the rest of her family fled to Albania. Visiting Rajmonda's village after the war, Durham found the family at home and the sister alive and well. Rajmonda confessed she had been a KLA member all along and had made the whole thing up. 'How many other lies will remain buried?', wondered Durham.[18] Another source was the United Nations. The UN Population Fund, for example, produced a report on 'Sexual Violence in Kosovo', based on interviews with refugees in Albania. The report noted at length the problems of collecting evidence, but neglected to mention how many women had actually been interviewed. The report includes allegations which appear highly implausible, and for which no substantive evidence is offered, such as the claim that Serbs 'cut open the stomachs of many pregnant women and skewered the fetus [sic] on their blades'.[19] Audrey Gillan, writing in the London Review of Books (27 May), recounted how Ron Redmond, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, stood at the Blace border crossing in Macedonia and: spoke to the press of bodies being desecrated, eyes being shot out. The way he talked it sounded as if there had been at least a hundred murders and dozens of rapes. When I pressed him on the rapes, asking him to be more precise, he reduced it a bit and said he had heard that five or six teenage girls had been raped and murdered. He had not spoken to any witnesses. Gillan went on to describe how later a BBC reporter: reeled off what Ron Redmond had said, using the words 'hundreds', 'rape' and 'murder' in the same breath. By way of qualification (a fairly meaningless one in the circumstances), he added that the stories had yet to be substantiated. Why, then, had he reported them so keenly in the first place? The answer is probably that such stories were not only sensational, but also conformed to preconceptions. Since the distorted and selective reporting of Bosnia has received little sustained criticism, it could serve as a model to set up a ready-made demonised villain in Kosovo. 2.4 The Mystification of 'Ethnic' Conflict A final important dimension of the coverage is how the conflict within Kosovo, between Serbs and Albanians, was explained. A number of commentators have noted how 'ethnicity' is used as a pseudo-explanation in the reporting of post-Cold War conflicts, presenting them as the product of atavistic 'tribal hatreds' in wild parts of the world. Kosovo was also placed firmly within this framework, again drawing on earlier reporting from Bosnia.[20] Simon Winchester, writing in the Sunday Telegraph (4 April), recalled visiting Yugoslavia in the 1970s, when he had 'felt there was something intractably wild and backward about the people in these parts'. Of the present, he said: Here in the Balkans, although there is a veneer of civilised behaviour, the appearance of prosperity and the suggestion of a future, there is truly only history. Nothing else matters. Just history, hatred and ruin. Similarly, the Independent's Dalrymple heard 'the language of the Balkans' in Macedonia (3 April): 'The words and the thoughts that fester into hatreds that lead inevitably down the road to ethnic cleansing and mass murder'. This apocalyptic vision was inspired by Dalrymple's conversation with a taxi driver. Often merely to mention 'the Balkans' or 'history' was enough to convey the sense that the whole region was beyond the pale of civilisation. As the leader of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Donald Anderson, told Parliament on 25 March: 'There's a lot of history in the Balkans&too much history'. The invocation of 'history' actually represented a refusal of historical explanation, in favour of prejudice. This was the spirit in which the Times wrote of a '1,000 year story written in blood' (29 March), and the Mail devoted a double-page spread to the 'Timebomb with a 600-year fuse' (25 March). This article, which opened: 'Today's troubles in Kosovo began in 1389', was not designed to explain anything, merely to present Kosovo as 'a cauldron of ethnic and religious rivalry' and a 'horrendously complicated tangle of ancient religious and ethnic hatreds'. It was only a matter of time before someone would describe Kosovo as 'the heart of darkness', as the Sunday Times did on 28 March. As Banks and Murray (1999:148) observe, 'ethnicity' is often used as a coded form of racial thinking. Occasionally this is made explicit, as for example by Marcus Tanner in the Independent (11 May), who asked 'Do Albanians look like Serbs?': No&.The Serbs often have black or dark brown hair and are generally darker and more heavily built than Albanians. Their appearance is fairly typical of southern Slavs. By contrast, the Kosovars look Celtic to a British eye. They have curly hair, which is often blonde or rust coloured, and their skin tends to be very pale and covered in freckles. Their eyes are often green or blue and their build is much more slender than that of the Serbs. They have longer heads. It is not surprising that they look so different as they belong to different races that have very rarely intermarried. The picture of blonde, blue-eyed Albanians versus swarthy Serbs is not only factually inaccurate (there are plenty of blonde Serbs and dark Albanians), but also racist in two senses: first in that Tanner presumes to divide the world into distinct racial groups based on imputed physical characteristics; and second because his intention is evidently to present Albanians as more appealing to a white British eye. As the Telegraph's Tom Utley admitted: 'it has been all the more painful to witness the suffering of the people of Kosovo because they look and live so much like us' (26 March). At the Independent, a racist attitude toward Serbs appears to be a long-standing editorial policy: the paper's leader-page cartoon on 29 May 1992 depicted Bosnian Serbs as apes in combat gear. It is hard to imagine such bigoted language and imagery being applied by a liberal broadsheet to, say, Jewish or African people. Critiques of 'ethnic' explanations of contemporary conflicts often start from the assumption that such reporting is problematic because it inhibits effective Western intervention. In Keen's words: 'In so far as the causes of wars&remain poorly understood, it may be relatively easy for some analysts&to insist that a proper response is an isolationist one' (1999:82). Yet there is no necessary correspondence between a preference for the mystified framework of 'ethnicity' and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Robin Harris, for example, an adviser to Baroness Thatcher, argued further intervention was futile since the Serbs showed 'no evidence so far of succumbing to sanity, let alone to lectures from Robin Cook and dollars from the International Monetary Fund' (Times, 29 July). Yet for Harris the cause of this 'Serb problem' was not ethnicity but politics - specifically, a 'Greater Serbian ideology'. Meanwhile, Hugo Young, writing in support of (then imminent) Nato bombing, described 'visceral ethnic enemies never likely to surrender their mutual hatred' (Guardian, 23 March). In fact there were two strands to the presentation of the conflict within Kosovo, which might be labelled the 'Medieval' and 'Nazi' explanations. Both were deployed to support intervention. On one hand, Kosovo was seen as a pre-modern conflict between ancient 'ethnic' enemies, as discussed above. This is what Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott meant when he told MPs on the first night of bombing that Kosovo was witnessing 'scenes more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than of Europe on the eve of the twenty-first century'. At the same time, the conflict was also explained politically, as the product of a deliberate policy - often compared to both the Holocaust and apartheid - whereby the Serbs had adopted backward, racist attitudes. In a 13 May speech, for example, Clinton disparaged those who 'justify looking away from this kind of slaughter&by saying that these people are simply incapable of civilised behaviour', and instead argued the West should show 'there is another path'. It may seem paradoxical that an essentially racial conception of 'ethnic conflict' could sit alongside a denunciation of the Serbs for their supposedly racist outlook, yet these 'Medieval' and 'Nazi' explanations were often combined. Cook, for example, at his 29 March briefing, located apartheid in the Middle Ages: It is utterly offensive that [Milosevic] should be waging war against a whole ethnic identity, trying to recreate a new apartheid in Europe based on the cleansing, the forcible removal and execution of people of the wrong ethnic identity in his region. That practice belonged to the Middle Ages, it does not belong to the modern Europe. Similarly, Clinton explained that 'people are still killing each other out of primitive urges, because they think what is different about them is more important than what they have in common', combining an elitist view of the Balkans as home to 'primitive urges', with a more politically-correct advocacy of tolerance. The contradictions did not matter, since the common thread was the civilisation vs. barbarism opposition. The 'Nazi' explanation tended to dominate media coverage, presenting a wildly misleading picture. Every British newspaper depicted the Serbs as fascists, committing genocide in Kosovo. It was a cruel absurdity to portray the most ethnically-diverse country in the region as dominated by a fascist ideology of racial purity. Occasionally, reports mentioned facts which gave the lie to this view. On 26 March, for example, the Guardian interviewed a Serb family who had spent the previous night sheltering from Nato bombing in a cellar with Albanians they had taken in (though this was buried at the end of the article). After the war, the Telegraph 'discovered' that Belgrade is home to around 200,000 Muslims, including some 50,000 Kosovo Albanians, living throughout the capital rather than in any ghetto. Visiting the city's mosque, the reporter found a noticeboard 'crammed with slips of paper from Kosovars offering two or, in one case, three flats in Pristina for one in Belgrade' (11 August). He also interviewed local Imam Mustafa Jusufspahic, who said: 'Yes, we have problems, but they go back to the time of Tito rather than Milosevic&.The Kosovars are our brothers in religion, but the Serbs are our brothers in blood'. It is difficult to imagine a 1940s Rabbi voicing similar sentiments, or refugees from Nazi Germany wishing to swap two homes in Israel for one in Berlin. Facts which did not fit the simple-minded explanations offered by politicians were frequently ignored by journalists, or remembered only when the war was over. This was not only due to the slavish acceptance of Nato propaganda, but reflected a shared belief in the moral superiority of the West. In the post-Cold War era, the Western military are seen as a force for Good, and liberal journalists have come to understand their role as urging governments to take tough action. The practices of demonising enemies and 'atrocities management' provide the rationale for such action, with the result that those to be targeted are viewed as irrational and primitive, fascistically intolerant, and Evil. In Blair's memorable phrase, the world is divided between civilisation and barbarity. Conclusion: The Propaganda of Moralism As Chomsky (1992:144) observes, for Western interventions in the post-Cold War era, 'some adjustments are needed in the propaganda framework'. This is the significance of the 'humanitarian' justification for bombing given by politicians, and the stridently moralistic tone adopted by many journalists. Füredi (1994:99) notes a 'sea-change in the climate of discussion' from the 1980s onward, whereby 'there is now a new attempt&morally to rehabilitate imperialism'. This rehabilitation takes place 'through the manipulation of&moral claims', he argues: 'Intervention is not justified on militaristic grounds, as a glorious imperial mission. It is rationalised on the plane of morality, as a humanitarian act' (ibid.:110). It was in this spirit that Ferdinand Mount proclaimed: 'Call it what you like - "liberal imperialism" or "humanitarian intervention" or "strategic coercion" - but the empire is back' (Sunday Times, 13 June). For Mount, Kosovo showed that 'the old post-colonial guilt and resentment are melting away. There is now a consensus for brisk intervention to save lives and damn the sensibilities of the local political elites.'[21] Whatever one thinks of his views, Mount undeniably had a point when he wrote: Listen to the UN official in Bosnia explaining how he is trying to teach Muslims and Serbs to live together again and you hear the voice of the old British district commissioner dispensing justice under the palm tree. Fighting wars in the name of 'civilisation' against 'barbarism' does indeed echo the rhetoric of imperialism, and as Chandler (1999a) shows, Western rule in Bosnia since 1995 has been as high-handed and undemocratic as that of any colonial administrator. Writing in the early 1990s, Füredi described a process which had so far been led by the political right, though he noted the importance of 'significant&input from liberal-minded sections of Western societies' (1994:112 - 3). In Kosovo, with a new generation of politicians in charge, it is possible to see the results of such input. There were right-wingers, like Mount, making a case for imperialism, but many conservative writers were wary of the implicit questioning of national sovereignty which the new type of 'humanitarian intervention' involves.[22] The discussion, like the war itself, was led by liberals and the left. To discuss Kosovo in terms of a 'rehabilitation of imperialism' may seem an exaggeration, yet many commentators were quite explicit. In the New Statesman, John Lloyd explained 'how the doves turned hawkish' because 'Kosovo is a new kind of war: a liberals' war, fought for humanitarian reasons only' (2 April). For Lloyd, this 'warlike humanitarianism' was a source of pride: 'now it seems that we have become truly good people, fighting evil in the Balkans'. In Prospect magazine (July), David Rieff argued the world faced a choice between 'imperialism and barbarism'. Since he bemoaned the 'limited' and 'hesitant' character of Nato bombing, one can only guess at the scale of military firepower Rieff hopes to see unleashed by 'a system of liberal imperialism based on great power mandates'. Echoing the arguments of Nato leaders, most commentators presented Kosovo as a break with the pa |