Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : The Kosovo conflict 1999
A Key Adviser to NATO Assails Kosovo Coverage by T Buerkle 
A Key Adviser to NATO Assails Kosovo Coverage Blair Spokesman Defends Alliance Briefings By Tom Buerkle International Herald Tribune LONDON - A key figure in the media campaign waged by NATO governments during the conflict in Kosovo criticized Western journalists on Friday for devoting as much coverage to alliance blunders and Serb civilian casualties as to the atrocities committed by Serb forces against ethnic Albanians. The official, Alistair Campbell, the spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, also defended the alliance's aggressive attempt to get its message out using daily briefings that combined refugee reports of widespread rape and murder with alliance claims of major hits against Serb military targets. NATO was not engaged in propaganda but was innovating ''to try to hold the public's interest on our terms,'' he said. ''That NATO could win militarily was never really in doubt,'' Mr. Campbell said in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute here. ''The only battle we might lose was the battle for hearts and minds. Keeping public support, keeping the alliance united, and showing Milosevic we were united, was what we were all about.'' But one British military official said later that the alliance had exaggerated the success of the air campaign. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said NATO knew two weeks into the campaign that Serb forces were using decoys and old tanks to get alliance pilots to bomb meaningless targets, but that many of these ''hits'' were included in NATO's public estimates of damage inflicted on Serb forces. ''There was pressure from NATO for figures,'' the official said. ''And I think the figures were higher than they should have been.'' NATO claimed near the end of the campaign to have destroyed one-quarter of Serb armor in Kosovo, but a recent report in The Times newspaper claimed NATO killed only 13 Serb tanks. The alliance has not yet produced an official assessment of military damage done by the bombing. Mr. Campbell and media advisers from other NATO capitals, including the White House speechwriter Jonathan Prince, were sent to Brussels to sharpen NATO's media operation in mid-April after a convoy of ethnic Albanians was bombed in southern Kosovo, killing dozens of civilians. Sowing confusion more than information, NATO initially suggested that Serb forces had shelled the convoy before acknowledging its own jets had bombed the refugees by mistake. More than in any other conflict, Mr. Campbell contended that NATO was handicapped by its inability to demonstrate the kind of ethnic cleansing that it believed was taking place on the ground in Kosovo. ''If a bomb went astray, the Serb media machine could round up a few chosen journalists at the Hyatt in Belgrade, take then down to the scene, and get the story running,'' he said. ''Pictures. Therefore news.'' In contrast, he claimed, assertions by Western governments that Serb forces were engaging in mass rape, murder and torture were often reported as ''no more than a NATO allegation'' because of a lack of photographic evidence. ''Recent reporting inside Kosovo - with pictures - shows that the real Kosovo story wasn't blunders,'' Mr. Campbell said. ''It was war crimes and atrocities. It was progress toward military victory. What is being discovered now suggests that if anything we underestimated the scale of the barbarism. We certainly did not exaggerate.'' Mr. Campbell, a former tabloid reporter, accused the British media of retreating into a kind of moral equivalence whereby they would report NATO claims about the progress of the war along with Serb footage of civilian casualties, and suggest that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. Reports rarely mentioned that Belgrade reports, or the Serb Lie Machine, as he put it, were used by the Milosevic regime to promote and prolong the conflict and fuel ethnic hatred, he said. ''After Iraq and Kosovo, the media needs to reflect whether it has not provided a kind of template to dictatorial regimes in how to use the Western media to their own advantage,'' he said. It may be a telling hallmark of the Kosovo conflict that Mr. Campbell was prepared to assess the public relations side of the conflict before NATO has reported on the actual results of the bombing. But a senior British defense official insisted that numbers were beside the point. ''War is not about arithmetic,'' this official said. ''War is about breaking people's will, it's about making them do things you want them to do. This is actually what the air campaign achieved.'' |