Byzantine Blog

Everyone who followed the Hague Kangaroo Court “trials” knows by now that a number of so-called eyewitnesses lied through their teeth in order to get Serbs accused of the monstrous crimes (including high ranking NATO officials, like Britain's own Paddy Ashdown, whose blatant perjury was proven beyond any doubt by Serbian General Bozidar Delic who testified in President Milosevic's defense). Not only that, but every single supposed “rape victim” testifying in The Hague was also caught in lies and perjury.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch researcher, Fred Abrahams, was forced to admit in the Hague UK's former foreign minister Robin Cook also lied when he claimed Serbian forces ran the “rape camp” in Kosovo's Djakovica, in 1999. Abrahams testified that he was in Kosovo and Metohija in 1998 and 1999, collecting documentation and evidence about human rights violations. He thoroughly investigated Cook's claims on the ground, but wasn't able to find any proof for Cook's accusation, nor a single “rape camp” run by Serbs.

In his excellent analysis on how the myths and epic lies got spawned in order to entirely dehumanize Serbs while doing everything possible to destroy them, Reporting ‘Humanitarian’ Warfare: Propaganda, Moralism and Nato’s Kosovo War, Philip Hammond examines the role Croats, Muslims, media and NATO jointly played in creating and perpetuating these myths.

A quick scan of the mainstream media from the time of the wars and during bombardment of Serbia shows the great “successes” of the unceasing vilification:

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?’ 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).

And here's why:

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’.[For details of anti-Serb bias in reporting from Bosnia see Brock (1993—94; 1995), and Burns (1996). On the journalism of attachment, see Hume (1997).] 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. 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.[Durham’s article, ‘The Truth about Rajmonda’ (8 September), was available at: http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/kosovo3/rajmonda.html [but not any more]. Swift (1999:25) notes the KLA is represented by the American PR firm Washington International Group, headed by former State Department officials. They previously employed another company, Ruder Finn, who represented the Muslim leadership during the Bosnian war.]

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 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.

Way back in 1999, one of the few honorable westerners employed in Kosovo, Roland Keith, Commander in the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, was honest enough to acknowledge: “I never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo.”

But the voice of one Roland Keith quickly gets drowned in the chorus of hundreds of highly imaginative Robin Cooks who let themselves get carried away by their own fantasies, in their well air-conditioned London/NewYork/Brussels offices. Hammond further explains:

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.

But no liar can compare or even come close to Roy Gutman, the notorious Serb-hater, who has built his carrier on the Serbian misery. At the time of Bosnian war, Gutman's task was to dig out the dirt on Serbs and send it to the Hague.

One night in hotel “Terma,” on the outskirts of Sarajevo, Gutman was paying rounds of drinks all night, trying to get Serbian soldiers drunk while asking for the rape stories. Serbian war reporter, Nebojsa Jeric, told him the story about Gruban, the character from Miodrag Bulatovic's novel, to satisfy Gutman's unhealthy thirst for gory stories, hoping he'll finally let them go and get some sleep. It is a nasty prank, but the one Gutman fully deserved for his sleaziness. It is also a stark illustration of the surreal, Orwellian world Hague “Tribunal” represents where, when it comes to Serbs, a mere hearsay, personal grudge or a figment of imagination is sufficient for the most serious accusations with the power of ruining lives.

A foreigner of Gutman's brilliance couldn't possibly know that even the name Gruban suggests the fictional character -- it's like telling stories about the American with the first name Brute or Thug or Bully. So, soon afterwards, a fictional “war criminal” Gruban (Thug) who up until than lived only on the pages of a book, found himself accused in the official Hague Tribunal bulletin, published on February 13, 1995, among 74 indictees for the alleged crimes related to “Trnopolje camp,” in Omarska, a fictional rape camp.

Along with other Serbs listed in the bulletin, imaginary rapist Gruban is accused of taking part in, and/or organizing the mass rapes of Muslim women in Trnopolje “camp” and other such fictional “camps” throughout Bosnia. Because of the gravity of his crimes, a character from Bulatovic's novel deserved to be indicted by The Hague immediately, although no other information about him was available at the time.