The Dominion - public relations

UN Arrested 40 Ahead of Harper's Haiti Visit

dru — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:10:03 +0000

Many demonstrators remain in jail

Forty Haitian demonstrators were arrested by UN soldiers hours before the arrival of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Haitian slum neighbourhood of Cite Soleil on July 20. Haiti was the last stop for the Prime Minister's Latin American tour, which also included stops in Colombia, Chile, and Barbados. The protest had been organized by residents of Cite Soleil in response to the visit of the Canadian Prime Minister, according to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, a protest organizer and director of the Haiti-based September 30th Foundation.

"On the morning of the 20th, our comrades went out into the streets with placards, banners, and megaphones," said Pierre-Antoine in a phone interview with the Dominion.

"At that moment, it was around six in the morning, MINUSTAH soldiers began to make arrests for no reason. Many of our friends were arrested that morning."

According to Pierre-Antoine, 10 demonstrators were released on the afternoon of July 20, after Harper's departure from the country. Thirty demonstrators remain imprisoned in the National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince. They have no access to legal counsel due to financial inability to hire a lawyer, and will wait for an indefinite amount of time before seeing a judge. Although Haiti's constitution requires prisoners to see a judge within 48 hours of their arrest, they will often remain in jail for months before this happens.

When contacted by the Dominion, UN spokesperson Sophie Boutaud de Lacombe would not confirm that UN soldiers had made arrests in Cite Soleil on July 20.

Several sources report that the UN mission for stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has committed numerous documented human rights abuses within the seaside neighbourhood. According to reports by Democracy Now! and the Haiti Information Project, UN forces conducted a raid in Cite Soleil on December 22, ostensibly aimed at rooting out "armed gangs," which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 civilians, including several children. As survivors of this raid lay bleeding in the streets, UN soldiers prevented Red Cross ambulances from reaching the dead and wounded.

Cite Soleil has been a centre of political support for the Fanmi Lavalas political party of deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The July 20 protest was organized to oppose Canada's involvement in the February 29, 2004 coup d'etat of elected President Aristide, as well as Canada's continued interference in Haitian politics.

After Aristide's removal, Haiti descended into a nightmare of political violence. Community activists were murdered, former Lavalas parliamentarians were jailed, and the Haitian National Police, which has received training by Canadian RCMP officers since 2004, waged a campaign of terror against some of the poorest neighbourhoods in Haiti's capital. Cite Soleil was the hardest hit of these neighbourhoods. The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK, estimated 8000 murders in Haiti's capital alone between 2004 and 2006, as well as 35,000 incidents of rape.

"Their plan was clear,"says Pierre-Antoine of the Canadian-backed Latortue regime which ruled until 2006. "Their plan was to eliminate the party of President Aristide, the Fanmi Lavalas party, the majority party. But they did not succeed in their objective."

Although such political repression has diminished since the election of current President Rene Preval, the Canadian government continues to play an influential role within Haiti. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs has been a strong advocate for aggressive "anti-gang" attacks and raids by MINUSTAH against poor neighbourhoods like Cite Soleil. In a January 15 radio interview, Canadian Ambassador Claude Boucher applauded the deadly December 22 raid, calling upon the UN to "increase their operations as they did last December." A Parliamentary report penned by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay also applauded the December 22 killings, stating that "more robust operations led by MINUSTAH and the Haitian National Police from December 22, 2006, further improved the security situation."

In the months following December 2006, the UN staged a number of brutal raids in Cite Soleil. Seven year-old Stephanie Lubin and four year-old Alexandra Lubin, killed as they lay sleeping on the morning of February 2, were two among many other civilians killed during these attacks. In its press statements, the UN has claimed it has subsequently been successful in dislodging gang leaders from Cite Soleil.

"What MINUSTAH is doing is not a mission of stabilization; it is not engaging in peacekeeping," said Pierre-Antoine. "It is a mission that engages in operations of massacres, of assassinations, [and] of destabilization more so than activities of reconstruction and peacekeeping."

During a visit to Haiti this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced plans to extend the UN's mission in Haiti by one year.

UN Soldiers In Cité Soleil

Picture Perfect

hillarybain — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:42:51 +0000

How images are used to create specific relationships between people and the physical environment

In North American environmentalism, most images, campaigns and programs align with either Conservationism or Preservationism.

Conservationism’s goal is sustainability. It is a use-based approach that focuses on over-development and scarcity as the main problems facing the environment and the resources it provides. Technology and governmental policies are promoted as a means to regulate natural resources so they can be used by future generations. The main criticism of Conservationism is that ecological issues are not seen as the result of industrialization, neocolonial debts or economic structural adjustment policies, but are attributed to unchecked technological progress and patterns of misuse in general; it does not connect “patterns of misuse” with the economic and social structures that cause them. This would not be in the main interest of Conservationists, whose goal is to ensure continued consumer resources. Not surprisingly, this is the narrative upon which former US vice-president Al Gore structures his film An Inconvenient Truth.

Preservationism, on the other hand, focuses on wilderness as a realm of spiritual and aesthetic contemplation, separate from resource-use. It is based on the idea that without human interference, nature tends towards a state of balance, beauty and goodness, and that humans are separate from, rather than part of, the environment.

There are four popular image brands for “the environment”: The Happy Field, the Environmental Apocalypse, the Graph and the Logo.

If it falls into a Preservationist framework, the Happy Field is usually a photograph of “wilderness.” These beautiful, peaceful, humanless landscapes are based in the Romantic tradition of the sublime, which proposed that God could be seen in, or through, nature. This puts nature “over there,” away from humans, cities and pipelines, and does not account for urban nature, local communities, or toxic-nature anomalies (such as the use of genetic engineering to increase an endangered native population of animals).

When the Happy Field leans in the Conservationist direction, “the environment” may look like a child smiling at a tree, instead of a landscape without humans. Conservationism does not put nature “elsewhere” because humans are an integral part of environmental degradation and its solution. Humans are also seen as one of the reasons to overcome environmental problems; the mantra “save the Earth for our children” reinforces the objective that natural settings and resources be sustained for the next generation, so that their offspring can continue patterns of use and consumption similar to their own.

The Happy Field in either ecological narrative is usually an Edenic narrative because of the underlying motivation to “return” to a balanced, more sustainable nature, whose existence and possibility is hinted at in the image. It implies that long ago, things were serene; things were pure and clean. This surmises that at one time, probably before humans or at least before white humans, there was no conflict, no change, and by extension, no environmental history. This is, in fact, a very popular view.

At the other end of the visual spectrum is the Environmental Apocalypse, which frequently doubles as Climate Porn. Spewing volcanoes, billowing smoke, chunks of icebergs as big as cathedrals crashing into the ocean and trees being felled – never saplings, always redwoods – provide the Old Testament version of the sublime. Awe and terror with a hint of guilt are evoked by over-the-top, beautiful, devastating and gratuitous scenes of ecological “ravaging.” Gorgeous, slick images of environmental degradation may seem decadent and even unethical, but David Ingram, an expert in environmental imagery in cinema, notes that, “by presenting ‘worse-case scenarios’ as foregone conclusions, these images constitute a radical attack on the notions of progress held by big business, big government and big science.” Critique notwithstanding, one problem with Environmental Apocalyptic images is the promotion of the message that “we” are terrible and are to blame for climate change or pollution. "We" includes every human equally, when in fact the majority of global pollution is caused by a very specific segment of the human population: Western developed nations. Images of Climate Porn and Apocalypse also frequently depend on the pre-porn, pre-apocalyptic Virgin Earth as a necessary contrast.

Conservationists usually use the Graph, perhaps because the funding for graph-making scientists comes from organizations tied up in resource management, thus having a partisan interest in sustaining resources within current institutional frameworks. In displays like those in An Inconvenient Truth, time-lapse images and points on a graph become more than justrepresentations of a glacier in 1970 and again in 2000; they are images of global warming itself, unavailable to the naked eye. Graphs create visible relationships that implicate humans, time and the physical world in their trajectories, basically making them anti-Preservationist.

The Logo is usually an iconic, graphic representation of Preservationism. Swooping leaves, blue skies, white wind and hands holding tiny Earths all evoke the fragile environmental harmony, serenity and balance that the institution to which the Logo belongs is striving to provide for its clients. Similar Logos may be used for activist groups and international financial institutions, despite mutually exclusive environmental goals, values and programs. This is not to say that “nature” is intrinsically objective and provides common ground, but that “the environment” has become cinematically iconic and inert. It is a buzzword to rally behind and an unspecific anxiety of great import.

This is not to say that the environment is an illegitimate or vague fabrication, but that more critical and nuanced accounts and images of nature and our relationship to it are necessary for a workable model of sustainability.

The "Happy Field" Landscape

The "Environmental Apocalypse" Image

The Good Guys

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:34:01 +0000

Part four in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic meeting with officials at NATO headquarters in 1998. While demonizing Milosevic, media coverage has avoided discussing the NATO-supported leaders of the breakaway republics. photo: NATO

While a Milosevic-led Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbia, Montenegro and Vojvodina) was under sanctions that rendered it unable to hire its own western Public Relations firm, the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army were receiving diplomatic, financial and military backing from the US and European powers. While Milosevic continues to receive thousands of column-inches of coverage that manage to avoid engaging with publicly available facts, his counterparts have received very little coverage, factual or otherwise.

Public Relations flak James Harff noted that mobilizing Jewish support for someone like Croatian president Franjo Tudjman was an impressive feat (see part 3). It also added a touch of irony to claims that Serbian forces were perpetrating a "new Nazism".

While those accusations were made, providing justification for a massive bombing campaign, Tudjman was busy perpetrating the old Nazism. In his 1989 book, Wasteland of Historical Truth, Tudjman wrote that "the establishment of Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews."

"Genocide is not only permitted," Tudjman wrote, "it is recommended, even commanded by the word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith." Tudjman counted Pope John Paul II among supporters of Croatian secession under his party.

During WWII, Croatian forces slaughtered over 700,000 Serbs, 45,000 Jews and at least 26,000 Roma at the Jasenovac death camp. With few exceptions, Croatian war criminals were never brought to justice; thousands of Nazi collaborators, including 500 members of the Roman Catholic clergy, fled to Austria and Italy at the end of WWII. Tudjman hailed these as independence fighters, and appointed several former Nazi collaborators to government posts.

Upon Croatia's separation in 1991, the Serbian minority in the Croatian region of Krajina itself declared independence from Croatia. In a referendum, 99.7 per cent of the 500,000 Krajina Serbs voted to re-join Yugoslavia. During four years of fighting, tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats either left or were driven out of Serbian majority areas by Serbian paramilitary groups. (A chief accusation of Milosevic's Serbia is that they supported these expulsions and the attendant atrocities, including murder and torture.) In 1995, a revitalized, US-backed Croatian army went on the counterattack. "Operation Storm," carried out with US, German and French support and training, took over all of Serbian Krajina, displacing almost the entire Serbian population, and sending over 200,000 Serbian refugees fleeing into Bosnia. Though it was the largest such displacement of the conflict, this "ethnic cleansing" went largely unreported. None of the Croatian leaders or officers responsible have been charged with war crimes.

Meanwhile, non-Croats in Croatia--especially Serbs--were subject to a range of punitive measures and systematic discrimination. In To Kill a Nation, Michael Parenti provides an overview of the Croatian situation, including restrictions on media and "confiscatory property taxes," denial "of employment" and "any effective police protection." After the conflict, Croatian Serbs were denied aid to rebuild their homes and businesses. Discrimination against Croatia's Serbian minority continues today, and only a third of Croatia's estimated 300,000 Serbs have returned.

Another lesser-known recipient of western backing was Alija Izetbegovic, who spent part of his youth as a member of the Young Muslims, a fundamentalist group that recruited Muslim units for the Nazi SS during WWII. In his book, Muslim Declaration, he wrote:

There can be no peace or coexistence between Islamic faith and non-Islamic faith and institutions. The Islamic movement must and can take power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough, not only to destroy the non-Islamic power, but to build up a new Islamic one.

According to the New York Times, a senior CIA official told Congress in a secret deposition that "There is no question that the policy of getting arms into Bosnia was of great assistance in allowing the Iranians to dig in and create good relations with the Bosnian government." The official was referring to a plan that, according to sources quoted by the Los Angeles Times, Clinton signed off on that allowed Iran to provide Izetbegovic with arms.

Izetbegovic placed second in Bosnia's 1990 Presidential election, but took power through political maneuvering. Though Bosnia's constitution stipulates a rotating presidency, Izetbegovic refused to step down. Fikret Abdic, who had the most votes in the election and remained quite popular in Bosnia, was ousted from government by Izetbegovic and demonized in the state-run media.

In his book on the Dayton peace negotiations, American diplomat Richard Holbrooke expressed his dubious opinion of Izetbegovic. "Even if Milosevic makes more concessions," Holbrooke wrote, "the Bosnians will simply raise the ante." Nonetheless, the US continued to support Izetbegovic. George Kenney wrote that Izetbegovic's "intention seemed to be to pretend to go along with negotiations while continuing the war." During the war, Izetbegovic invaded areas of Bosnia inhabited primarily by Serbs, creating, Holbrooke admitted, over one hundred thousand refugees. Nonetheless, Izetbegovic remains outside the scope of media coverage of war crimes during the war.

Bosnia and its federated Serbian counterpart, Republika Srpska, are to this day under the authority of a UN "high representative", which has the authority to remove democratically elected officials or overturn laws. There has been considerable pressure placed on the governments to implement programs of privatization and to conform to IMF policy proscriptions. Elected President Nikola Poplasen of Republika Srpska was removed by the high representative after being elected in spite of a high level of foreign financial and material support for the incumbent president, who came into office after NATO ousted Karadzic, the previous elected president. Poplasen said that he had been pressured to "break off relations" with Yugoslavia, but refused.

In Kosovo, Western governments bypassed moderate separatists like the Kosovo Democratic League and non-separatist ethnic Albanian organizations to throw support behind the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Publicly, US officials were calling the KLA a "terrorist organization" as late as 1998. It appears, however, that the KLA were receiving US assistance long before. KLA members stand accused of assassinating moderate Albanians, drug dealing, collaborating with al-Qaeda, murderous attacks on Serbian villages intended to provoke retaliation, historical ties to Nazi collaborators.

Retired Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie wrote in the National Post in 2004 that "Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers." The former peacekeeper noted that the KLA was "universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda."

MacKenzie also commented on Canadian media coverage.

The recent dearth of news in the North American media regarding the increase in violence in Kosovo compared to the comprehensive coverage in the European press strongly suggests that we Canadians don't like to admit it when we are wrong. On the contrary, selected news clips on this side of the ocean continue to reinforce the popular spin that those dastardly Serbs are at it again.

Ironically, Slobodan Milosevic, who is frequently compared to Hitler, was among the few leaders in the war that did not have Nazi ties. Surely the media are sitting on damning evidence against him, given the monikers that have graced headlines announcing his death ("Butcher of the Balkans" is a favourite). Casual observers will have to wait until journalists decide it is time to show why Milosevic and the Serbs are guilty when NATO and the other leaders are not.

One hopes that such future explanations, though entirely hypothetical, will be forced to contend with the body of facts, including the fact that Western-funded opposition newspapers continued to operate in Belgrade while Milosevic was in office, and numerous demonstrations against him went unsuppressed. It is not accurate to say that Milosevic's government did not engage in political repression, as fighting against military forces and guerilla insurgencies is by definition a kind of political repression, a variety that countries like Canada proudly participate in today.

That said, available evidence indicates that freedom of speech was practiced by Serbian citizens of all nationalities, at least in cities like Belgrade. One Washington Post reporter found the democratically-elected Milosevic's tolerance of public criticism to be evidence of his cunning, writing that it helps "let off steam and mitigate threats to [Milosevic's] government."

In occupied Republika Srpska, by contrast, popular demonstrations against occupying NATO troops seizing radio stations were met with armed vehicles, tear gas, and warning shots. We "will not hesitate to take the necessary measures including the use of force against media inciting attacks on [NATO forces] or other international organizations," a NATO representative said. The meaning of "inciting attacks" was made clear when the television channel Kanal S was told to "immediately cease broadcasting" after playing a message from Sarajevo University students which invited viewers to "join a peaceful protest" against NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

To this day, US officials insist that the bombing of the National TV studios in Belgrade was justified. Their reasoning? It was a "ministry of lies."

No one can doubt that serious atrocities were committed by Serb forces during the war. That said, one does not need to be a supporter of Mr. Milosevic to wonder why coverage of Western-supported republics did not reach the level of scrutiny and wild speculation to which Serb actions were subject. Why are large swaths of the public record ignored, and why do the media not account for their circulation of what no one can deny were massively inflated figures and claims of mass graves with tens or hundreds of thousands of bodies? While it is possible that these exist, it is also true that they have yet to be found after a massive search.

The responsibility to provide minimal evidence for oft-repeated claims has not been met. News coverage citing the opinions of NATO leaders and their allies cannot substitute for evidence in the long term. Nonetheless, claims from government sources with an interest in the outcome of coverage are repeated, even after they are contradicted by evidence gathered by NATO or UN teams. (Evidence provided by the Yugoslavian government of NATO atrocities is, naturally, subject to the media's a priori dismissal.)

"Anyone that tries to describe what was going on [in Bosnia] in a rational manner is deemed to be some sort of pro-Serb, rather than pro-truth," says the former general MacKenzie. MacKenzie was defending former BC provincial NDP candidate Rollie Keith, who stepped down after his claim that he saw no evidence of genocide while serving as a UN observer in Kosovo received negative media attention.

"I was shocked that someone who had merely described what was going on in Kosovo, which he saw with his own eyes, that some people interpreted that [sic] as an apologist for Milosevic," added MacKenzie.

Lieutenant General Satish Nambiar of India, who headed the UN mission in Yugoslavia, wrote that "Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest."

"According to my experience," wrote Nambiar, "all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist that they were."

Further reading

» Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retired): The Fatal Flaws Underlying NATO'S Intervention in Yugoslavia

» Rollie Keith: Failure of Diplomacy

» Lewis MacKenzie: National Post article on Kosovo

» Global Research: Clinton Administration supported the "Militant Islamic Base"

» Wikipedia: Operation Storm

» Stephen Gowans: Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia?

» Nebojsa Malic: Review of Richard Holbrooke's To End a War

» CBC Vancouver: NDPer quits over Milosevic comments

» CBC Vancouver: Strong military support for former NDP candidate

» Amnesty International: Croatia

» BIRN: Serb Refugees Unmoved by Gotovina Trial

» Minorities at Risk: Assessment for Serbs in Croatia

» BBC: Serb struggles for Croatian home

» Human Rights Watch: Croatia Fails Serb Refugees

» Petar Makara and Jared Israel: The Croatian Ustashi

&raqo; Oliver Kamm: Examining claims between Izetbegovic and Nazi SS

Who was NATO supporting during the war? Part four of Dru Oja Jay's series on the former Yugoslavia takes a look

The Media War

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 01:48:01 +0000

Part three in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

James Harff, of public relations firm Ruder Finn, claimed credit for the effective demonization of Serbs and the reduction of a historically complex situation to "good guys and bad guys". "The emotive charge," said Harff of the political climate following the campaign, "was so strong that no one could go against the dominant current, except on pain of being accused of revisionism."

Extensive analysis and investigation of the public record has shown that during the series of civil wars that beset the former Yugoslavia, the Western news media provided coverage that was, by any objective standard, misleading and in many cases completely false.

Recent media reports have simply stopped referring to mass graves and death camps where hundreds of thousands of people were--according to breathless TV, radio and newspaper reports during the war--systematically raped, tortured, and killed.

Seven years later, little evidence supporting the conclusion that such vast atrocities took place has surfaced, though casual references to genocide and ethnic cleansing find themselves sharing a sentence with the name Milosevic. Evidence does show that tens of thousands of combatants and civilians died in the tragic decade-long conflict. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, forced to live in refugee camps.

The silence of the same journalists that were scrambling to tell the world about genocide on the scale of "Hitler or Stalin" not only fails to correct the misinformation that hundreds of thousands of innocents were killed, it also undermines the credibility of future reports of genocide. The media's collective credibility is further undermined by its ongoing silence about conflicts where hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, with western complicity or support: in West Papua and Congo, for example.

George Kenney, who resigned from the US State Department in 1992 to protest the Bush administration's policies in the then-disintegrating Yugoslavia, wrote in 1996 that "much of the early war was fought not on the battlefield but through high-powered (and high-priced) lobbying firms."

"Since late 1992 there has also been a splendidly effective volunteer army of journalists, think-tank analysts, Capitol Hill staff and administration hawks pushing the Bosnian, and secondarily Croatian, causes," wrote Kenney. The Yugoslavian civil war began when Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Macedonia seceded from Yugoslavia with US and European funding and encouragement. In the case of Croatia and Bosnia, significant Serb minorities insisted on autonomy or rejoining Yugoslavia, which was not consistent with the US-European plan. The fact that in the case of Croatia, members of the Serb minority had their rights systematically violated by the US- and German-backed government also did not matter.

In America, Kenney wrote, "it is almost impossible to be too anti-Serb."

UN and NATO investigations have shown that military and paramilitary groups on all sides--as well as NATO itself, which dropped 20,000 tonnes of bombs on Serbia--committed atrocities. However, the record also shows that news media repeatedly reported made-up atrocities attributed to Serb forces, while taking minimal interest in atrocities committed against Serbs. Evidence of crimes committed by Serbs sometimes turned out to be crimes perpetrated against Serbs, as was the case with BBC footage of a "Bosnian prisoner of war in a concentration camp" who was later identified as a Bosnian Serb in a Muslim detention camp. No evidence of Serbian "concentration camps" ever surfaced, though conditions in detention camps on all sides were predictably brutal.

In other cases, unidentified bodies were attributed to untold Serb atrocities before having been identified as belonging to a particular ethnic group or even as noncombatants.

In a shocking number of cases, estimates of thousands of victims were reported where later only a few dozen bodies were found.

The most striking example was State Department official David Scheffer's estimate--in the middle of the NATO bombing campaign--that "as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for." This alarming estimate, reported widely in the media, was later reduced when the British government circulated an estimate that 10,000 were missing. A month later, NATO-led peacekeepers told the press that a total of 2,150 bodies had been found, of which 850 were civilians. It was evidence of war crimes, but of a significantly smaller scale than had been initially reported.

The radical revision of estimates after the shocking headlines was often several news cycles behind, which was exemplary of reporting during the war. In most cases, horrifying headlines and stories attributed to "government sources"--often governments with an interest in a particular outcome--were followed up with obscure corrections.

According to many sources, Bosnian Muslim leaders like President Izetbegovic were keenly aware of the impact of images of suffering on international public opinion. In the case of several high-profile massacres in Sarajevo that made headlines and rallied western support, for example, UN investigations later revealed that Bosnian Muslim forces had been responsible for slaughtering their own people. The massacres served their purpose, and western media attention focused on the "siege of Sarajevo" by Serb forces, which were held responsible for the killings.

Many atrocities against Serbs went unreported or underreported, including villages burned to the ground, describing gang rape by Croatian militias (based on the testimony of victims, not unnamed government sources), and murderous attacks--killing hundreds of Serbian civilians--by Muslim forces stationed at Srebrenica prior to the massacre of hundreds of Muslims there by Serb forces.

In the case of Srebrenica, the number of "over 8,000" missing Muslims is often cited, but the number of bodies found in a massive search of the area is under 3,000, as of last October. Only a fraction have been identified, and the bodies include soldiers and fighters on both sides killed in three years of war. One can be relatively certain that Serbian troops executed at least 153 prisoners of war in one case, which few will dispute is a horrific war crime. Evidence on the public record after extensive searches, however, does not support the much larger numbers often cited, or charges of genocide. This does not necessarily mean that larger atrocities did not take place, but simply that supporting evidence has not been found after a major investigation.

Public relations firms played a key role in the disinformation around the war. Ruder Finn was one such firm, employed at various times by Croatia, Muslim Bosnia, and the Albanian parliamentary opposition in Kosovo.

In a notable exception to media orthodoxy, the National Post's Isabel Vincent reported in 1998:

If the plight of Kosovo Albanians is today viewed around the world as an issue of self-determination for an oppressed minority group, then it is largely due to the efforts of former Ruder Finn executive James Harff, who almost single-handedly reduced a historically complex conflict to a black and white morality play, complete with oppressed good guys and bloodthirsty bad guys.

In 1993, Harff told French journalist Jacques Morlino that he was "most proud" of Ruder Finn's successful bid to mobilize major Jewish organizations like the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. According to Morlino's transcript, Harff said that

There was every reason then for Jewish intellectuals and organizations to be hostile to the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this state of things. And we succeeded in masterly fashion... The entry into the fray of Jewish organizations on the side of the Bosnians was an extraordinary move. All at once, we were able to make public opinion equate Serbs and Nazis. The dossier was complex, nobody understood what was going on in Bosnia... But in one stroke we were able to present a simple matter, a story with good guys and bad guys. We knew that the business would be played out on this terrain... All at once, there was a very clear change of language in the press with the employment of terms with a very strong emotive value, such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., all evoking Nazi Germany, the gas chambers and Auschwitz. The emotive charge was so strong that no one could go against the dominant current, except on pain of being accused of revisionism. We hit the bull's eye.

When Morlino pointed out that Harff didn't have any proof of claims circulated to media by Ruder Finn, Harff responded that "Our business is not to verify information. We're not equipped to do that. Our business... is to accelerate the circulation of information that is favorable to us... That's what we did. We didn't assert that there were death camps in Bosnia, we let it be known that Newsday asserted it."

Pressed by Morlino, Harff insisted, "We're professionals. We had work to do and we did it. We're not paid to practice morality."

Journalists, on the other hand, have taken great pains to point out that they practice morality. In this regard, their continued silence on the question of evidence--while repeating claims without any substantiation--is confusing.

Further Reading:

» Diana Johnstone: Srebrenica Revisited

» Source Watch: Ruder Finn's work for Croatia

» Partial transcript of James Harff's comments to Jacques Morlino

» National Post: International Media Under Attack in Serbia

» George Kenney: Kosovo: On Ends and Means

» George Kenney: Steering Clear of Balkan Shoals

» George Kenney: A Premature Death

» Michael Parenti: The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia

» Michael Parenti: The Media and their Atrocities

» Michael Parenti: The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic

» Ruder Finn: Official Site

Part three of Dru Oja Jay's series on the former Yugoslavia looks at the role of the media in shaping the conflict.