The Dominion - Globe and Mail

Machetes, Ethnic Conflict and Reductionism

dru — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:44:03 +0000

Racist assumptions mar western media coverage of Kenya

Arriving back in Montreal after a brief journey to my home country of Kenya during the December elections there, I went online to get the latest updates. In the days immediately following the election on December 27 the incumbent President Kibaki stole the vote and had himself sworn in before a motley group of dejected government officials. Opposition supporters rose up to protest the rigged result. Ironically, the only source of news in Kenya before I left was the BBC. The government had banned the local media from reporting any conflict, leaving the country in a domestic media blackout.

Reading media reports from Montreal, I found myself more confused and afraid than when I was still in Kenya. According to many of these reports, my country was suddenly in the midst of a "civil war," or even a "genocide," not unlike the stories the media told about Rwanda in 1994. It was as if the situation could be reduced to a few violent images, like those of machete-wielding youth dancing next to burning houses.

Among the mainstream media's favourite words when referring to the current political crisis in Kenya are "ethnic," "chaos" and "tribal." In its report on January 27, the Los Angeles Times carried the title "'Tribal war' spreads in Kenya." The same article provided almost no historical context or explanation for how this "tribal war" was linked to the December elections, save for two paragraphs that clumsily summed up the country's history since its independence in 1963.

The word "tribal" itself is denied specific meaning. Kenya is composed of more than 40 ethnic groups, none of which media reports have attempted to describe with any accuracy. Instead, we get scant descriptions of men from the Kalenjin or Luo ethnic groups "at war" with their Kikuyu neighbours.

Again and again, the corporate media has reduced complex political events to simple binary conflicts. In Rwanda, it is the "Hutu" versus the "Tutsi." In Sudan-- the "Arabs" versus the "Africans" or the "Muslims" versus the "Christians." In the vast territory of the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, the "Hema" fight against the "Lendu."

All these groups do exist on the African continent, but not as rigidly fixed identities dating from time immemorial. Identities are complex and often fluid in nature, sometimes hardening in the crucible of political movements or colonial struggles. Simplifying every violent episode down to an “ethnic conflict” has a familiar effect: making every conflict on the African continent seem irrational, chaotic, and without historical precedent.

The BBC’s reporting is no less culpable for oversimplifications. On one of the broadcaster's news pages, provocative quotes entice readers: “We will start the war. We will divide Kenya.” These are the words selected by the BBC to reflect the views of one Kalenjin "leader," Jackson Kibbur. Readers relying on the BBC to find out about the Kalenjin are likely to assume that he represents the views of all Kalenjin. Elsewhere in the article, snippets that seem to have been cut and pasted from an action film are quoted in isolation. “We will of course kill them,” an interviewee is reported to have said of the Kikuyu.

This variety of sensationalism and oversimplification is not atypical of corporate media reporting from Africa. Their representations perpetuate the racist assumptions that have historically influenced western perceptions of "Africans" as barbaric, primitive and inherently destructive. Such representations also have the advantage of justifying external intervention in the region which in most cases serves to disguise many different kinds of exploitation.

Western journalists reporting on the current situation in Kenya frequently approach their work with an air of adventure and sensationalism mixed with disappointment at the direction in which Kenya is moving. Doug Miller, the host of "Amandla!" -- a radio program on Montreal's CKUT dedicated to political events in Africa -- says this approach does not help readers understand what is going on.

Miller praises the Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen for her "wonderful stuff on AIDS in Southern Africa," but criticized her approach to the political crisis in Kenya. It is, he says, a "cheap thrill kind of journalism."

"The emphasis was on her going into the 'valley of death' and facing these bloodthirsty warriors. It's an awful attraction for a journalist to go out there. But is it giving us any insight into the situation? I don't think so."

In her article, entitled "Into the Valley of Death," Nolen writes, "the Kenya I travelled through this week was not a country I recognized ... the Kenya that was prospering and ambitious and dignified and peaceful." Nolen is echoing a frequent refrain in the media since the conflict: that Kenya was the last remaining "democracy" -- the only hope on a continent ravaged by senseless violence. In the words of one writer and according to the sentiment of many, the situation is a "tragic setback for democracy in Africa."

Missing Colonialism and Class

Celebrated Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o has observed that the current crisis does indeed concern two tribes: not tribes based on ethnic identity, but on the divide between "the haves and the have-nots." It is not accidental that much of the violence has taken place in Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa and also in Mathare, another collection of slums.

Writing for African news publication Pambazuka, Nunu Kidane and Walter Turner remark that the people living in Kibera and Mathare have "nothing to fear and nothing to lose." Running battles between armed police and residents of Kibera were fought in the post-election period, while the middle-classes and elites remained largely unaffected by such conflicts. The media has neglected to report sufficiently on the heavy-handed tactics of repression used by the Kenyan police and the notorious paramilitary General Service Unit in areas like Kibera and Mathare.

Nonetheless, Kibera has attracted international attention; it is becoming increasingly popular as a venue for "slum tourism." Reuters correspondent Andrew Cawthorne recently wrote of Kibera: "Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour."

How, then, to make sense of the situation in Kenya while avoiding the pitfalls of sensationalistic reporting and racist assumptions?

If the media claim this is an ethnic conflict, how did it begin? When did it begin? It is important to first differentiate between the different acts of "violence" that are taking place in Kenya. Security forces are responsible for a large number of the killings. Acting on government orders immediately after the election results were announced, they have largely been operating on a shoot-to-kill policy.

Disturbing scenes of police brutality have been aired on local television. In one case, a young man in western Kisumu -- a region with a large number of opposition supports -- is shown taunting the police by sticking his tongue out and jumping up and down. A police officer runs toward him, shoots him from a few feet away and kicks him in the ribs. Little or none of this makes it into corporate media reports.

As “ethnic violence,” it certainly did not emerge out of nowhere, and not all members of the Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Luo communities are bent on destroying each other. But what other impression would people get when they read headlines like “Rival Kenyan tribes face off with machetes and clubs” next to photographs of black Africans holding weapons, silhouetted by the sun?

Certainly it is not ordinary Kenyans who benefit from the climate of terror stoked by politicians who manipulate ethnic differences to serve their own political agendas. They have mobilized gangs of young men, who are marginalized and cut off from any participation in the country’s economy, to target ethnic groups, thus prompting revenge attacks.

I received an alarming text message from a friend who had to leave home for fear of being targeted by members of the Kikuyu community. "Am ok," it read, "There were revenge attacks from Kikuyus as the place is predominantly Kikuyu. Looking for another house." The same friend was rushing to the Rift Valley three weeks ago to help evacuate members of the Kikuyu community who were being targeted by Kalenjin supporters of the opposition in the elections.

These kinds of stories -- of ordinary Kenyans who are trying to help each other and who are troubled and alarmed by what is happening as the result of a power struggle between two men -- are not covered by the many foreign correspondents visiting Kenya.

A notable exception to the lack of critical and accurate coverage in the corporate media was an article by author Caroline Elkins, who wrote about Kenya's national resistance movement in her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Writing in the Washington Post, Elkins explains: "If you're looking for the origins of Kenya's ethnic tensions, look to its colonial past... we are often told that age-old tribal hatreds drive today's conflicts in Africa. In fact, both ethnic conflict and its attendant grievances are colonial phenomena."

In Kenya, says Elkins, the British spent much of their time trying to keep the Kikuyu and Luo divided for fear that if they united, the colonial order in the country would collapse. A Kikuyu-Luo alliance in the 1950s forced the British to release Jomo Kenyatta, who would later become the country's first president, from a colonial detention camp and hastened the removal of the British colonial structure. But the alliance was short-lived, and the imperial "divide-and-rule" policy was applied time and again in Britain's colonies. The policy was strong enough to create the "ethnic units" that are now playing into the hands of elites.

These same elites, carefully cultivated by the British to protect their geopolitical interests in the region, took control of the legal systems left behind that, according to Elkins, "facilitated tyranny, oppression and poverty rather than open, accountable government."

We also have to consider the many other factors that make possible the kind of violence currently taking place. Kenya is a very poor country whose more serious troubles concern low wages, unemployment, structural poverty, lack of social security, poorly funded health and education systems and lack of access to land and resources.

Doug Miller of "Amandla!" says, "It is no wonder that the structural poverty imposed on Africa throughout history has created an underclass of young people who have no hope and no future. Many people are getting an education but there is nowhere to go with it."

"The economies have been undermined by world capitalism. Even if you do what they say and you grow tobacco or something, you get crap prices and you can't live off what you do as a farmer. What this is about is people with no access to resources in a country where they can't do anything and a rich person can come by with any amount of money and mobilize them into what I call 'the army of the unemployed.'"

It is these armies of disenfranchised youth that have been mobilized to set Kenyan against Kenyan. Understanding the origins for their exclusion will bring us closer to transcending the stereotypes that dominate Western media reportage, and perhaps a little closer to envisioning a resolution.

Machete-wielding men

Daily Life

Burma and Democracy Protests: Where is the coverage of Ivanhoe?

dru — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:16:09 +0000

burma1.jpg

Burma (aka Myanmar) has been on the front page of the Globe and Mail twice this week, and has been featured by many other publications and media outlets, as monks and pro-democracy protesters are mercilessly killed on the orders of the military junta that rules the country.

This has spawned a whole outpouring of solidarity and concern in various forms, as should be expected.

But the media coverage has been truly bizarre, and it seriously compromises the aims of that solidarity. The massive coverage given to the Burmese crackdown raises two very serious questions, the premises of which are somewhat contradictory:

1. Where was the the media outrage when this was happening in Haiti?

Mark Mackinnon's New Cold War

dru — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:48:21 +0000

Canada, the US and democracy promotion in the former Soviet republics

Mark Mackinnon's new book opens with a tale of two large buildings blown up by terrorists. The president, until then an unremarkable leader with deep ties to the country's secretive intelligence agency, seizes on the tragedy by launching a war against the terrorists. Suddenly popular for his decisive strikes, the president sends troops to a small Muslim country that had been occupied, then abandoned by previous administrations. He uses the urgency of war as a pretext for consolidating power, naming his lackeys to key positions. The "oligarchs" of the country, Mackinnon writes, proceeded to set up a system of "managed democracy," where the illusion of choice and a popular longing for stability cover up the fact that fundamental decisions are made in an undemocratic fashion and power remains concentrated in the hands of the few.

Mackinnon, who is currently the Middle East bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, is of course talking about Russia, and its president, ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin--though if Mackinnon notices parallels with another country, he doesn't say so. The Muslim country is Chechnya and the terrorist attacks were against two apartment buildings in the town of Ryazan, 200km southeast of Moscow. Questions were raised about KGB involvement.

Mackinnon's book is The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union.

Almost without exception, Canadian reporters find it a lot easier to cut through PR spin and official lies when they're covering foreign governments--especially when those governments are seen as rivals of Canada or its close partner, the US. But when the subject is closer to home, their critical acumen suddenly wilts.

Mackinnon suffers from this common affliction less than most reporters. One gets the sense that it's a conscious choice, but still a tentative one.

Over the last seven years, the US State Department, the Soros Foundation and several partner organizations have orchestrated a series of "democratic revolutions" in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And, during those years, each "revolution," whether attempted or successful, has been portrayed by journalists as a spontaneous uprising of freedom-loving citizens receiving inspiration and moral support from their brothers and sisters in the West.

Evidence that this support also involved hundreds of millions of dollars, meddling with choices of candidates and changes to foreign and domestic policies has been widely available. And yet, for the last seven years, this information has been almost entirely suppressed.

Perhaps the most glaring evidence of suppression came when the Associated Press (AP) ran a story on December 11, 2004--at the height of the "Orange Revolution"--noting that the Bush Administration had given $65 million to political groups in Ukraine, though none of it went "directly" to political parties. It was "funneled," the report said, through other groups. Many media outlets in Canada--notably the Globe and Mail and the CBC--rely on the AP, but none ran the story. On the same day, CBC.ca published four other stories from the AP about Ukraine's political upheaval, but did not see fit to include the one that tepidly investigated US funding.

Similarly, books by William Robinson, Eva Golinger and others have exposed US funding of political parties abroad, but have not been discussed by the corporate press.

Canada's role went unreported until two and a half years later, when--coinciding with the release of The New Cold War--the Globe and Mail finally saw fit to publish an account, written by Mackinnon. The Canadian embassy, Mackinnon reported, "spent a half-million dollars promoting 'fair elections' in a country that shares no border with Canada and is a negligible trading partner." Canadian funding of election observers had been reported before, but the fact that the money had been only a part of an orchestrated attempt to influence elections had not.

For reasons that remain obscure, the editors of the Globe decided, after seven years of silence, to allow Mackinnon to tell the public about what Western money has been up to in the former Soviet Union. Perhaps they were influenced by Mackinnon's choice to write a book about the topic; perhaps it was decided that it was time to let the cat out of the bag.

It's a fascinating account. Mackinnon starts in Serbia in 2000, where the West, after funding opposition groups and "independent media" that provided a constant stream of coverage critical of the government--as well as dropping 20,000 tonnes of bombs on the country--finally succeeded in toppling the last stubborn holdout against neoliberalism in Europe.

Mackinnon describes in detail how Western funding--an effort spearheaded by billionaire George Soros--flowed to four principle areas: Otpor (Serbian for 'resistance'), a student-heavy youth movement that used grafitti, street theatre and non-violent demonstrations to channel negative political sentiments against the Milosevic government; CeSID, a group of election monitors that existed to "catch Milosevic in the act if he ever again tried to manipulate the results of an election"; B92, a radio station that provided a steady supply of anti-regime news and the edgy rock stylings of Nirvana and the Clash; and assorted NGOs were given funding to raise "issues"--which Mackinnon calls "the problems with the power-that-is, as defined by the groups' Western sponsors." The Canadian embassy in Belgrade, he notes, was a venue for many donor meetings.

Finally, disparate opposition parties had to be united. This was facilitated by then-US Secretary of State Madeline Albright and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who told opposition leaders not to run, but to join a "democratic coalition" with the relatively unknown lawyer Vojislav Kostunica as the sole opposition candidate for the presidency. The Western-funded opposition leaders, who didn't have a lot of say in the matter, agreed.

It worked. Kostunica won the vote, the election monitors quickly announced their version of the results, which were broadcast via B92 and other Western-sponsored media outlets, and tens of thousands poured into the streets to protest Milosevic's attempted vote-rigging in a demonstration led by the pseudo-anarchist group Otpor. Milosevic, having lost his "pillars of support" in the courts, police and bureaucracy, resigned soon after. "Seven months later," Mackinnon writes, "Slobodan Milosevic would be in The Hague."

The Serbian "revolution" became the model: fund "independent media," NGOs and election observers; force the opposition to unite around one selected candidate; and fund and train a spray-paint-wielding, freedom-loving group of angry students united by no program other than opposition to the regime. The model was used successfully in Georgia ("the Rose Revolution"), Ukraine ("the Orange Revolution") and unsuccessfully in Belarus, where denim was the preferred symbol. The New Cold War has chapters for each of these, and Mackinnon delves deep into the details of the funding arrangements and political coalitions built with Western support.

Mackinnon seems to harbour few illusions about the US exercise of power. His overall thesis is that, in the former Soviet Union, the US has used "democratic revolutions" to further its geopolitical interests; control of oil supply and pipelines, and the isolation of Russia, its main competitor in the region. He notes that in many cases--Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, for example--repressive regimes receive the hearty support of the US, while only Russian-allied governments are singled out for the democracy promotion treatment.

And while Mackinnon may be too polite to mention it, his account significantly contradicts the reporting regularly vetted by his editors and written by his colleagues. Milosevic, for example, is not the "Butcher of the Balkans" of Western media lore. Serbia was "not the outright dictatorship it was often portrayed in the Western media to be," Mackinnon writes. "In fact, it was more like an early version of the 'managed democracy' [of Putin's Russia]." He is frank about the effects of the bombing and sanctions on Serbia, which were devastating.

But in other ways, Mackinnon swallows the propaganda whole. He repeats the official NATO line on Kosovo, for example, neglecting to note that the US and others were funding drug-dealing autocratic militias like the Kosovo Liberation Army, the subject of many misleading, laudatory reports by Mackinnon's colleagues circa 2000.

More fundamentally, Mackinnon ignores the West's central role in the destabilization of Yugoslavia after its government balked at further implementation of IMF reforms that were already causing misery. Mackinnon experiences and discusses the phenomenon of destabilization-by-privatization in most of the countries he covers, but seems unable to trace it back to its common source, or see it as principle of US and European foreign policy.

Former Russian Politburo operative Alexander Yakovlev tells Mackinnon that Russia's politicians had "pushed the economic reforms too far, too fast" creating "a criminalized economy and state where residents came to equate terms like 'liberal' and 'democracy' with corruption, poverty and helplessness."

In one of the more dramatic moments in the book, the 82-year-old Yakovlev takes responsibility, saying: "We must confess that what is now going on is not the fault of those who are doing it... It's us who are guilty. We made some very serious errors."

In Mackinnon's world, the rapid dismantling and privatization of the state-run economy--which left millions in poverty and despair--is an explanation for the Russian and Belarussian peoples' love affair with strongman presidents who curb liberties, marginalize opposition, control the media and maintain stabilnost, stability. But somehow, the ideology behind the IMF-driven devastation doesn't make it into Mackinnon's analysis of the motivations behind "New Cold War."

Mackinnon notices the most literal US interests: oil and the Americans' fight for regional influence with Russia. But what escapes his account is the broader intolerance for governments that assert their independence and maintain the ability to direct their own economic development.

Energy and pipeline politics are a plausible explanation for the US's interest in the southern former Soviet republics. He might have added that the US used Georgia as a staging ground during the Iraq war. When it comes to Serbia, Mackinnon is forced to rely on an implausible account of NATO carrying out a moral mission to prevent genocide. The claim no longer makes any sense, given available evidence, but remains prevalent in the Western press.

Mackinnon mentions Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela in passing. In all of these places, attempts have been made to overthrow the governments. In Venezuela, a US-backed military coup was quickly overturned. In Haiti, a Canadian- and US-led coup resulted in a human rights catastrophe that is ongoing and recent elections confirmed that the party that was deposed remained more popular than the alternative presented by the economic elite. In Cuba, attempts to overthrow the government have been thwarted for half a century.

To explain these additional, more violent attempts at "regime change," it is not enough to cite the literal interests. Venezuela has considerable oil, but Cuba's natural resources do not make it a major strategic asset, and, by this standard, Haiti even less so. To explain why the US government provided millions of dollars to political parties, NGOs and opposition groups in these countries requires an understanding of neoliberal ideology and its origins in the Cold War and beyond.

This much would be evident if Mackinnon added some much-needed historical context to his account of modern-day methods of regime change. In his book Killing Hope, William Blum documents over 50 US interventions in foreign governments since 1945. History has shown these to be overwhelmingly anti-democratic, if not outright catastrophic. Even mild social-democratic reforms of government in tiny countries were overwhelmed by military attacks.

If true democracy involves self-determination--and at least the theoretical ability to refuse the dictates of the "Washington Consensus" or the IMF--then any evaluation of democracy promotion as the tool of US foreign policy has to reckon with this history. Mackinnon's account does not and remains almost resolutely ahistorical.

The last chapter of The New Cold War, entitled "Afterglow," is dedicated to evaluating the ultimate effects of democracy promotion in the former Soviet republics. It is Mackinnon's weakest chapter. Mackinnon limits himself to asking whether things are better now than before. The frame of the question lowers expectations and severely stunts the democratic imagination.

If one sets aside these considerations, then it is still possible for curiosity to get the better of the reader. Is it possible that good things can come even from cynical motivations? Liberal writers like Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens made similar arguments in support of the Iraq war and Mackinnon flirts with the idea when he wonders whether young activists in Serbia and Ukraine were using the US, or whether the US was using them.

So, did things get better? The information Mackinnon presents in his answer is extremely vague.

In Serbia, he says, life is much better. The revolution hasn't brought too many benefits to the daily lives of Serbs, a cab driver tells Mackinnon. However, he writes, "The era of gasoline shortages and of young men being sent off to fight for a 'Greater Serbia' was long past and the late-night laughter and music that spilled out of Belgrade's packed restaurants spoke to an optimism unheard of under the old regime."

In this and many other cases, Mackinnon buys a well-diffused propaganda line without looking at the facts. Straying from the meticulous detail he brings to his reporting of the ins and outs of democracy promotion, Mackinnon seems to believe that it was a diabolical scheme by Milosevic--and not economic sanctions or bombing and subsequent destruction of the bulk of Serbia's state-owned industrial infrastructure--that led to gasoline shortages. Mackinnon admonishes Serbs to face up to their role in the war, while letting NATO's bombing campaign, which left tonnes of depleted uranium, flooded the Danube with hundreds of tonnes of toxic chemicals, and incinerated 80,000 tonnes of crude oil (thus the gasoline shortages), off the hook.

In Georgia, Mackinnon again relies on nightlife in the capital city as an indicator of the country's democratic well-being. "The city bubbled with a sense that things were starting to move in the right direction...swish Japanese restaurants, Irish pubs and French wine bars were popping up on seemingly every corner." The leisure activities of the economic elite are just that; there are many ways to judge the well-being of a country, but to rely on the sights and sounds of well-heeled city dwellers enjoying themselves to the exclusion of other criteria is peculiar.

Mackinnon remarks in passing that the Western-backed regime of Saakashvili has resulted in "declining freedom of the press," but has "boosted the economy."

In Ukraine, "newspapers and television stations could and did criticize or caricature whomever they wanted," but the Western-backed free market ideologue Yuschenko made a series of blunders and unpopular moves, resulting in major electoral setbacks for his party a few years after the "revolution" that brought them to power.

Strangely, Mackinnon's sources--other than the odd cab driver--seem to consist entirely of the people receiving funding from the West. Independent critics, apart from aging and deposed former politicians, are virtually nonexistent in his reporting.

Still, the question: did the West do good? In the final pages, Mackinnon is equivocal and even indecisive.

Some countries are "freer and thus better," but the Western funding has made it more likely for repressive regimes to crack down on would-be democratizing forces. In Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, he is critical of the lack of funds for democratic promotion, leaving local NGOs and opposition groups hanging. He attributes this inconsistency to arrangements where American needs are better served by repressive regimes. In other parts of the chapter, he finds democracy promotion as a whole to be problematic.

At one point, he comments that "the help that [US agencies] gave to political parties in countries like Ukraine would have been illegal had a Ukrainian NGO been giving such aid to the Democrats or Republicans." One also imagines that Canadians would not be impressed if Venezuela, for example, gave millions of dollars to the NDP. Indeed, the prospect seems as ridiculous as it is unlikely...and illegal.

Mackinnon's information suggests, though he does not say it outright, that associating the idea of "democracy" and its attendant freedoms with Western funding and US-led meddling in the governance of countries is likely to undermine legitimate grassroots efforts at democratization. For example, dissidents in Russia tell Mackinnon that when they gather to demonstrate, people often look at them spitefully and ask who is paying them to stand in the street. In one case, Mackinnon points out that a report from an authoritarian government claiming that dissidents are pawns of the West is dead-on.

Mackinnon's assessment does not follow this evidence to its conclusion; he doesn't stray from the view that alignment with either the US or Russia are the only options for countries in the region.

While alignment with one empire or another may seem to be inevitable, Mackinnon's implicit Russia-or-US manicheanism obviates other ways of promoting democracy. Mackinnon ignores, for example, a decades-long tradition of grassroots solidarity with democratic forces in countries--predominantly in Latin America--where dictators were often financially backed and armed by the US government. Such movements were usually limited to curbing excessive repression rather than sponsoring democratic revolutions, but this lack of power can be attributed, at least in part, to the lack of media coverage from mainstream journalists like Mackinnon.

If one is concerned with democratic decision-making, then surely one is also concerned with the ability of countries to make decisions independently of the meddling of foreign powers. Mackinnon also does not address how such independence might be brought about. One can speculate that it would involve preventing the aforementioned meddling.

The New Cold War is notable for its thorough account of the internal workings of democracy promotion and the point of view of those receiving the funding. Those looking for an analysis that bring such a thorough accounting to its actual aims and effects, however, will have to look elsewhere.

New Cold War

Orange Revolution

Mackinnon on Post-Soviet Revolutions, take II

dru — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:52:38 +0000

Early descriptions of Mark Mackinnon's new book, The New Cold War received a skeptical reaction from this corner -- to say the least -- and Stefan Christoff's and my critique of his coverage in Lebanon resulted in a bit of a scrap via email.

Arms makers see opportunity in Gulf tension

hillarybain — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:01:37 +0000

You can always count on the business section of the Globe to give you the real news, without the spin.

Bruce Konviser on Serbia

dru — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:45:56 +0000

In today's Globe, Bruce Konviser hits all the major notes of Globe and Mail foreign coverage: unspecified "pro-western reforms" are good, "nationalism" is "destabilizing", and why should any facts get in the way of us reporting that story once again.

I forgot the most important one: history doesn't exist, and if it does, it doesn't matter.

(For a long, fascinating, historical take on whether Serbia should join the EU, check out this essay of sorts by John Bosnitch)

Mark Mackinnon's Counter-Excerpt

dru — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:29:52 +0000

Mark Mackinnon sent in the highlighted article excerpt in response to the ongoing discussion about Mark MacKinnon's coverage in Lebanon.

For his remarks, read the discussion.

* * *

From "Hezbollah protestors rally against government," by Mark MacKinnon.

Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 2, 2006.

(snip)
The demonstrators accused the government, which has supported international calls for Hezbollah to surrender its weapons, of being run by the U.S. embassy. "Down with Feltman's government!" was a popular chant, referring to Jeffery Feltman, the U.S. ambassador.

Mark Mackinnon Quotes Hezbollah

dru — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:14:23 +0000

The following is a list of all the quotes (or near-quotes) I could find in nineteen articles written by Mark MacKinnon about the situation in Lebanon over a three week period. This serves as an appendix of sorts to our response to MacKinnon's response to the recent analysis of MacKinnon's reporting. But it also provides a degree of insight into how systematically MacKinnon avoids any discussion of the motivation factors behind the massive demonstrations that are still occupying downtown Beirut.

Globe and Lebanon

dru — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:34:38 +0000

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail published a half-decent piece about the sit ins in Beirut. I can't help but wonder if the sudden improvement in coverage (which is to say, conformity with well-established facts) had something to do with this analysis that the Dominion published two weeks ago of Mark Mackinnon's wildly misleading coverage of the same protests.

The crux of that analysis was that Mark Mackinnon probably wouldn't mind telling the truth, but likes having his job and pleasing his editors better than he likes telling the truth. (Not unlike a lot of people, probably...) And that, given the opportunity, Mackinnon probably wouldn't have a personal problem with reporting accurately. It's just that when his editors want something different, his career takes precedence.

The Manichean Middle East of Mark MacKinnon

dru — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:12:40 +0000

Globe and Mail coverage of Lebanon suffers from ideological interventions

When newspapers send correspondents afield to report on world events, the position is fraught with opportunity and responsibility. Opportunity to share meaningful insight into current events, and responsibility to accurately report on them.

In many cases, unfortunately, other motivations prevail. For the owners and editors of the few papers that shell out for foreign correspondents, the opportunity to shape public opinion seems too tempting to pass up, even if it comes at the expense of insight and accuracy.

The Globe and Mail's Middle East correspondent Mark MacKinnon has been publishing dispatches on the ongoing political crisis in Lebanon regularly from Beirut. It should be noted that MacKinnon's reports are often superior to the generic newswire reports carried by many newspapers. Regrettably, this speaks more to the skewed quality of wire reports and less to the Globe correspondent's capacity to promote accurate understanding of events in Lebanon.

It's no secret that the Globe and Mail prefers certain political actors in Lebanon to others. When in 2005, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese demonstrated in response to the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri, eventually resulting in the withdrawal of Syrian troops, amidst intense US pressure on Damascus, the Globe ran a series of front page stories, touting the "pro-Western" "Cedar Revolution" that was sweeping the country. Globe editorialists praised the IMF-mandated "free market" reforms of "pro-Western" forces, which won a Parliamentary majority in the subsequent elections.

When larger street protests hit Beirut in recent weeks, however, Globe coverage was to be found in small doses, nowhere near the front page. It is in this context that Mark MacKinnon's frequent reports are published.

MacKinnon's reporting from Beirut is dominated by a neat division of Lebanese politics into "pro-Syrian" and "pro-Western" camps, a theme that is repeated multiple times in every one of 19 dispatches that were examined for this analysis. On the other hand, MacKinnon barely mentions the summer Israeli offensive that destroyed most of the country's civil-infrastructure, and killed thousands, mostly civilians. MacKinnon mentions the offensive in less than half of the reports we examined, and then usually only in passing.

A look at the evidence shows that MacKinnon's Syria-vs-West division is erroneous, while Israel's summer offensive is the defining factor in the current political situation on the streets of Beirut.

MacKinnon cites Gen. Michel Aoun, the Christian leader of the "Free Patriotic Movement" party, as one of the key supporters of the Hezbollah-led protests, which he constantly characterizes as "pro-Syrian." Overlooked by MacKinnon is the fact that Aoun was driven to exile in France by Syrian and allied Lebanese factions in 1990, and returned only with the withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005. As a result, it is awkward to characterize Aoun as simply "pro-Syrian."

Hezbollah, on the other hand, maintains a strategic alliance with the government in Damascus, though this is far from the central focus of the current protests.

Why do these unlikely allies find themselves demanding a greater share of cabinet seats? Because, as MacKinnon mentions in passing in one article (but does not mention at all in 17 out of 19 reports on the subject), "recent opinion polls suggest Hezbollah and Gen. Aoun would combine to win more seats than the government in a snap election."

Why is this? It has everything to do with the Israeli bombing of Lebanon that killed 1,100 people, displaced a full quarter of the country's population, and systematically destroyed its key infrastructure, including roads, airports, power stations, hospitals, schools and refugee shelters.

During the assault, Hezbollah led fierce counter-attacks, ultimately limiting the Israeli army's ability to maintain a hold on the ground in southern Lebanon, and winning massive support from the Lebanese for their resistance.

The relatively well financed government and state institutions of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora--the leader of MacKinnon's pro-Western camp--by contrast, did almost nothing to provide aid to many affected by the war, and offered no military defence against the Israeli attacks despite multiple bombings of Lebanese military bases.

At the height of the Israeli bombings, Ghassan Makarem of the grassroots relief organization Samidoun, told CKUT Radio that the "internally displaced Lebanese support for the resistance hasn't wavered due to the level of aggression on the part of Israel."

"Until now, there has been no action from the government or by the government agencies," Maskarem added, "while many people in regions of Lebanon who are traditionally not supportive of Hezbollah are shifting their support towards the resistance."

In stark contrast to the silence of Lebanese state powers during the war, the Free Patriotic Movement, Gen. Aoun's political support base, mobilized hundreds of volunteers to provide frontline medical and humanitarian relief for internally displaced refugees from southern Lebanon, while thousands more opened their homes as impromptu shelters in the heart of East Beirut, a traditionally Christian area.

According to a broadly reported opinion poll conducted throughout the country in late July 2006 by Lebanon's main polling institute, the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 per cent of Lebanese supported Hezbollah during the war.

While widely recognized in Lebanon, this reality doesn't fit with the Globe and Mail's image of the region. MacKinnon in particular goes out of his way to warn readers that despite the specific political demands [which his reports do not mention], clashes between demonstrators in the streets are "an ominous sign that efforts by the Shia Hezbollah movement to bring down the Sunni-led government... could rapidly devolve into all out sectarian conflict."

The warning would have been tempered had MacKinnon mentioned that in addition to Gen. Aoun's Christian party, some significant Sunni and Druze political parties are also supporting the demonstrations. Could the message of demonstrators in Lebanon be driven by something other than religion given that parties from all religious sects in Lebanon are on the streets with Hezbollah?

It's not even clear from MacKinnon's reports what motivates Hezbollah's demands, or what motivates the thousands of demonstrators to remain in the streets of Beirut. Further inquiry revealed that the reason for this is that he did not ask.

In a recent interview with CKUT Radio in Montreal, MacKinnon was asked whether he had interviewed any of the leaders of the demonstrations.

"Since it began... No," MacKinnon responded, "because they are quite busy people and in the specific case of [Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan] Nasrallah he hasn't given any interviews since the summer war with Israel."

However, Hezbollah political leaders have been regularly speaking with the Western press at the Beirut demonstrations. Just this week Mahmoud Komati, deputy head of Hezbollah's political bureau gave a widely published interview to the Associated Press.

"Now we are demanding it [greater government share], because our experience during the war and the performance of the government has made us unsure. On several occasions they pressured us to lay down our weapons while we were fighting a war," Komati told the Associated Press on December 15th, presenting a political argument against the current government, not a sectarian one.

Despite the readily available Hezbollah spokespeople and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators clogging central Beirut, MacKinnon did not quote a single Hezbollah representative about the reasons for the demonstrations. He mentions the reasons for calling the demonstrations twice, and only in passing. MacKinnon, however, did manage to secure an interview with Sheik Sobhi Tufeili in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley.

Sheik Tufeili, a former secretary general of Hezbollah no longer associated with the party, has been comparatively absent from Lebanese politics in recent years. Living in a compound and flanked by bodyguards, Tufeili is wanted by the Lebanese authorities. Through fragmented quotations, paraded as confessions extracted by MacKinnon, Tufeili denounces the current Hezbollah leadership.

Highlighting Sheik Tufeili without featuring any of the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese on the streets of Beirut is puzzling.

It's not clear that the poor quality of his coverage is entirely MacKinnon's doing, though it is difficult to imagine that he is not aware that his coverage does not match the facts on the ground.

Indeed, MacKinnon's writing is more in touch with reality in his online diary than it is in reports that appear in print.

Shortly after the UN-brokered ceasefire in August, MacKinnon visited southern Lebanon. "No picture or 1,000 words of mine can ever capture what these places look like. In towns that once weren't much different from some places in Greece or Italy, there's simply nothing left standing," wrote MacKinnon. "Just piles of rubble where people's homes and lives used to be."

Today, a responsible journalist--or a minimally competent one--would have to ask why residents of the very same villages bombed by Israel and described by MacKinnon above are now demonstrating for political change in Beirut.

It's hard to imagine that MacKinnon is ignorant of this direct connection between the current demonstrations and the recent Israeli attack. A more likely explanation is that he is conscious of the interests of his own career, knows what his editors want to hear, and is willing to severely compromise his own journalism in service of both.

If MacKinnon were to be replaced, his successor may have a slightly different journalistic style. The ideological and political exigencies of the Globe and Mail's editorial board, however, would remain. We predict the result would hardly be an improvement, regardless of the skill of the correspondent.

In a recent op/ed in Montreal's La Presse, Fabrice Balanche took reporters to task for simplistic reporting along the same lines as MacKinnon's.

"Manicheanism is de rigeur," Balanche writes. "Certainly it is difficult to understand Lebanon and to explain it in a few minutes to [an audience], but all the same, lets stop the caricatures."

Balanche cites facts that show the story of pro-Syrian battling pro-West forces to be bogus. But while Balanche's modest appeal to pay attention to reality is compelling, corporate media like the Globe have long-standing and equally compelling reasons of their own to ignore it.

* * *

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that "Despite the readily available Hezbollah spokespeople and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators clogging central Beirut, MacKinnon did not quote a single Hezbollah representative while he was there." As written, this passage was inaccurate. The Dominion regrets the error.

Opposition Protests

Bombed Building, Beirut

On The Globe and Mail's High Standards

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:51:53 +0000

The Lancet, Haiti and the manufacture of controversy

Prisoners in a Port-au-Prince jail demonstrate on the roof after UN troops were accused of killing prisoners. photo: Randall White/HaitiAction.net

On occasion, a study or report will appear that significantly embarrasses--or even shames--people in positions of power. In such cases, one can expect those who see themselves as being slighted to mobilize their resources to attack those whose findings caused them to suffer. The result is an open battle over who has the ability to state facts without becoming the centre of "controversy."

This is the case with UK-based medical journal The Lancet's recent study that suggests that after the US- and Canada-backed overthrow of Haiti's government, an estimated 8 000 people were killed, and 35 000 women were sexually assaulted in Port-au-Prince. The study, which was peer-reviewed by four advisors, interviewed a random sample of residents of Haiti's capital.

[A similar case involving Human Rights Watch and Lebanon was recently explored in an article by Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook.]

Because Canadian officials have repeatedly claimed that Canada's intervention was conducted in order to improve the human rights situation, and because Canada is responsible for training and vetting the police officers who are named as a significant source of political violence (along with UN soldiers), the report qualifies as embarrassing.

At least two similarly high-profile human rights reports--from teams from the University of Miami and Harvard University--long ago reached very similar conclusions about the coup and the attendant increase in political violence. Despite their thorough documentation, the Canadian media almost entirely ignored both reports.

The Lancet report, perhaps in part due to the publication's high profile, proved harder to ignore. In its last weekend edition, the Montreal Gazette published a front-page story on the findings. The next day, a follow-up story reported that Canadian soldiers had made death threats during house raids and sexually threatened women while off-duty. The report attracted interest from CBC's The Current and As It Happens.

The response to the report, which emerged a few days later, has been characterized by its attempts to discredit the author by raising the standards by which such reports are judged to comical levels of purity.

The Globe and Mail broke from its long-standing de facto policy of not covering human rights reports that allege Canadian malpractice in Haiti with a report by Marina Jimenez under the headline "Author of Lancet article on Haiti investigated: Writer critical of Canadian peacekeepers worked at orphanage founded by Aristide."

The report raises two concerns. First, that nine years ago, Athena Kolbe, one of the report's authors, worked for an orphanage started by Jean Bertrand Aristide. Second, that she once wrote articles under the pseudonym Lyn Duff. There, the substance ends.

Jimenez quotes a letter by Charles Arthur which claims that the study could have been, "skewed or biased in order to exonerate Fanmi Lavalas/Aristide supporters from accusation of involvement in human-rights violations." Jimenez and others do not mention that Arthur and his Haiti Support Group are affiliated with numerous organizations that receive funding directly from the Canadian government as well as Rights and Democracy, an organization created by Canada's Parliament in 1988.

The Guardian, a newspaper with a more progressive reputation than the Globe, also opted to avoid covering the story until the "investigation" became news. The sub-headline reads: "Report appeared to clear Aristide camp of blame," and the story opens with "The Lancet medical journal is investigating complaints that it published a misleading account of violence in Haiti that appears to exonerate the supporters of [Aristide]."

Attentive readers, however, may be confused when they read the actual Lancet report and find the statements like the following: "Political groups on both sides of the spectrum were named as responsible for violent and criminal acts... Lavalas members and partisans of the Lavalas movement were also named as having committed such acts."

But the reason for a story's importance, such as it is, is always in the headlines: the author is being "investigated." It is only through close reading that one determines that the only source cited for the fact of the "investigation" is Kolbe herself and her editors at The Lancet. The patient reader of the Guardian will reach the fourteenth paragraph and discover Lancet publisher Richard Horton stating that, "The Lancet is checking that all the correct procedures for the research were followed."

He adds: "It is not suggested that the Lancet report had misreported its findings or that Ms Kolbe had any other agenda than the welfare of ordinary Haitians at heart."

Investigation, indeed. "Checking" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. (Jimenez, in the end, only cites Kolbe herself to establish the fact of an "investigation"; Kolbe has said she is in fact not being "investigated" and said that Jimenez falsely attributed her statement to that effect.)

In its enthusiasm for objectivity, however, the Globe, the Guardian and the Associated Press, which ran a similar story, may have lost some perspective. The Globe's Jimenez cites Rights and Democracy's Nicholas Galletti, who complains of the "author's background," calling into question a "study 'based on flawed methodology' whereby responsibility for crimes is attributed to groups without a proper criminal investigation or trial."

The question is, to whom does the standard that "responsibility" should not be delegated "without a proper investigation or trial" apply? Rights and Democracy receives millions in annual funding from the Federal Government (the "majority" of its funding, by its own account) and its president is appointed by the prime minister's office. One has only to visit the falsely-named "Non-Governmental Organization's" web site to find numerous reports on human rights that do not adhere to this standard. If it did operate by the same standard, it's not clear how it would be possible to keep track of human rights abuses in countries (Haiti, for example) where such crimes go unprosecuted.

Rights and Democracy's reports do differ in one significant respect, they almost uniformly do not inspire front-page articles that embarrass those in positions of power in Canada.

* * *

Postscript: This is not the first time that the Lancet has been attacked for a study examining the impact of a military invasion on human rights. An analyst at the UK's MediaLens pointed out some of the inconsistencies in the media's coverage of various Lancet reports.

How flimsy can the basis for a "controversy" be? Dru Oja Jay looks at the Globe's example.

The Balance of Coverage

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 21:35:44 +0000

The Canadian Media, the Middle East, and Racism

A protest in Montreal demonstrates that not everyone shares the views of Harper and much of the mainstream Canadian media. photo: CMAQ

According to the Canadian media, Israel is provoked, and then responds. For the military attacks on the Gaza Strip in late June and early July, we are told that the provocation was the June 25 operation by Palestinian resistance fighters against a military outpost near Gaza, and specifically the capture of an Israeli tank gunner.

The Palestinian operation, according to most Canadian media, was unprovoked – it could not have been provoked by the Israeli attacks leading up to the operation, though in June alone these had already killed 49 Palestinians. Nor could it have been provoked by the imprisonment of 359 Palestinian children, 105 Palestinian female adults and another 9000+ Arab males (mostly Palestinians) in Israeli jails, or by the mass starvation of Gaza. As a June 30 editorial in the Globe and Mail put it, "the onus for resolving the confrontation lies with Hamas" and while Palestinians must quietly endure tank shelling, air strikes and starvation, "Israel is within its right to respond to terrorism and violence."

Without pause, Israel has since gone on to invade Lebanon, killing hundreds of Lebanese, while Gaza continues to starve. In the Canadian media, Israel was provoked to do so, in this case by the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah.

Hizbollah has not been provoked in the same way the Palestinians have been. So what prompted their action? An obvious possibility is that they were moved to action by the Israeli assault on Gaza. By the time Hizbollah carried out its July 12 attack, the Israeli escalation following June 25 had already claimed another 67 Palestinian lives. More direct grievances with Israel include the continued Israeli imprisonment of many Lebanese, particularly Hizbollah supporters, and the Israeli live ammunition training on the Lebanese border that recently killed several Lebanese villagers. But one could barely begin to consider this on the basis of information provided by Canadian media. No attacks on Israel can have been provoked. All of Israel's attacks must be provoked and defensive.

On July 13, Prime Minister Stephen Harper revealed the extent to which this logic has come to dominate Canadian diplomacy. With the Israeli military intensifying its assault on the Lebanese population and on critical civilian infrastructure, Harper described the massive attack as a "measured" exercise of Israel's "right to defend itself." Mainstream media joined in the chorus: "Faced with such aggression, Israel had no choice but to strike back," a July 15 Globe and Mail editorial declared. The next day, several Canadians were added to the skyrocketing death count from Israeli massacres.

Israel's massacres in Gaza and southern Lebanon coincide with a shift in Canadian foreign policy. Under the last two regimes (Martin's Liberals and now Harper's Conservatives), Canada has rapidly shed any pretense of having an independent foreign policy and has aligned itself completely with the United States, Israel's chief financial backer and arms dealer. Where past Canadian regimes would have settled for silent complicity in war crimes, Harper actively cheers and participates in them. This drastic realignment of Canadian policy happens at a time when the U.S. and Israel are embarking on aggressive, criminal wars involving major human rights violations.

For Canadians to accept this, they will have to consume an equally drastic dose of racism, dehumanization, and distorted understanding. Getting them to do so may be something of a challenge. The Canadian media have taken up the task with gusto.

Aggression and defence

"No nation would stand by while its enemies bombarded its towns and cities."
–-Globeand Mail editorial, July 15

Of course, the Globe's editors were not talking about the Palestinian nation. The Palestinians are expected to stand by while Israel bombards its towns and cities, as it has been doing continuously for the past six years, with a sharp escalation in June – well before June 25, by which time 49 Palestinians had already been killed. But when Palestinians resist through armed struggle, we read on the Globe and Mail's editorial pages that Israel's "right to respond to the latest Palestinian provocations is beyond question." We cannot expect "superhuman effort" from Israel, the editors explain, and this is what would be required "to resist retaliating."

Through most of June, the situation was quite different – but then it was only Palestinians who were being killed, only Palestinians who were starving. This was, in the words of the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter, a period of "relative calm." For disturbing this calm, Palestinians bear a double responsibility: for aggression against Israel and for forcing Israel to attack Palestinians in response. As Potter insists on repeating, the ongoing Israeli assault was itself "sparked initially by the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants."

In fact, if the notion of self-defence was applied with any consistency, the operation of June 25 would be beyond reproach. Following an economic siege and recurring air strikes on their communities, Palestinian fighters based in the Gaza Strip initiated an attack against the Israeli military. This is no small feat, since Gaza's airspace and borders are under tight Israeli control, and it is difficult for a lightly armed popular resistance to bring down F-16s. Nonetheless, the fighters managed to tunnel their way underground for hundreds of metres, deep beneath Israeli fortifications, to reach a military outpost for their raid. Two Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting, as were two Palestinians, creating a very rare symmetry in the death count. Palestinian fighters also destroyed an Israeli tank, likely one of those that regularly shell Palestinian communities from such outposts. They captured the tank gunner and brought him back to Gaza as a prisoner of war.

The Palestinian resistance thus had one Israeli detainee, as against some 10,000 prisoners on the Israeli side. The resistance group offered a limited exchange. They would release the tank gunner if Israel freed Palestinian child prisoners, female prisoners, and approximately 1,000 "administrative detainees" currently in Israeli prisons without charge. A negotiated settlement reached through conditions of reciprocity and dignity could well have seen the soldier released. But Israel had a different plan.

As former Israeli intelligence director Shlomo Gazit explained, the situation served as a "pretext" for escalating military operations in Gaza. Israeli forces began a series of forceful incursions, destroying critical civilian infrastructure though air strikes, shelling Palestinian communities, and instituting a comprehensive siege on the territory. These escalations quickly revealed the Israeli goal as regime change. The Israeli military rounded up and detained 64 political leaders from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, including elected legislators and a third of the Palestinian Cabinet. It began aerial bombardment of central civilian structures housing the Palestinian Authority.

The Israeli regime responsible for these attacks enjoys thorough support from the Canadian government. Its prime minister, Ehud Olmert, visited Canada little more than a year ago. During the visit, he received a pledge from the federal government that it would maintain preferential trade policies towards Israel. Olmert also visited Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty at Queen's Park, where he helped to set up a parallel provincial trade arrangement. Joking with reporters as he presented McGuinty with a gift, Olmert asked: "Do you want us to hug?" Olmert and Canadian officials did everything but.

The Harper government strengthened links with Israel further, making Canada still more complicit in ongoing Israeli crimes. As Israeli attacks ravaged Gaza, journalists with concern for 'balance' ought to have paid attention to who was doing the killing and who the victims were.

Instead, Canadian media continued shifting focus to Palestinian culpability and encouraging the government's pro-Israel partisanship. The spin in news coverage was spelled out explicitly on editorial pages. The Toronto Star's editors called attention to "the folly of what [Palestinians] wrought by electing a Hamas government," while staking limited optimism on "the hope of a chastened Palestinian Authority" (June 29). The editors of the National Post and the Globe and Mail held Palestinians directly responsible for Israeli attacks. "That there is a humanitarian tragedy afflicting the Palestinian people there can be no doubt," a July 29 National Post editorial conceded, "but in the current context it is a tragedy entirely of their own making." On June 30, the Globe's editors hammered away at the same theme: "The main responsibility for the death and destruction that has followed [June 25] lies with Palestinian militants and leaders."

The capture of a tank gunner as a prisoner of war was translated into an act of aggression, a "kidnapping." Within a couple of weeks, the three leading Anglo-Canadian dailies – the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post – had published the name of the captured ("kidnapped") soldier more than 100 times, often alongside his age and other personal information. The Globe's Shira Herzog, reflecting a broad journalistic consensus, explained that strong Israeli retaliation was necessary: Israel "is a country that takes collective pride in the sanctity of every life, an ethos that comforts Israeli soldiers in combat who know that no human effort will be spared to rescue even a single one of them from enemy territory, dead or alive."

As for the apparent contradiction given Israel's approach to the lives of Palestinian prisoners, the issue could not be ignored entirely. On the thorny issue of child prisoners, the Globe referred readers to a front-page article on the topic it had published on June 19, titled "Getting locked up to get away from it all." The piece argued that Palestinian children view imprisonment in Israeli jails as "a dream vacation" and are getting themselves imprisoned wilfully as part of a Palestinian cultural trend. Regarding female prisoners, the paper published a June 27 report titled, "Palestinian female prisoners have 'blood on their hands.'" The title was based on a quote from the Israeli prison authority, and the article assured readers that those Palestinian women convicted in Israeli military courts were quite guilty and very bad. The Post, for its part, ran an editorial referring without distinction to all the Palestinians whom the resistance was demanding be released – children, women and "administrative detainees" alike – as "fanatics now justifiably languishing in Israeli prisons."

Canadian media thus followed the Israeli lead, prizing the sanctity of every Israeli life while holding Palestinian lives in utter contempt.

Dehumanizing Palestinians

"It is our duty to prevent any danger of losing a Jewish majority or creating an inseparable bi-national reality in the Land of Israel."
--Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, June 20, 2006 (Speech to the 35th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem)

As disturbing as it is, contempt for Palestinian life on the part of Israel and its supporters is unsurprising. It is, in fact, a necessary cornerstone of the ideology of political Zionism, which guides the Israeli political establishment and determines the core of Israeli policy.

This policy is based on the determination to establish and maintain a state with a Jewish majority on lands that have long been home to a predominantly non-Jewish native population. Pursuit of this goal has involved expelling Palestinians from these lands, prohibiting their right to return to their homes, and encouraging large-scale Zionist settlement from abroad. This is a recipe for perpetual crisis and violence. Israeli forces effectively control all of historic (mandatory) Palestine, the territory stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And despite Israel's forced exile of millions of Palestinians from these lands, the present inhabitants of this territory are in the majority not Jewish.

For Canadians to support Israel, they must adopt the Israeli perspective regarding the native population of this land, the view that the Palestinian population is an ethnic imbalance to be corrected, a problem to be dealt with, a "demographic threat" to a state which must be made "Jewish" at all costs. This thoroughly racist position frames mainstream Canadian debate.

It is hardly worth quoting the National Post on this, given that the paper is operated by CanWest Global, a media conglomerate founded by two of Canada's leading Israel lobbyists (Israel Asper and Gerry Schwartz). But the position holds firm on the liberal wing of the Canadian mainstream.

Consider, for example, the work of Mitch Potter, the Toronto Star's leading Israel-Palestine pundit in recent weeks. Potter is aware that Gaza is not the planet's most densely-populated area by accident, but largely as a result of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the 78% of historic Palestine occupied by Zionist forces in 1948 (when Zionists took their first real stab at achieving a Jewish majority). Some 700,000 Palestinians were then expelled from the territory claimed as the State of Israel, forced into either neighbouring countries or the 22 per cent of Palestine still outside of Zionist control (the West Bank and Gaza Strip). With respect to the southern Israeli settlement of Ashkelon, for example, Potter offers the following background: "The modern city was formed by Jewish immigrants to Israel in the site of the Arab town of Al-Majdal, whose 11,000 residents were mostly driven into Gaza after the 1948 war."

Potter does not even feel it necessary to explain why those driven out cannot return to their homes in accord with the basic, inalienable rights of refugees displaced during wartime. Instead, Potter automatically assumes the Israeli perspective. He correctly explains that the Israeli "disengagement" from Gaza was simply an outgrowth of Israel's agenda of ethnic and national discrimination. For obvious reasons, Israel has been finding it difficult to deny the indigenous presence on the land it has conquered. This difficulty, Potter explained, was addressed through an effort to permanently exclude the Palestinian refugees of Gaza from dominant settler society: "Analysts spoke of an emerging Israeli consensus that understood a bitter pill had to be swallowed once and for all in order for Israel to cure itself of the demographic realities of the burgeoning Palestinian birth rate."

This is unabashed racism: the native majority population is described as a disease to be treated by state policy, though even conceding a stretch of land for Palestinians to starve on is a "bitter pill." None of the leading Canadian newspapers published a serious challenge to this racism.

Instead, they repeatedly published the flimsy argument that such a challenge would itself be racist. In a rhetorical sleight of hand that has become quite familiar, commentators repeatedly suggested that basic principles of human and national rights must be sacrificed on the altar of political Zionism, and that defending the rights of Palestinians (particularly those in exile) amounts to anti-Jewish racism. The point was put clearly in a July 3 column in the Globe and Mail: "it's anti-Semitic to call, as CUPE did, for an unconditional right of return of all Palestinian refugees, since such a massive demographic change would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state."

The Globe thus tells us that Palestine's indigenous population is not only inferior and troublesome, but also oppressively racist by its very presence.

From this perspective, contempt for Palestinian life comes all too naturally. On June 29, the National Post, ever a mouthpiece for Israeli diplomacy, addressed the issue through an interview with Israeli foreign and deputy Prime Minister Tzipi Livni. For Livni, as reporter Douglas Davis uncritically relayed to readers, international contempt for Palestinian life is still insufficient: "She is particularly irritated by the equivalence given to the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children … 'Only when the world sends the right message to the terrorists will they understand that it's not the same.'" Canada's leading journalists have already gotten the message.

Consider, again, the work of Mitch Potter, who in his recent position as the Toronto Star's leading Israel-Palestine pundit is a canary in the mineshaft of liberal Canadian racism. On June 30, just one day after the publication of Livni's anti-"equivalency" plea, Potter made the following assertion: "Despite five days of international headlines there has been but a single death – that of kidnapped 18-year-old Israeli hitchhiker Eliyahu Asheri."

Apparently, it was not worth counting the two Palestinian children, aged 2 and 17, who were killed on June 28 by an unexploded Israeli shell in the Gaza community of Khan Yunis (though this had even been reported in the New York Times). Nor was it worth retracting or correcting Potter's statement in light of the Israeli military's killing of a Palestinian in nearby Rafah at 2 a.m. on the morning of the 30th, or of another in the West Bank city of Nablus a little more than three hours later (already, by 6:13 a.m., Agence France Press had reported the Nablus killing). There were reports of other deaths during this period, which Potter or his editors could easily have investigated if they took Palestinian life seriously.

Evidently, they do not. As the Palestinian death toll mounted in the following week, denying the fatalities outright became untenable. Instead, Potter reduced Palestinian resistance to stubborn stupidity and described the fallen fighters as animals: "Another batch of Palestinian militants drawn out lemming-like and falling by the dozen to higher-calibre Israeli fire, just like their predecessors." [For Potter to call Palestinians lemmings is certainly ironic].

Falling, he might have added, to U.S. weapons, with the support of Canadian foreign policy and its loyal pundits.

Whitewashing collective punishment

"Hezbollah and Hamas … triggered the current crisis by staging guerrilla raids into Israel"
–-Toronto Star, July 19 (reporter Less Whittington)

On July 12, Hizbollah, for decades the main southern Lebanese group in resistance to Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed two more on the Israel-Lebanon border. That day, Israel not only killed 23 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but also began to bomb Beirut. Israeli military action against Lebanon swiftly escalated. On July 15, for example, Reuters reported that Israel used loudspeakers to order Lebanese civilians to leave the village of Marwaheen. Twenty people, including 15 children, got in a van to leave. Israel then bombed the van, killing them all.

Of all of Israel's international allies, including the United States, the Harper government was widely regarded as the most outspoken diplomatic supporter of escalating Israeli attacks. For Canadian media, fully accustomed to whitewashing Israeli atrocities, this was only appropriate. Massacres and the war crime of collective punishment were sanitized and reduced to offhand euphemisms: "As in the Palestinian territories," the Globe's Orly Halpern reported, "Israel is ratcheting up the pressure on the civilian population in an effort to push the Lebanese to reject Hezbollah tactics."(July 14)

And as in Palestinian territory, the attacks were a matter of defence. On July 15, the Globe editorialized: "The kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers, in a small country that holds the life of every soldier dear, was a grievous provocation. Coming just weeks after the seizing of another soldier by militants at the other end of the country, it looks like a coordinated campaign of intimidation."

The imputed "coordinated campaign of intimidation," which Globe editors disapprove of, is not to be confused with Israel's "ratcheting up the pressure on the civilian population," with which the Globe raises only strategic objections.

As Israel continued to kill and starve Palestinians, and as the Lebanese death toll from Israeli massacres mounted into the hundreds (with several Canadians killed in the indiscriminate bombardment), Mitch Potter explained that Palestinians now shared blame for the violence – with Hizbollah: "The words Hamas and Hezbollah may sound equally foreboding to most Western ears. And the militant merger of the two has brought the Middle East to the brink of regional war." (July 16)

Even for the killing of Canadians, Israeli culpability was sidelined: "Lebanon terror hits home," read a Toronto Star headline on the topic for July 17; "Canadians were killed in crossfire of fight with Hezbollah," read another headline, this one from the July 18 issue of the Globe and Mail. In much of the coverage, it was as though Canadians were fleeing a natural disaster, not a campaign of collective punishment fully condoned by the Harper government.

The reliance on Israeli sources became almost comical. By July 19, the Lebanese death count from Israeli massacres had reached 312, with more than 100,000 civilians displaced. As Canadians scrambled to leave Lebanon amidst the Israeli assault, the public relations line of the chief Israeli diplomat to Canada received the widest possible circulation through a story printed by the Canadian Press. Drawing entirely from unsubstantiated claims, the piece ran with the headline "Canadians fleeing Lebanon could be Hezbollah targets: Israeli ambassador."

Israel has since pledged to continue its invasion of Lebanon for weeks to come and both the Canadian government and Canadian media are lining up in support. The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter continues to get front-page attention for his articles, led by prominent cover references to Lebanese "terror" (July 18) and the suggestion that Hizbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah could be the "next Osama bin Laden" (July 19). Potter's journalism is shallow public relations, most recently for Israeli assassination efforts against Nasrallah. Potter has described the leader as an eloquent, strategic figure with a mass base for regional resistance to Israel. From his vantage point in "the corridors of power" in Israel, Potter notes that, "the strategies for Israeli victory are converging on Nasrallah's head."

Israel, while pledging a prolonged attack on Lebanon, has continued its atrocities in Gaza and escalated attacks on the West Bank, with incursions into the Palestinian towns of Nablus (where the Israeli military took over the municipality building, smashed cars and shot indiscriminately at residents' houses), Tulkarem, Bethlehem and Jenin.

The Harper government's nearly unconditional support for this Israeli aggression is scandalous, matched only by the media's support for Harper. On July 20, the Globe and Mail's editors reaffirmed this. The title of the editorial in 'Canada's national newspaper,' which praised Harper for his "refreshing" pro-Israel diplomacy, conveys the general tone of coverage: "Harper is right on the Mideast."

Mounting a challenge

There are indications that the Canadian population may be lagging behind the political establishment in its contempt for Palestinians. At the end of 2004, the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) released polls that offer some hope in this regard. They found that prior to the recent intensification of support for Israel, official Canadian pro-Israel partisanship was opposed by majority public opinion. The polls found that the more Canadians learn about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the more they sympathize with the Palestinian cause.

In recent months, this sympathy has found increasingly organized expression. The past week's massive demonstrations in Montreal come on the heels of various important displays of regional solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Prominent among these is the decision by the Ontario wing of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE-Ontario), Canada's largest union of public sector workers, to identify Israel's regime of systematic ethnic and national discrimination as apartheid, and to join the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until apartheid is dismantled. This movement is continuing to spread and is picking up momentum within the United Church and elsewhere.

As the Canadian government opts instead for open rejection of the rights of Palestinians (and Lebanese), "Israel advocacy" groups like the Canada-Israel Committee take comfort in support from the mainstream press. When the Harper government became the first of Israel's allies to support renewed suffocation of the Palestinian economy (in March 2006), CIC communications director Paul Michaels commented happily that the "decision was greeted positively on the editorial pages of most Canadian newspapers." Again in late June, Canadian media indifference to attacks on Palestinians occasioned the expression of satisfaction on the part of the CIC: "While events on the ground included several Israeli air strikes in which civilians were injured or killed, this week's media coverage was fairly light."

With support from the government and the corporate press, Israel's allies pretend to near universal Canadian representation. They are in turn able to depict Palestine solidarity as a rejection of the popular consensus: "This week," a Globe article on July 8 declared, "public opinion was inflamed again when, contrary to the outrage [against CUPE for its Palestine work], the Toronto Conference of the United Church of Canada commended CUPE Ontario for its stand, and echoed the union's call for a boycott of Israeli goods."

There is no denying the real strength of Canada's institutional base of support for Israel. However, there is good reason to believe that this does not flow from "popular opinion." Rather, it results from the eagerness of the Canadian government to harmonize its foreign policy with the U.S., the support of corporate Canada for this agenda, and the strength of Canadian "Israel advocacy" groups which draw support from corporate organization, the United States and Israel itself. Mainstream media are reflecting and shaping the pro-Israel consensus determined by these powerful interests. But they have yet to bring a real public consensus behind them.

In this context, opportunities for a successful challenge to Canadian support for Israel remain very real. But it is only outside of the political establishment that this challenge can be built, and only through alternative information systems that it can be sustained. In any event, it is clear that while genuine awareness of the Israel-Palestine conflict may translate into Palestine solidarity, the mainstream press, far from the solution, is quite near to the core of the problem.

Dan Freeman-Maloy examines the Canadian media's coverage of violence in the Middle East, and finds it unbalanced, and racist.

Embedded Edits

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:14:01 +0000

Is news coverage of Afghanistan straight from the source?

A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. There are many obstacles to accurate information from Afghanistan. photo: Combat Camera

Many stories and facts are left out of the media completely, making media criticism a straightforward affair. To establish that a publisher's or broadcaster's other priorities are affecting its ability to tell the truth, the critic simply has to point to stories that were ignored altogether and account for why truthful, accurate reporting would not have ignored them.

In some cases, evidence points to outright supression of certain facts that are undisputed and part of the public record. The use of taxpayers' money to fund organizations responsible for murder and human rights abuses in Haiti, for example, or the violent imposition of the band council system on Indigenous nations.

The case of Afghanistan is somewhat different.

To a certain extent, the information that undermines the official story of Canada's role in Kandahar and Kabul comes from the same sources that the official account itself relies on. That said, there are many factors that distort and chip away at this information on its way to viewers and readers in Canada.

A recent, fascinating article by the Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York illustrates this dynamic in two surprising ways. In June 3rd's "Dispatches From an Embedded Life," York writes about problems with having reporters "embedded" with Canadian troops--a public relations innovation Canada has borrowed from the Americans' successful media relations campaign during the Iraq invasion.

"Yes," York writes matter-of-factly, "there was censorship."

"Yes, there were heavy-handed attempts to control the story, to suppress photos, to spin messages and to deny reality."

A statement like this--along with York's explanation that "The Department of National Defence doesn't want the embedded reporters to write much about refugees, schools, health care or electricity--all the basic realities of life for Afghans"--calls into question much of the body of reporting from Canadian journalists assigned to Afghanistan.

Does York examine the implications of these incredible revelations from a journalist with first-hand experience of "censorship" by the Canadian forces?

No.

"But," York continues, a propos of nothing, "there is something endearingly Canadian about it all."

Because the "hard-working military spokesmen" York met "just couldn't manage the ruthlessness of a Pentagon media campaign," he concludes that the situation is, at least, "more complicated". And Globe reporters, he reassures the reader, are pushing the boundaries of their embedded condition to deliver a more complete story.

While it is tempting to indict York over such a bizarre seguë, to do so would stop where the story starts to get interesting.

Would the Globe's editors, one must ask, have accepted a story about censorship by Canadian Forces if it had not itself been covered in a carapace of Canadian nationalism?

Short of falling out with their employers and writing a tell-all memoir, journalists like York will likely never reveal the tension between what they see on the ground, what they write, and what actually gets printed. And there is tension.

Glimpses of the reporter-editor tension can be caught on the odd occasion.

Reporting from Afghanistan in 2001, for example, freelancer Ted Rall wrote of a veteran American war reporter who "as a test... fired off a thousand words about a 15,000-pound 'daisy cutter' bomb that had taken out an entire neighborhood in southeastern Kunduz."

"Hundreds of civilians lay scattered in bits of protoplasm amid the rubble," Rall wrote. "His editors killed the piece, calling it 'redundant.'"

For more than than the occasional glimpse of the discrepancy between the facts and the reporting, however, one must study the stories themselves.

A June 6 report by the Senlis group, for example, was hardly mentioned in the Canadian press. Geoffrey York's major story "Taliban Rising" took notice of it, but did not mention the report's main finding: that in some southern provinces, support for the Taliban is now as high as eighty per cent. A brief report by Globe report that appeared on the newspaper's web site but not in the print edition also omitted the figure but cited the Senlis group as one of two "competing theories" about the increase in Taliban activity. The National Post did publish an article that covered the report more thoroughly.

On June 29, the Senlis group released a report entitled "Canada in Kandahar: No peace to keep," which called Kandahar a "suicide mission" for Canada. The response from the Canadian media was swift. Without mentioning the title, a Canadian Press report provided a partial summary of the Senlis group's claims, followed by an extensive response by Defense Minister and former defense industry lobbyist Gordon O'Connor and top General Rick Hillier.

However, this was not enough for the Globe, which rewrote the Canadian Press article to include even fewer of the Senlis report's direct criticisms in time for the June 29 print edition.

The CanWest News Service, which is used by dozens of daily newspapers and television stations owned by CanWest Global went further, downplaying the substance of the report and highlighting Canada's aid efforts. The story was accompanied with a photo of Afghan children receiving Canadian-funded polio vaccinations.

Students of the media will often find that thorough reading can reveal a lot more information than in provided in most coverage. By reading source material and the subsequent revisions, through to what appears in actual newspapers, one can see the political process that determines the overall picture of reality that gets to those without the time to pore over the media.

As Geoffrey York managed to note, embedding journalists with troops might not result in the most complete coverage. What York didn't mention is the greater and enduring problem: that journalists are embedded with editors, owners and others who are constantly shaping and filtering messages before they reach the public.

Yves Engler contributed to this article

Canadian journalists are embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. But, Dru Oja Jay asks, are there other threats to accurate coverage?

None of Our Business

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:46:21 +0000

Canada's role in the world and the business press

Hugo Chavez: makes the news when he affects the bottom line. photo: Agência Brasil

Did you know that Royal Bank (RBC), Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), Alcan and SNC-Lavalin all share board members? Or that Yves Fortier, Canada's former ambassador to the UN, sits on the boards of RBC and Alcan? Where does one go for the plain facts about Canada's tiny, interconnected corporate and political elite?

The Globe and Mail business pages, of course. A long story in October of 2002 reported that "directors travel in small world". "The power circles are very small," a professor at a business school was quoted as saying. "I think within a small community, there's a lot of peer pressure," another business professor told the paper.

What was the focus of the article? Was Globe reporter Janet McFarland concerned about the rapid consolidation of corporate power and its effect on policy? Was the editor who assigned the story wondering whether the pressure to announce record profits would lead corporations to act against the public good?

The report was, in fact, concerned with the possibility that too much overlap in boards could have a negative effect on corporations' accountability to their shareholders. Which is to say, ultimately, a negative impact on the corporations' obligation to maximize profits.

Outside the business pages, we quickly learn that Canadian business is not news. Take the CBC's understanding of "Canada's role in the world," for example.

In February of 2004, the CBC's flagship program The National ran "A World of Difference," a series dedicated to coverage of Canadians volunteering abroad to "make a difference". Installments carried titles like "Hope in Bolivia" and "a school of joy and hope" in Afghanistan.

Two years later, CBC debuted "Our World," a new series with a similar focus. The National's anchor Peter Mansbridge introduced Our World, saying that viewers had asked for more coverage of what Canadians were doing abroad. Since receiving this feedback, the CBC has run reports on a Canadian-funded clinic for disabled children in Haiti, efforts of Canadian soldiers to help Afghan children "regain their sense of stability," and a Quebec-sponsored program to "bringing new skills and hope to troubled youth." A cynic could be forgiven for sensing an emerging theme. (The CBC is hardly alone in this, however, and other networks often feature similar programming.)

What does business coverage have to do with the CBC's--let's be honest--nationalist propaganda?

If one is actually interested in understanding literally perennial topics like "Canadians making a difference," or "Canada's role in the world," a first step would be to take note of the largest Canadian corporations operating abroad. These include SNC Lavalin, Alcan, and banks like RBC. Canadian mining operations span the globe, extracting billions of dollars worth of resources from countries in Africa, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Oil companies are similarly globally implicated, and engineering firms--led by SNC Lavalin--do hundreds of millions of dollars in business on third-world megaprojects and arms manufacturing alike.

By any objective measure, these corporation are significant--if not defining--components of "Canada's role" globally.

Instead, the CBC's correspondent in Haiti speaks of a Canadian-sponsored effort to "ease pain in a country that offers its weakest citizens nothing," but we hear nothing of engineering firms and defense contractor SNC Lavalin's "role" in getting a $20 million contract for the new embassy in Haiti. Nor do we hear about the Canadian-backed, non-elected "interim" government's dealings with Montreal-based mining company St. Geneviève Resources.

Last December, the Globe and Mail's business section reported that "dozens of Ecuadoreans opposed to a Canadian mining firm's copper venture burned down a building at the company's South American project site." The article was not concerned with finding out why the protesters were so opposed to the mining project; what made the story "news" was that it affects Canadian investors' interests. For the same reason coverage of the story did not appear outside the business section: the Globe's editors determined that it is not news for the non-investor Canadians.

Perhaps the most salient discrepancy shows itself in coverage of the governments of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. While the business press regularly features in-depth coverage of the effects of diverting oil revenues into health and education programs, "international coverage" usually makes do with a well-edited news brief.

When coverage is more prominent, the exception tends to prove the rule.
Last October, the Globe and Mail featured a front-page article about how Venezuela's subsidized fuel prices "worsens air pollution," "[costs] the government billions of dollars," and "helps finance Colombia's outlawed right-wing paramilitary forces."

Thousands of environmentally-minded readers of the "national newspaper" of the world's fourth-highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases were undoubtedly disappointed to discover that the article did not signal a shift in its de facto policy of not covering Canada's billions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies.

Except in the business section, where environmental impact is relevant when it affects profits.

Dru Oja Jay reads the business section, and finds the news that non-investor Canadians rarely see.

The Origins of the War in the Balkans

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 04:45:57 +0000

Part two in a five part series on the former Yugoslavia

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

The former Yugoslavia. The green areas are Serbia-Montenegro's autonomous provinces: Vojvodina, Serbia, Montenegro (top to bottom).

Slobodan Milosevic isn't only charged with war crimes. The Globe's Doug Saunders says that Milosevic is "considered responsible for 250,000 deaths and the descent of the former Yugoslavia into terrible ethnic warfare."

Though Saunders does not say who "considers" Milosevic responsible, he is certainly not the only commentator to repeat the claim.

The media's failure to examine facts on the ground (or at least, their failure to tell their readers about them) extends beyond Milosevic himself to the entire history of Yugoslavia's civil war.

Between 1960 and 1980, Yugoslavia--a federation consisting of multiple ethnic groups, including Albanians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Egyptians, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats--was, by objective measures, a prosperous country. Economic growth was vigorous, all citizens had a guaranteed right to income, a month of paid vacation, and life expectancy was seventy-two years. The federation's many national and linguistic groups coexisted peacefully through a complex system of government spanning multiple languages and semiautonomous regions.

As Michael Parenti writes in To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia--which documents the history of US and European intervention--Yugoslavian leaders committed a "disastrous error" in the 1970s: they borrowed money from the West. When western economies entered a recession, free trade principles gave way to economic self-preservation, and Yugoslavian exports were blocked, to devastating effect.

Earlier borrowing brought with it the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which demanded that the economy be "restructured." This process, Parenti writes, included "wage freezes, the abolition of state subsidized prices, increased unemployment, elimination of most worker-managed enterprises, and massive cuts in social spending." According to the World Bank's figures, restructuring produced six hundred thousand layoffs in 1989-90 alone.

Taking control of monetary policy by 1991, the IMF effectively broke Yugoslavia into pieces by preventing transfer payments to the republics (such as Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia) from the federal government and assigning debt to each of the member republics.

Serbia, Parenti notes, was the most hostile to IMF "reforms," with 650,000 workers (joined, in many cases, by workers of other ethnicities in Serbia and other republics) engaging in "massive walkouts and protests."

For Parenti and others, all available evidence points to a long term, deliberate campaign on the part of the US, Britain, and Germany (among others) to destabilize and divide the last socialist holdout in eastern Europe. Before the economic collapse, almost all observers agree that people from many ethnic backgrounds coexisted peacefully. The economic destruction of Yugoslavia, Parenti argues, caused different nationalities to "compete more furiously than ever for a share" of rapidly declining economic wealth. "Once the bloodletting starts, the cycle of vengeance and retribution takes on a momentum of its own."

In 1990, the US threatened to cut off aid if Yugoslavia did not hold elections, but insisted that elections be held only in the republics, not at the federal level. In 1991, the European Community organized a conference on Yugoslavia, which called for its division into "sovereign and independent republics," at which point Yugoslavian representatives were barred from attending any more of the conference meetings.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has most recently called attention to itself by financing political groups that fomented military coups against elected governments in Haiti and Venezuela, was also involved in the Yugoslavian civil war and the ensuing conflict. Allan Weinstein, one of the NED's founders, was candid about the mission of the NED, which is funded directly by the US federal government. "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA," Weinstein said in 1991.

According to research conducted by William Blum, a scholar of US interventions abroad, the NED described the mandate of its 1997-98 programs as aiming to "identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change...[and] to develop strategies for private sector growth."

Starting in 1988, the NED provided millions of dollars to "independent media," "opposition political parties," and "pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations," "student groups," "labour unions" and "think tanks" throughout the former Yugoslavia. According to testimony in Senate hearings, in the two years leading up to the Kosovo crisis, the US government provided $16.5 million for democracy promotion in Serbia alone, mostly through the NED. Proportional to population, and not accounting for lower pay scales, the equivalent amount of funding for Canadian media and political groupings would be roughly $46 million.

A Milosevic-headed Serbian government did eventually pass legislation that decreed that the media could face steep fines for circulating false information, forcing US-sponsored newspapers and radio stations to move to Montenegro. The US, however, has even less tolerance for outside funding of its democracy. Senator John Kerry, for example, found himself the subject of a firestorm of media criticism when his 2004 presidential campaign accepted a $2,000 cheque from a private citizen of South Korea (not a government group). Kerry sent the cheque back and vowed to do more thorough "background checks" on campaign donors.

The Canada Elections Act prohibits any group that receives money from a foreign source from using it for "election advertising purposes." Canada also maintains extensive regulations preventing foreign ownership of the media.

Are critics like Parenti and Blum right? How does their evidence stack up to that provided by Canadian media? This is difficult to say, because almost all news media in Canada and the US have ignored the role of the West in the demise of Yugoslavia and the United States' subsequent well-financed political interventions.

"In the eyes of the global media," writes University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky, "Western powers bear no responsibility for the impoverishment and destruction of a nation of 24 million people." Instead, the prevailing view continues to be that the US, Canada, and other NATO powers acted benevolently to end the conflict.

Meanwhile, the breakup continues. NED-funded political parties, currently governing in Serbia-Montenegro's autonomous province of Montenegro (and, since 2000, Serbia itself) are currently preparing for a referendum on secession.

Further reading:

» William Blum: Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy

» Michel Chossudovsky: Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonising Bosnia

» Cathrin Schütz: The Militarism of German Foreign Policy and the Dismantling of a State

» Jared Israel et alia: The Nuts & Bolts of a Scam... How the U.S. has Created a Corrupt Opposition in Serbia

» Post-Soviet Media Law and Policy: Media Law in Serbia-Montenegro

» James Ciment and Immanuel Ness: NED and the Empire's New Clothes

» George Szamuely: The National Evisceration of Democracy

» US Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Prospects for Democracy in Yugoslavia

» Neil Clark: The spoils of another war

» Al Giordano: Do Foreign Governments Have a "Human Right" to Buy Venezuela Elections?

» Elections Canada: Questions and Answers About Third Party Election Advertising

» Yves Engler: Market Famines and the IMF

The second part of a series by Dru Oja Jay examines the role of the west in the breakup of Yugoslavia