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Map of the Balkans.
European powers had long intervened throughout the world as a matter of imperial habit. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, Britain, France, and Portugal were still players in colonial and post-colonial conflicts, especially in Africa. Conflict, however, was also common within Europe itself. Some of these tensions were related to the Cold War. Terrorist groups in Italy and Germany spoke in Marxist terms of class war while emulating terror tactics developed in Latin America. Some were based on nationalism, as with the Basque separatists in Spain. Others were amalgamations of these tensions, as with the official Irish Republican Army (IRA) and later the Provisionals who adapted elements of Marxism, nationalism and terror tactics. In addition, the politics of the Middle East intruded, with the deaths of thirteen Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and Libyan arms supplies to the IRA that same year. Criminal gangs also became embroiled in European tensions as people and arms smuggling, as well as drugs, financed a large black economy. Afghan heroin, Russian weapons, and illegal goods provided by Albanian smugglers created an underworld in which the embryonic jihadist movement could operate clandestinely.
The consensual glue, the ideological framework of the Cold War, had allowed Western journalists an uncomplicated means of practising their craft. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the downfall of Marxism throughout Western Europe, however, journalists were confronted with many challenges. This included changes in their lexicon. From ‘Apparatchik’ to ‘Zhivago’, covering events in the USSR had popularised numerous concepts and phrases. Suddenly, ‘Big Brother’ and the ‘Gulag’ became less fearsome terms. Marxists no longer set the intellectual agenda for the chattering, let alone the working, classes. Monolithic communism had been easy to hate and, for most Western columnists, to fear and fight. ‘Glasnost’, initiating a new era of peace, was good, they said, but suddenly conflicts were springing up throughout Europe. Now journalists had to grapple with an intimidating mosaic of supranational threats interwoven with a host of domestic conflicts. Globalisation of the world economy, environmental threats, resource wars (for example, the ‘Cod War’ between the UK and Iceland in 1975–76), virtual wars (for example, Kosovo in 1999, which will be discussed later) and the impetus for the waves of immigration into Europe all demanded a new intellectual rigour from journalists. Correspondents were also influenced by the Afghan defeat of the Soviets in 1989, which marked a shift from the old communist threat to a new one, Islamic extremism. Few in the media understood this crucial transition from the end of the capitalism–communism battle to the much bigger challenge from jihadism in the crucial years 1989–2001. A short analysis of three civil wars – Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and Chechnya – will help to explain this transition and outline how correspondents coped with this complex transformation in international relations.
Scarcely larger than Britain but with a population of twenty-four million, the Yugoslav federation comprised six republics and two autonomous regions, as well as different languages and various isms. The federation ranged from Slovenians and Austrians in the north, to the Kosovo Albanians in the south. The abundance of cathedrals, monasteries, and mosques reflected the variety of religions practised in Yugoslavia. Although most Yugoslavs were Catholic or Orthodox Christians, the federation contained Europe’s largest Muslim community. Perhaps inevitably, the Balkans, as formed by the treaties imposed after the First World War, began to unravel. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, with its recent implosion of communism, were linked: both enforced federations were on the point of economic and political disintegration.
Slovenia, in economic terms the Sweden of the Balkans, was the first to break away from Yugoslavia. This declaration of independence sparked the Ten Day War in June and July of 1991. Casualties were low and surprisingly few Slovenians were killed when the federal Yugoslav planes launched air raids on their cities, the first such assault in Europe since 1945. This was a token spasm from the federal government in Belgrade. Because Slovenia contained a small minority of Serbs in its population of two million, it could gain its independence as long as Belgrade could secure a greater Serbia that encompassed all Serbs throughout the failing federation.
It was the independence of neighbouring Croatia that resulted in major combat.
As Croatia moved to independence, the Serb minority inside Croatia rebelled and declared the Republic of Serb Krajina. Serbia’s traditional allies, France and Russia, were hostile to Germany and its push to recognise Croatia, a friend under Nazi rule. Because of these divisions within Europe, and the initial reluctance of the United States to intervene, especially after Mogadishu, the war escalated as regular Croatian and Serb forces joined the battle between their militias in eastern Croatia. Soon, Serbs controlled about a third of Croat territory. In September 1991 the UN imposed an arms embargo which affected all involved except the heavily armed Serbs, who had inherited the bulk of the old federal army. The mainly Serb remnants of the federal army backed the Serb rebels in Croatia. Over 10,000 were killed in bitter fighting and hundreds of thousands were displaced in what became known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Heavy fighting continued from mid-1991 until a temporary ceasefire in January 1992. After intermittent combat, regular Croat armies in rapid offensives retook their occupied lands before the internationally imposed ceasefire in 1995.
Journalists portrayed Croatia as chaotic, where guns and slivovitz were used immoderately. The war created a media frenzy, because no pools existed in the anarchic conditions; this coverage was more akin to that in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and during the Vietnam War. As a historian of photojournalism noted, ‘Would-be Robert Capas and Margaret Bourke-Whites, festooned with Nikons, swarmed into the war zone. Some were going to die, many were going to go back to “proper” jobs, but a few would make it.’1 Despite some excellent work by professional photo-journalists and film-makers, lightweight video and audio recorders, or camcorders, proliferated among soldiers, victims, voyeurs, as well as reporters. Pictures were abundant but profound analysis was rare. Moreover, journalists usually could not master the complex languages, where names were Tolkienesque, and where, as writer P. J. O’Rourke famously quipped, ‘the unpronounceables were killing the unspellables’. ‘Ancient tribal rivalries’ became the handy, if incorrect, shorthand for the opposing factions.
Ethically, it was difficult to decipher, in the beginning, who wore the white hats – the Serbians, the Croatians, or the Bosnian Muslims. Would the Western correspondents and government officials favour the side that suffered the most casualties or committed the fewest war crimes? General Lewis MacKenzie, the Canadian commander of UNPROFOR (the UN Protection Force), put it slightly differently: ‘Dealing with Bosnia is a little like dealing with three serial killers. One has killed 15. One has killed 10. One has killed five. Do we help the one who has only killed five?’2 Soon, the media, in the main, opted to blame the Serbs – justly, because they did commit the most, and worst, atrocities. Serbia was dubbed the land of Mordor by the more literate journalists, in honour of writer Tolkien’s dark vision of a fallen kingdom.3 A few even tried to explain Serbia’s paranoid belligerence. Mark Thompson, in his book Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia, argued, ‘There is no understanding Serbia without fathoming its wounded self-righteousness, its perception of itself as more sinned against than sinning.’4 By the spring of 1992 the civil war had spread to Bosnia (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Bosnian Serbs declared their own republic and, with federal (Belgrade’s) forces, blockaded Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. It came within a whisker of falling, but its inhabitants, including some Serbs and Croats, fought on for three years. It seemed a revisit to the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War and was certainly the heaviest fighting in any European capital since 1945. The newest state in Europe appeared as though it would be the most short-lived. The UN estimated that in 1992 alone 130,000 soldiers and civilians were killed in Bosnia. Young men of military age who were not killed were often rounded up into Serb-controlled concentration camps. Ron Haviv, a 26-year-old New York photographer, discovered a camp at Trnopolje; his pictures appalled the world by exposing the atrocities that may have never come to light without his reportage. ‘Never again’ had been the moral watchword after 1945, but death camps were once more a part of the European landscape. Sadly, while UNPROFOR was tasked with safeguarding humanitarian relief, it could do little about these massacres and atrocities because the force was so poorly equipped and under such strict mandates.
Map of the Balkans.
Sarajevo became the media cockpit of the Bosnian war. The UK Ministry of Defence was horrified at the prospect of committing more British troops to the Balkan quagmire, partly because of the graphic images coming out of the region, and instead wished to withdraw its elements of the peacekeeping forces. Speaking for the ministry, Defence Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind energetically informed the Overseas and Defence Committee of the Cabinet that such a commitment could be endless and could risk a considerable number of British lives. As one intelligence expert argued, however, ‘Ministers like Rifkind were swimming against a tide of television images of suffering.’5 Many journalists stayed in Sarajevo only temporarily. American journalist Janine di Giovanni of London’s Sunday Times, however, endured the majority of the siege. She delivered some of the most powerful reporting and, in the process, came to understand Bosnians’ perception of war. In her emotive book, The Quick and the Dead, di Giovanni observed that Yugoslavia was ‘like a wind tunnel, sucking in everything around it back in time, the century beginning and ending with a brutal and vicious conflict’. The fault lines in Bosnia did date back, arguably, to the division of the Roman Empire into East and West. During my time reporting in Sarajevo I heard numerous variations on the story of a Bosnian Muslim combatant raving about a Serb crime in the dark medieval past. In utter exasperation I would usually say, ‘But that was in the fourteenth century!’ ‘Yes,’ the Muslim soldier would reply, ‘but I heard about it only last week.’ Ed Vulliamy, in his book Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, also recognised this tendency and touched on Yugoslavs’ passionate interest in cartography: ‘The answer to a question to a Serb about a Serbian artillery attack yesterday will begin in the year 925 and is invariably illustrated with maps.’
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Martin Bell of the BBC was a cheerleader for ‘the something must be done’ school of journalism. His reporting had a marked effect on British government thinking – eventually.
Though the Bosnians may have attributed the war to factors rooted in another century or even millennium, much of the antagonism was recent and artificial, stoked up by firebrand politicians and the local media in the new republics. One exception was the remarkable Sarajevo daily, Oslobodjenje. The newspaper was unusual for two reasons. First, it was comprised of a multi-ethnic staff; Muslim, Serb, and Croat journalists worked together to deliver their stories. Second, the newspaper continued to churn out issues in the years of the Bosnian Serb siege, despite adverse conditions. During the winters, the office was bereft of heat and electricity and was eventually shelled out, forcing the staff to relocate to the building’s basement. Tom Gjelten of America’s National Public Radio covered the story of this courageous newspaper in his book Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege. His book was a happy marriage from a tragic circumstance, where the subject, a newspaper under fire, and a journalist with a distinguished career, including authorship of a study on professionalism in war reporting, came together via a respected organisation, NPR. Despite criticism from both left and right in the United States, Gjelten maintained high standards of public broadcasting in delivering the story. His coverage of the wars in the former Yugoslavia earned him the Overseas Press Club’s Lowell Thomas Award, a George Polk Award, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Though other journalists earned Pulitzers for their heavyweight analysis, television attention was often focused on human-interest stories. In July 1993 British television broadcasted the tragedy of Irma, a young girl wounded in Sarajevo. In a knee-jerk reaction, the British government flew her (and approximately forty other casualties) out of Sarajevo for specialist treatment in the UK. The Sarajevo UN headquarters cynically referred to Irma’s case as ‘Instant Response to Media Attention’. Uncynically, others rescued children from Sarajevo. For example, Mike Nicholson, of Independent Television News, saved an eight-year-old Sarajevan orphan named Natasha and brought her back to England. He wrote a book on this experience, titled Natasha’s Story, which later became the basis for Welcome to Sarajevo, a feature film starring Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei. Marcel Ophüls, the director of The Troubles We’ve Seen, a film on journalists in besieged Sarajevo, described war correspondents as ‘today’s resistance fighters’.
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Srebrenica was the worst mass killing in Europe for fifty years. Joe Sacco captured this act of genocide in his brilliant book on the so-called safe areas, Safe Area Gorazde. In his pop comic style Sacco clarions the tragedy and brutality of the Bosnian war with utter honesty and clarity. Sacco’s genius extends the role of art in war reporting. (From Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco, published by Jonathan Cape. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd)
Despite the UN declaring certain towns in Bosnia, such as Sarajevo, safe havens, these towns were neither safe nor havens. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army overran one town, Srebrenica, with tragic and momentous consequences. Scornful of the UN, its 400 inadequate Dutch peacekeepers, and the media, the Serbs massacred 8,000 male Muslims – the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. The failure of the UN to respond and its lack of preparation were blatantly obvious; the previous year the UN had abandoned the arms embargo, while on the ground NATO peace enforcers replaced UNPROFOR. In August 1995 the re-trained and re-armed Croatian army, backed by NATO air power, rolled up Serb forces in the Krajina region. A heavy aerial bombardment of Serb artillery positions around Sarajevo finally lifted the siege and forced the Serbian government to accept an agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio. Nearly all the Western journalists cheered on the eventual NATO response. Their reaction was generally: the Serbs were getting the shit well and truly kicked out of them after three years of doling it out to everyone else. In the Balkans NATO had fired its first shot in anger, but only after hundreds of thousands of killings in Croatia and Bosnia. In the Cold War deterrence had created a duopoly of the alliance system; in the unipolar new world order NATO compulsion was creating protectorates. Bosnia duly became a de facto military protectorate of the West. The politics were still muddled, but large-scale killing in the former Yugoslavia stopped – at least momentarily.
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Ruined buildings in Sarajevo. One was the Holiday Inn, which hacks used despite lack of water and electricity, 1994. (Author.)
For the international press corps, covering the Bosnian war had its advantages and disadvantages. It was difficult for journalists to cover because of the war’s inherent dangers; at least seventy-five reporters were killed between 1991 and 1996. The Serb snipers did not check for press cards before pulling the trigger. In fact, they sometimes received bonuses for killing journalists. There were also no effective pools, though NATO and the UN offered accreditation and occasionally aid. The Bosnian war was a long war in relatively favourable terrain (unlike the short and wide-ranging desert war in the Gulf) and in terms of access was easy to get into and to operate in. Since it was a UN humanitarian mission and officially transparent, journalists could switch sides, often by crossing a single bridge, though perhaps under fire. The military, in short, could not dictate to them. As General Sir Michael Rose, the UNPROFOR commander, said:
In a war environment, journalists cannot travel freely about the battlefield or talk to the enemy, and they are often obliged to depend upon the military structure for their information as well as their survival. In a UN mission, however, journalists owe peacekeepers nothing.6
Because of this transparency, journalists from larger organisations, such as the BBC, would travel in their armoured vehicles to places many soldiers were not permitted or able to visit. In this sense, hacks were useful sources of intelligence for the military. Because of its reliance on journalists’ access, the military was progressively friendlier and more helpful the closer reporters came to frontline fighting. Journalists railed against the local warlords, not the disciplined Western armies, though the French military was rarely popular with British correspondents because of its perceived bureaucracy. Journalists behaved more responsibly than they had in previous conflicts as far as the British Army was concerned, partly because of their sense of ownership. The journalists had called for Western intervention, and they had received it, albeit belatedly and piecemeal. It had become their war as well. The BBC’s Martin Bell, perhaps the most distinguished British journalist in the Balkans, described this oddcouple tango in his book In Harm’s Way:
In peacekeeping, we in the press were engaged in an entirely new relationship with the military – that is the blue-helmeted military. Of course we had our differences with the UN – usually over interpretations of its mandate – but we were fundamentally its partners and not its antagonists. We shared its dangers and frustrations. We were to some extent responsible for its deployment in the first place. We wished it to succeed.
Though good relations with the Western peacekeepers may have helped correspondents, the war itself was far more complex because of the tribal gridlock. This was a far cry from the recent Gulf War where most journalists could focus on one evil figure, Saddam Hussein. (Later in the Balkan imbroglio, though, NATO spin doctors demonised the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, as a latter-day Stalin.) From the start, media images tended to conform to Cold War stereotypes: good and brave Slovenians and Catholic Croatian capitalists versus the big and bad communist Serbians. Furthermore, journalists tended to commonly refer to the Balkan people, as a whole, as ‘others’, lost in dark myths and chasing ancient ghosts – not as fellow Europeans. If context was deficient, pictures were often far too powerful. In fact, many images were sanitised because of their anticipated impact on squeamish Western audiences. Why wars should be sanitised, except on the feeble grounds of good taste, has never been adequately addressed by anyone. The media satellite dishes in Sarajevo still pumped out daily horror pictures, though not from Mostar where conditions were even worse.
Journalists, most eloquently Bell in his regular BBC reporting, called for NATO powers to relieve the agony. He warned that unless the West intervened early, the problems would only worsen and be more insoluble in the long term. UNPROFOR, and then NATO, provided pseudo-action and alibis, not policies to end the war. Some journalists argued that humanitarian aid distorted the war and prolonged it. Effective peace enforcement depended on American will and power. Only US air power could push the contestants to what Carl von Clausewitz called the culminating point which, in this case, was marked by the Bosnian Serbs’ military defeat, the Dayton peace accords and the deployment of 60,000 NATO troops in 1995.
Most veteran Western journalists felt that they had acquitted themselves honourably. ‘We had our faults,’ confessed Bell, ‘but at least we were not inert in the face of genocide, and we did not run away.’ How effective, though, were the journalists in influencing policy? Little to no policy existed in the beginning. Furthermore, correspondents tended to concentrate on the symptoms, not the causes of the war, and called for intervention, though the parameters for an intervention had not yet been determined. The Western European powers did not wish to intervene and only reluctantly embarked on a peacekeeping role. They did not accept peace enforcement until Washington was fully prepared to commit hard power to strengthen the relatively feeble European response. After being asked whether television coverage was blowing British policy off course, Lord Carrington, former British defence secretary, replied, ‘That always supposes that there’s a course to be blown off.’ The coverage, though, was extensive, with mass communication of the slaughter beamed by satellite into living rooms daily. Pictures such as the Sarajevo market-place massacre in May 1992 and the appalling pictures of the Omarska Mine concentration camp soon after were as graphic as Westerners could handle. The Irma rescue too played on popular sympathy but it did not necessarily drive political change.
The drip-drip effect of Bell’s authoritative delivery seemed to have worked on the consciences of some British ministers. His regular reporting positioned Bosnia at the top of the government’s agenda. Though the coverage may have also affected policy as it was crystallising toward real intervention, it did not fundamentally change course. The impact of the media on decision-making was incremental and tactical but not strategic, unless the decision-makers were caught unawares, as with the concentration camp pictures on the UK’s Independent Television News in summer 1992. As it happened, Western intelligence agencies knew of these camps, yet politicians lacked the will to tackle the crisis openly. With pressure from the media mounting, Serbian officials sometimes shifted inmates out of Serb-controlled areas which indirectly suggested that television had enforced complicity in ethnic cleansing. This is, however, a convoluted argument. While the constant influx of pictures fed politicians’ fears of intervention, their influence on editors and newspaper columnists opened politicians and their publics to the feasibility and then necessity of real action.
In his memoirs, In Harm’s Way, Martin Bell famously called for ‘journalism of attachment, journalism which cares as well as knows’, despite his additional, perhaps contradictory, insistence on objectivity. Many journalists had become personally involved in the Bosnian war, although few, such as Mike Nicholson, ventured as far as adopting orphans. Whether or not their professional objectivity had been undermined by this exceptionally emotional and lengthy war, Western correspondents were clearly biased against the Serbs. To journalists, the Serbs, or rather their overall leader and his armies and militias, had been largely responsible for the destruction of the once-prosperous federation. Some journalists had even attacked the Sarajevo foreign press corps for abandoning objectivity by aligning themselves as propagandists for the Bosnian government and choosing to ignore Bosnian atrocities.
Though it would seem that major wars in Europe should be of concern to a British cabinet, especially when a liberation force had been sent to the remote Falklands, the Conservative governments of the period were instinctively cautious about entering wars. With Tony Blair’s appointment as prime minister in 1997, however, wars of intervention, usually shoulder to shoulder with the United States, became fashionable. And the first of the Blair wars was Kosovo.
In summer 1999 NATO turned its head toward Kosovo, determined to drive out the forces allied to local Serbs, who accounted for only 10 per cent of the population, and to bring back 800,000 Albanian Kosovars who had been forced to flee. NATO also had other aims: notably stabilising the Balkans and, by default, preserving NATO’s credibility. Serb atrocities in the province – exaggerated by the Western media and NATO – encouraged the Alliance to bomb a resistant Serbian President Milošević into submission. The Western allies believed that a short, sharp air war would dismantle the Belgrade strongman, maybe in less than seventy-two hours. ‘Air power,’ as Eliot Cohen noted in Foreign Affairs, ‘is an unusually seductive form of military strength because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.’ This estimate proved to be modest; the actual bombing campaign lasted seventy-eight days. After the first twelve days NATO had launched the same number of combat operations that it had ordered in the first twelve hours of the Gulf War. The Alliance, and President Bill Clinton in particular, was reluctant to commit combat troops on the ground. It became increasingly clear, though, that a ground offensive, in addition to the air campaign, might be necessary. This decision, however, became obsolete. Milošević soon realised he was largely on his own; Russia, though anti-NATO, was not going to intervene and defend Serbia.
The Serbs capitulated, and the war ended on 11 June 1999 without a single combat fatality on the allied side. Since there were no NATO casualties the Western media concentrated on the impact of the bombing, especially on civilians. Milošević survived long enough to finesse an arrangement: an international force was sent into Kosovo to maintain a UN protectorate that was autonomous but not officially independent. In fact, international peacekeeping troops, including Russians, were tasked with curbing the unruly Kosovo Liberation Army and its bandit partners in Albania proper. When Milošević’s regime started to totter, the Allies also had to pay millions of dollars for the repair of Serbia’s bomb damage. During 40,000 NATO bombing sorties, they destroyed just thirteen elderly Serbian tanks. It would have made economic sense to offer Milošević $10 million for each one, and saved a hell of a lot of lives.
Although it was a short war, it was destined to be a long peacekeeping operation. The intervention had fulfilled one of NATO’s aims by refashioning an alliance that had lost its rationale. Yet the alliance still had its flaws. NATO’s British commander in Macedonia, General Mike Jackson, had negotiated the initial peaceful withdrawal of Serb forces from the province, until the Russians sent a small armoured flying column to Pristina, the Kosovo capital, where the local Serbs treated them as heroes. Ordered to send in British forces by helicopter to Pristina’s airport to face down the Russians, Jackson refused to obey his NATO commander, US General Wesley Clark. ‘General, I’m not going to start World War Three for you,’ the Brit famously declared. The race to Pristina could be seen as the last battle of the Cold War.
Unlike the long unruly wars in Croatia and particularly Bosnia, Kosovo was a heavily media-manipulated war. The first time since 1945 that so many European countries were involved in one war, it was clear from the start that the Serbs could not defeat NATO in battle. Milošević’s only chance of success was for Belgrade to break allied solidarity by launching a media war, or what journalist Peter Dunn dubbed ‘the first international conflict fought by press officers’.7 The Serbs controlled the small Western press corps in Belgrade, and NATO’s HQ in Brussels micro-managed the initial reasons for intervention and the air war. The Serbs cleverly used propaganda, especially Serb and Kosovar civilian casualties, to trumpet the dichotomy between the failure of NATO’s humanitarian mission on the ground and the additional casualties caused by air bombardment. Serbian propaganda was so prevalent and influential that British government ministers attacked the BBC, especially John Simpson, for reporting from Belgrade. Simpson replied that it was ‘ludicrous and offensive to suggest that I was this glove puppet for Milošević’.
NATO’s media operation in Brussels began to fold under the Serb propaganda, especially after untrue accounts of NATO’s air attack casualties came out. Overtaxed press spokesman Dr Jamie Shea, who conducted the daily press briefing in Brussels, was responsible for relaying what military historian Alistair Horne called ‘the pre-digested spin that had been chewed over at length by a committee of NATO ruminants’. Tony Blair sent in spin doctor and eminence grise, Alastair Campbell, to Brussels to relieve Shea, re-organise the media process, and steady nerves. On the ground, a new breed of British army media operations specialists was assigned to Pristina to manage the 2,700 foreign journalists following NATO’s occupation of Kosovo. Despite better media ops personnel, the hacks still complained. ‘We were given lots of material but no information,’ said Sky News correspondent Jake Lynch.
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The NATO PR machine started to fall apart, even though there was not a single Alliance casualty. Alistair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s top spin doctor, was sent to Brussels to restore order.
NATO and its respective governments, especially in Washington and London, were also subjected to media criticism. They were guilty of propaganda and gross exaggeration – especially about Serb atrocities and the accuracy of NATO bombings – in order to diabolise the Serbs, Milošević in particular. Phillip Knightley, in The First Casualty, accused NATO propaganda of being worse than the old Soviet propaganda ‘because there was no opposition to it’. Knightley, however, commented approvingly on the work of veterans such as John Simpson of the BBC who reported out of Belgrade, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, who was forced out of Belgrade by Serb threats, and Julian Mannion of ITN, also in Belgrade. Knightley also cited the Kosovo endeavours of Maggie O’Kane of the Guardian and Marie Colvin and John Swain of the London Sunday Times, commenting as an aside on the high number and the quality of senior female correspondents covering Kosovo. Nonetheless, his overall conclusion on media coverage of Kosovo was stark: ‘The lies, manipulation, news management, propaganda, spin, distortion, omission, slant and gullibility of the coverage of this war, so soon after the media debacle in the Gulf, has brought war correspondents to crisis point in their short history.’ An editorial in the British Journalism Review noted, however, that when, compared with DESERT STORM, the Falklands, Suez, and certainly the Korean War, ‘we must conclude that we have not been badly served’ by the profession.
Since this was a new kind of virtual war, journalists in the field, and out of the Brussels propaganda web, conducted themselves reasonably well. The Kosovo War had been termed the virtual war by Michael Ignatieff in his book Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond. Because this war was a war without death, at least on the Western side, it ceased to be fully real. He argued that the victory was also virtual, particularly as the future status of Kosovo had not been resolved. In this new surreal conflict all NATO citizens were mobilised ‘not as combatants but as spectators’, with Western journalists turned willingly or otherwise into combatants in the media war, because so many swallowed the NATO line. Assuming the role as combatants was not without danger. In April 1999 NATO launched an air attack on Belgrade’s main Serb TV station that was also used by Western film crews. This was to set a pattern for later wars, not least in Iraq when TV stations, and even TV crews, were attacked by American aircraft and tanks. The editorial in the British Journalism Review on Kosovo had proven prophetic: ‘The media, and therefore working journalists, have now become prime targets for destruction as well as for influencing.’8
Other writers attacked NATO’s circumvention of international law. Leftwing critics admitted that they had failed to castigate the war. Diana Johnstone summarised this critique when she wrote, ‘Not since the Socialist Parties of Europe rallied to their governments’ war programmes in 1914 has the left’s opposition to war collapsed so ignominiously and with such good conscience.’ She admitted that the real challenge to the war came from right-wing analysts, often spurred by libertarian suspicion of official propaganda. Johnstone also noted:
Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of ‘nongovernmental organisations’ – often linked to powerful governments – whose competition with each other for donations provides motivation for exaggerations of the abuses they specialise in denouncing. Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism and international relations, the most prosperous country in Eastern Central Europe, is being systematically reduced to an ungovernable chaos by Western support to secessionist movements. The emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the international community, enforced by NATO.9
Given the zeitgeist and the mood of humanitarianism via casualty-free virtual war throughout Western Europe – though Blair was prepared for major casualties in the British Army – NATO governments and their electorates largely supported this war. It was about humanitarian impulses as much as power plays. Their involvement also reflected guilt about delayed intervention in Bosnia: perhaps the Kosovo intervention was partly atonement for Srebrenica.
Though media critics such as Knightley and proponents of the left such as Johnstone may have overstated their arguments, the military, and their governments, undoubtedly dominated the media in Kosovo. Despite the new openness of the military’s media operations, manipulation and misinformation were still rife. Army media specialists on the ground and the war correspondents in the field were both victims of the intense propaganda campaigns of NATO’s political leaders, and not only in London and Washington. Most of the media in Western Europe and the United States joined the campaign and quickly moved to promoting war and pressing for violent action to maintain credibility instead of providing reasonably objective information that would contribute to public debate. Though it is a gross distortion to accuse the BBC of being a ‘de facto public information arm’ of NATO, it is true that most media outlets bought into the demonization of the Serbs once more. Like the Kosovo conflict itself, it was also, as later wars were to prove, merely a virtual victory for the democracies. Unfortunately for the Serbs, their sophisticated external media propaganda war over Kosovo, especially their use of the Internet, was not matched by a greater self-awareness of their own political deficiencies at home.
In December 2004 more than 6,000 EU troops replaced NATO in Bosnia. By spring of 2007 the number was reduced to 2,500. That March, the remaining British troops departed after having served fifteen years in Bosnia. Based on these figures, Defence Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind had been justifiably concerned about the length of commitment reinforcing the Balkans would require after the Bosnian war. UK and other NATO casualties, however, were actually much lower than forecast. The same is not true for the civilian casualty rate. Compared with other battlefields, Bosnia’s are still the most densely mined, and, with luck, it may take another seventy-five years to clear them.
The Kosovars and the Serb government could not reach agreement on the status of the province. A senior mediator proposed that the UN allow Kosovo its independence, setting the stage for further diplomatic tensions between Russia and the West and the beginning of Cold War Mark 2. Russian diplomats argued, inter alia, that recognition of Kosovo would give Moscow leverage over pro-Western Georgia by suggesting that the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia could follow Kosovo’s example. Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and it was recognised by most European states.
The lure of EU membership has brought much peace to the Balkans. Slovenia, for example, joined the EU as later did Croatia. Prompt Western military and political intervention largely resolved the highly explosive region of Macedonia. Montenegro peacefully voted for independence in May 2006. Even Serbia underwent major reforms and, in the same year, NATO granted Belgrade Partnership for Peace status – the first steps to joining the alliance that had expelled it from Kosovo seven years earlier. The Balkans now fell into the category of ‘good news’ journalism because of its progress and, as such, was guaranteed to earn far less airtime than when its states had been at war. ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ was still true of most news editors.
Northern Ireland (Ulster) was a classic case of a protracted war – over thirty years – in a liberal democracy. The origin of Ireland’s recent ‘Troubles’, as the fighting was called, can be traced back hundreds of years. An American journalist of Irish extraction, P. J. O’Rourke, provides the pithiest summary in Holidays in Hell:
The Brits arrived [in Ireland] somewhat tardily, in 1169, and proceeded to commit the unforgivable sin of having long bows and chain mail. For the next 819 years (and counting) the English stole land, crushed rebellions, exploited the populace, persecuted Catholics, dragged a bunch of Scottish settlers into Ulster, crushed more rebellions, held potato famines, hanged patriots, stamped out the language, taxed everybody’s pig, crushed more rebellions yet and generally behaved in a manner much different than the Irish would have if it had been the Irish who invaded England ....
In short, this mock-partisan view expresses the defence that enough barbarism had been inflicted on the Irish to excuse all barbarities later committed by the Irish. More recently, though, Ireland and its relationship with the rest of the British Isles has not been the sole reason for its conflict. Instead, internal religious tensions, albeit indirectly involving Britain, have caused strife. This intra-Christian feuding has been likened to the Sunni-Shi’a divisions in Islam.
Surfacing again in the 1960s the conflict centred on the Protestant majority’s desire to remain part of the UK and the Catholic minority’s determination to join the Republic of Ireland in the twenty-six counties. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, the Catholic minority suffered discrimination over housing and employment. In 1969 civil rights marches by Catholics and counterdemonstrations by Protestant loyalists (loyal to the British Crown) led to violent unrest in Belfast. The British government initially deployed local garrison troops to support the police who were losing control over the crowds. Greeted warmly at first by the Catholics, the Army soon was challenged by the Irish Republican Army (later the Provisional IRA). As a result, Northern Ireland’s regional parliament was suspended and direct rule was imposed from London. In an act of rebellion, the IRA finessed the car-bomb attack and continued bomb, mortar, rocket and gun attacks in Northern Ireland, England (but rarely the fellow Celtic nations of Scotland and Wales), as well as military installations in mainland Europe. Loyalist paramilitaries targeted Catholics in tit-for-tat killings.
After years of intermittent fighting, broken ceasefires, and hidden deals, the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998, after much effort by Prime Minister Blair and some help from President Bill Clinton. A power-sharing executive was set up, backed by referenda in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic, which gave up claims to the north. Power-sharing devolution broke down, partly because of the slow progress of arms decommissioning by the IRA. The Belfast Agreement had been signed by other more moderate leaders and parties but Northern Irish politics moved to the extremes. Nevertheless, on 26 March 2007, the two opposing hardliners, Gerry Adams of the IRA/Sinn Féin and Ian Paisley, the leader of the largest unionist party, finally sat down together. They did not shake hands then, but they agreed to share power in a devolved assembly. Though a few extremists on both sides opposed the settlement, the vast majority of the citizens of Northern Ireland welcomed the change and the peace, prosperity and employment that followed it. For them, regressing to the Troubles was unthinkable.
The British media had taken a battering during the Troubles. Much of the coverage of the conflict had been one-sided. As one experienced British journalist articulated a cause of this bias, ‘Reporting a war on one’s own doorstep is always more difficult than reporting someone else’s war.’10 The nationalist/republican newspapers in the province were expected to be partisan. The BBC and the quality English newspapers were not. Much of the time, however, the British media failed the Irish as well as their own professional standards. Initially, the British Army was to blame for the BBC’s bias. Its response to the media was secretive, unreliable and hostile. Gradually, it improved as it realised that the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, were winning the propaganda war in the province and in the United States, with its large Irish-American community. Successive British governments treated the unrest as a wartime emergency and put great pressure on newspapers and broadcasters to avoid publishing the views of the terrorists. In particular, Prime Minister Thatcher was determined to cut off what she called the ‘oxygen of publicity’ to the IRA.
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Provisional IRA poster.
The government used an array of existing legislation and some specially devised for the province to keep the media’s focus away from the IRA. The government also was guilty of cover-ups, with the 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ killing of fourteen civilians by paratroopers as the most infamous example. Spasmodically, the serious UK newspapers would return to issues such as ‘Bloody Sunday’ and prod the authorities. A series of expensive government enquiries eventually demonstrated that the Army’s report of the deaths was inaccurate, though one military expert argued that it was caused by ‘an undisciplined cock-up, not a conspiracy’.11
The British government’s relations with the media further deteriorated in the aftermath of the Milltown cemetery killings. The BBC and ITN had taken pictures of two slain off-duty British soldiers who had mistakenly passed through an IRA funeral in Belfast in March 1988. The government forced both broadcasters, after serious protest, to hand over their tapes after news editors were threatened with arrest under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Though the BBC accepted that it had to abide by the law, it recognised that complying was not only against media ethics, but also meant that its film crews could be targeted by IRA gunmen who did not want television footage in the hands of security forces.
Relations between the government and the media reached their lowest point with the 1988 ban on the direct airing of IRA representatives, though there had been relatively few television interviews with them. The broadcasters found a loophole in the legislation (which was based on similar existing laws in the Irish Republic): Sinn Féin spokespeople were broadcast, soundlessly, with their words subtitled or spoken by actors. This only drew attention to what the IRA had to say. ‘There is a no more ludicrous sight on television than the lip-synched sound-bite’, in the words of John Simpson, then the BBC’s foreign editor. The ban survived until September 1994, shortly after the IRA announced a ceasefire. More effective was the secret arm-twisting by government officials, especially the BBC, which was inevitably sensitive about its status and funding, particularly during the Thatcher premiership. This has been called the ‘British way of censorship’: self-censorship and filtration of news stories up the chain of command, notably in the highly bureaucratic BBC.
Although Northern Ireland was, and is, officially part of the United Kingdom, the military counter-insurgency sometimes acted as it would in a Third World country. Laws were ignored, bent, or re-invented, such as internment without trial, harsh treatment of internees, and the alleged ‘shootto-kill’ policy. (Shoot to wound is something of a Hollywood myth. Soldiers are usually trained to hit the largest target possible, the torso.) There was initial justification to IRA publicity in the United States that described ‘an army of occupation out of control’. The Army soon learned, however, that it was not at war, but providing aid to the civil power, particularly as it ‘Ulsterised’ the conflict by working alongside the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment. It refined its techniques, not least in dealing with the media.
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British troops were at first welcomed as protectors by the Catholic minority. Soon, the army was caught in the middle of IRA and loyalist fighting. This was the longest insurgency in modern Europe – thirty years.
After 1977 all Army units had to field a press officer. This hard training ground would later prove useful for the Army and its peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and elsewhere.12 And, in the secret war, the Army was highly successful in the use of ‘supergrass’ informants and moles, which reached to the top of the IRA. The IRA was determined to sap the will of the Army in the province, but the heavy-handed preliminary responses were replaced over the three decades by sophisticated containment. During this time, Army officers patiently understood they were ‘holding the ring’ for politicians in Belfast, Dublin and London to reach a political solution. At the same time, the IRA/Sinn Féin maintained a successful propaganda war, especially in hiding the ‘disappearances’ of its own dissidents and fundraising activities, which echoed the Mafia’s style. The IRA manipulated the freedoms that a liberal democracy offered, though some of these were also eroded by government legislation and covert means of pressure on the media. The National Union of Journalists, particularly during the ban on hearing IRA voices, regularly accused the government of emulating the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Especially in liberal democracies, the longer the conflict and the greater the lack of success in quickly ending the war, the more determined the media will become in circumventing restrictions. Yet the media generally failed its audience in Great Britain. Except when the IRA staged a spectacular by bombing British cities or assassinating a Cabinet minister or a member of the Royal Family, the electorate tried to forget the Troubles.13 If the government had held a UK-wide referendum on withdrawing from the province, the vast majority of the population would have been in support of it (as they would have supported the return of capital punishment, especially for killing members of the police). No major British political party, however, could then be seen to surrender in the province, especially the Conservative Party, which was constitutionally committed to the Union with Northern Ireland (and Scotland and Wales).
Italy and Germany also brought the media, by persuasion and legal pressure, into a centralised response to their home-grown terrorists, the Red Brigade and the West German Red Army Faction. West Germany effectively imposed a news blackout after the kidnapping of a prominent West German industrialist in 1977. Italy was less successful in controlling its media after the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the twice-elected prime minister. In both cases, the hostages were murdered. As with the IRA, whether deprivation of publicity had a direct impact on the terrorists’ goals is difficult to prove. Political redress for long running grievances, such as Basque separatist group ETA’s demands for autonomy and independence, were the key, not short-term media tactics. A historian of media– military relations summarised the debate thus:
Withholding the ‘oxygen of publicity’ may suppress some outward manifestations of terrorism, although such repressive measures ... force ‘terrorists’ to resort to yet more spectacular atrocities in order to pierce the veil of censorship .... But bans on media reportage are most unlikely to suffocate terrorism altogether, for this prescription tackles only the symptoms, not the underlying malady, and treats terrorism as essentially a problem for journalists, not politicians.14
The fighting in Northern Ireland was often treated as a form of IRA psychosis. Tabloid headlines screamed variations on ‘murdering mad bastards’. The military, in the beginning, bungled operationally in military and media terms. On occasion, the government behaved, particularly under Thatcher, as though the British media were in cahoots with the IRA. The media also tended often to take the path of least resistance, even censoring themselves. Moreover, the Irish seemed unpredictable. Even traffic wardens, Catholic and Protestant alike, were friendly to visitors in Ulster. A few square miles of Belfast looked like conventional war zones, where young street kids would ask cheekily, ‘D’ ye want a soundbite, sir?’ and then criticise the journalist’s choice of shutter speed on his Nikon. Even in South Armagh, amid the serene countryside that constituted the majority of the province, stood the Army observation towers, gangling, soaring contraptions of guy wire and pipe that looked like Heath-Robinson building scaffolds had crossbred with the Martian war machines of H. G. Wells.15
Underneath the superficial negotiating charm of the IRA and the loyalists lurked intense emotions: a passionate anger of the IRA men who could starve themselves to death in prison protests, and the deep allegiance of the ultraloyalists who would fight anyone, including the British, to remain British. Except for a few Fleet Street veterans of the Troubles, the London-based media were often bamboozled by the Irish people, as much as by their government or the Army. In London it was easier to adopt the Basil Fawlty mantra: ‘Don’t mention the war.’16
In 1858, after decades of tough resistance, Chechnya was conquered by Russia. This followed the defeat of Imam Shamil, whose fighters had vowed to establish an Islamic state. During the chaos of the Russian revolution, the Chechens briefly secured independence. Germany’s invasion brought renewed hope of freedom from the Soviet yoke. When the Second World War ended Josef Stalin sought vengeance by wholesale deportation of the Chechens, mainly to Siberia. They were allowed to return in 1957, after Stalin’s death.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991 the Chechens again declared independence. In 1994 the Russians bungled a poorly planned bid to regain control. They attacked, as they had in Afghanistan twenty-five years before, at Christmas time, to dilute Western protests. Perhaps a tenth of the population was killed in the onslaught, especially in Grozny, the capital. David Loyn, of the BBC, observed, ‘For the first time since the Second World War thousands of shells were fired into a city in a single day. The snipers of Sarajevo seemed almost gentlemanly by comparison.’17 The main resistance leader, General Aslan Maskhadov, fought well and hard. Former British Army officer and co-founder of Frontline TV News Vaughan Smith commented on the widespread support that the Chechens gave Maskhadov, ‘If you were a fighter, you didn’t get a shag from the missus that night unless you killed a Russian’. Amid growing public concern in a Russia that had grasped at media freedoms, Moscow withdrew its forces after heavy losses. Chechnya achieved substantial autonomy but not full independence. It did not achieve stability either, as warlordism and organised crime proliferated. In August 1999 Chechen fighters crossed into the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan as part of a planned Islamic insurrection in the region. The following year the Russians blamed the Chechens for a series of explosions in Moscow apartment blocks. Others, including ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko (who was famously assassinated by radiation poisoning in London), suspected that the Russian security services had bombed them to create a pretext for war and the re-election of President Vladimir Putin in 2000.
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Russian forces in Grozny during the First Chechen war.
The assertive and autocratic president ordered a brutal campaign to reconquer the rebel state. Putin used the Second Chechen War to stoke Russian xenophobia and to curb his domestic media. Western media had covered the First Chechen War, although reporting had been sporadic. Because of this coverage during the first war, Russia imposed a total ban on journalists in the second. In February 2000 the Russians captured and destroyed much of Grozny. This time, however, the Russians combined the reconstruction, especially in the capital, with gross violations of human rights. After 9/11 Putin projected his Chechnya adventures as part of the wider war on global jihadist terror to mute criticism from Washington and London. As John Pilger opined, ‘Having demonstrated his ability to keep post-Soviet Russia under control, Putin was Washington’s and London’s man, and in return received carte blanche in troublesome Chechnya.’ If the Cold War had not ended the Chechens would probably have been armed by the West in the same way that the Afghan fighters had received support in the 1980s. Journalists covering the war generally admired the Chechens’ courage in fighting the Russians, but understood why their struggle had been sacrificed to the politics of the new world order.
Chechen rebels seized a Moscow theatre in October 2002 and held 800 people hostage; 120 of the hostages were killed when Russian troops stormed the building. Moscow then damned the Chechens for organising the siege at North Ossetia’s Beslan school, which ended in a bloodbath. The fighting by dissident Islamic fighters continued against the pro-Moscow Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. The anti-Russian forces were still trying to widen the conflict to include the whole of the Caucasus where a kaleidoscope of conflicts smouldered, not least in Georgia.
In the early days of the Chechen independence wars Western journalists could gain access to the region, though it was dangerous. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen produced powerful television footage in 1995 and succinctly described in his memoirs the Stalingrad-like conditions in Grozny. After Putin’s crackdown, it became increasingly difficult for foreign journalists to operate freely in Chechnya. A few Russians were allowed entry and they reported the war from the official Moscow standpoint. A brave exception was Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote for the independent Novaya Gazeta. She travelled to Chechnya thirty-nine times between 1999 and 2001.
In one of her despatches from near Grozny in November 1999, Politkovskaya wrote:
Our losses are immeasurable as we let the army get out of hand and degenerate into anarchy. By allowing such a war to be fought in our own country, without any rules, not against terrorists but against those who hate their own bandits perhaps even more strongly than we do, we are the losers and the loss is irreversible.
Politkovskaya made many powerful enemies. In Chechnya senior Russian officers repeatedly threatened her with rape. She survived numerous death threats and an attempted poisoning in 2004. Then, in October 2006, she was murdered in her Moscow apartment building. Experts suspect it was a contract killing.
In 2007 Putin declared the war to be over but a secret partisan war was still underway. Conservative estimates were then that 200,000 Chechens had been killed in the fighting since 1994. Officially Moscow has admitted that 10,000 federal troops were killed in combat in Chechnya, which is certainly an underestimate. Of the approximately one million Russian troops who survived, many of the veterans became alcoholics, unemployable and anti-social, suffering from what has been termed ‘the Chechen syndrome’.
By mid-2007 the Russians were using their Chechen loyalist proxies, some of whom had been bought, while others claimed to have been disenchanted with the small number of foreign Islamic extremists who had infiltrated and dominated the separatist forces. Many utterly war-weary Chechens hoped that Putin’s strong-arm tactics, allied to reconstruction, would allow Ramzan Kadyrov, Moscow’s man and certainly no bleeding-heart liberal, to bring peace of sorts. Better one warlord in control, they said, than several competing bandit or jihadist leaders.
Chechnya was only one of many largely hidden wars, places where most media couldn’t reach. Tibet was closed to foreign correspondents, as was Burma, where the Karen people were exterminated. (The reforms led by Aung San Suu Kyi introduced democracy in 2015.) The Maoist insurgency in Nepal too was little reported.18 The list of conflicts ignored in Africa was long. Sometimes the sheer inaccessibility of the fighting and the restrictions of authoritarian regimes deterred reporters. More often, though, it was a straightforward question of Western news values. To quote the intrepid Welsh correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, ‘A traditional British newsroom follows a terrible arithmetic. Generally speaking, the further away from London, and the poorer the people, the more deaths it takes to qualify as a big story.’
The wars in the Balkans were extensively covered, partly because of the advent of lightweight cameras deployed by journalists as well as by ordinary citizens. This was a portent of the twentieth-first century phenomenon of citizen journalists armed with cameras in their mobile phones. Wars suddenly became more difficult to hide.
The wars of Islamic extremism, from phone footage of the 7/7 attacks on the London Underground and on a bus in Tavistock Square to the unofficial recording of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, resulted in an explosion of images. These reports by amateurs were increasingly absorbed into mainstream news. They may have dramatized the stories, but they may also have undermined the professionals’ anxious search for context in the bewildering new world disorder.