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Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis

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This is a collection of essays which attack the myths of the Kosovo war. Essayists include John Pilger, Philip Hammond, Diana Johnstone, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Nicos Raptis, Thomas Deichman, David Chandler and Mick Hume (a British right wing libertarian).

The subjects the authors analyze include, the Western intervention that was the primary cause of the Balkan wars in the first place; the extreme pro-Nato bias of the so-called International War Crimes Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia; the efforts of the U.S. military to "work with" the mass media; the effort to "nazify" the Serbs in the Western media; and the evolving nature of warfare in the West.

Probably the best chapters are by Jim Naureckas and Seth Ackerman of Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and Edward S. Herman and David Peterson on the American media's coverage of the war (Herman and Peterson concentrate on CNN's coverage) and John Pilger and Philip Hammond on the British media's coverage of the war. The subjects discussed in these chapters include, New York Times articles from the 1980's describing mass atrocities in Kosovo by Albanians against Serbs, stories that the Times, along with the rest of the media, forgot as they portrayed the Kosovo conflict as a black and white story that was nothing more than Milosevic, when he came to power in the late 80's, inflicting his barbaric racism against defenseless Albanians; the fact that atrocities and the misery of Kosovar Albanians vastly increased in Kosovo after the bombing began on March 24th; the hysterical anti-Serb racism of the British and American media along with their typically puerile self-righteousness as they urged Nato to attack Serb civillians and civillian infrastructure so that the Serbs's would get a taste of the unique atrocities that their leaders had inflicted upon other people's of the region; the unwillingness of the media to report details about these Nato war crimes; the fact that the Western media paid no attention to the fact that Nato inserted a clause in Appendix B of the Rambouillet accords which called for an exclusively Nato occupation force for Kosovo that would have unlimited access to the rest of Yugoslavia, terminating that nation's sovereignty (all this caused a brief stir in the German media before being quieted by foreign minister Joschka Fischer, as Thomas Deichman shows in his chapter on Germany's reaction to the war); the fact that George Kenney, former chair of the Yugoslav desk at the State Department during the Bush administration, ignored by the media, reported that a state department official had told him that Nato deliberately had deliberately sabotoged the Rambouillet accords; the fact that the Serb parliament had passed a resolution the day before the bombing began, that received scattered attention in the U.S. media, agreeing to an international security presence in Kosovo that would include neutral elements like the United Nations, as opposed to the exclusively Nato occupation force that the U.S. insisted upon; the fact that tens of thousands of Serbs, gypsies, Jews, and other non-Albanians have been ethnically cleansed by the Kosovo Liberation Army since the bombing ended; the fact that war crimes investigators have not been able to find more than between two thousand to three thousand bodies since the war ended, placing serious doubt on Nato's claims of "genocide" and its 10,000 dead figure (or 11,000, Bernard Kouchner's figure).

The rest of the book contains some good chapters on the reaction of the media the to the war in Germany, Russia, India, Norway and Greece, where the vast majority of the population opposed the war. Diana Johnstone analyzes the likely imperial motivations for the war and analyzes the media reaction to the war in France, where liberals, like Bernard Henri Levy, were obsessed by the alleged "multiculturalism" of Bosnian Moslems and their city, Sarajevo, in contrast to the barbaric racism of the Serbs, a centerpiece of their drive to distract attention from the harmful economic effects of further European integration and focus on an ideology of anti-racism, anti-chauvanism, anti-isolationism,etc. and smear any opponents of the European Union as automatically being in the same league with Jean Marie Le Pen, the fascist party leader.

On the whole, this is an excellent collection of essays. Not all of them are particularly well written. If you want a more succinct summary of the Kosovo War, try Noam Chomsky's "The New Military Humanism."

This is the best book yet on the NATO aggression of March-June 1999. It also studies the media coverage of the war. The first part consists of four essays on the background to the war, David Chandler's essay, Western intervention and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, 1989-1999, being outstanding. The second and third parts comprise fourteen essays on media coverage around the world, including a brilliant essay on CNN's role as NATO's mouthpiece. Unfortunately, however, there is no essay studying the huge popular opposition to the war in Europe and America.

This was NATO's first war, and it attacked a sovereign country with no UN authorisation. It showed itself as an alliance with no legal or geographic limits, in which the USA and Germany quarrelled like rats in a sack. To trigger the war, the US government demanded that NATO forces occupy the whole country. As a US official said, "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get."

It was also the EU's war. From 1990, the EC intervened in Yugoslavia's internal affairs, aiding those seeking to secede. Its recognition of Yugoslavia's seceding republics breached international law, precipitating war. The EU's social democratic governments embrace capital, `the market' and big business: their enemy is nationalism, politics, demonised as the source of all evil.

Germany, the USA, Austria and Albania armed the Kosovo Liberation Army. In early 1998, the KLA's first major attack provoked a Serb crackdown. NATO claimed that the Serbs killed 100,000 people. Later the International Criminal Tribunal of The Hague counted 2,500 dead. The NATO bombing killed 2,600 people. Who should be tried for war crimes?

After the war, the US Congress voted $100 million to `independent' forces in former Yugoslavia, seeking its further disintegration. NATO was supposed to disarm the KLA and to protect Serbs and Roma Gypsies in Kosovo. But it has allowed the KLA to kill more than 200 Serbs and to expel 240,000 Serbs and 90,000 Roma.

I have been waiting for such a book for a long time. First of all let me tell the reader of this review to ignore those morons that gave this book a low grade and call the author boring, reading "entertaining" and "short" history is what made the Kosovo war so appealing to the public in the first place.
Book is very well written, not boring to a person interested in the subject, and tells in great detail what and how the western media did during the Kosovo crisis. It tells about the bias that western media had against the Serbs, people who fought bravely against Nazis in WW2, and how the war was manufactured, and many other GREAT FACTS about the "civilised west" that we will not see on FOXNEWS or read in New York Times.
Also the book NEVER says that Serbs did not commit atrocities (whoever says this clearly did not read the book), but it remindes the casual reader that Serbs were not the only ones who did violent things, a major ommission in the western media.
I would recommend this book to any student that needs an excellent source on the subject and to anyone else who thought that the coverage of the balkan conflicts were not objective.

If you just look at the contributors and authors of this book you will know how good it is. Those who rate this work with one star are same people who do this with every other book that exposes anti-serb propaganda. It is now more than obvious that they are doing this proffesionaly, as a full time job.Neither they have read this book neither they really know what is inside the covers. Their only task is to downgrade any work that could open your eyes regarding ex-Yugo affairs. Do not listen to them and don't let them influence you- this book is a rare gem, and after you read it you will know why.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it!


The people of Serbia know what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo. They know that genocide occurred and that the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo were the primary victims. I wonder why Mr. Hammond fails to explain why Serbia refuses to extradite Karadzic and Mladic? Why are they refusing to admit the truth about the gruesome massacre in Srebrenica? Is the whole world conspiring against the Serbian people and more important is there a covert Western campaign to dehumanize the Serbian people? Since Mr. Hammond refuses to condemn the Serbian atrocities, the present reviewer will attempt to bring clarity as to why Serbia keeps providing shelter for notorious war criminals, such as Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.

Even though he has been accused of committing egregious atrocities in Bosnia, Mladic is still hiding in Serbia under the protection of the Serbian authorities. Considered a national hero in Serbia, Mladic commands great respect and admiration. How does one explain the non-compliance of the Serbian authorities to accommodate the international community?

According to some estimates, more than 50% of the Serbian population still believes that there was no massacre in Srebrenica. The figure is probably much higher among the Bosnian Serb population. I recently watched a debate on Serbian TV about Mladic's role in the Srebrenica massacre. The central question of the debate was whether or not the massacre in Srebrenica had actually taken place. One participant remarked that there had been no massacre in Srebrenica and that Mladic has always been a Serbian hero. When asked why she believed in Mladic's innocence and why she held him in such high regard, she replied that Mladic had been killing "bloody Turks" in Srebrenica. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that more than six hundred years have passed since the Turkish presence in the Balkans. In order to understand the root causes of the Serbian nationalism we will have to return to year 1389. It was in this year that the infamous battle between the Turks and the Serbs took place in Kosovo, the outcome of which had come to play a pivotal role in the rise of the Serbian nationalism. Considered God by many Serbs, Prince Lazar's death probably still constitutes the most significant event in the Serbian history. Islam has ever since been viewed as Serbia's primary enemy in spite of the fact that more than six centuries have passed since Lazar's death.

This enormous hatred of the Turks was easily transferred onto the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo, even though their only common denominator was Islam. In point of fact, many Serbs still make no distinction between the Turks and the Bosnian or Kosovo's Muslims. In contemporary Serbian literature, Muslims are frequently portrayed as backward, uncivilized and belligerent savages, for corroboration see for example books by Vuk Draskovic and Njegos. Paradoxically, despite their grossly distorted let alone parochial views of Islam, Draskovic and Njegos have many readers in Serbia. What better way to mislead the public than to have "experts" like the notorious Serbian ultra-nationalist Draskovic spread vicious anti-Islamic propaganda? Once these so called experts had managed to create a sense of "victimization" in the Serbian people, justifying a war to defend the Serbian people from the "Islamic threat" and the "Albanian nationalism" was easy. Of course, there were no such threats, if anything, the situation was reversed. The Albanians in Kosovo had been suffering from the Serbian repression for years. The Muslims of Bosnia were and still are the most secularized Muslims in the world so all talk of the Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia has always been nonsensical and completely groundless. For a thorough analysis of Islam in Bosnia see Noel Malcolm's Bosnia a Short History. Thus, it is clear that the Serbian nationalism has always been fuelled by myths (see Michael Sells's brilliantly researched The Bridge Betrayed for a comprehensive analysis of the root causes of the Serbian nationalism).

Thus, the principal reason Serbia refuses to turn over Ratko Mladic to the War Tribunal in The Hague is the ancient Serbian dream of a "Greater Serbia". Many Serbs believe that Mladic was fighting for a creation of the "Greater Serbia" and for that reason they tend to deny or at best downplay his atrocities. I think that this also explains the Serbian unwillingness to admit the truth about the Srebrenica massacre. Acknowledging the truth about Mladic's role in Srebrenica massacre would have severe repercussions for Serbia. First, the Serbian people would finally realize that their government had been deceiving them all the time about the war in Bosnia and Kosovo. More important, they would learn that the Serbs were not the victims as their government had been telling them from the very beginning of the war in Bosnia and the subsequent Serbian aggression in Kosovo.

Hammond's central thesis is that the NATO's intervention in Kosovo only exacerbated the conflict. What Hammond however fails to explain is what was the alternative to a military intervention. To keep negotiating with Milosevic until his troops exterminate all Albanians? For three years the Western diplomats had been trying to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia but to no avail. Approximately 300,000 people had to die because the international community refused to intervene in Bosnia. Had the NATO intervened immediately many innocent lives would have been saved. This is irrefutable!

Sometimes when there is no peaceful resolution in sight we must fight fire with fire! When someone is defenseless and powerless
(as the people of Bosnia and Kosovo were) then we are all obliged to put an end to their suffering, be it by diplomacy or by force.

Another aspect clearly neglected by Hammond, Diana Johnstone, Christian Parenti and other left revisionists is the incontrovertible fact that the Serbs were heavily armed while the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo lacked sophisticated weaponry. Had the international community lifted the arms embargo then they would not have needed to intervene.

Hammond's book thus provides an inaccurate and flawed analysis of the war in Kosovo. Based on the assumption that the NATO's intervention merely escalated the atrocities, this book offers a grossly distorted view of the war in Kosovo.

This is NOT simply a set of articles criticising NATO's 1999 assault on Serbia. Rather, its contributors appear horrified with the very thought of human empathy for the oppressed Albanian people of Kosovo on the part of Western observers. They count corpses, deny atrocities and minimise suffering to the point where it appears almost as though life for the Albanians in Milosevic's Kosovo was actually pretty rosy. There is a great deal of insincerity here. Thus Mick Hume professes concern at comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler: they involve minimising the unique horror of the Holocaust, he says. This is a bit rich coming from someone who spent much of the 1990s equating the Croats and Germans of today with the Nazis. Diana Johnstone views the Serbs almost as a kind of 'chosen people' whom she imbues with mystical powers of resistence to her imaginary Western imperialist conspiracies. After reading this book, I do not believe that even if Milosevic really had exterminated six million people in gas chambers the reaction of these authors would have been any different. Whatever next ? Perhaps a sequel claiming that the Taliban were great feminists and that their atrocities against women were the invention of the Western media...

The best story is how the Serb parliament passed a resolution just before the war started accepting a peaceful solution. What kind of naivete allows one to give credibility to a parliament dominated by Milosevic cronies, one that supported genocide in Croatia and Bosnia? Does the author not know what happened in Bosnia, where the Serbs behaved like patholigical liars, fooling the West into believing them, then killing 250,000 people? Does the author recall how the British, to him the leaders of anti-Serb propaganda, from day one appeased the Serbs in Bosnia, and only reluctantly got involved in the Balkans? It is pathetic how persons can ignore common sense in order to write something different. It is so boring to rest one's laurels on breaking percieved conformist thinking, while abandoning inteligent ethical commentary in the process. Serbs will love this book, as will people who lack the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Chomskyism is becoming too morally confused to be relevant any longer. This boring author should have been made to spend a year in Vukovar, Sarajevo or Pristina when they were under Serb domination. Read Noel Malcom's "Kososo: a Short History."