Cover
story
Albanian Kosovar actions of 80s go unreported
The following is a major portion of an article published in the
May/June issue of Extra!, the magazine published by FAIR, a national
media watch group. The author is the magazines editor.
By JIM NAURECKAS
In presenting the background to the
Kosovo conflict, U.S. news outlets have focused overwhelmingly on the very real
crimes committed by Yugoslavian and Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians. In
the process, they have downplayed or ignored the ways that Albanian
nationalists have contributed to ethnic tensions in the region. These one-sided
accounts have reduced a complex dynamic that calls for careful mediation to a
cartoon battle of good v. evil, with bombing the bad guys as the obvious
solution.
In order to eliminate any moral ambiguity from the NATO
intervention, media attempts to provide context to Kosovo generally
start the modern history of the conflict in 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic began
using Serb/Albanian tensions for his own political ends. A New York
Times backgrounder (March 4) by Michael Kaufman basically skips from World
War II to 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic, now the Yugoslav president,
first began exploiting and inflaming the historical rivalries of Albanians and
Serbs. In Kaufmans account, the conflict was relatively
dormant until Mr. Milosevic stirred up hostilities in 1989 by revoking the
autonomous status that Kosovo enjoyed in Serbia.
The revocation of autonomy was a crucial decision, one that
greatly destabilized the multiethnic Yugoslavian system and contributed to the
countrys breakup. The loss of autonomy was a grievance that helped pave
the way for the rise of an armed separatist movement in the form of the Kosovo
Liberation Army.
But the decision to end Kosovos autonomous status did not
come out of nowhere or out of a simple Serbian desire to oppress Albanians. To
get a more complicated picture of the situation in Kosovo in the 80s,
Kaufman would only have had to look up his own papers coverage from the
era.
Origins of ethnic
cleansing?
New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in
1982 (Nov. 28, 1982): In violence growing out of the Pristina University
riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured.
There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial
sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovos remaining indigenous
Slavs -- Serbs and Montenegrins -- out of the province.
Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy,
Binder reported (Nov. 9, 1982): Such incidents have prompted many of
Kosovos Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to
fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically pure Albanian
Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have
left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots.
Ethnically pure, of course, is another way to
translate the phrase ethnically clean -- as in ethnic
cleansing. The first use of this concept to appear in Nexis was in
relation to the Albanian nationalists program for Kosovo: The
nationalists have a two-point platform, the Times Marvine
Howe quotes a communist (and ethnically Albanian) official in Kosovo (July 12,
1982), first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian
republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania. All
of the half-dozen references in Nexis to ethnically clean or
ethnic cleansing over the next seven years attribute the phrase to
Albanian nationalists.
The New York Times returned to the Kosovo issue in 1986
when the papers Henry Kamm (April 28, 1986) reported that Slavic
Yugoslavians blame ethnic Albanians ... for continuing assaults, rape and
vandalism. They believe their aim is to drive non-Albanians out of the
province. He reported suspicions by Slavs that the autonomous communist
authorities in Kosovo were covering up anti-Slavic crimes, including arson at a
nunnery and the brutal mutilation of a Serbian farmer. Kamm quoted a prescient
Western diplomat who described Kosovo as Yugoslavias
single greatest problem.
By 1987, the Times was portraying a dire situation in
Kosovo. David Binder reported (Nov. 11, 1987):
Ethnic Albanians in the government have manipulated
public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. ... Slavic
Orthodox churches have been attacked and flags have been torn down. Wells have
been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young
ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls. ... As
Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian
nationalists have been demanding for years and especially strongly since the
bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981 -- an ethnically
pure Albanian region, a Republic of Kosovo in all but
name.
This is the situation -- at least as perceived by Serbs -- that
led to Milosevics infamous 1987 speech promising protection of Serbs, and
later resulted in the revocation of Kosovos autonomy. Despite being
easily available on Nexis, virtually none of this material has found its way
into contemporary coverage of Kosovo, in The New York Times or anywhere
else.
Consistent skepticism
It may be, of course, that some of the charges levied against
Albanian nationalists during the 80s were exaggerated or even fabricated
by politically motivated Serbs. Those who are tempted to dismiss these accounts
based on this possibility, however, should be careful to apply the same
critical standards to media coverage of anti-Albanian atrocities in the
90s. The current coverage of Serbian crimes, if anything, should be
viewed with even greater skepticism, since Yugoslavia has now become an
official enemy of the United States, and establishment reporting generally
shows a strong bias against such countries. (See Manufacturing Consent,
Herman and Chomsky.)
And if one suggests that The New York Times had a peculiar
anti-Albanian bias in the 80s, one still has to explain why similar
reports of proto-ethnic cleansing appeared in The Washington Post (Nov.
29, 1986) and the Financial Times (July 20, 1982, and July 22,
1986).
National Catholic Reporter, June 18,
1999
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