• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2685 0

the year before the NATO bombing were estimated by U.S. and other Western sources to number no more than 2,000, and the Serb assault and expulsions that followed and accompanied the NATO bombing campaign also appear to have resulted in deaths in the low thousands (an intensive postwar search for graves had yielded some 3,000 bodies by August 2000, not all of them Albanian civilians or necessarily victims of the Serbs).36 Deaths in the Turkish war on the Kurds in the 1990s were estimated to be 30,000 or more, a large fraction Kurdish civilians, with refugee numbers running to 2–3 million. In East Timor, where the Indonesian military organized and collaborated with a paramilitary opposition to a U.N.-sponsored independence referendum held on August 30, 1999, an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 East Timorese civilians were slaughtered even before the referendum vote that rejected Indonesian rule, which unleashed a furious Indonesian army–paramilitary assault on East Timorese.37

The double standard reflected in the politicized use of “genocide” is applicable to the treatment of news events more broadly, with the media regularly focusing on the abuse of worthy victims and playing down or neglecting altogether the plight of unworthy victims. As an illustration, we may consider the contrasting media treatment of the alleged killing of some forty Albanians by the Serbs at Racak, Kosovo, on January 15, 1999, and the Indonesian army-militia killing of “up to 200” East Timorese at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999.38 The former was seen as useful by U.S. officials,39 who were trying to ready the U.S. and Western publics for an imminent NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Although the facts in the Racak killings, which occurred in the course of fighting between the Serbian military and Kosovo Liberation Army insurgents within Yugoslavia, were and remain in dispute—and recent evidence raises further doubts about the NATO-KLA account of events there40—the deaths were immediately denounced and featured by U.S. and NATO officials as an intolerable “massacre.” The U.S. mainstream media did the same and gave this reported massacre heavy and uncritical attention.41 This helped create the moral basis for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that began on March 24, 1999.

The Liquica killings of East Timorese seeking refuge in a Catholic church by Indonesian-organized militia forces were indisputably a “massacre,” apparently involved many more victims than at Racak, and it took place in a territory illegally occupied by a foreign state (Indonesia). It was also neither a unique event nor was it connected to any warfare, as in Kosovo—it was a straightforward slaughter of civilians. But U.S. officials did not denounce this massacre—in fact, active U.S. support of the Indonesian military continued throughout this period and up to a week after the referendum, by which time 85 percent of the population had been driven from their homes and well over 6,000 civilians had been slaughtered. The U.S. mainstream media followed the official lead. For a twelve-month period following the date of each event, the mentions of Racak by the five media entities cited in the table exceeded mentions of Liquica by 4.1 to 1, and mentions of “massacre” at the two sites was in a ratio of 6.7 to 1. The greater length of accounts of the Racak event elevates the ratio to 14 to 1 as measured by word count. Newsweek, which mentioned Racak and its “massacre” nine times, failed to mention Liquica once.

Thus, with the cooperation of the media, the Racak killings were effectively used by U.S. officials to ready the public for war, not only by their intensive coverage but also by their taking the official allegations of massacre at face value. In the same time frame, the media’s treatment of the indisputable massacre at Liquica was insufficient in volume or indignation to mobilize the public, in accord with the U.S. policy of leaving the management of events in East Timor to the U.S. ally Indonesia.

LEGITIMATING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS

In chapter 3 we show that the mainstream