SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, TONY BLAIR, TO THE NEWSPAPER SOCIETY ANNUAL LUNCH, LONDON, MONDAY 10 MAY 1999
Of course the major preoccupation of politicians and media alike in recent weeks has been the Kosovo crisis.
As I have said before, the responsibility of asking servicemen and women to risk their lives is one that any Prime Minister takes very seriously indeed. You do not do it unless you think it through and you believe it to be right.
[The 78-day NATO bombardment of Serbia was exclusively from the air – and bombs were generally dropped from a great height. The risks for NATO forces were negligible.]
Every single political leader in the NATO Alliance has thought it through and believes it to be right. The longer it goes on, and the more we hear of the nature of the Milosevic regime and the atrocities committed, the more convinced I become of the rightness of our course.
Our aims have been clear throughout. His troops must get out, and the refugees must be allowed home in safety under an international military force. These are basic minimum demands and they will be met.
[NATO leaders were induced to back the illegal bombing campaign on the basis that terrible human rights abuses were taking place in Kosovo, perpetrated by Serb forces. This was totally false: the UN’s final reckoning of the war was that some 4,000 people had been killed on all sides. Around half of this total died in the NATO bombing. The other 50%, split evenly between the two sides, were the result of fighting.]
This is the media age, the era of 24-hour news, in which events are subject to instant and relentless analysis and commentary.
As the politicians who ultimately take the decisions to send our forces into battle, it is absolutely right that we are subject to such analysis -something which President Milosevic does not agree with, but then that is one of the many distinctions between dictatorship and democracy.
[Slobodan Milosevic was more of a democrat than Tony Blair. Milosevic was elected Serbian President in two successive elections. He accepted defeat in the election held after the end of the war despite the fact the US had intervened heavily in the election, spending millions of dollars to secure the outcome they wanted. As for media coverage, western countries were subjected to incessant NATO and KLA propaganda. Western journalists had no inclination to be seen to challenge the orthodox view. Serbia, by contrast, had state media that was more restrained than western media and commercial media that operated throughout the bombing.]
This is largely presented as a two-sided conflict – NATO versus Milosevic. But it is not as simple as that. There is a third party, the Kosovar Albanians, and for various reasons, they are in danger of being overlooked and sidelined in the media.
That is not to say there has not been some powerful reporting on the refugees. There has. There was one such piece on the radio this morning. There have been many others and they have helped our public understand why we are engaged in the way that we are.
[There was never the slightest danger that the ‘Kosovar Albanians’ would be overlooked and sidelined. The west had secretly armed and trained the KLA army that invaded Kosovo from Albania in early 1998 with the aim of capturing the entire province by force. UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had given a state-of-the-art satellite phone to KLA leader Hashim Thaci so that he could be feed direct to Cook the latest KLA claims to be passed on immediately to the media.]
But when I visited Macedonia last week, one of the TV reporters there told a member of my staff that he was really pleased we went. My visit, he said, meant there was a chance of him getting a report on the news that night. He’d been struggling in recent days. His news desk had told him that ‘refugee fatigue’ was setting in.
[‘Refugee fatigue’ set in primarily because the many refugee accounts were virtually indistinguishable from each other. Refugees were coached word-for-word by the Bosnian Muslim propaganda machine.No hard evidence to support the claims was ever brought forward.]
Refugee fatigue. In other words, once you’ve reported one mass rape, the next one’s not so newsworthy. See one mass grave, you’ve seen the lot.
This is a dangerous path, and it is one that benefits the Serbs. The reporter said the story told by the refugees became repetitive. That is because the Serbs follow a pattern. News doesn’t like patterns. It likes news.
[This is idiotic nonsense. It was not the Serbs who were promulgating this misinformation, it was the KLA and the western media.]
Please understand that this is not an attack on the media but a plea for understanding of the full picture, despite – through no fault of your own -your limited access to it.
For the Serbs also benefit from the fact that there is no media access to Kosovo, and I fully understand why most journalists would not want to risk even trying to get in there.
[NATO had no interest in providing full access to journalists because this would have been likely to undermine the claims put out by NATO and western spokesmen.]
But just as we should be alert to the dangers of refugee fatigue, so we must resist the notion that unless something is on film, it’s not news.
No pictures, no news.
[The ‘notion’ of proper journalism is that facts should be accurately reported and, wherever possible, supported by verified evidence. This never happened during the Kosovo war. Hardly any western journalists spoke the local language and were consequently totally dependent on one-sided briefings provided by NATO and western governments.]
We live in a democracy. We take freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for granted. Whatever your criticisms, I defend your right to make them.
[Freedom of speech and freedom of the press were never taken for granted during the Kosovo war. Immense pressure was placed on any western journalist who challenged the ‘consensus’ viewpoint. Perhaps understandably, most succumbed.]
The Serb media is State-controlled. It is part and parcel of Milosevic’s military machine. Critical editors are shot. Independent radio stations are shut down. Western journalists are censored and restricted and the bland ‘reporters are subject to certain restrictions’ at the beginning or end of their reports does not really convey the full nature of those restrictions.
[More misleading rubbish. Most broadcasters included a reference to restrictions imposed on them when they filed their reports. But in reality there was general agreement that veryfew changes were requested by the Serbian authorities. Serbian media rarely resorted to propaganda; NATO rarely resorted to anything else.]
If reporters are only allowed to see what the Serbs want, and if their reports are censored, then it is very hard, if not impossible, to be genuinely authoritative. If a bomb goes astray, and hits a residential area, or the Chinese Embassy is mistakenly attacked, then I’m not going to pretend that is not news. It is.
[We know now that only a small percentage of NATO’s smart bombs hit their intended targets and that the 78-day bombing was littered with incidents where NATO bombs struck non-military targets. The Chinese embassy was in an isolated area, well removed from any military target. It’s hard to believe this was a ‘mistake’. The damage to the infrastructure of Serbia inflicted by the 78-day bombing was independently estimated at between $50-100 billion dollars at 1999 prices by two international economic think tanks].
But if these are the only scenes reporters are allowed to see and this becomes the only news they report, then it is far from being the whole picture. Several thousand bombs have been used in the campaign. A very small proportion have gone astray. We regret, genuinely, the loss of civilian life, the pain and hurt they cause. But of course the Serbs only show you the damage they want you to see.
The fact that the media is not inside Kosovo in my view increases, rather than lessens, the responsibility to try to find out what is going on in there.
[Yet everything was done to ensure that the western media remained solidly behind the western alliance.]
And as refugees are the prime source, then surely we need to be extra vigilant not to fall victim to ‘refugee fatigue’.
There have been civilian deaths in Belgrade, yes. But how does it compare
to 1.5 million people driven from their homes? 100,000 men aged 15-55 missing? The systematic rape? The mass graves? The executions? People forced to bury their dead, and then murdered and – thrown in on top?
[We now know that the exodus of Kosovo Albanians was not caused by Serbian forces. It only started when the NATO bombing commenced. It seems that the refugees were mainly impelled to move by fear of the bombing or because they were told to do so by the KLA. No hard evidence has ever been produced to back claims of 100,000 missing Albanian men, systematic rape, mass graves or executions – for the very simple reasons that none of these claims was true.]
If the cameras were in there, able to see these things, the world would see a very different situation to the one being reported.
The conflict does not begin or end on a TV screen.
You may be wondering why I have a map of Kosovo behind me, and what it shows. It shows 20 incidents, all since early March, in which more than 100 people have been killed, or 1000 or more displaced from towns and villages inside Kosovo.
The numbers of dead run into thousands; the number displaced tens of thousands. We published the map last week. It made very little impact.
[None of these claims was ever substantiated.]
‘No pictures, no news’. But I believe the fact that there are no pictures is part of the story.
And it is a story that has to be told, day after day, pictures or no pictures.
These are real places, real people. Real stories of burnt villages, devastated families, lootings, robberies, beatings, mass executions.
These people are the reason we are engaged and the fact that we cannot see them makes us more determined to get in there and give them the help they need.
This is more than a map. It is a montage of murder.
Of course we regret the loss of civilian life in Nis and at the Chinese Embassy. Every single one of them.
But are these tens of thousands of lives inside Kosovo worth less because there happens to be no film of them? Are they non-people not worth a studio discussion simply because CNN and the BBC and the rest cannot get in on the ground?
Few of us have even heard of Orlate. Look at the map. ‘Village set on fire after 200 executions’. Is that not a story of horrific proportions? Was that news? Shouldn’t it be?
Or Malakrusa? Did that get much coverage when we published the map, or at any time before and since? ‘112 men shot – bodies burnt to conceal evidence’. No pictures, no news.
These deaths are not the unintended consequences of military action. They are acts of policy. Deliberate. Systematic. And evil.
By controlling the media in Belgrade, or by keeping them out of Kosovo, Milosevic hopes that we will be lulled; that if you see no evil, you will speak no evil. But you can hear of the evil, and the voices telling of it, the Kosovar Albanians have as much right to be heard as the Serb ministers or the indicted war criminals who can get themselves out on screen whenever they want. Indeed, I would say they have more of a right.
If I mention ‘the convoy attack’ you know what I mean, because the story ran for days. If I mention 20,000 taken prisoner in Srbica, 50,000 expelled from Pec, 270 killed in Izbica, it won’t have quite the same resonance.
No pictures, no news. But these people are the victims of the most appalling acts of barbarism and cruelty Europe has seen since World War 2. We teach our children never to forget what happened in that war. We must not allow ourselves to become sensitised to accept what is happening in Kosovo today.
[How these claims roll off the tongue – but again none has ever been substantiated.]
I believe that the vast majority of the readers of your newspapers understand why we are engaged in this conflict. They understand too that in conflicts like this, innocent people will be hurt. Like me, they regret that.
[Yet people were never told that the NATO bombing of Kosovo was in breach of the UN Charter (no unprovoked aggression against Sovereign States) and a raft of international treaties. It was also contrary to the NATO Charter which confined NATO to a purely defensive role – until belatedly in June 1999, at its 50th anniversary meeting, NATO revised its Charter to allow aggressive intervention for humanitarian purposes. After the war, a formal investigation was carried out by the UK Parliament which concluded that the NATO bombing had been illegal, but suggested that it had been ‘moral’. There wasn’t a vestige of morality.]
But provided the full story of the conflict continues to be told I have no doubt that because of their basic decency, and their basic common sense, the British people will maintain their support for what we are doing until the job is done.
And the job will be done. Of that I am in no doubt whatever. We have taken down Milosevic’s air defences. We have done huge damage to the infrastructure that supports his regime, the fuel dumps and refineries that keep his artillery and tanks on the move; the bridges, railways and roads he needs to supply his forces; the power plants; the high command in Belgrade who are directing the ethnic cleansing on the ground.
And with all that done, we are doing more and more damage to the ethnic cleansers themselves. They are increasingly cut off inside Kosovo.
Supplies, food and fuel are scarce. They have no air cover and proper accommodation. They are pinned down; unable to move freely, busy repairing the damage we have done.
[Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo after the imposed settlement with virtually all their equipment intact.]
I made a pledge to those refugees. I intend to deliver. Refugee fatigue may have set in with some TV stations, but it will not set in with me until the refugees are home.
Our objectives are clear. And they must and will be met. And to achieve them, far from slowing down, we will intensify our attacks upon Milosevic’s military machine until he accepts what he knows, what I know, what every NATO and Serb Commander knows – that he cannot win and that NATO will prevail.