Ten days into NATO’s illegal bombing of Serbia, supposedly to prevent killing of ethnic Albanians in Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, the BBC HARDTalk programme hosted a debate between Marko Gasic of the London-based Serbian Information Centre and Pleurat Sedjiu, a spokesman for the KLA.
The host is Tim Sebastian, a journalist with many years’ experience. If his stance towards Marko Gasic seems at odds with neutrality, it was a time when high explosives were being rained down from the air and the newspapers and broadcast media were bombarding their public with increasingly extreme numbers of massacred Albanians: 50,000, 100,000, even 500,000. “Pick a number, any number!”, for in reality that is what NATO mouthpieces like James Rubin (partner of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour), William Cohen (US Defense Secretary), Jamie Shea, Wesley Clark and Richard Holbrooke were saying.
And in 1999 the internet was in its infancy — dial up modems were the norm and a single image could take minutes to appear. There was no YouTube, no Twitter. Websites were mostly the preserve of those who already owned media resources. Newspapers, TV and radio continued to be the sole source of information for the vast majority of those living in NATO countries, most of whom were wholly ignorant of the background to the conflict except for what “experts” told them.
Marko Gasic dominated debate. Refusing to be cowed, he stuck to the facts, clearly pointing out that none of the lurid massacres tales could have been verified because the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM interview here) had been withdrawn prior to the bombing.
Journalists safely based in Macedonia were swallowing every story told them by Albanian refugees. But when the Western investigators went in to look for mass graves and evidence of “genocide”, nothing was found to justify the hyperbole pumped out at the time of this interview.
Marko Gasic makes the crucial point that the KLA were profiting from gun running and drug trafficking. This was hotly denied at the time but soon Western Europe was suffering from an epidemic of these crimes: Albanian gangs dominate UK organised crime (12-Oct-2024). The Albanian spokesman betrays the atavistic nature of Albanian nationalists who claim to be the prehistoric rulers of the land, entitled to kill Serb policemen and cast out the Serbs because they are Slavs who, in the phrase of racists everywhere, “should go back to where they came from”, interlopers from the 6th century!