Good evening everyone.

This beautiful church of St. Sava seems the perfect setting in which to make a personal confession.

After many years reporting and presenting television news it was only with hindsight I realised I had helped perpetuate one of the greatest lies in modern European history.

The myth that Serbs were responsible for the worst genocide since the Second World War.

I felt both shock and shame at this discovery. How could I, actually working in the media, have been so taken in by the official narrative?  Reporters have privileged access to information and power to change peoples lives so there’s a responsibility to record the truth.

Joseph Pulitzer loftily called journalism  `a noble profession – one of unequalled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people.`

Often called `the first rough draft of history`  it should be the most accurate record possible  of contemporary events. It’s an ongoing process that continually asks questions to refine and enlarge our understanding.

It’s our job to expose injustice, corruption and incompetence, not collude in propaganda.. To question, challenge and call power to account.

Unaccountable power was the root cause of the Yugoslav catastrophe.  A former Nuremberg prosecutor summed up NATO`s humanitarian bombing as `raw imperialism run amok…the most brazen aggression since Hitler invaded Poland.`

NATO, a purely defensive alliance, committed what Nuremberg declared to be the ultimate crime  – waging a war of aggression.  After the collapse of communism Washington was desperate to find a new purpose for NATO in time to mark its fiftieth anniversary in April 1999.  Mindful of the challenge of the newly united Europe the US also wanted to reassert its leadership of the West.

So how did the media allow itself to become part of the appalling propaganda machine manufacturing public consent?

In the BBC concepts of impartiality, balance and fairness in news reporting are hardwired to ensure accuracy and guard against bias.

Reporters undergo rigorous training, are given hefty manuals of guidance and then left to get on with the job. In 25 years with the BBC I don’t recall a single occasion on which I was explicitly told the line to take on a sensitive or controversial story. But there was no need. Everyone knew what was expected and nothing is more effective than self censorship.

Journalists are paid to find out how things work and part of that is keeping a close eye on editorial values, attitudes and colleagues’ output.  Herein lies the danger.

Shared beliefs, practices and attitudes can become so deeply embedded and second nature, they are no longer even thought about, let alone questioned. They become articles of faith and, blindly followed, can lead to an assumption of infallibility.

There’s also safety in numbers. It’s a rare news hound that will break from the pack, let alone run in the opposite direction. There has to be good reason and strong evidence to justify a fresh take on a story that’s been routinely framed within familiar parameters. In Yugoslavia there was, but old habits die hard.  The newsroom line has always been  – if it bleeds it leads. Sadly in the Balkans the trail of blood proved irresistible.

Mass media thrives on serial sensation and the power of the Image is supreme. Television Images have instant impact –  overwhelming argument, analysis or nuance. We are programmed to believe the evidence of our own eyes. Seeing is believing. For the propagandist TV is the sharpest tool in the box.

One image of an emaciated man behind a couple of strands of barbed wire was universally seen as proof of the existence of  network of Serb death camps.

The bigger picture reveals the lie. Unused footage you can still see on line, shows much of the fence was flimsy waist-high chicken wire with large gaps and so called prisoners leaving and entering at will.

Throughout the Balkan conflicts  the media with rare exceptions failed to give the full picture – endlessly reciting the gross distortions of the official narrative. Meanwhile millions of viewers just saw unbearable human misery and suffering and wanted it to end. A purely emotional response. That western intervention was the problem, rather than the solution, was unthinkable.

But we had been warned. Way back in 1948, George Kennan, head of policy at the US State department, had spelled out chilling ground rules for American post-war foreign policy. In a top secret internal document he wrote:

‘We will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better.’ 

That’s how we got to US Secretary of State Albright declaring half a million dead babies in Iraq due to sanctions, a price worth paying.

The US has always been about straight power.  Jimmy Carter called it the most warlike country in the world. With 800 military bases around the globe, including the massive Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the US has been at war for all but 15 of its 250 year existence. It’s a past master at creating pretexts for regime change.  Kosovo, was its template for future global intervention.

Certainly interviewing many of the leading players during the 1990s I had accepted the characterisation of Serbs as genocidal war criminals ethnically cleansing on an industrial scale.  Milosevic was the Butcher of the Balkans, a dictator ruthlessly pursuing his dream of a Greater Serbia.

Even when the false narrative was drawn to my attention by a close friend and colleague at the BBC I found it hard to get my head around it. It is much easier to deceive people than convince them they have been deceived. But slowly I saw  how the media had failed to challenge appalling injustice and enabled criminal conduct.

How  core principles – such as sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity, the peaceful resolution of disputes and the protection of human rights – had all been sacrificed to self interest.

What persuaded me was the conduct of The Hague tribunal – the infamous court conceived by the CIA to justify the entirely lawless Balkan adventure.

The International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia or ICTY was not about justice but geopolitics. Its sole purpose political – to publicly condemn Serbs, punish their war crimes while resolutely ignoring NATO’s.

90% of ICTY evidence was hearsay often from anonymous witnesses heard in closed session. There was no due process and blatant bias. If, by any remote chance, a defendant were acquitted, the judges could appeal the verdict and keep them in prison for retrial.  The tribunal was literally a law unto itself – even ruling on its own legality when challenged.

The very idea of creating an international tribunal to fabricate evidence and invent verdicts I found mind boggling. The sheer enormity of it beggared belief.  That’s when the penny finally dropped. It was of course the old Nazi trick every dictator knows. The BIG LIE  – the bigger the lie the more likely it will be believed. In Mein Kampf , Hitler wrote about ‘a  lie so big it would be hard to believe anyone could have the temerity to tell it.’

The truth was the polar opposite of everything we were told.

Milosevic had in fact been democratically elected and never spoke or wrote of creating a Greater Serbia. He consistently celebrated multiculturalism and the benefits of a multi ethnic Yugoslavia.  He was the one leader trying to hold the federal state together while the West was determined to destroy it. That’s why Milosevic had to go.

To that end  the United States, the UN and NATO combined to commit a catalogue of heinous crimes.

·      They declared an illegal war

·      Bombed civilians in the name of humanitarianism

·      Destroyed a sovereign country,  wrecking its economy and plundering its mineral resources

·      Helped plan and execute Operation Storm the worst ethnic cleansing of the entire war brutally expelling 300,000 Krajina Serbs in 3 days from land they had lived on for centuries.

·      Breached UN sanctions to secretly arm the Bosnian Muslims.

·      Trained and armed the criminal KLA which Washington itself had declared a terrorist organisation.

 

The reports of mass killing and genocide used to manipulate public support for all the above were hugely exaggerated.  The US official responsible for collating the figures blamed the press for what he called ‘pervasive lies’ in publishing ‘wildly inflated’ figures from the Bosnian government. He said :

‘There has never been a shred of evidence, none at all, for repeated claims that 200,000 or more people, mostly Muslims, were killed.’

In any war the first rule of propaganda is to dehumanise the enemy so American PR experts were hired to demonise Serbs as modern Nazis. Muslims shelled their own people in the Sarajevo market and blamed Serb troops. They faked a Serb massacre at Racak to trigger NATO bombing.

At Rambouillet American duplicity plumbed new depths.  Under the guise of peace talks the utterly dishonest brokers plotted war –  presenting  Serbs with a non-negotiable ultimatum. A  secret annexe insisted on an effective army of NATO peacekeepers occupying Yugoslavia indefinitely. Something no sovereign state could accept.

Henry Kissinger called it provocation, just an excuse to bomb. The Americans claimed they simply sought clarity so everyone could see who the bad guys were. Anti Serb prejudice was rampant and deep rooted.

Columnist Melanie Phillips tells of an amazing editorial meeting at the Guardian. They were discussing  a front page story that had given a harrowing account of  Muslim suffering at the hands of Serbs. During the meeting the reporter actually admitted she had made the story up – it was a complete invention- but  it was argued that the decision to run it had been right because, even though it was a total lie, it  “illustrated the broader truth of Serb aggression”!

Members of Tony Blair’s press team seconded to NATO boasted their control of information was such they could put out anything they liked because no journalists would be in any position to challenge them.  Few had any other sources, spoke Serbo Croat or had any grasp of local history and culture.

Although Milosevic is routinely accused of letting the nationalist genie out of the bottle the real cause was the harsh western economic policies imposed by the IMF to restructure Yugoslavia’s  huge national debt. This led to rampant inflation, spiralling unemployment, massive strikes and social disorder as different communities competed for dwindling resources.

As Professor Susan Woodward puts it:

  ‘Ordinary people turned into ethnic monsters only after all their options for a normal economic life were destroyed. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ arrived only after ‘(IMF)shock therapy’ had done its work.’

The Balkan powder keg was finally ignited by the West’s premature recognition of the illegal declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia. At that point bloodshed became inevitable.

No ethnic grouping could tolerate suddenly finding itself an isolated minority potentially at the mercy of a rival ethnic majority in a newly independent country. For Serbs especially, it revived memories of appalling persecution at the hands of the Croatian Nazi Ustache government during the Second World War. But then all evidence of  Serbs ever being victims themselves was routinely ignored by the media and dismissed as irrelevant by The Hague tribunal.

To this day Serbs are widely perceived as the sole perpetrators of violence with everyone else as innocent victims.

Katya Adler’s recent BBC series on the Balkans repeats ad nauseam the still unproven claim that 8,000 Moslem men and boys were massacred at Srebrenica.

In war, truth is always the first casualty. As Napoleon said history is ‘a set of lies that have been agreed upon.’  That is why it must be constantly re-examined.

The only way to counter lies is to carry on telling the truth. There was certainly much bloodshed and violence throughout Yugoslavia during the 1990s but ALL sides behaved badly. The country was in the throes of civil war.  There were isolated incidents of massacre but the overwhelming majority of deaths were the result of legitimate military combat not Serb inflicted genocide – the clear intentional destruction of an entire ethnic group.

It’s impossible to reconcile Serb actions on the ground with genocide.

General Mladic bussed Muslim women, children and the elderly to safety in Tuzla. Those Muslim men of fighting age – 16 to 60 – who joined Bosnian troops on the march to Tuzla had already been drafted were a legitimate military target. The Muslim wounded taken prisoner were given proper medical care.  None of the survivors interviewed by the UN reported massacres or genocide.

I believe the truth is to be found not in what we are told but in what we are NOT told. Where the official narrative actively suppresses information and deliberately withholds evidence. It’s the unanswered questions that fuel doubt and suspicion and destroy trust. Here are just a few to end with.

·      Why were the spy satellite photographs Albright showed the UN as the ‘first evidence of genocide’ promptly locked away for 60 years preventing public scrutiny?

·      Why have special laws been passed granting the International Commission on Missing Persons permanent immunity from any independent examination of primary evidence?

·      Why is there an implicit assumption that those bodies identified through DNA were all victims of genocide when DNA can only tell us who died, not where, when or how?

·      Why, after over 3 years the longest criminal trial in history, was the court still unable to convict Milosevic before his highly convenient and suspicious death in custody?

There can be no justice until these questions and many others are truthfully answered.

Only a full, fair and balanced picture can lay the basis for lasting peace and enable future generations to learn the true lessons of the past.