Why Nato bombed Serb TV Did George W. Bush make
a tasteless gag about bombing al-Jazeera? Did Tony Blair dutifully laugh? How could two leaders of the free world think it appropriate to jest about whacking pesky Arab journos while a nation — Iraq — burned under their watch? These are the questions being asked by British journalists who are shocked by rumours of a conversation that allegedly took place between Bush and Blair in April last year. I have a different question: why do these journalists seem more outraged by this President’s alleged scurrilous aside about bombing a TV station than they were by an earlier president’s actual bombing of a TV station?
Six years ago President Bill Clinton sent cruise missiles to destroy a TV studio and knock off some media workers, and it was no joke. At 2.20 a.m. on 23 April 1999, at the height of the Kosovo campaign, the Nato alliance led by Clinton and Blair destroyed the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in central Belgrade. The missiles destroyed the entrance and left at least one studio in ruins. More than 120 people were working in the building at the time; 16 were killed and another 16 were injured — all of them civilian workers, mostly technicians and support staff.
The BBC’s John Simpson described seeing ‘the body of a make-up artist ... lying in a dressing room’. That was 27-year-old Yelitsa Munitlak, burned to death in the small room where she applied make-up to the station’s newsreaders. She was so badly disfigured that her body could be identified only by the rings she was wearing. One of the RTS technical team, trapped between two collapsed concrete blocks, had to have both his legs amputated at the scene. He died later in hospital.
Today journalists wonder whether Blair laughed at Bush’s joke about al-Jazeera, or perhaps even talked the President out of a serious ‘plot’ to bomb the Arab channel. Never mind all that. Here is what Blair said after the targeted killing of media workers in Yugoslavia: the media ‘is the apparatus that keeps [Slobodan Milosevic] in power and we are entirely justified as Nato allies in damaging and taking on those targets’. He was backed by Clare Short, who today poses as an anti-war warrior but who six years ago was Blair’s cheerleader-in-chief for bombing Yugoslavia. After the attack on RTS she said, ‘The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it’s a legitimate target.’ Tell that to the family of Yelitsa Munitlak.
To add insult to grotesque injuries, Nato officials later tried to deny that they had purposefully targeted a studio packed with civilian workers, instead claiming they had meant to bomb the TV transmitter next door. Yet according to the final report of the UN committee to review the Nato bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, ‘Nato intentionally bombed the central studio of the RTS broadcasting corporation.’ And as Amnesty International pointed out, ‘intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’.
How did British journalists react to this ‘war crime’? Not very honourably; certainly with far less rage than they have directed against Bush and Blair for their alleged chat about al-Jazeera. Some in the media who supported the Kosovo campaign kept shtoom about the attack. The broadcasting union Bectu did not even comment on it. There was almost a celebratory tone in the Guardian’s initial coverage of the bombing of RTS. In its first report on the attack (written by Martin Kettle and Maggie O’Kane, both of whom supported ‘punishing’ the Serbs) the paper repeated Nato’s justifications for the attack without question: ‘Nato targeted the heart of ... Milosevic’s power base early today by bombing the headquarters of Serbian state television, taking it off the air in the middle of a news bulletin.’ It failed to say how camera operators, soundmen and makeup girls were central to Milosevic’s ‘power base’. Some journalists criticised the bombing of RTS not because it was criminal but because it provided a ‘gift to Nato’s critics’; in short, it made their ‘good war’ look bad.
There were honourable exceptions to all this. The National Union of Journalists, for example, vigorously opposed the attack. But too many journalists tried to squeeze this bombing of media workers into their view of the Kosovo campaign as a ‘humanitarian’ war. Yet the idea that you can burn to death a make-up girl in the name of ‘humanitarianism’ is surely as perverse — if not more so — than the thought of Bush and Blair talking about bringing freedom to Iraq (which presumably includes freedom of speech) while talking about blowing up journalists.
Brendan O’Neill
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