http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3462
By Diana Johnstone
Across this last weekend, the Western propaganda machine was working overtime, celebrating the latest NATO miracle: the transformation of http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3396. A shameless land grab by the United States, which used the Kosovo problem to install an enormous military base (Camp Bondsteel) on other people’s strategically located land, is transformed by the power of the media into an edifying legend of “national liberation”.
For the unhappy few who know the complicated truth about Kosovo, the words of Aldous Huxley seem most appropriate: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall drive you mad.”
Concerning Kosovo, truth is like letters written in the sand as the tsunami of propaganda comes thundering in. The truth is available–for instance in George Szamuely’s thoroughly informative piece last Friday here on CounterPunch. Fragments of the truth sometimes even show up in the mainstream media, mostly in letters from readers. But hopeless as it is to try to turn back the tide of officially endorsed legend, let me examine just one drop in this unstoppable sea of propaganda: a column by Roger Cohen entitled “Europe’s new state”, published in the Valentine’s Day edition of the International Herald Tribune.Cohen’s op ed piece is fairly typical in the dismissive way it deals with Milosevic, Russia and the Serbs. Cohen writes: “Slobodan Milosevic, the late dictator, set Serbia’s murderous nationalist tide in motion on April 24, 1987, when he went to Kosovo to declare that Serbian ‘ancestors would be defiled’ if ethnic Albanians had their way.”
I don’t know where Roger Cohen got that quotation, but it is not to be found in the speech Milosevic made that day in Kosovo. And certainly, Milosevic did not go to Kosovo to declare any such thing, but to consult with local Communist League officials in the town of Kosovo Polje about the province’s serious economic and social problems. Aside from the province’s chronic poverty, unemployment, and mismanagement of development funds contributed from the rest of Yugoslavia, the main social problem was the constant exodus of Serb and Montenegrin inhabitants under pressure from ethnic Albanians. At the time, this problem was reported in leading Western media.
For instance, as early as July 12, 1982, Marvine Howe reported to the New York Times that Serbs were leaving Kosovo by the tens of thousands because of discrimination and intimidation on the part of the ethnic Albanian majority:
‘”The [Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform,” according to Beci Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, “first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.
‘Mr Hoti, an Albanian, expressed concern voer political pressures that were forcing Serbs to leave Kosovo. “What is important now,” he said, “is to establish a climate of security and create confidence.”‘
And seven months after Milosevic’s visit to Kosovo, David Binder reported in the New York Times (November 1, 1987):
‘Ethnic Albanians in the Government [of Kosovo have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.
‘The goal of the radical nationals among them, one said in an interview, is an “ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself.”
‘As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981–an “ethnically pure” Albanian region’
This was in fact the first instance of “ethnic cleansing” in post-World War II Yugoslavia, as reported in The New York Times and other Western media, and the victims were the Serbs. The cult of “memory” has become a contemporary religion, but some memories are more equal than others. In the 1990s, the New York Times evidently forgot completely what it had said about Kosovo in the 1980s. Why? Perhaps because meanwhile, the Soviet bloc had collapsed and the unity of independent, non-aligned Yugoslavia was no longer in the strategic interest of the United States.
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone02182008.html