Post by Fender on Jan 25, 2008 6:15:33 GMT -5
Democracy and Propaganda:
NATO’s War in Kosovo
Dr. Mark A. Wolfgram
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Oklahoma State University - Stillwater
Department of Political Science
519 Math Science
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078
405-744-5571
mark.wolfgram@okstate.edu
Democracy and Propaganda:
NATO’s War in Kosovo
Keywords: Kosovo, NATO, Operation Horseshoe, Racak, Mass Media
Abstract:
Although an independent media is recognized as central to the proper functioning of democratic institutions, democratic governments often exploit their citizens’ faith in that independence to generate popular support or at least acquiescence. I use the examples of Operation Horseshoe and the fighting at Racak and Rugovo during the Kosovo war to illustrate how democratic governments in the United States and Germany attempted to manipulate public perceptions of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 and justify the war. The study is based upon a review of over 100 newspaper articles found in the Lexis-Nexis database and numerous scholarly articles, allowing me to trace the development these specific narratives.
The article shows the construction of two illusions: the illusion of multiple sources and the illusion of independent confirmation. The former occurs when governments plant information in the prestige press and then allow it to circulate until the original source is lost and the planted information takes on the aura of “truth.” The latter refers to a government practice of citing the planted information as having been “independently confirmed in the free press” in later public statements.
In the end, these “truths” and frameworks filter into scholarship, as many scholars begin to base their interpretations on these “facts.” Independent of the justice or injustice of the war, the article argues that these practices are harmful to democratic development.
The most recent war in Iraq has led again to a vetting of the journalistic process leading up to war, and with good reason. One of the main justifications for the war, the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and an active nuclear program, turned out to be either “failures of the intelligence community” or “war propaganda” (Massing, 2004; Rutherford, 2004). The observation that democratic governments intentionally mislead or seek to persuade their publics to garner public support for policies is common enough knowledge, but such knowledge also continues to exist alongside powerful democratic myths of responsive a dialogue between citizens and their government.
In this article, I want to return back to another war of recent memory, the NATO-led war against Yugoslavia over the province of Kosovo, and look at how information, which now appears to be have been in part fabricated or manipulated to justify and support the war effort, entered the print media and rapidly gained wide circulation and validity. There have been other critical evaluations of the media in the Kosovo war (Ali, 2000; Hammond and Herman, 2000; European Journal of Communication, 2000; Thomas, 2003), but most were written very close to the events themselves. With the benefit of more distance and new information, this article seeks to critique further the use of propaganda in democracies.
The media research discussed here includes a systematic survey from the winter of 1999 through 2002 of American, British and German newspapers, magazines, and transcripts contained in the Lexis-Nexis database with special attention given to two key events or programs: (1) the fighting at the village of Racak and (2) Operation Horseshoe. The narratives surrounding these events have remained highly controversial. This survey included the use of content analysis for over 100 journalistic reports.
My sole intention here is to critique the use of propaganda in democratic governance and to leave open the question of whether or not the war was justified, necessary or the proper course of action at the time. The very fact that I raise these questions will strike some as crass revisionism or maybe even an apologetic for Milosevic and others. These are not my goals. To the extent that revealing past propaganda campaigns requires historical revision, I see this as a worthwhile project as one strives for knowledge freed from relations of power.
I am, however, fundamentally concerned about the corrosive nature of propaganda for democratic governance and the role that the media plays in this process. As Jacques Ellul notes in the closing of his classic work on propaganda, “With the help of propaganda one can do almost anything, but certainly not create the behavior of a free man or, to a lesser degree, a democratic man. A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself...” (Ellul, 1965, p. 256).
I begin with a brief theoretical reflection upon the role of the media in a democracy. In the empirical section, I attempt to show that “Operation Horseshoe” did not exist as it was sold to the public in April 1999, about a week after the beginning of the air war against Yugoslavia on the 24th of March. I then trace the Operation Horseshoe narrative in the British, American and German press to demonstrate how it quickly established itself as a fact at the time. The “facts” of Operation Horseshoe and Racak became key turning points in many rhetorical arguments justifying the NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia. In the final section, I give examples of how scholars and journalists have written Operation Horseshoe and Racak into the history books.
DEMOCRATIC THEORY
Some democratic theorists place the free exchange of information between citizens and their governments at the heart of their definitions of liberal democracy. Robert Dahl has offered a useful way of defining democratic development along a continuum of what he calls polyarchy, or rule by many (Dahl, 1989, p. 222). The participation of all citizens in free elections is, of course, the most basic criteria for developing polyarchy. But if a society wishes to develop beyond this most basic stage, other variables need to be brought into play. Dahl places a great deal of emphasis upon the public’s access to alternative sources of information. He warns that a failure to develop such democratic tools increases the likelihood that the democratic state will slip further and further into the role of guardianship, one in which technocrats rule based upon the assumption of superior knowledge (Dahl, 1989, p. 337-341).
Dahl is far from alone in placing great emphasis upon the centrality of communication and information at the heart of his understanding of democratic development. John Stuart Mill opens the section entitled, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” in On Liberty with the following, “The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the ‘liberty of the press’ as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government” (Mill, 1975, p. 17). Mill then goes on to deny, in principle, the right of a democratic government to coerce its public through control of information.
Does this remain an ideal worthy striving for? Dahl certainly seems to think so, although a growing list of authors in the twentieth century have remained skeptical. Walter Lippmann (1922) offered one of the first and most severe critiques of the general masses being able to participate in dialogue and discussion with their governments, which sought to rule through manipulation rather than critical dialogue. Jürgen Habermas (1975) has argued that the very coercion Mill warns against, and that Lippmann advocates, has become the central exercise of power in liberal societies. Writing in the middle and toward the end of the twentieth century, Murray Edelman appeared ready to conclude that the very hopes that Mill and Dahl hold out for a marketplace of ideas should perhaps be abandoned (1964; 1988). On a normative level, I believe that the struggle for what Dahl, Habermas and Mill hold forth as better forms of democratic governance are worth struggling for. Analytically, the research presented here supports the skeptical school.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
I will only very briefly outline the history of the conflict here (Brown, 1988; Udovicki and Ridgeway, 1997; Judah, 2000; Mazower 2000). The Ottoman Empire had long been losing control over its territories in the Balkans, and this demise was hastened by the loss of Bosnia and its occupation by Austria in 1878, and the creation of an independent Serbian state at the same time. As the Ottoman Empire withdrew, the Serbian state expanded in two successful Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913. It was during these conflicts that the territory we now know as Kosovo was incorporated into the Serbian state and later into what became known as Yugoslavia after World War I.
From the beginning, Kosovo’s Albanian population has fought against its incorporation into Serbia and then later Yugoslavia. The history of these two peoples in Kosovo has been filled with fierce fighting on both sides. Tito’s Yugoslavia after World War II incorporated many potential ethnic divides into the new federal state, although for the most part, the federal system and the unity of the socialist party were able either ameliorate, accommodate or suppress these tensions. The ethnic Albanians within Kosovo were never content with their position within Yugoslavia. Even with the granting of greater autonomy in Tito’s 1974 constitution, some Albanians continued to agitate for a strengthened nationalist position or outright independence.
The central point of this history for the modern context is to understand that the ethnic tensions in Kosovo extended much further back than July 1990, when the Kosovo assembly declared its sovereignty and the regime in Belgrade responded by dissolving the assembly and all other aspects of the provincial government. The dynamics of the conflict are much broader than the single figure of Slobodan Milosevic. Nonetheless, journalists and scholars have continued erroneously to date the beginning of the Albanian nationalist movement and ethnic strife in Kosovo from 1990. It has been generally portrayed as a response to Milosevic’s Serbia, rather than a nationalist movement with long historical roots. This entire period of time has seen increasing and decreasing periods of violence, discrimination, and conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the province of Kosovo. Another telling point of this history is that the Kosovo Albanians only found themselves in the ascendancy with the aid of an outside military power, the Austrians during World War I and the Germans during World War II. NATO filled this position in 1999.
The most recent round of fighting also has its roots in the early 1980s rather than the 1990s and the rise of Milosevic in Serbia. After Tito’s death in 1980, there was Albanian separatist violence in Kosovo in 1981. A small immigrant group in Switzerland and Germany then formed the Popular Movement for the Republic of Kosovo (LPRK) in 1982. Radical members within this group began to advocate a more aggressive program for creating an independent Kosovo in 1992. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), also known by its Albanian acronym UCK, formed in 1993 and made its first appearance in 1996 when its members attacked Serbian refugees in the Krajina. With the collapse of the government in Albania in 1997, the KLA gained access to better weapons and began to expand its military campaign against Serbian targets in Kosovo. In February and March 1998, there was fierce fighting between Serbian and KLA forces in Drenica after the KLA killed four Serbian policemen. Although the response of the western powers was at first rather neutral, even referring to the KLA fighters as “terrorists” at the outset, the United States and Great Britain moved continuously closer to partisanship for the KLA, which was clear by early 1999 (Meckel, 2000). As the fighting continued and increasing numbers of civilians were internally displaced, the western powers put more pressure on Belgrade to modify its counterinsurgency war. In October 1998, U.S. representative Richard Holbrooke and the Serbian President Milosevic reached an agreement for the withdrawing of Serbian forces from Kosovo. However, the pressure to back off was applied in only a one-sided fashion, and the KLA filled in the vacuum left by the withdrawing Serbian forces. In December 1998, the KLA increased its attacks on Serbian military and civilian targets hoping to further escalate the situation and to draw NATO into the conflict.
Within a context of increased KLA attacks against Serbian targets as well as Albanians, who refused to support the cause of independence, the U.S. government and prestige press began to focus almost solely on Serbian aggression against apparently civilian targets. The most infamous of these by now is the charge of a massacre by Serbian forces in the village of Racak on the 15th of January 1999. The then Secretary of State Madeline Albright sought to use the evidence of a massacre to galvanize the western governments against Belgrade noting that “forty-five civilians” had been shot at close range and that one of the bodies had been mutilated through decapitation (Albright, 2003). On the 29th of January 1999, there were charges of yet another massacre in the village of Rugovo. The New York Times reported, “After a Serbian attack that killed 45 Albanian civilians in the village of Racak this month, the United States began mobilizing international support for stronger action to stop the violence. . . The threat of imminent NATO action did not prevent a Serbian police raid in which 24 ethnic Albanians were killed in the village of Rugovo on Friday” (Whitney, 1999a). While Milosevic was ordered to reduce his forces in Kosovo as a result, NATO said it was “studying how to support measures to curb arms smuggling into Kosovo” to support KLA fighters. Yet, there is no evidence that NATO ever sought to hinder KLA activities. We will return to Racak and Rugovo in the following section.
There was at least a formal attempt at negotiating a resolution to the conflict at Rambouillet in France from the 6th of February until the 23rd. The stated goal of the negotiations was to end the fighting by both the KLA and the Serbian forces. By the 23rd, neither side was willing to sign a document put together by the Americans. A second round of negotiations was held from the 15th of March to the 19th in Paris, at the end of which the Kosovar Albanian representatives signed and the Belgrade side refused to sign. The final stage was set for war, and on the 19th the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) withdrew from Kosovo. On the 24th of March NATO launched Operation Allied Force. The NATO air campaign was suspended on the 10th of June, when the Serbian forces began to withdraw and formally ceased on the 20th. We still do not know why Milosevic reversed his earlier decision to challenge NATO.
RACAK AND RUGOVO
Before turning to the discourse surrounding Operation Horseshoe and its construction in the media, it is important to reflect upon two specific charges of massacres by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanian civilians as opposed to anti-KLA activities. NATO attempted to justify its commencement of bombing on the 24th of March by claiming that it was a “humanitarian intervention,” in large part because it was unable to secure a resolution for military action from the Untied Nations Security Council, thus making its attack questionable in terms of international law. There is no question that the situation had deteriorated dramatically with over 300,000 civilians displaced by the fighting within Kosovo. But the NATO governments needed to achieve an ethical clarity so as to justify the war to their domestic populations. Thus, the charges of massacres at Racak and Rugovo aided this campaign in preparing their populations for war. The alleged massacre at Racak has formed a central aspect of the Kosovo trial against Milosevic at International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. While the prosecution dropped charges of genocide in the Kosovo case, Milosevic is still being held accountable for the disproportionate use of force in fighting the KLA. In the end, he is being held accountable for 600 deaths, but only 45 of those deaths occurred before the commencement of NATO’s bombing, those are the deaths in Racak.
Thus, the credibility of NATO’s humanitarian intervention depended a great deal upon what happened at Racak and in Kosovo prior to the 15th of March 1999. It was “the legal cover needed to go to war” (Judah, 2002, p. 233). With the commencement of NATO’s bombing campaign, there is no question that the Serbian forces began to expel Albanian civilians from the province and increased the level of violence on the ground, as did the KLA. What is important to keep distinct, and this has everything to do with the narrative of Operation Horseshoe, is that NATO needed to be able to claim that this was already in process in advance of their bombing. As we will see below, this claim is highly dubious. NATO’s credibility was on the line, and the western leaders recognized that they had to start working intensely on swinging public opinion to back their policy (Judah, 2002, p. 235, 236, 253).
NATO’s War in Kosovo
Dr. Mark A. Wolfgram
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Oklahoma State University - Stillwater
Department of Political Science
519 Math Science
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078
405-744-5571
mark.wolfgram@okstate.edu
Democracy and Propaganda:
NATO’s War in Kosovo
Keywords: Kosovo, NATO, Operation Horseshoe, Racak, Mass Media
Abstract:
Although an independent media is recognized as central to the proper functioning of democratic institutions, democratic governments often exploit their citizens’ faith in that independence to generate popular support or at least acquiescence. I use the examples of Operation Horseshoe and the fighting at Racak and Rugovo during the Kosovo war to illustrate how democratic governments in the United States and Germany attempted to manipulate public perceptions of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 and justify the war. The study is based upon a review of over 100 newspaper articles found in the Lexis-Nexis database and numerous scholarly articles, allowing me to trace the development these specific narratives.
The article shows the construction of two illusions: the illusion of multiple sources and the illusion of independent confirmation. The former occurs when governments plant information in the prestige press and then allow it to circulate until the original source is lost and the planted information takes on the aura of “truth.” The latter refers to a government practice of citing the planted information as having been “independently confirmed in the free press” in later public statements.
In the end, these “truths” and frameworks filter into scholarship, as many scholars begin to base their interpretations on these “facts.” Independent of the justice or injustice of the war, the article argues that these practices are harmful to democratic development.
The most recent war in Iraq has led again to a vetting of the journalistic process leading up to war, and with good reason. One of the main justifications for the war, the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and an active nuclear program, turned out to be either “failures of the intelligence community” or “war propaganda” (Massing, 2004; Rutherford, 2004). The observation that democratic governments intentionally mislead or seek to persuade their publics to garner public support for policies is common enough knowledge, but such knowledge also continues to exist alongside powerful democratic myths of responsive a dialogue between citizens and their government.
In this article, I want to return back to another war of recent memory, the NATO-led war against Yugoslavia over the province of Kosovo, and look at how information, which now appears to be have been in part fabricated or manipulated to justify and support the war effort, entered the print media and rapidly gained wide circulation and validity. There have been other critical evaluations of the media in the Kosovo war (Ali, 2000; Hammond and Herman, 2000; European Journal of Communication, 2000; Thomas, 2003), but most were written very close to the events themselves. With the benefit of more distance and new information, this article seeks to critique further the use of propaganda in democracies.
The media research discussed here includes a systematic survey from the winter of 1999 through 2002 of American, British and German newspapers, magazines, and transcripts contained in the Lexis-Nexis database with special attention given to two key events or programs: (1) the fighting at the village of Racak and (2) Operation Horseshoe. The narratives surrounding these events have remained highly controversial. This survey included the use of content analysis for over 100 journalistic reports.
My sole intention here is to critique the use of propaganda in democratic governance and to leave open the question of whether or not the war was justified, necessary or the proper course of action at the time. The very fact that I raise these questions will strike some as crass revisionism or maybe even an apologetic for Milosevic and others. These are not my goals. To the extent that revealing past propaganda campaigns requires historical revision, I see this as a worthwhile project as one strives for knowledge freed from relations of power.
I am, however, fundamentally concerned about the corrosive nature of propaganda for democratic governance and the role that the media plays in this process. As Jacques Ellul notes in the closing of his classic work on propaganda, “With the help of propaganda one can do almost anything, but certainly not create the behavior of a free man or, to a lesser degree, a democratic man. A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself...” (Ellul, 1965, p. 256).
I begin with a brief theoretical reflection upon the role of the media in a democracy. In the empirical section, I attempt to show that “Operation Horseshoe” did not exist as it was sold to the public in April 1999, about a week after the beginning of the air war against Yugoslavia on the 24th of March. I then trace the Operation Horseshoe narrative in the British, American and German press to demonstrate how it quickly established itself as a fact at the time. The “facts” of Operation Horseshoe and Racak became key turning points in many rhetorical arguments justifying the NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia. In the final section, I give examples of how scholars and journalists have written Operation Horseshoe and Racak into the history books.
DEMOCRATIC THEORY
Some democratic theorists place the free exchange of information between citizens and their governments at the heart of their definitions of liberal democracy. Robert Dahl has offered a useful way of defining democratic development along a continuum of what he calls polyarchy, or rule by many (Dahl, 1989, p. 222). The participation of all citizens in free elections is, of course, the most basic criteria for developing polyarchy. But if a society wishes to develop beyond this most basic stage, other variables need to be brought into play. Dahl places a great deal of emphasis upon the public’s access to alternative sources of information. He warns that a failure to develop such democratic tools increases the likelihood that the democratic state will slip further and further into the role of guardianship, one in which technocrats rule based upon the assumption of superior knowledge (Dahl, 1989, p. 337-341).
Dahl is far from alone in placing great emphasis upon the centrality of communication and information at the heart of his understanding of democratic development. John Stuart Mill opens the section entitled, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” in On Liberty with the following, “The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the ‘liberty of the press’ as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government” (Mill, 1975, p. 17). Mill then goes on to deny, in principle, the right of a democratic government to coerce its public through control of information.
Does this remain an ideal worthy striving for? Dahl certainly seems to think so, although a growing list of authors in the twentieth century have remained skeptical. Walter Lippmann (1922) offered one of the first and most severe critiques of the general masses being able to participate in dialogue and discussion with their governments, which sought to rule through manipulation rather than critical dialogue. Jürgen Habermas (1975) has argued that the very coercion Mill warns against, and that Lippmann advocates, has become the central exercise of power in liberal societies. Writing in the middle and toward the end of the twentieth century, Murray Edelman appeared ready to conclude that the very hopes that Mill and Dahl hold out for a marketplace of ideas should perhaps be abandoned (1964; 1988). On a normative level, I believe that the struggle for what Dahl, Habermas and Mill hold forth as better forms of democratic governance are worth struggling for. Analytically, the research presented here supports the skeptical school.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
I will only very briefly outline the history of the conflict here (Brown, 1988; Udovicki and Ridgeway, 1997; Judah, 2000; Mazower 2000). The Ottoman Empire had long been losing control over its territories in the Balkans, and this demise was hastened by the loss of Bosnia and its occupation by Austria in 1878, and the creation of an independent Serbian state at the same time. As the Ottoman Empire withdrew, the Serbian state expanded in two successful Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913. It was during these conflicts that the territory we now know as Kosovo was incorporated into the Serbian state and later into what became known as Yugoslavia after World War I.
From the beginning, Kosovo’s Albanian population has fought against its incorporation into Serbia and then later Yugoslavia. The history of these two peoples in Kosovo has been filled with fierce fighting on both sides. Tito’s Yugoslavia after World War II incorporated many potential ethnic divides into the new federal state, although for the most part, the federal system and the unity of the socialist party were able either ameliorate, accommodate or suppress these tensions. The ethnic Albanians within Kosovo were never content with their position within Yugoslavia. Even with the granting of greater autonomy in Tito’s 1974 constitution, some Albanians continued to agitate for a strengthened nationalist position or outright independence.
The central point of this history for the modern context is to understand that the ethnic tensions in Kosovo extended much further back than July 1990, when the Kosovo assembly declared its sovereignty and the regime in Belgrade responded by dissolving the assembly and all other aspects of the provincial government. The dynamics of the conflict are much broader than the single figure of Slobodan Milosevic. Nonetheless, journalists and scholars have continued erroneously to date the beginning of the Albanian nationalist movement and ethnic strife in Kosovo from 1990. It has been generally portrayed as a response to Milosevic’s Serbia, rather than a nationalist movement with long historical roots. This entire period of time has seen increasing and decreasing periods of violence, discrimination, and conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the province of Kosovo. Another telling point of this history is that the Kosovo Albanians only found themselves in the ascendancy with the aid of an outside military power, the Austrians during World War I and the Germans during World War II. NATO filled this position in 1999.
The most recent round of fighting also has its roots in the early 1980s rather than the 1990s and the rise of Milosevic in Serbia. After Tito’s death in 1980, there was Albanian separatist violence in Kosovo in 1981. A small immigrant group in Switzerland and Germany then formed the Popular Movement for the Republic of Kosovo (LPRK) in 1982. Radical members within this group began to advocate a more aggressive program for creating an independent Kosovo in 1992. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), also known by its Albanian acronym UCK, formed in 1993 and made its first appearance in 1996 when its members attacked Serbian refugees in the Krajina. With the collapse of the government in Albania in 1997, the KLA gained access to better weapons and began to expand its military campaign against Serbian targets in Kosovo. In February and March 1998, there was fierce fighting between Serbian and KLA forces in Drenica after the KLA killed four Serbian policemen. Although the response of the western powers was at first rather neutral, even referring to the KLA fighters as “terrorists” at the outset, the United States and Great Britain moved continuously closer to partisanship for the KLA, which was clear by early 1999 (Meckel, 2000). As the fighting continued and increasing numbers of civilians were internally displaced, the western powers put more pressure on Belgrade to modify its counterinsurgency war. In October 1998, U.S. representative Richard Holbrooke and the Serbian President Milosevic reached an agreement for the withdrawing of Serbian forces from Kosovo. However, the pressure to back off was applied in only a one-sided fashion, and the KLA filled in the vacuum left by the withdrawing Serbian forces. In December 1998, the KLA increased its attacks on Serbian military and civilian targets hoping to further escalate the situation and to draw NATO into the conflict.
Within a context of increased KLA attacks against Serbian targets as well as Albanians, who refused to support the cause of independence, the U.S. government and prestige press began to focus almost solely on Serbian aggression against apparently civilian targets. The most infamous of these by now is the charge of a massacre by Serbian forces in the village of Racak on the 15th of January 1999. The then Secretary of State Madeline Albright sought to use the evidence of a massacre to galvanize the western governments against Belgrade noting that “forty-five civilians” had been shot at close range and that one of the bodies had been mutilated through decapitation (Albright, 2003). On the 29th of January 1999, there were charges of yet another massacre in the village of Rugovo. The New York Times reported, “After a Serbian attack that killed 45 Albanian civilians in the village of Racak this month, the United States began mobilizing international support for stronger action to stop the violence. . . The threat of imminent NATO action did not prevent a Serbian police raid in which 24 ethnic Albanians were killed in the village of Rugovo on Friday” (Whitney, 1999a). While Milosevic was ordered to reduce his forces in Kosovo as a result, NATO said it was “studying how to support measures to curb arms smuggling into Kosovo” to support KLA fighters. Yet, there is no evidence that NATO ever sought to hinder KLA activities. We will return to Racak and Rugovo in the following section.
There was at least a formal attempt at negotiating a resolution to the conflict at Rambouillet in France from the 6th of February until the 23rd. The stated goal of the negotiations was to end the fighting by both the KLA and the Serbian forces. By the 23rd, neither side was willing to sign a document put together by the Americans. A second round of negotiations was held from the 15th of March to the 19th in Paris, at the end of which the Kosovar Albanian representatives signed and the Belgrade side refused to sign. The final stage was set for war, and on the 19th the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) withdrew from Kosovo. On the 24th of March NATO launched Operation Allied Force. The NATO air campaign was suspended on the 10th of June, when the Serbian forces began to withdraw and formally ceased on the 20th. We still do not know why Milosevic reversed his earlier decision to challenge NATO.
RACAK AND RUGOVO
Before turning to the discourse surrounding Operation Horseshoe and its construction in the media, it is important to reflect upon two specific charges of massacres by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanian civilians as opposed to anti-KLA activities. NATO attempted to justify its commencement of bombing on the 24th of March by claiming that it was a “humanitarian intervention,” in large part because it was unable to secure a resolution for military action from the Untied Nations Security Council, thus making its attack questionable in terms of international law. There is no question that the situation had deteriorated dramatically with over 300,000 civilians displaced by the fighting within Kosovo. But the NATO governments needed to achieve an ethical clarity so as to justify the war to their domestic populations. Thus, the charges of massacres at Racak and Rugovo aided this campaign in preparing their populations for war. The alleged massacre at Racak has formed a central aspect of the Kosovo trial against Milosevic at International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. While the prosecution dropped charges of genocide in the Kosovo case, Milosevic is still being held accountable for the disproportionate use of force in fighting the KLA. In the end, he is being held accountable for 600 deaths, but only 45 of those deaths occurred before the commencement of NATO’s bombing, those are the deaths in Racak.
Thus, the credibility of NATO’s humanitarian intervention depended a great deal upon what happened at Racak and in Kosovo prior to the 15th of March 1999. It was “the legal cover needed to go to war” (Judah, 2002, p. 233). With the commencement of NATO’s bombing campaign, there is no question that the Serbian forces began to expel Albanian civilians from the province and increased the level of violence on the ground, as did the KLA. What is important to keep distinct, and this has everything to do with the narrative of Operation Horseshoe, is that NATO needed to be able to claim that this was already in process in advance of their bombing. As we will see below, this claim is highly dubious. NATO’s credibility was on the line, and the western leaders recognized that they had to start working intensely on swinging public opinion to back their policy (Judah, 2002, p. 235, 236, 253).