[Nettime-bold] (Fwd) At war with NATO

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

Under the IHL, World Trade Center could not be a legitimate  
military objective - even if it was hit by a missile in the middle of the 
 night - because it was in the middle of highly populated area, 
where civilian death was virtually inavoidable. But in the same 
sense the TV building in Belgrade hit by US missiles was not a 
legitimate military objective, was it? Civilians died, too. We shall 
see, though, how the case about that would play out in the 
European Court of Human Rights in Strassbourg. At least, 
Americans hit the RTS building in off-hours, during the night, and 
with an unmanned cruise missile - not with a Serbian airliner full of 
unsuspecting Serbian citizens. By hitting the towers at the  
beginning of the work day and with passenger airliners full of  
passengers, Al Qaeda obviously showed us that they didn't give a  
flying shit for the IHL, didn't they? 
ivo
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From:           	Daniel Tomasevich <danilo@MARTNET.COM>
Subject:        	At war with NATO
To:             	JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

The European Court of human rights will hear the case against
NATO's bombing of RTS and the violation of a right to life.


   Marani's rhetoric was subsequently reflected in statements by Nato
   leaders after the April 23 bombing. Tony Blair said: "It's very, very
   important people realise that these television stations are part of
   the apparatus of dictatorship and power of Milosevic, and that
   apparatus is the apparatus he has used to do this ethnic cleansing in
   Kosovo. It's the apparatus that keeps him in power." Propaganda equals
   power, power leads to ethnic cleansing, or so the Nato equation seemed
   to run.

   The truth appears to be that RTS was producing annoying propaganda
   about Nato leaders, including sketches involving an unflattering
   puppet of Bill Clin ton with a saxophone, was grossly misrepresenting
   Nato activities and also, embarrassingly, was on the ground to produce
   coverage of Nato blunders.


Daniel
(article not for cross posting)
-------------------------------------------------------------

   The Guardian         Tuesday October 23, 2001
   Serbia

   At war with Nato

   In 1999 coalition bombs killed 16 employees at Radio-Television
   Serbia. Tomorrow their relatives go to Strasbourg to accuse the UK and
   others of violating the right to life. Natasha Joffe reports


   In the early hours of April 23 1999, Nato bombed the head office of
   Radio-Television Serbia in Belgrade, killing 16 employees, mostly
   technicians and support staff, and injuring 16 others. Some victims
   had to be identified by a single personal effect: part of a sock, a
   ring. Mirjana Stoimenovski, mother of one of the victims, waited four
   days in front of the RTS building for news of her son's death.

   Tomorrow in a circular room in Strasbourg the European court of human
   rights will consider whether to hear a claim by relatives of five of
   those killed and one survivor that 17 Nato countries violated their
   right to life and the right to freedom of expression. The 17 countries
   - those, including the UK, which have signed up to the European
   convention on human rights - argue that the court should not entertain
   the application because the bombing took place in Yugoslavia, outside
   the territory of any of the signatories to the Convention. At this
   stage none of the countries has been required to put forward any
   explanation of what happened.

   If the judges decide that states can be held responsible for human
   rights violations outside European convention countries, they will
   probably not hear the case for several years. So the victims and the
   wider world face a long wait to receive answers to the questions
   raised by the bombing - questions which have acquired a new resonance
   post-September 11.

   Why did Nato deliberately bomb a civilian target that no one seems
   ever to have seriously suggested was performing any military function?
   How did the many foreign journalists who had been making use of RTS
   facilities know to leave the building before the attack? What, if any,
   warnings were given to Serbian authorities and RTS management prior to
   the strike?

   All the families have to go on at the moment are statements made by
   Nato spokespeople, military leaders and politicians at the time. These
   raise more questions than they answer. On March 26 1999, days after
   the Nato bombing of Serbia started, the talk was of "limiting
   collateral damage".

   Air Commodore David Wilby, Nato's chief military spokesman, was
   issuing reassurances about civilian targets: "We do everything that is
   humanly possible to make sure that our weapons are targeted on the
   right place, that we have done our homework to make sure that we are
   not targeting civilians, we're not targeting people, and we're not
   targeting civilian infrastructure."

   As the bombing intensified, there was growing concern that the targets
   might be widened to include the largely state-controlled Serb media.
   As late as April 12 Nato spokesman Jamie Shea was promising the
   International Federation of Journalists: "There is no policy to strike
   television and radio transmitters as such. Allied air missions are
   planned to avoid civilian casualties, including of course
   journalists."

   But by April 18 the concept of what constituted a legitimate target
   had apparently changed. Shea said at a press briefing: "I think the
   time has come to take a closer look at the Serb state media. It is not
   really a media at all; it is part of President Milosevic's war
   machine." Attacks followed on radio relay and TV transmitting
   stations. General Giuseppe Marani, a Nato spokesman, described these
   on April 21 as attacks designed to "disrupt the regime and degrade the
   FRY [Federal Republic of Yugloslavia] propaganda apparatus". Within
   two days Nato had graduated from bombing transmitters to bombing the
   RTS stu dios.

   Marani's rhetoric was subsequently reflected in statements by Nato
   leaders after the April 23 bombing. Tony Blair said: "It's very, very
   important people realise that these television stations are part of
   the apparatus of dictatorship and power of Milosevic, and that
   apparatus is the apparatus he has used to do this ethnic cleansing in
   Kosovo. It's the apparatus that keeps him in power." Propaganda equals
   power, power leads to ethnic cleansing, or so the Nato equation seemed
   to run.

   The truth appears to be that RTS was producing annoying propaganda
   about Nato leaders, including sketches involving an unflattering
   puppet of Bill Clin ton with a saxophone, was grossly misrepresenting
   Nato activities and also, embarrassingly, was on the ground to produce
   coverage of Nato blunders.

   What it wasn't covering were any of the atrocities committed against
   Albanians in Kosovo. As Shea put it: "The Serb media have alleged that
   Nato has deliberately bombed the elderly and the retarded; they have
   claimed that Nato has been dropping napalm bombs and firing
   radioactive missiles at targets; they have alleged that many of the
   refugees suffering on the border with the former Yugoslav Republic of
   Macedonia are in fact Macedonian Albanians doing this in collusion
   with Nato."

   All very irritating no doubt. However, under the Geneva Convention,
   "television channels and equipment" can be legitimate targets only if
   they are "an integral part of the military apparatus" - when, for
   example, they are being used for military communications purposes.

   When is a TV station not a TV station? According to President Clinton,
   when you don't like what it's saying: "Our military leaders at Nato
   believe, based on what they have seen and what others in the area have
   told them, that the Serb television is an essential instrument of Mr
   Milosevic's command and control. He uses it to spew hatred and
   basically to spread disinformation. It is not, in a conventional
   sense, therefore, a media outlet." But if we say that something ceases
   to be a media outlet because it lies or we don't like what it
   produces, aren't we inviting those conducting anthrax attacks on the
   US media to make the same point?

   Ironically, far from "disrupting the regime" and "degrading the
   propaganda appara tus" as Nato claimed, the RTS bombing seems to have
   caused suspension of the station's television channel for a mere five
   hours. In any event some observers doubt whether the majority of Serbs
   took the output of RTS (after years of state control) very seriously
   by this stage. What is certain is that Milosevic made considerable
   capital out of the RTS bombing.

   The human cost of the bombing is bleakly reflected in a list of the
   dead and injured which forms part of the application before the
   European court.It simply provides names, dates of birth and
   occupations - "Ksenija Bankovic, born in 1971, video mix, Jelica
   Munitlak, born in 1971, make-up artist" - but somehow transforms the
   dead from collateral damage into lost individuals.

   Many of those killed, we are told, opposed the Milosevic government.
   As Ljiljana Bererina, a survivor of the attack put it, "What does RTS
   represent for me? An interesting job. You can't imagine what it means
   in a poor country under an embargo to deal with international
   relations, to be in contact with foreign colleagues. But at home we
   never watched the news on RTS, we switched on the TV only when there
   was football."

   And even if RTS was producing highly effective propaganda, was Nato
   really justified in bombing it? Tim Gopsill of the National Union of
   Journalists (which protested against the bombing vigorously at the
   time) points out: "In wars everyone produces propaganda. Nato are
   making the BBC a target if you are legitimising the attack on RTS."

   Tony Fisher is an English solicitor who, with the Belgrade human
   rights centre and academics from the University of Essex, is
   presenting the applicants' case in Strasbourg. He says that while they
   are claiming monetary compensation for human rights violations, "their
   principal concern is to establish truth and accountability". As the
   headstone erected by the families of victims in front of the RTS
   building says: "Died on duty, following the Nato bombing. Why?"

   Some of the truth may eventually come out of the European court
   proceedings. Other questions will need to be answered in the Serb
   courts. Dragoljub Milanovic, the former head of RTS, has been charged
   with failing to order evacuation of the building despite allegedly
   knowing of the bomb threat.

   None of the station's senior officials or key journalists were on the
   premises. Witnesses say the editor-in-chief left an hour before the
   attack.

   The suspicion is that those who were on the premises had been
   deliberately left to die for propaganda purposes.

   The issues before the European Court transcend this particular
   tragedy. To what extent are we required to respect the human rights of
   those outside our own territory? Under what circumstances, if ever,
   are we justified in regarding civilian targets as part of someone's
   "war machine"? If Nato can play with the meaning of words, so, as we
   know, can the world's terrorists.

   And if the World Trade Centre was not a symbol of global capitalism,
   but just a place where people worked and in which they died, horribly,
   for no reason, then so was the RTS building.


           Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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