Killing People Because You Don't Like What They Say (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:04:01 -0700
From: Phil.Gasper@sirius.com
To: jmusselm_rpa@indiana.edu
Subject: Killing People Because You Don't Like What They Say

> 1999.04.24 Independent (UK)
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/
>
> **'Once you kill people because you don't like what they say,
> you change the rules of war'**
>
> **Hanging upside-down from the wreckage was a dead man, in his
> fifties perhaps, although a benevolent grey dust had covered his
> face. Not far away, also upside-down -- his legs trapped between
> tons of concrete and steel -- was a younger man in a pullover,
> face grey, blood dribbling from his head on to the rubble
> beneath.**
>
> THE BOMBING OF BELGRADE'S TV CENTER
>
> by Robert Fisk in Belgrade
>
> Deep inside the tangle of cement and plastic and iron, in what
> had once been the make-up room next to the broadcasting studio
> of Serb Television, was all that was left of a young woman, burnt
> alive when Nato's missile exploded in the radio control room.
> Within six hours, the Secretary of State for International
> Development, Clare Short, declared the place a "legitimate
> target".
>
> It wasn't an argument worth debating with the wounded -- one of
> them a young technician who could only be extracted from the
> hundreds of tons ofconcrete in which he was encased by
> amputating both his legs. Nor with the silent hundreds who
> gathered in front of the still-smoking ruin at dawn yesterday, lost
> for words as they stood in the little glade of trees beside St
> Marko's Cathedral, where Belgrade's red and cream trams turn
> round. A Belgrade fireman pulled at one of the bodies for all of
> 30 seconds before he realised that the man, swinging back and
> forth amid the wreckage, was dead.
>
> By dusk last night, 10 crushed bodies -- two of them women --
> had been tugged from beneath the concrete, another man had
> died in hospital and 15 other technicians and secretaries still lay
> buried. A fireman reported hearing a voice from the depths as the
> heavens opened, turning into mud themuck and dust of a
> building that Ms Short had declared to be a "propaganda
> machine".
>
> We had all wondered how long it would be before Nato decided
> that Radio Televizija Srbija should join the list of "military"
> targets. Spokesmen had long objected to its crude propaganda --
> it included a Nato symbol turning into a swastika and a montage
> of Madeleine Albright growing Dracula teeth in front of a
> burning building.
>
> It never reported on the tens of thousands of Albanian refugees
> who spoke of executions and "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. It
> endlessly repeated films that depicted Yugoslav soldiers as
> idealised heroes defending their country. It carried soporific
> tapes of President Slobodan Milosevic meeting patriarchs,
> Cossacks, Russian envoys and the Kosovo Albanian leader
> Ibrahim Rugova. The channel was showing an American
> interview with Mr Milosevic when the first cruise missile
> smashed into the station's control room just after two o'clock
> yesterday morning.
>
> But did this justify killing the night staff in their studios and
> taping rooms? Two weeks ago, Nato's spokesmen had been
> suggesting that RTS would have to carry six hours of Western
> television a day if it was to survive -- CNN's bland, safe
> coverage of events presumably offering some balance to the
> rubbish churned out on the RTS news. But once Nato decided
> this was as preposterous as it was impracticable, its spokesman
> announced that the station was not on the list of Nato targets.
>
> Then, on Monday, CNN's bosses called up from Atlanta to
> inform the satellite boys in Belgrade that they should pull out of
> the RTS offices. Against the wishes of other Nato nations, so the
> word went, General Wesley Clark had decided to bomb Serb
> television. CNN withdrew from the building in Takovska Street.
> And that night, we were all invited to have coffee and orange
> juice in the studios.
>
> The building was likely to be a target of the "Nato aggressor",
> according to Goran Matic, a Yugoslav federal minister, as he
> walked us through the ground floor of the doomed building. Yet,
> oddly, we did not take him seriously. Even when the air-raid
> siren sounded, I stayed for another coffee.
>
> Surely Nato wouldn't waste its bombs on this tiresome station
> with its third-rate propaganda and old movies, let alone kill its
> staff.
>
> Yesterday morning, the moment I heard the cruise missile
> scream over my hotel roof, I knew I was wrong. There was a
> thunderous explosion and a mile-high cloud of dust as four
> storeys collapsed to the ground, sandwiching offices, machines,
> transmitters and people into a pile of rubble only 15 feet high.
>
> Yet, within six hours, Serb television was back on the air,
> beaming its programmes from secret transmitters, the female
> anchorwoman reading the news from pieces of pink paper
> between pre-recorded films of Serbian folk-songs and ancient
> Orthodox churches. All along, the Serbs had been ready for just
> such an attack. We had not believed Nato capable of such
> ferocity. The Serbs had.
>
> The crowds still stood in the park as darkness fell, watching the
> men with drills punching their way through the concrete for more
> survivors. By that time, explanations were flowing from Nato's
> birthday celebrations in Washington. Serbia's "propaganda
> machine" had been prolonging the war. I wonder. I seem to recall
> Croatian television spreading hatred a-plenty when it was
> ethnically cleansing 170,000 Serbs from Croatia in 1995. But we
> didn't bomb Zagreb. And when President Franjo Tudjman's lads
> were massacring Serbs and Muslims alike in Bosnia, we didn't
> bomb his residence. Was Serbian television's real sin its
> broadcast of film of the Nato massacre of Kosovo Albanian
> refugees last week, killings that Nato was forced to admit had
> been a mistake?
>
> Yes, Serbian television could be hateful, biased, bad. It was
> owned by the government. But once you kill people because you
> don't like what they say, you have changed the rules of war. And
> that's what Nato did in Belgrade in the early hours of yesterday
> morning.