CNN was told of TVS bombing (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 16:12:09 -0400
From: Daniel Tomasevich <danilo@primenet.com>
Reply-To: srpska_kultura@4Cbiz.net
To: SRPSKA KULTURA <srpska_kultura@4Cbiz.net>
Subject: CNN was told of TVS bombing


       --
____ CP||CKA KY/\TYPA ____ No. 869  Poruka od:  Daniel Tomasevich <danilo@primenet.com>

                       Copyright 1999 The Irish Times
                              The Irish Times
                                      
                        April 24, 1999, CITY EDITION
                                      
   SECTION: WORLD NEWS; CRISIS IN THE BALKANS; Pg. 11
   LENGTH: 1132 words
   HEADLINE: Searchlights scan studio dust and rubble in search for dead
   Lara Marlowe listened as the trapped survivors moaned or tapped from
   below in the ruins of the bombed Belgrade studios

   BODY:

       A dead man hung upside down in the pancaked rubble of the Radio
   Televizija Srbije (RTS) building, his brains oozing out of the top of
   his head. The body of the station's make-up artist - the close friend
   of an interpreter for a British television network - was charred
   beyond recognition. A limp, dead hand emerged from the ruins.
   Dust and smoke swirled in the searchlights as yellow-helmeted firemen
   pulled the wreckage away. There was a strong odour of burning plastic
   - electrical cables or videotape? - as hundreds of stunned Serbs
   watched from behind police lines in Tasmajdan Park.
   "Why is NATO doing this?" a part-time RTS employee asked me. "Don't
   they realise that this will really make people hate them?"
   At least 10 people were killed when cruise missiles struck the
   state-run television building in central Belgrade at 2.06 a.m.
   yesterday, but the death toll is expected to rise. About 100
   journalists and technicians were working when the explosion occurred,
   and yesterday afternoon firemen still struggled to remove the roof of
   the four collapsed storeys of the network's main control room and tape
   recording centre. Survivors moaned or tapped from beneath concrete
   slabs. One man could only be freed by amputating both his legs.
   RTS had anticipated the bombardment and within six hours was
   broadcasting from another location, showing images of monasteries and
   historical paintings, then reports on its own destruction. The
   patriotic songs and marching soldiers were back on air - Mr Blair
   called the station "a recruiting sergeant for Milosevic's wars" - so
   NATO had killed at least 10 civilians for nothing.

   A NATO spokesman first mentioned the station's possible destruction in
   a briefing two weeks ago. RTS was "the heart of Slobodan Milosevic's
   propaganda machine", he said. But if the station agreed to broadcast
   six hours of western television each day, it might be spared. Another
   NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said that RTS was not on NATO's target
   list. But the question of the station's fate kept cropping up, and the
   NATO commander, Gen Wesley Clark, reportedly led those advocating its
   destruction.

   On Monday, April 19th, the CNN office in Belgrade received a telephone
   call from an executive in Atlanta. The White House had told the US
   network that RTS would be destroyed despite the risk of civilian
   casualties, and that CNN should cease operating in the RTS building.
   A few hours later, Mr Goran Matic, a Yugoslav minister without
   portfolio, held a press conference where he invited foreign
   journalists "to see the building that makes NATO tremble". The
   television studios on Takovska Street "will be bombed tomorrow", he
   predicted. He was wrong by three days.

   Western correspondents did not take Mr Matic seriously. They did not
   believe that after more than 100 Serbs and ethnic Albanians were
   accidentally killed in NATO bombings of Aleksinac, the Grdelica
   passenger train and the Prizren refugee convoys, NATO would
   deliberately target a radio and television station.

   At Mr Matic's press conference, an Australian journalist asked how
   Serb officials could possibly believe that NATO would do anything so
   absurd as attack a building where hundreds of civilians were known to
   work round the clock. "Absurd?" Mr Matic responded. "The assault on
   Yugoslavia was absurd. The attack on the train was absurd. The attack
   on the convoy was absurd . . . "

   Yesterday, Serb officials claimed that the attack on RTS was an
   attempt to muzzle the international press too; after all, they noted,
   foreign television networks transmitted their videotape from the
   destroyed building. Earlier, Serb media widely reported British
   government criticism of the BBC correspondent John Simpson and his
   reporting on NATO's April 12th bombing of the bridge where a passenger
   train was hit.

   Serb television is biased and pro-Milosevic. It has emphasised NATO
   strikes against infrastructure and civilians, but rarely reports
   attacks on Serb military targets. And it has totally ignored the
   Serbs' "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo Albanians. It refers to western
   heads of state as plotters, "fascists" and "blood-thirsty criminals".
   Propaganda videos show the US Secretary of State, Mrs Madeleine
   Albright, wearing a Nazi helmet, her face becoming a skull with flames
   shooting from the eye sockets. In other clips from the NATO u Blato
   ("NATO into the mud") series, Adolf Hitler transmogrifies into
   President Clinton and Hitler pats a little boy on the head, calling
   him Javier Solana.

   Uncomfortable as they were at Serb attempts to equate them with RTS
   journalists, western correspondents in Belgrade - some of whom had
   been working in the RTS building - were asking yesterday how NATO
   could claim moral superiority after killing journalists and
   technicians because it did not like the content of their broadcasts.
   The attack was condemned by the International Federation of
   Journalists, but western leaders tried to justify it. A British
   cabinet minister, Ms Clare Short, said "the propaganda machine is
   prolonging the conflict - this is a legitimate target". The NATO
   spokesman, Mr Shea, compared the attack with strikes of the two
   previous nights that destroyed Mr Milosevic's party headquarters and
   home - without casualties.

   "There will be no sanctuary for those aspects of the regime which are
   spreading hatred and creating this political environment for
   repression," Mr Shea said.

   Rajka, a Serb woman living across the street from the RTS building,
   noticed fire trucks around the television station on Thursday night
   and could not go to sleep for fear it would be bombed.
   Note the fire trucks: the Serbs knew the building was to be destroyed,
   but like NATO they were willing to sacrifice the journalists inside
   rather than back down. Rajka talked with a neighbour and watched
   television until 2 a.m. She had just tip-toed back into her own flat
   to avoid waking her family when she was jolted by the explosion.
   "It's a thing that only happens to you once in your life," she said.
   "I went to the balcony and I saw a huge cloud of dust where the
   building was . . . What happens next?"

   Other targets that were bombed early yesterday give an indication of
   what NATO has in mind for Serbia's immediate future. The main post
   office and telephone exchange in the south-eastern town of Uzice were
   bombed, putting 80,000 telephones out of order. Two hours after the
   RTS building was destroyed, NATO aircraft bombed power transmitters at
   Resnik and Zemun Polje, depriving most of Belgrade's suburbs of
   electricity.

   NATO is celebrating its 50th anniversary "with blood-stained hands",
   the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Nebojsa Vujovic, said.
   "This is a campaign of intimidation. It's a campaign to bomb the
   Serbian people into submission."
   ______________________________________________________________________

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