Australian Financial Review 3rd June 99
Vietnam taught the military that the best way to maintain domestic support
for a war is to keep it as bloodless as possible, which is, of course, impossible
even in a high-tech air campaign such as that over Kosovo. So the language
interpreting it must be sanitised instead.
Civilians killed or maimed thus become "collateral damage". The bombs that
were meant to hit military installations but instead "accidently" strike
a hospital or an apartment block are explained away politely as having been
"seduced from their targets".
Meanwhile, the generals rule out a ground invasion, while conceding that
their troops may be called upon to fight in a "non-permissive environment".
The polite language is even extended to the actions of NATO's enemy: the
most bloodless phrase to emerge from the entire Balkans conflict must be
"ethnic cleansing", two words so overused that they are now completely devoid
of meaning.
The flipside of the sanitised euphemism is exaggerated rhetoric. Rhetoric
is the traditional tool of political leaders during times of conflict. But
during the Kosovo campaign it has gone into over-drive. US President Clinton
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair liken Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic
to Adolf Hitler and his "ethnic cleansing" offensive against the Kosovar
Albanians to that of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.
Of course, the Serbs, too, are playing the same game. Yugoslav state television
has described NATO leaders as "degenerate criminals" and CNN as "pigs". As
British playwright Harold Pinter and other members of the international writers'
group PEN wrote in a letter to The Times recently, the difference is that
Serbian statements are dubbed propaganda in the West while the West's overblown
language is dismissed as mere "spin". "Both terms are deplorable," they wrote.
"If we cannot have peace let us at least have the truth."
Truth? In war? (Sorry, NATO has not declared war against the Serbs, it is
conducting precision air strikes against "legitimate, military targets" such
as the bridge in the Serbian town of Varvarin on Sunday which was crowded
with market day traffic and pedestrians. Eleven people were killed.)
The biggest spin of all is that of NATO "unity" US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright calls the alliance "wedge-proof". Stay tuned for more statements
of such unity of purpose during this week's European Union heads of government
meeting in Cologne and the upcoming G8 economic summit in the same city two
weeks later although Russia, a member of the G8 and a Serb ally, will likely
upset that apple cart.
The 19-member alliance is unified because its dominant players, the US and
Britain, tell us it is. While they say this, Greece, a NATO member within
shouting distance of the conflict, has consistently called for an end to
the air strikes. Italy has also proposed a ceasefire, while the Germans,
who have been shoulder-to-shoulder with the US and Britain on the need to
keep up the military pressure on Milosevic, have parted company with the
hawks who urge the deployment of ground troops.
Indeed, the spin two weeks ago from London was that tough-talking British
Prime Minister Tony Blair had been urging a dovish Bill Clinton to give the
ground troops option a chance. This was followed by counter-spin from Washington
that Clinton had told Blair to stop his aides spinning stories suggesting
a rift between the pair. Are there differences of opinion over ground troops?
Who knows?
"There is a bottle of champagne for the first person who can supply me with
a single direct quotation from Tony Blair showing that our Prime Minister
has been in any sense lobbying for an invasion of Kosovo. Scour the record,"
commented Daily Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson, one of the war's chief
cynics. He added: "We're being spun, boys!"
Yet with the war now in its 10th week, the British media seem happy to soak
up any spin thrown their way, if it gives them a new headline. The Sunday
Telegraph ran an "exclusive" this week which revealed that the British
Government, in a secret meeting with its European counterparts, had pledged
50,000 troops to a 150,000-strong ground invasion for Kosovo. The story was
dismissed the next day.
Even when the NATO leaders are quoted directly, we can't be sure of what
they are saying. A big story last week in Europe was a Germany-Italy meeting
in southern Italy, where the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder declared
that the use of ground troops was "unthinkable". The headlines dutifully
declared that a new rift had now opened up between Germany and Britain on
the issue.
The problem was that Schroeder said nothing of the sort. It emerged some
days later that what he had actually said in German was that "for Germany,
sending in ground troops was not being considered", something rather less
strident than "unthinkable". It turned out that the official translator at
the meeting had made an error, compounded by news agencies which unknowingly
flashed it around the world.
Does anybody care any more? There have been so many stories about ground
invasions, so many references to Milosevic's "evil war machine", that I suspect
readers' eyes now just glaze over in the West. We have started turning off
the television and its images of fleeing refugees.
The language of the Kosovo war the euphemisms, the lies and the exaggerations
no longer has an impact.
Perhaps. But George Orwell probably would disagree. He believed such language
made future wars more likely.
"War damages the fabric of civilisation not only by the destruction it causes,
nor even by the slaughter of human beings but by stimulating hatred and
dishonesty," he wrote in 1944.
"By shooting at your enemy, you are not in the deepest sense wronging him.
But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to
believe them, by clamoring for unjust peace terms which make further wars
inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation but at humanity
itself."
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