By IPS Correspondents
ROME, Mar 27 1999 (IPS)

It seems impartial, but is not as unbiased as it appears, when the newspapers say that, in Yugoslavia, NATO is attacking “Milosevic’s armies.”

After eight years of this type of language, the words “Serb” and “Milosevic” are synonymous – in the eyes of the Western public – with evil, violence, ethnic cleansing and repression.

Italian experts stressed Friday that, both in military and legal terms, the war is an offensive operation against a sovereign state, the Yugoslav Federation, which includes Serbia and Montenegro – both targets for missiles.

Western journalists no longer feel the need to quote any sources when they attribute Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic total responsibility for the attacks, and the violence which burst out in the Balkans following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991.

The confusion between Serbia and Yugoslavia, and the personification of both in Milosevic is a journalistic simplification which would be inadmissible in a Western country: no one would dare speak of the US army as Bill Clinton’s forces.

It is the same technique used to identify Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein, who is often compared with Milosevic.

When explaining why he writes that Yugoslav tanks are Milosevic’s, while the US planes are not Clinton’s, a veteran British journalist said angrily: “it is obvious Milosevic is the boss and makes all the decisions. I don’t understand how anyone could think otherwise.”

Thus, as very few people think differently, an institutional war with democracy – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – pitched against a calculating, dictatorial and demonic regime, cannot be anything but fair and natural.

Descriptions of the situation also rest credibility from the political parties and Parliament of Yugoslavia, which unanimously voted against foreign troops entering the nation.

Former Portuguese president Mario Soares (Socialist) recalled Thursday in Lisbon that “Milosevic might not be to our taste, but the fact is he is a democratically elected and internationally recognised president.”

Few people are aware that Milosevic was elected president in a process supervised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and that his government is now made up of practically all the political forces of the country.

Such omissions tend to reinforce the image of Milosevic as head of an illegal regime, feeding the illusion that a military or popular rebellion could change the situation at any time.

Italian general Carlo Jean, Italy’s representative to the OSCE, wrote in an essay that the modern conflicts represent “two parallel wars: one on the battlefield and another in the media.”

“With the media in real live time, like television, the public becomes a strategic political player, given the importance of their consent and support,” said Jean in the article presented to the Centre of Higher Defence Studies in Rome.

Public consent “is conditioned more by the form in which the message is presented than by the content of the information,” and it is “reinforced when the information involves the dominant values of the public which receives it,” he added.

“The ‘just cause’ of (military) intervention became a communication necessity: also the objectives of the ‘realpolitik’ msut be dressed in the costume of ‘idealpolitik’,” concluded Jean.

While Serb oppression of the Albanian minority in the province of Kosovo was set out as the main motive for the attacks, the world press virtually stopped coverage of the lives of the civilian population, abandonned to their fate there.

Since Wednesday, the television screens have been mainly concentrating on the Western military might and the plumes of fire left by the aircraft at the “Serbian military objectives,” while human rights organisations reported mass exoduses and ethnic cleansing operations in Kosovo.

The United Nations agencies had to abandon Kosovo, where since the worsening of the crisis two weeks ago some 40,000 civilians were displaced, leaving them with no food or shelter.

“People will have to realise that this is a war, that people are going to die and there will be destruction,” said a British journalist in NATO headquarters in Brussels Wednesday, as if it was a matter of course.

Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency, reported that Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) rebels are attacking the government forces “stimulated and sustained by the criminal activity (of the bombardments.”

Just like their colleagues in Tanjug, reporters from the big Western media appear to have overlooked the call for objectivity in their complex television dissertations on military strategy and techniques given at the doorways of military installations.

And this is because, as General Jean said, from the invasion of Grenada (1983), journalists has stepped down from the sidelines to join the battle. And it is well known that in warfare, you have to shoot or you die.

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