Re: Syndicate: Ecological disaster

[Naskov@aol.c]

'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. 

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. 

 From The Independent
------Syndicate mailinglist--------------------
 Syndicate network for media culture and media art
 information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/east/
 to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at>
 in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress