My Favorite Atrocity Story -Justin Raimondo

["MR JAVIER BERNAL" <988005350@98.LINCOLN.AC.UK>]

From: "Vojislav Stojkovic" <codemage@technologist.com>
Subject: My Favorite Atrocity Story
-Justin Raimondo


June 18, 1999
MY FAVORITE ATROCITY STORIES

Atrocity stories are the very woof and warp of war propaganda: from
Belgian babies bayoneted by bloodthirsty Huns during World War I, to
Kuwaiti babies murdered in their incubators by Saddam’s sadistic
henchmen, the manufacture of lies has been the growth industry of the
20th century.
 By now, of course, the public is so inured to exaggeration and outright
falsehood that most have developed an immunity to anything but the
crudest hyperbole: it is the strong stuff, or nothing. This is why the
screaming headlines about the Kosovo “genocide” supposedly being
uncovered in the wake of   the Serbs’ retreat practically jump right off the page at the
reader: 10,000 MASSACRED! proclaims the San Francisco Examiner. This turns out to
be  an “estimate” trumpeted by the Brits, based on nothing but conjecture,
but expect this number to double and even triple in the next 48 hours. We
are in for an atrocity storytelling marathon, a morality play in which
the Serbs are he villains, the Kosovars are the victims, and anything that
deviates from this script is simply edited out of the text. Yes, says
the Devil’s Advocate, but what about those atrocity stories? Are they
true?

Okay, then, we can’t look at each and every accusation in
the flood of charges and counter-charges in the space of a
single column, so let’s look at a typical article: “Road of
death yields up its ghosts,” Right off the bat we are in a
semi-fictional framework: this sounds more like the title of a
novel or a short story than a “news” article. The leader
reads: “Daniel McGrory in Kosovo is confronted by
gruesome evidence of Serb atrocities.” [Times of London,
June 17, 1999]. As it turns out, however, what he is
“confronted” with is pure hearsay.

A GUN BATTLE OR AN “ATROCITY”?
Kosovars who returned to the village of Lukare, we are
told, found “gruesome evidence of atrocities.” What
evidence? A farmhouse has been ransacked and partially
burned, and “inside the dining room was the charred corpse
of a man wearing wellington boots. A single rifle cartridge
lay beside the body, which had been wrapped in a lamb’s
fleece rug and set alight.” McGrory cites one Ejup Krasniqi
as saying: “The man who owns this house is in a refugee
camp in Macedonia, so we have no idea who this is.” Now
what are we to make of this? Who was this man? What
was he doing in someone else’s house? Might he have been
a KLA fighter? It certainly seems possible, given his taste in
footwear. What kind of a phony “atrocity” is this? It could
just as easily have been a gun battle, or a looter summarily
executed (which, admittedly, some might deem an atrocity).
The point is, however, that this is far from clear-cut. Where
oh where is this “gruesome evidence”?

SACRILEGE
Atrocity stories are all written in an overwrought,
melodramatic style: the idea is not so much to state facts as
to construct a narrative, complete with a plot, characters
major and minor, and those signature touches that add color
and enthrall the critics. McGrory’s own literary flourishes
come under the heading of unintentional humor. At the end
of his paragraph on the mysterious man in the Wellington
boots, he adds: “Before they left, the executioners put a
final shot through the television screen.” Oh no, not that –
not, gasp, the television screen! While the Serbs complain
that thirty Orthodox churches have been put to the torch by
the KLA, and the holy relics of their most sacred shrines
violated, what outrages the limey press is this sacrilege
against a TV set, the holy altar of Western culture.

CONSIDER THE SOURCE
As we get deeper into the piece, it becomes all too clear
that McGrory is being given a “war crimes” guided tour by
the KLA: “On a tray in a hilltop farmhouse – the makeshift
headquarters of the KLA – is an assortment of identity
cards from the dead.” The Serbs supposedly recovered
these from a “mass grave” of 77 Kosovars allegedly
massacred. But who knows where these cards really came
from? Are we supposed to take the KLA’s word for it?

A REAL WHOPPER
There are many suspicious aspects to this story: the
forensic evidence, we are told, in many cases has been
“tainted,” evidence such as shell cases “taken as
souvenirs.” Oh, really: by whom? The paragraph ends with
a real whopper: “And vital witnesses are too scared to
testify.” This sentence seems almost incomprehensible,
until you really begin to think about it: after all, with the
Serbs gone, witnesses to Serb atrocities would have nothing
to lose and everything to gain (including some kind of
material reward) by testifying about these alleged acts of
brutality. Just who or what are they afraid of? The obvious
answer is, of course, the KLA. Who else is anybody afraid
of in Kosovo these days?

VENGEANCE IN VICTORY
Not all the Kosovars supported the KLA: some were
loyalists, who supported the idea of a multinational
Yugoslav federation, others tried to remain neutral. These
the KLA consider enemies, and they have gone after
alleged “collaborators” and executed them on the spot. This
was one reason why they rushed into Kosovo, ahead of the
NATO invasion force: to exact vengeance on their enemies,
to settle old scores and consolidate their reign of terror.
Who knows how many they executed, before NATO
troops were finally given the order to move? We will never
know.

TRUST, AND VERIFY
A good deal of the Times piece is based on the
testimony of Albanian Kosovars, virtually all of it in the
form of flat-out assertions, which McGrory reports
uncritically, as if it were fact. A woman called Zarife (no
last name) accuses Serb soldiers of using what used to be
her home as a “rape camp.” The evidence: bloodstained
mattresses and piles of women’s underwear. Zarife has
spent all day cleaning up the mess (more “evidence”
tainted). We are told another story of an ambush, in which
all the men were separated out and forced to march along a
bridge and face the waters: “When they were looking
away,” says Mr. Krasniqi, “they were stabbed in the back
of the neck by about 20 soldiers.” Stabbed in the back of
the neck? Isn’t that a rather unusual – and problematic –
way to execute someone? “It took them nearly an hour to
kill everybody and we were too afraid to help.” Krasniqi’s
story just does not make any sense: are we supposed to
believe that 50 men passively stood on a bridge for an hour
while they were slowly stabbed to death? This is not
reporting, it is stenography. It isn’t until the fifteenth
paragraph of this article that the author writes “such claims
are impossible to verify.” The British are so terribly
understated, don’t you think?

THE ROAD OF MALARKEY

“It is inevitable that larger massacres will be discovered
in the coming days, “ writes McGrory, with what seems
like far too much relish. Besides, why is it inevitable?
Certainly it is not inevitable unless the assumption is that
the Serbs are guilty in advance. “The survivors of the killing
on the Lukare to Koliq road hope that what happened here
will not be forgotten.” But what did happen on the
so-called Road of Death? Even a mildly critical look behind
the headlines suggests that there is much less here than
meets the eye.

NEITHER ANGELS NOR DEVILS
This is not to suggest that the Serbs are angels: but
neither are they devils, or “Milosevic’s willing
executioners,” as one KLA spokesman – yet another
Krasniqi! – put it in a recent television interview. This is a
phrase you could tell he was quite proud of, having picked
it up from the Susan Sontag-New Republic wing of the War
Party – the amen-corner of the KLA in this country. It is an
odious phrase, meant to stigmatize an entire people. There
is already talk of “arresting” Slobodan Milosevic and others
in his government indicted by the phony War Crimes
Tribunal, which has been nothing but a kangaroo court
from the very beginning. How else would they arrest him
without invading Serbia proper?

PHASE II COMING UP
This is what is on the agenda now, with the Brits – as
usual – leading the push to war, and the Germans
unleashing their KLA clients to wreak havoc on the ground
and provoke the Serbs into a fight. This is the real story
behind the headlines, the function of atrocity stories in this
war: to dehumanize and justify the annihilation of the
Serbian nation. The NATO-crats won’t be happy until they
have marched into Belgrade, set up a puppet government,
and proceeded to put virtually the entire population on trial
for “war crimes.” NATO’s war against Serbia is far from
over: phase II is coming right up.

Note to readers: Due to a technical problem, a partial
version of this column was posted earlier. We apologize
for any confusion or inconvenience.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the
author of Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against US Intervention
in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, in Auburn,Alabama,
He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard 
(forthcoming from Prometheus Books).