Crimes against truth

The relentless propaganda war is trivialising epic suffering, says Felipe Fernndez-Armesto

In war, the victims die and the victors die to decency. The campaigns in Kosovo and Serbia wreck lives. The propaganda war, meanwhile, rots brains and engorges hatreds. As always, when "British boys" go into battle, the sight and sound of the popular media in this country become sickening. "Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!" screams the Sun. The Mirror fuses holocaust with Hollywood in a tacky front-page flashback to Schindler's List. Sanity and humanity are flattened by lies. A war proclaimed to spare suffering gets hijacked by bloodlust. Critical intelligence is sacrificed to the government line. The lies are airborne and are pounding the truth into silence.

Some of the lies are Serb: Nato motives misrepresented, Western leaders demonised, massacres in Kosovo covered up, incredible figures claimed for casualties and victories. The Serb lies are mirrored and matched by Nato lies. The British government - always more interested in spin than substance - is one of the big twisters of the truth.

The media war is being fought with blunt instruments: language battered into meaninglessness by abuse. Bill Clinton is truly a repellent man - selfish, mendacious, meretricious and immoral - but he cannot fairly be called by the tag he now bears in Serbia: "Adolf Clinton, the biggest criminal in the history of the world". Milosevic makes Clinton look saintly by comparison but he is not the Hitler or Stalin that Western propaganda claims: he has neither their limitless Weltpolitik nor their ideological consistency. In Yugoslavia, the Nato aggressors are called "fascists", which by over-exploitation has become a dustbowl of a word, empty of meaning except as a vague insult. This is mild by the standards of some of the counter-catcalls howled by the Western press, where Serbs are "Nazi aggressors" - even though their forces have not attacked anyone outside the sovereign territory of Yugoslavia. Their behaviour in Kosovo is jacked to the level of Stalin's Great Terror, Pol Pot's killing fields and Hitler's holocaust, whereas part of its horror is that it belongs in a peculiarly Balkan tradition of ruthless inter-communal warfare. The iniquity of repression and massacre in Kosovo is best described by the truth: that is horrible enough; Nato's lies only make it ludicrous.

On the Nato side, the war of abuse is designed to justify the war of bombs. If you want to bomb, you first erect a target, create a Hitler, invoke a holocaust. In the present case, the lies are counter-productive. They make Serb motives unintelligible by fusing them with other instances of undifferentiated evil. This is potentially disastrous since, in order to end a conflict you must first understand the belligerents and every misrepresentation erodes understanding. Second, the language-gerrymandering subverts Nato by bringing the alliance into disrepute. Thirdly, the lies draw attention to the weakness of Nato's position in international law. The Serbs can put up an entirely factual defence against Nato's disregard of long-standing international agreements and conventions. The alliance, on the other hand, seems able to justify the war only by demonising the enemy.

It is worth scrutinising Nato's newspeak and the seven leading lies of the Western propagandists:

1. "The Serbs are like the Nazis." The notion that Nazism is the only political evil was a lie started by Stalinists to mask their own crimes. The horror of Serb atrocities is effectively camouflaged by comparisons that no reasonable person credits. Their reality is masked by misrepresentation.

2. "There is no alternative to war." Coming from Tony Blair - heir to Margaret Thatcher in so many ways surprising to those who voted for him - this claim has a tragicomic timbre. It is a particularly nasty lie, since it shuts the door on peace. The war is the result not of invincible wickedness but of manipulable fear: the mutual insecurity of neighbours who hate each other. Throughout the present decade, Western policy in the Balkans has aggravated insecurity, especially among the Serbs. The bombing, of course, makes it even worse. The results of insecurity are brutality in self-defence and pre-emptive acts of aggression. Under Tito, Yugoslavia's peoples stayed at peace with each other. They could enjoy the same security in democracy, if they were given genuine international guarantees and support.

3. "This is a war waged for people's right to their culture and sense of the past and historic community" - a propaganda line now heavily plugged in Jamie Shea's output. The trouble with it is that it exactly describes the Serb position. If valid, it would commit Nato to supporting Serb claims as much as those of Albanians in Kosovo.

4. "This is a humanitarian war." It is a funny sort of humanitarianism which goes to war in Kosovo but leaves people massacred and cultures exterminated in East Timor, Burma, Rwanda, Kurdistan and Tibet. Only a chillingly selective humanitarianism rates white lives more highly than those clad in skins of other colours. Exposure of the inconsistency invites a counter-presumption fatal to Western credibility: this war was inaugurated not to save lives but to save face. Milosevic called Nato's bluff and the Nato leaders were left with no choice but to enforce their threats or withdraw them.

5. "This war was started to stop `genocide' or `holocaust'." The wickedness of this language is that it warps the facts about the real holocaust; yet it is one of the Government's most hackneyed phrases. Last week, Robin Cook used the word "genocide" six times in a five-minute BBC interview, following the principle from the Scam-man's Handbook: if you repeat nonsense often enough, people will believe it. Serb policy in Kosovo is repulsively vicious and we should do everything possible, short of war, to stop it. But it is not genocide. The sufferings of the Jews in the Second World War were special: effectively without precedent, almost without parallel. Serb war objectives are depressingly commonplace: at first Yugoslav forces sought to crush the KLA by a policy of terror so thorough that the guerrillas' natural consituency would be cowed into submission. Gradually, and with increasing intensity under the Nato bombardment, the policy has hardened into an even more lethal form of extremism, which is unhappily traditional in south-east Europe. Most Serbs probably now think - even if they do not declare it explicitly - that the only way to ensure Yugoslavia's hold on Kosovo is to drive out or kill as many Albanians as necessary and replace them with Serb colonists.

6. "Nato did not foresee that the bombs would encourage the death squads." No one believes this. In reality, Nato knew what would happen but was willing to accelerate slaughter rather than back down. Last week, the spin-doctors realised their claims were preposterous and hurriedly primed Jamie Shea and Robin Cook to say instead that Nato was "shocked" by the scale of the slaughter that the bombing unleashed. It was now clear that Nato sent in the bombers without making preparations for the refugee problem which was bound to ensue.

7. "The ranks of the Serbs are riddled with war criminals." This is true, but it masks a Nato deception. In a strict, technical sense, all the Nato leaders who authorised the bombing are liable to arraignment as war criminals, because they have no right to inflict death and destruction in Yugoslavia, either in international law or in traditional just-war theory. The KLA and the Serbs have some theoretical justification for making war on each other. The KLA fights in defence of Kosovo's autonomy and in pursuit of self-determination. The Serbs fight in defence of Yugoslavia's sovereignty. Bill Clinton's allies have no such cause. Their plea is noble-sounding: they acted in the interests of humanity. There are three things wrong with it. First, it may be untrue. Secondly, it is contradicted by the consequences. Thirdly, no war can be just unless the belligerents have the right to wage it. It is fine to fight to save the weak from oppression or extermination but, in the world we now live in, only the United Nations has that right. This is not just a pious bleat: it is an essential condition of world security.

The deep evil of the lies is that they will prevent peace. It is hard to re- perceive a demonised enemy as a potential partner. Men transmuted into monsters become unwanted at the negotiating table. The magic of comparisons with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot resembles werewolf-magic: it changes men into beasts who can only be dealt with by a stake through the heart. Serbs branded as "Nazis" become fit only for unconditional surrender. By steeping Serbs in imputed guilt, we deny the reality of why they are at war. Like all communities, they contain individuals whose bloodlust is breathtaking. In general, however, they are driven, not by collective depravity or congenital evil but by typical human flaws. We should stop the demonisation, re- humanise the "enemy" and start the long, arduous, honest, bloodless job of dealing with them in peace.

Felipe Fernndez-Armesto is the author of `Truth: A History', published by Black Swan Paperback.