CHRONICLES ONLINE, Thursday, May 11, 2000
LIES, DAMN LIES AND WILLIAM PFAFF A Journalist as an Apologist for War Crimes
Srdja Trifkovic
The proponents of the Kosovo intervention are in real trouble. That
they stand exposed as liars, conspirators against peace, and war criminals
is no news to our readers. But when their own minions in the courtier
press decide that it is time to look for a lifeboat, the ship must be
sinking indeed.
The International Herald Tribune published a remarkable op-ed piece
last Thursday (May 11) by that paper's and Los Angeles Times' columnist
William Pfaff. "After NATO's Lies About Kosovo, It's Time to Come Clean,"
says the headline to Pfaff's piece prompted by recent revelations that
NATO lied about the military effectiveness of its air war against
Serbia a year ago. This "poses a question," says he:
"What other lies may have been told? Did the ethnic cleansing inside
Kosovo really begin before NATO's attacks started? The Serbs and some
reports in the international press say 'no.' There have been claims that
the United States deliberately sabotaged the Rambouillet conferences in
order to provoke a bombing campaign that it expected to be quick and
decisive. We know that panic was produced in Brussels when it proved to
be neither... What else is there to come out about what went on in
Kosovo before the NATO intervention? About the American connection with the
Kosovo Liberation Army and the promises, if any, made to them? About
the diplomacy that led up to the war, and the diplomacy that ended it?
Eventually it will all come out, just as the truth about the air campaign
has now come out. It would be better if the rest of the truth were told
now. Otherwise the alliance that fought the war is undermined, and so
are the reputations of NATO and the United States."
Not to mention the reputation of William Pfaff. Hypocritically posing
the questions to which we have had the answers all along he hopes to
cover up his tracks. He was an early and enthusiastic advocate of the war.
On January 25 his headline was self-explanatory: "Turn Kosovo Into an
International Protectorate." Only three days later (January 28) he asked
for "an international agreement, or NATO finding, that Serbia's policy
in Kosovo, by its war crimes and defiance of international norms of
conduct, has provisionally forfeited Serbia's rights in Kosovo" and called
for "a NATO decision to conduct air operations to interdict Serbian
military and police."
Now he wonders if Rambouillet was a "sabotage," but on February 11,
1999, he declared urbi et orbi that "The plan for Kosovo put before
Serbian and Kosovar delegates to the Rambouillet conference is the best plan
that rational man could design."
We would have suggested the above quote for the Idiocy in Journalism
Award had it resulted from genuine stupidity of the author. But Pfaff is
not an idiot, even though he treats his readers as such. On March 25 he
hailed the beginning of the bombing and demanded that Kosovo's
independence be recognized: "Kosovo's claim to national independence is solidly
based... Kosovo's independence could scarcely be more destabilizing
than what had been going on until Tuesday's NATO decision to attack
Serbian forces."
On March 27 he went a step further: "A Western policy of supporting
Kosovo independence is politically sustainable. Western publics will
accept it. It is politically coherent because it responds to the reality
that, for the Kosovars, their independent republic already exists: They
proclaimed it, ratified it, and have respected its clandestine authority
for nearly a decade. Such a NATO policy would have a plausible claim to
represent international legality." By April 8 Pfaff was urging the
all-out land war:
"The only solution, then, is a NATO military victory. If there is no
NATO victory over Serbia, there will no longer be a NATO... The debate
over intervention is no longer a dispute over the means to an end. It is
a debate over abandoning NATO and the American claim to international
leadership."
In a culture that takes journalistic standards seriously the career of
William Pfaff would be over by now on the strength of his role in
spreading the lie about "Operation Horseshoe" and using it as a means of
supporting his war hysteria. As we now know, and as the leading German
daily Frankfuhrter Rundshau reported on March 21, German secret services
had forged a "secret Serb plan" that was used as justification for NATO
air strikes on Yugoslavia last year. The plan, code-named "Horseshoe,"
purported to prove that the Serbs had planned ethnic cleansing of
Kosovo Albanians well before the NATO bombing campaign. The German paper
quoted Bundeswehr General Heinz Loquai, who says that the "plan" was no
more than an intelligence assessment written in Sofia and subsequently
embellished in Bonn.
But William Pfaff eagerly spread the lie as fact. On April 15 he used
"Horseshoe" in support of his claim that it would be "immoral" to stop
the bombing of Serbia. Needless to say, Pfaff treated "Horseshoe" as a
given fact:
"Mr. Milosevic and his government are attempting to solve their Kosovo
problem by producing a basic demographic change in the province through
deporting its Albanian population, the overwhelming majority. According
to German government sources, this program for purging Kosovo of its
Albanian population was prepared at the end of last year under the code
name "Horseshoe." ... Horseshoe was designed to produce a permanent
solution, and was launched even before the Rambouillet discussions in
February, which the Serbian leadership did not take seriously."
It is now common knowledge that Operation Horseshoe was yet another
Kosovo Lie, even though Mr. Pfaff is keeping understandably quiet about
that one. Perhaps he doesn't read German; but on April 2 The Sunday Times
of London followed the Rundschau story up with a comprehensive and
conclusive report: "Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake," proclaimed
its headline, explaining that the German defense ministry turned a
vague Bulgarian report from Sofia into a "plan" and even coined the name
Horseshoe. But this eagerness to embellish it in order to produce a
convincing forgery resulted in the fundamental flaw: the Germans named the
operation "Potkova," which is the CROATIAN word for horseshoe. The
Serbian for horseshoe is Potkovica.
"Eventually it will all come out, just as the truth about the air
campaign has now come out," wrote Pfaff last Thursday. Is it just his
arrogance, or frivolity, or both, that blinded him to the fact that he should
take his own words seriously?
The "Horseshoe" revelations were still a year away when on April 22,
1999, the indefatigable Pfaff warned that the war against the Serbs must
end with a clear NATO victory. "There still is time for NATO to redeem
itself by launching serious land operations to expel Serbian forces
from Kosovo," he urged before proceeding with the customary hateful
stereotyping of "Serbs" and yet more outright lies about their "program" of
ethnic cleansing:
"Serbs, with some honorable exceptions, seem unable to concede that the
cause of their war with NATO is not the goals they have for the Serbian
nation but how they have gone about getting what they want. NATO has
never sought Kosovo's separation from Serbia. The Western powers have
defended Kosovo autonomy, not independence. They have now set peace terms
that logically imply independence - withdrawal of all Serbian forces
and installation of a foreign troop presence - because President Slobodan
Milosevic's program to expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo has left them
no alternative."
Pfaff does not name those "honorable exceptions," but - still not
satisfied with his own contribution to the collective demonization of the
Serbs - on May 13 of last year he made a further contribution to the lie
of the "Kosovo genocide":
"Kosovo's... fatalities must be in the tens of thousands, and in
addition there have been the well-attested rapes, other deliberate
humiliations or degradations of ethnic Albanians."
Kosovo's fatalities in fact amounted to 2,108 victims on all sides in
the two years preceding the war, but Mr. Pfaff never corrected the
assessment presumably made for him by Messrs. Rubin and Cohen.
Never the one to allow mere reality to stand in the way of his
longings, and unburdened by the demands of conventional morality, by the end of
May William Pfaff eagerly advocated an all-out war against Serbian
civilians:
"Depriving Serbia of electricity, and disrupting its water supplies,
communications and civilian transport, are part of the program. Much has
been made, unwisely in my view, of NATO's being in conflict only with
Serbia's leaders. Serbia's leaders have been elected by the Serbian
people. Those elections were decidedly imperfect, but few suggest that the
overall results failed to express the will of the Serbian electorate.
Serbian voters have kept Slobodan Milosevic in power during the past
decade. It is not clear why they should be spared a taste of the suffering
he has inflicted on their neighbors."
The depth of cynicism evident in Mr. Pfaff's writing was coupled, in
his June 9 column, with a colossal misrepresentation of the political
endgame in the Balkans:
"If NATO is not in clear control of Kosovo, with international
approval, and the Kosovars are not offered a convincing prospect of permanent
protection from the power that has just brutally expelled them from
their own country - or of independence - the refugees will not go back. If
they do not go back, Mr. Milosevic has won. Kosovo will have been
purged of its ethnic Albanian population. The goal of a "greater Serbia" for
Serbs alone will have been advanced. President Milosevic's remaining
task will be to dispose of the Hungarian minority that remains inside his
country, and recover the Republika Srpska, now part of Bosnia.
Macedonia, Montenegro and rival Albania will all have been destabilized."
After a year of NATO occupation of Kosovo - during which hundreds of
thousands of its non-Albanian inhabitants have been ethnically cleansed,
thousands murdered, and over a hundred Serbian churches destroyed - it
takes a strong stomach to go through Mr. Pfaff's final, gloating
pontifications to the freshly defeated Serbs (June 17):
"Russian support for Serbia indulges the paranoid political culture in
Serbia, which has done so much harm not only to Serbia's neighbors but
also to Serbia itself. The country has no serious future, other than to
reopen relations with Western civilization, install democracy and give
up its linked fantasies of national superiority and national
persecution. It has to come to terms with the reality that Serbia intolerably
repressed the Kosovars, inviting their rebellion, committed war crimes and
has been defeated. The game that Russia is playing in Kosovo comforts
the Serbian denial that any of this happened. The West is ready for
reconciliation with the Serbs. It wants solid relations of mutual respect
with Russia. It is up to the Serbs and Russians to choose."
In this and many other instances William Pfaff chose to speak on behalf
of "the West." The role of a self-appointed port-parole of the
"international community" evidently suited his vanity, his self-importance, his
neurotic urge to be on what he assumed to be the winning side of
history. Now that the edifice is unraveling he cannot evade the
responsibility for his actions. They show him to be not a journalist, much less an
analyst, but a propagandist in "Jamie" Shea's intellectual and moral
league.
Indeed, as his headline reads, "after NATO's lies about Kosovo, it's
time to come clean," but William Pfaff cannot do so because he is unable
to come clean on his own lies and distortions. A sincere "mea culpa"
might save his soul, if not his career, but the Pfaffs of this world know
their priorities. He often asks what "history" will say of people and
events he writes about. If "history" ever bothers to say anything of
William Pfaff it will be to record him - in a footnote to the infamous
paragraph on "The Clinton Presidency" - as a fellow-purveyor of lies, a
flawed man whose morals and whose values accurately reflected the spirit
of these shameful times.
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