The Washington Post: Anti-Serbian troika acting


Fri, 02 Apr 1999 11:48:15 -0800

09:42 Novi Sad - Water supply of the Srem side of the  town stopped after demolishing of the bridge. At the  moment we in Waterworks are working on finding a  temporary solution. The demolished bridge had no military  significance, however water supply went over it for supply  of 40.000-50.000 people. At the moment I cannot tell you  when we could expect any of them to get water.
Waterworks and Sewage Utilities Novi Sad
 



Refugees say - we flee NATO bombs

 April 01, 1999

Skopje, April 1 (Tanjug - abridged) - Refugees from Kosovo and Metohia  and from other parts of Serbia arrive  in Macedonia fleeing NATO bombs,  saying they will return to their homes, if  any left after bombing, as soon as  Clinton stops "liberating" them.

Closing their eyes before obvious  things, NATO criminals and their media manipulators use the photos of   frightened children and women to deceive their public informing them they are fleeing Serbian terror.

Border crossings are full of reporters seeking of sensations, so that  sometimes it happens there are more reporters then refugees at the  border.

Macedonian government is unprepared for this event and does not know what to do with them. The total number of refugees differ from 25 to 36  thousand. Among the civilians there are a lot of deserters from the KLA  organization.
 



The Washington Post: Anti-Serbian troika acting

 March 18, 1999

 The Washington Times
Sunday, March 14, 1999

FORUM: Odd alliance at State, CNN?
 by Stella Jatras

 In my opinion, there is something unhealthy   when the recently married CNN's Christiane   Amanpour and the State Department's James Rubin cover the same "breaking news" story.

Ms. Amanpour, who never ceased to present a one-sided CNN  perspective throughout the Bosnian war, is now doing the same with her  one-sided anti-Serb CNN perspective of the civil war now raging in   Kosovo. At the same time, Mr. Rubin is touting the anti-Serb position from the State Department, which is in effect: If the Serbs do not sign on the dotted line, NATO will bomb the Serbs. If the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) does not sign on the dotted line, NATO will still bomb the Serbs!

The American people should be asking themselves, "What gives? Is CNN   running the State Department, or vice versa?" There is clearly a conflict  here. Mr. Rubin should step down as spokesman for the State  Department. How can he have any credibility considering with whom he shares pillow talk? How can there be any semblance of journalistic  impartiality with such a relationship between a "news" agency and the government? If there was any doubt before, the identical slant of Ms. Amanpour's "reporting" and Mr. Rubin's "official statements" out of  Rambouillet should make it perfectly clear.

Don't underestimate Ms. Amanpour's influence, not just on the news, but  on U.S. foreign policy.

You need only ask yourself if we would be involved in Bosnia if CNN, driven by Ms. Amanpour, had not had Bosnia on the tube night after  night. "Where there's a war there's Amanpour," wrote Stephen Kinzer of  The NY Times Magazine, Oct 9, 1994. She certainly has the drive and an   instinct for the big stories; Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Kosovo. But  what happens when she gets there? In her own words, from a New York   Times article regarding Peter Arnett's involvement in the discredited CNN   story about U.S. forces allegedly using poison gas in Vietnam: "The  bottom line is that a television correspondent's most important contract  with the public. Trust and credibility are the commodities we trade in;  without them we are worthless." It's only fair to ask ourselves how well  Ms. Amanpour has lived up to her own standard.

The Stephen Kinzer article gives part of the answer in a quote from a  longtime T.V. associate of Ms. Amanpour: "She just insisted on going  there [Rwanda], and the impact of her coverage forced the other  networks to follow. It was another example of her great news instincts."
But this same insider has doubts about Amanpour's commitment to  objective journalism. 'I have winced at some of what she's done, at what  used to be called advocacy journalism,' he said. 'She was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she  could have known that. She was assuming an omniscience which no  journalist has. Christiane is a journalist more in the British than the  American tradition, more willing to take sides on a story. And I think she  has a little of that traditional British contempt for America.' " The fact that a UN classified report concluded that Bosnian Muslim forces had  committed the Markale marketplace massacre seems of no consequence  to Ms. Amanpour. Deutsch Presse-Agentur of June 6, 1996, wrote: "For  the first time, a senior U.N. official had admitted the existence of a secret U.N. report that blames the Bosnian Moslems for the February 1994  massacre of Moslems at the Sarajevo market." Christiane Amanpour has  yet to inform her viewers of this fact, but continues to allow them to  believe the massacre was a Serbian atrocity which United States and  NATO used as an excuse to drop over 6,000 tons of bombs on the   Bosnian Serbs.

During her interview on the Charlie Rose show of 25 November 1997,   Ms. Amanpour said, "an ABC journalist was killed [in Bosnia]." She  omitted the fact that U.N. and military experts believe that David Kaplan,  the ABC journalist, was killed by Muslims. Another big CNN story early  in the Bosnian conflict was the killing, allegedly by Serb snipers of two  "Muslim babies" on a bus. Who could not have been horrified by the   tragic sight of the funeral service for those innocent Muslim babies? Where were Ms. Amanpour and CNN to set the record straight? If it had  not been for French 2 TV that covered the funeral, this writer would never  have known that the babies were Serbian (not Muslim) killed by a Muslim sniper, as was made painfully clear by the presence of a Serbian  Orthodox priest conducting the funeral service. . . before it was  interrupted by a grenade attack. However, in the CNN coverage the  priest had been cropped out, leaving the American audience to believe  that Serbs were not only the assassins, but were also responsible for the   grenade attack.

Mr. Kinzer goes on to say, "Advocate or not, Amanpour has developed a style of her own. She has a strong ego, and is satisfied only when she can dominate a story, as she has in Bosnia." I guess that includes a little stage  management when appropriate. According to another journalist who was  with Ms. Amanpour during a visit to Kosovo, some of the journalists were  taken on a orientation flight along the border between Kosovo and  Albania by helicopter and were advised to wear flak jackets for the flight  because of possible ground fire from Albanian positions. When the flight  returned, Ms. Amanpour, wearing a flak jacket, taped her report for the CNN audience with scenes photographed from the helicopter in the  background...really dramatic stuff. The only problem is, she had not accompanied her camerman on the flight. The flak jacket and the taped film of the flight were all for effect. And to think that Cokie Roberts was criticized for wearing a coat and having a picture of the apitol Building in  the background when, in fact, she was being filmed in a studio.

In a full-page Washington Times ad of July 29, 1998, a Vietnam veterans  group wrote, "Now that the Sarin gas fraud has been exposed -- what about Bosnia coverage by Christiane Amanpour who fed the American  people a nightly diet of slanted reports and chilling images? Her biased reporting promoted the "We Must Do Something" approach that enabled President Clinton to send American GIs to Bosnia without facing the hard  questions from American taxpayers and their elected representatives: What national interests justified that decision?" We hould be asking the same question today: What national interests justify the decision to send GIs to Kosovo? It appears the "We Must Do Something" mentality once again prevails due to the biased anti-Serb reporting by the media.

The United States has always said that we would never negotiate with  terrorists, yet the Kosovo Liberation Army with its connections to Osama  bin Laden was invited to negotiate in Paris. NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, US General Wesley Clark, as has Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, met with key leaders of the rebel Kosovo  Liberation Army (KLA) in the Paris region. The question should be, "Why are we negotiating with known terrorists?" In his AP commentary, "Ethnic  Albanians Sensing Victory," George Jahn writes: "Life or death, bombs or peace. The outcome of the faraway talks on Kosovo seems irrelevant for many here, where ethnic Albanians are convinced they are winning their  independence struggle and many Serbs sense defeat."

Take the "ouillet" out of Rambouillet, and what do you get? RAMBO!
Whether as Rambo or her role model Xena, Warrior Princess, U.S.  Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in her macho cowboy hat,  kowtows to KLA terrorists and threatens the Serbian people  ("Yugoslavia will 'Pay a Price,' Albright Warns," The Washington Post, 8 March 1998). All the while Ms. Amanpour and Mr. Rubin sing her  praises in close harmony.

Christiane Amanpour, James Rubin and Madeleine Albright. What a troika!

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