Page 106 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
Glogovac on February 28 and March 1, 24 people were killed
including 10 members of the Ahmeti family. These attacks involved
house-to-house searches and what the Albanian side called “executions”
of suspected KLA members. From the Serb perspective, the Albanian
deaths were an unintentional consequence of self-defense and anti-
terrorist law enforcement. In these raids, five Albanians were arrested
and an arsenal of weapons, including hand grenades, explosives, and
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machine guns were captured.
In the second raid on the nearby village of Prekaz, which began on
March 5 and lasted for two days, 51 members of the Jashari family
were killed. The head of this family, Adem Jashari, was one of the
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founders of the KLA and had been a target of police arrest for years.
The incident began with a KLA attack on Serb police that injured two
officers, from where, according to Serbian accounts, the KLA
retreated to the Jashari compound in Prekaz. The police responded by
surrounding the compound and giving residents and suspected
“terrorists” several hours to surrender. Although 30 people surrendered,
others stayed to fight. Serb authorities reported that the Jashari clan
fought back using machine guns, rocket launchers, and bazookas,
killing two Serb police officers, before being killed. The battle lasted
for 27 hours until all resistance ended. The Serbs claimed that civilians
were given time to surrender and accused Adem Jashari of killing his
own nephew to prevent him from leaving. 11
Images of the Drenica Massacre
The Serbs initially attempted to cut off access to the Drenica area by
sealing the area from journalists and setting up heavily guarded road-
blocks on the main routes into the villages where conflict had
occurred. The information that initially trickled out was largely
through the eyewitness accounts of people who fled the area during
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the attacks. Despite their efforts, however, images did eventually seep
out of the conflict zone from a number of sources. The first were those
of desperate refugees whom journalists found huddled together in the
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nearby Cicevica Mountains. The second, surprisingly, was from Serb
television, which perhaps naively showed dramatic footage of shelled
houses and corpses littering the Jashari compound. 14 It also showed a
bulldozer destroying the house of Adem Jashari. 15 Once these images
were broadcast in the FRY, they were picked up and broadcast around
the world by other networks. The third source came from Western
journalists who, after some pressure, were reluctantly allowed limited
and controlled entry into the Drenica area through an organized tour