Page 113 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE MEDIA DURING THE KOSOVO CRISIS
Images of the Racak Massacre
Journalists and monitors arrived on the scene in Racak the next morn-
ing on January 16, 1999. Throughout the village, 45 dead bodies
were discovered. Although the vast majority of victims were men who,
local eyewitnesses claimed, were separated from women and children
by Yugoslav forces earlier in the day for execution, victims also
included a young woman, a 16-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy, and a
70-year-old man. Many scenes showed the dead up close, focusing on
the wound that had killed the individual. One of the worst images
was that of a gully at the edge of the village where the main atrocity
was purported to have occurred. The gully was littered with numerous
dead bodies, with a section containing a mangled pile of about 17 or
43
18 victims on top of each other, with some even mutilated.
In pre-
senting the footage to television audiences, images of the carnage
were intermingled with scenes of bewildered and shocked villagers,
some of whom had just returned to the village to find their relatives
dead. There were also interviews with family members crying over
their lost relatives. Perhaps what made these images exceptionally
powerful was the presence of William Walker, the head of the Kosovo
Verification Mission (KVM), who walked through the corpses and was
visibly shaken by what he saw. In one scene, Walker, along with a
group of journalists, is seen standing around the body of a decapitated
person saying, “he’s been beheaded? ...Jesus Christ . . . lets give
him the dignity of covering him up.” 44 At another point, surrounded
by journalists and microphones, he pronounced, “This is about as
horrendous an event as I have seen and I have been in some pretty
45
nasty situations.” Unlike other incidents resulting in a large number
of deaths, this one had almost immediate judgment of blame, which
along with the pictures, made for a powerful cocktail. Later that day,
at a press conference in Pristina, Walker stated, “I’ve seen all the
ingredients of a massacre.” 46 The media then took this theme and
elaborated on it by referring to extrajudicial killings and the mutilation
of unarmed Albanians. 47
Framing from the Racak Massacre
To the Albanian side, Racak, like previous massacres, was another
attempt by Serbian authorities to project their power and crush all
desire for basic rights. To the Serbs, however, the events of January 15,
1999 in Racak were not a massacre, but a battle against terrorists who
had killed FRY police the previous week. In their attempt to arrest
“terrorists” who had a base in Racak, Yugoslav authorities encountered