Page 185 - 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
misguided. If future images of this nature were to be avoided, the sta-
tus quo policy seemed in need of radical transformation. According to
one assessment, Racak was “the culmination of a period of fumbled
foreign policy decisions by an administration that had seemed to
sleepwalk through the previous 12 months of the Kosovo Crisis.
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Racak cast that period in a sharp light.”
Television images from the aftermath of the Racak massacre were
transmitted faster to the West and in more graphic detail than those of
previous massacres. This was due in part to the fact that the FRY
troops pulled out of the village on the same day they conducted their
activities, allowing the KLA to take over and invite the world to see
their people’s horror. The incident also drew faster and more unequiv-
ocal blame against the Serbian side than any other. This was perpetu-
ated by the fact that William Walker, the head of the KVM, arrived on
the scene the next day and declared the incident an atrocity, stating he
would not “hesitate to accuse the government security forces of
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responsibility.”
After the Racak massacre, a wide range of Western government
institutions condemned the incident. As the Kosovo crisis had pro-
tracted over the previous year, an increasing number of Western insti-
tutions had become involved in the conflict and were quick to
condemn what all believed to be an atrocity. Over the two weeks
immediately following Racak, a number of important meetings took
place in the United States and amongst Western powers. Racak had
deemed the status quo inadequate, and the means the West would use
to attempt to solve the problem would be revealed two weeks after the
incident at a Contact Group meeting on January 29. 77 At that meet-
ing, it was decided that the parties to the conflict would be sum-
moned to a “peace” conference that would be held in Rambouillet,
France. The conference was intended to allow the disputing parties to
hammer out their differences in a period of up to two weeks before
reaching agreement. 78 This was a similar approach to that of the
Dayton Accords, which had proven effective in Bosnia. In practice,
however, some fundamental elements of the agreement were non-
negotiable, making this agreement more of an imposed solution than
a negotiation.
Policy Shift after the Racak Massacre
There is perhaps no clearer example of policy shift over the entire
period under study than after the Racak massacre. According to
Boyer, “Within days the political landscape did indeed change. Racak