Page 207 - 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
there was strong resistance against Serbian conquest by the ethnically
Albanian inhabitants who desired to join Albania. Subsequent fighting
and slaughter ended with tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians dead.
In both world wars, Serbs and Albanians, who mostly fought on oppos-
ing sides, took opportunities to exact revenge on each other for past
atrocities. After Tito’s partisan forces defeated Nazi occupation,
Albanian insurgency based in the Drenica area lasted until 1951.
By the late 1990s, the Kosovo Albanians found themselves in
unique historical circumstances, some relating to their place and time.
The Yugoslav state, which had contained a diversity of nationalisms
for over four decades, was disintegrating. The Albanians’ historic
adversaries who had been suppressing them for most of the previous
century, as a result of their recent tactics in other breakaway Yugoslav
republics, were vilified by the world’s major Western powers. These
same powers were in a unique period of their own recent history, per-
ceiving no major threats to their survival. In addition to all these cir-
cumstantial factors, the Kosovo Albanians were now connected with
the outside world in unprecedented ways. If only they could showcase
their struggle to the world, many believed that outsiders might
intervene. Initial attempts at gaining international sympathy through
pacifist resistance were largely ignored, setting the groundwork for
the KLA’s rise. The KLA promised to deliver what Rugova and his
nonviolent approach had not—international attention for the Kosovo
Albanian cause.
As the previous sections of this conclusion argued, the CNN effect,
amongst other factors, gradually shifted Western policy toward mili-
tary intervention during the Kosovo civil war. Although controversial,
some analysts have since suggested that these media-focused mas-
sacres were not merely beneficial coincidences for the Albanian cause,
but part of a deliberate strategy by the KLA to draw the West into
their struggle. Some comments by Albanian and KLA leadership have
even validated this argument. According to Dugi Gorani, a Kosovo
Albanian negotiator at Rambouillet, “The more civilians were killed,
the chances of international intervention became bigger, and the KLA
of course realized that. There was this foreign diplomat who once told
me ‘Look, unless you pass the quota of five thousand deaths you’ll
never have anybody permanently present in Kosovo.’ ” 10 According
to Hashim Thaci, the KLA’s political leader, “Any armed action we
undertook would bring retaliation against civilians. We knew we were
endangering a great number of civilian lives.” 11
The suggestion that the KLA sought the deaths of the very people
it was trying to liberate is considered an outrageous suggestion by