Kosova Versus Bosnia: Western Involvement and the Media Connection

It was perhaps inevitable considering my heritage that of all the readings for this week, that which spoke to me the most strongly was Thomas Keenan's piece entitled "Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)". Before continuing, I should explain: my father is an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, and I was born in Zagreb, the Croatian capital city where he had been studying. The year, 1990, was characterized for my family and countless others mainly by the meteoric rise of ethnic and political tensions in then-Yugoslavia. With war on the horizon, my parents chose to protect their child by taking advantage of an option few Yugoslavians possessed: escape to America, the place of my mother's upbringing, and a safe haven from the brutal consequences of Yugoslavia's catastrophic failure as a nation-state. The same events that led me here to the United States set the stage for the conflict at the centerpiece of Keenan's piece, the genocidal Bosnian War that followed Yugoslavia's collapse, becoming a global symbol for the ineffectuality of international response to institutionalized war crimes akin to Rwanda and today's Darfur. Raging at the same time, though, away from the television cameras and reporters who believed they could shock the world to action, was a similar conflict in my father's homeland of Kosovo (or Kosova in the native Albanian tongue), a three-year ordeal that represented at alternate times the best and worst of Western-led intervention and illuminates, I think, several points that did not find place in Keenan's specific analysis of Bosnia as an example of publicity's power - and powerlessness - in the face of a crisis.

While the world's eyes were locked on Bosnia, a forgotten war was beginning to erupt in Kosova, which fell even post-Yugoslavia within the borders of Serbia despite the overwhelmingly Albanian population. The most vigorous fighting between Serbian forces and the militant Kosova Liberation Army only began in the time following the belated resolution of the Bosnian crisis, but in the sense of mass catharsis that inevitably succeeded such a publicized campaign of brutality, the rumblings of history beginning to repeat itself were lost to Western audiences and journalists. These early days of the conflict represent the polar opposite of Bosnia in that they were largely missed or ignored by the media, and in turn their concerned audiences of potential activists. Perhaps most dangerously, the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who presided over his nation's attempt to cleanse Bosnia of its Muslim population, remained in power. Keenan criticizes the almost self-righteous belief of the Western media that simply by broadcasting the atrocities taking place in Bosnia they could somehow trigger action, their images ultimately serving as a deterrent to the decisive action they sought; in their almost immediate disappearance following the end of that first crisis, without regard for the complex challenges of reconstruction and the still-seething tides of ethnic disharmony, the damage was nearly as severe, as is shown by the case of Kosova. In short, a speedy response to Bosnia was doomed by the sense of self-fulfilment nursed by an indignant media; in Kosova, the fatal flaw was that of the opposite extreme, complete complacency. It is clear the ideal solution lies somewhere in between these two opposites, and yet every intervention in our nation's history has carried at least some of the crippling stigma of on one end sensationalism, or the other, ignorance.

Still, though, when reports of genocide in Kosova began to emerge in such numbers and scope as to be no longer unnoticeable, the NATO powers led by the United States dignified themselves with a more prompt and decisive response that proved the debacle of Bosnia, and their complicity in it by virtue of inaction, had not already been forgotten. Most importantly, care was taken to eliminate a root cause of the recurring Balkan conflicts by forcing the removal of the Milosevic regime, which by now had presided over two significant ethnic cleansings, from its Serbian seat of power. While media presence in Kosova after the explosion of this latest genocide story was similar to that seen in Bosnia, their representative governments made a conscious and effective effort to ensure the recent mistakes of Bosnia not be repeated; in a sense, that the same assumptions regarding the power of the image not be taken for granted this time.

So does Kosova support or refute Keenan's arguments? To argue that nothing in this more effective involvement overturns any of Keenan's conclusions, I will identify a few postscripts, and briefly draw Keenan's argument to what I see as a logical corollary. First, while Kosova provided a distinct counterpoint to Bosnia once it caught the attention of the world, as noted above, this success may largely be attributed to the recent memory of the almost archetypically identical Bosnian crisis, and not to any change in media influences. Second, the current media fixation, and corresponding lack of any significant action, on the crisis in Sudan proves, I think, that Kosova did not result in any major change in the media-action fantasy in Western society. Finally, much as in Bosnia, I feel the aftermath of the Kosova conflict illustrates a point that can be considered tangent to Keenan's central assumption: in a manner similar to that in which a reporter's image is considered to hold power and action in and of itself, the media continually demonstrates a one-dimensional sense of conflict, focusing on it with a wild fixation during the violence that precedes its resolution, then disappearing overnight, leaving the finer details of reconstruction out of the public or international eye, creating another fantasy, that of a simple and lasting solution to every problem that will sustain itself without continued attention. For proof of this, one must look no further than recent developments in, again, Kosova: ten years after the intervention, this nation has only just now achieved independence, and the fledgling state is now plagued by a new crisis of economics and infrastructure. This fantasy of a band-aid for every international crisis goes side-by-side, I think, with Keenan's notions of media illusion, and demonstrates the problems that occur when the aftermath of a cataclysmic war is left without the attention it held just shortly before.