What were the dominant themes within media narratives during the UN sanctioned NATO intervention in Libya and the non-UN sanctioned NATO intervention in Kosovo?
An analysis of print media discourses.
The recent NATO
intervention into Libya had many similarities and some key differences to the
NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
Both interventions were justified by NATO and its allies and also in the
Western media as ‘humanitarian’, as necessary to prevent a ‘genocide’ or
‘massacre’ from occurring and to remove an undemocratic dictator from power.
Both interventions involved an aerial bombardment on the enemy, and the support
of a non-state actor in an internal conflict. The differences lay in the fact
that the NATO intervention into Libya had UN Security Council sanction, whilst
the intervention into Kosovo had not received the same sanction. Since the
Kosovo intervention, the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) had come into being, in many ways as the direct
result of the controversy of NATO’s illegal intervention into Kosovo. R2P as a
growing international norm had now legitimised an intervention into Libya.
During the
intervention into Libya, I began to view and read different sources of media
and I was interested to see the different interplay of narratives about the
intervention from the different sources. While the Western media that I viewed
such as Sky News, BBC News and CNN all took a very pro-NATO and anti-Gaddafi
stance, the non-Western media I viewed such as Russia Today (RT) and Al-Jazeera
took a more critical stand in its reporting.
This prompted me to think about the role that media plays in generating
public support for various wars. Recently I began to look into the literature
on the role of the media during the NATO intervention into Libya, however with
the conflict being so recent, the literature is very limited. Through my
investigation of sources on media representations of NATO in Libya, the topic
of their intervention in Kosovo kept appearing. It was then that the idea of a
comparative thematic discourse analysis of the media narratives of NATO’s
interventions in Kosovo and Libya came to mind. I felt that the two cases had
interesting similarities, but also very remarkable differences insofar as the
intervention into Libya had UN Security Council sanction and the changing
political context had now ushered in the new norm of humanitarian intervention
based on the principle of R2P. With this new international norm in play, this
research could analyse if it had changed the media narratives from the Kosovo
conflict. I also felt that this piece of research that combined the two case studies
will add to the debate.
Literature Review:
In order to
assess the relevance and possible uniqueness of this piece of research, I
started by investigating the literature on the topic of discourse analysis. In
particular I focussed on three prominent practitioners of the critical
discourse analysis method. After this I began looking into the previous
literature on the media and discourses of the NATO intervention in Kosovo in
March 1999. Many interesting studies into the role of the media in the NATO
intervention in Kosovo had been conducted. However, there is a very limited
amount of literature on the media and the Libya intervention and as of yet
there has been no comparative discourse analysis of media narratives between
the two NATO interventions in Kosovo and Libya. Each of the texts that were
consulted is of a critical nature.
Discourse
Analysis:
This research
will use the tools of discourse analysis to discover the dominant themes within
media narratives during the UN sanctioned NATO intervention in Libya and the
non-UN sanctioned NATO intervention in Kosovo. To do this, a number of texts on
discourse analysis were consulted. The first text was ‘Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis’, which is a step by step
guide on conducting Discourse Analysis. In the first chapter by Stephanie
Taylor, she explains that “discourse analysis is the close study of language in
use” and furthermore analysts are looking for patterns (Taylor 2001,
p.6). Further on in
chapter six, Norman Fairclough explains the basis for Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA). He suggests that the objective of CDA is to expose how language
figures in social relations. He points out that it is critical insofar as it
aims to show how language is involved in the “social relations of power and
domination, and in ideology” (Fairclough
2001, p.229). It is a form
of analysis that questions how language figures in the social processes that
produce social inequalities. Fairclough goes on to use Gramsci’s concept of
‘hegemony’ to describe how the dominance of the ruling class depends on winning
the consent of the majority to the existing social arrangements (Ibid, p.232).
This, he argues is achieved through control of discourses. Fairclough also
explains that linguistic analysis involves working on a text at different
levels including; Narrative, linking sentences, grammar and semantics and
finally the choice of words to create semantic relations (Ibid, pp. 241 – 242).
Building upon
this work on CDA is Teun Van Dijk’s ‘Discourse
and Power’. The author focuses heavily on the relations between power and
discourses. He defines social power in terms of control, that is, the control
of one group over another through control of discourses (Van Dijk 2008,
p.9). This, he
suggests is pervasive in society where this control is in the interests of
those who hold power. The most pervasive form of contemporary power can be best
described as symbolic power, that is, power that grants preferential access to
or control over discourses. The control of public discourse is, according to
Van Dijk the “control of the mind of the public, and hence, indirectly, control
of what the public wants and does (Ibid, p.14). This idea of control of
discourse to shape public views can be seen to be closely related to Gramsci’s
hegemony that Fairclough also draws upon in his analysis. In its essence, CDA
is interested in the critical analysis of power abuses by politicians, and in
how media misinforms rather than informs, or what Van Dijk calls ‘power abuse
domination’ (Ibid, p.15). Also, the author suggests that CDA is unlike other
forms of discourse analysis insofar as it rejects the possibility of a “value-free”
science. Instead, CDA comes from a perspective that acknowledges the
researcher’s bias before beginning the research and expects that bias to be
part and parcel of the research.
Focussing
specifically on the issue of the analysis of newspapers from the perspective of
CDA is John Richardson’s ‘Analysing
Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. In his analysis,
Richardson picks up on the theme of power and social relations in discourse
whilst drawing on Steven Lukes’ concept of three faces of power to illustrate
this. In particular Richardson emphasises how Lukes’ third face best describes
the way power works in and through discourses. For example, “A may exercise
power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, but he also
exercises power over by influencing, shaping or determining his attitudes,
beliefs and very wants” (Bachrach and
Baratz, 1970, cited in Richardson 2007, p.31). In a similar sense to the two
previous authors, this concept of power is very close to Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony. Keeping this line of thought, Richardson suggests that journalists,
having internalised ‘common sense notions of who ought to be authoritative’,
accept the frames imposed on events by official sources. This has the effect of
marginalising and delegitimising voices outside of elite circles (Ibid, p.36).
In focusing on
the analysis of war reporting like the topic of this research, Richardson makes
the point that war reporting is generally constructed in a radically polarised
way, between the good guys and the bad guys, and so, discourse dominated by
official propaganda will only allow two positions to take up, for war or
against war (Ibid, p.179). This is a deliberate measure designed to close down
a possible critical debate. Richardson also suggests that there are four key
professional and occupational procedures that shape journalism as a discourse
process, and therefore account for products of newspaper discourse. These are;
a declared war against ‘your country’ is highly newsworthy. Journalism requires
‘authoritative sources’, which usually means military or government sources.
Journalists live to be first, hence ‘official’ stories that are unconfirmed and
unverified. And finally, pressure to avoid stories that are critical of ‘our
side’. (Ibid, pp.182-186). All of these, Richardson suggests, “reduce war
journalism to being a conduit for the views of the powerful (Ibid, p.186).
The Media and Kosovo:
In ‘Reporting “Humanitarian” Warfare:
propaganda, moralism and NATO’s Kosovo war’ Phillip Hammond found a number
of trends in British media reporting such as a closer relationship between the
military and the media, a “journalism of attachment” and the demonization of
enemies (Hammond 2000). The phrase ‘journalism of
attachment’ was coined by BBC correspondent Martin Bell to describe a style of
reporting that would be openly partisan and engaged as opposed to “the
dispassionate practices of the past”.
Bell advocated journalism that did not “stand neutrally between good and
evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor.” This is very similar to
Tony Blair’s explanation of the NATO bombings as “a battle between good and
evil, between civilisation and barbarity, between democracy and dictatorship”
(Ibid, p.375). This form of journalism functions not as a source of independent
reporting for society, but as a propaganda tool for any government that wishes
to use it. Hammond also notes a ‘propaganda
of moralism,’ i.e. intervention in the name of humanitarianism, was used to
further the NATO agenda before and during the conflict (Ibid, p.382).
A similar form
of propaganda of moralism and a journalism of attachment was to be found in
other pieces of research. In ‘From the
Persian Gulf to Kosovo – War Journalism and Propaganda’, Nohrstedt et al
conducted a discourse and propaganda analysis involving four leading daily
newspapers from Greece, Norway, Sweden and the UK. They found that media
reporting was very much in line with US President Bill Clinton’s speeches on
the conflict which emphasised the necessity of the bombings to stop ethnic
cleansing and that responsibility lay solely with Milosevic. This view was
reinforced in the Norwegian, Swedish and UK dailies (Nohrstedt et
al. 2000). In a similar
way to Hammond’s idea of the ‘demonization of enemies,’ this study also noted
an association between Milosevic and Hitler that was inferred by US President
Clinton, that was further elaborated on by the media.
The work of
Herman and Chomsky in their seminal ‘Manufacturing
Consent’ also adds much to the two previous studies. In line with the idea
of a demonization of enemies, their work has suggested that US print media have
been complicit in using emotive terms such as ‘genocide’ in selective cases
that enemy states are involved in, but using the term much less frequently when
the US or its allies are involved. For example, an analysis of five major US
titles between 1998 and 1999 showed that the term ‘genocide’ was used two
hundred and twenty times against the Serbs in Kosovo. Forty one of these
instances were on the front page of the title. Contrast this with the case of
US ally Indonesia and their occupation in East Timor. Over a ten year period
between 1990 and 1999, the term was used just thirty three times, four of those
times on the front page (Herman, E. and
Chomsky, N. 2002).
Adding to this
debate is the book ‘Degraded Capability:
The Media and the Kosovo Crisis’ (Hammond, Herman
2000) which within
its chapters suggests that the media in many ways were used as a propagandistic
tool of NATO, producing uncritical reporting in a way that incompatible with
the supposed idea of a free and unbiased press. In particular, Chapter nine, ‘Following Washington’s Script: The United
States Media and Kosovo’ highlights the way in which the US media
overwhelmingly focused on Serbian state violence whilst failing to report on opposition
stories nor on many instances of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) violence during
the conflict (Ackerman, Naureckas 2000). The authors also note a form of
journalism that is reminiscent to the idea of a journalism of attachment
between the media and NATO. For example, on February 24th 1999, New
York Times journalist Steven Erlanger reported that Slobodan Milosevic had
shown himself to be quite reasonable when trying to find a solution at the
Rambouillet peace talks. However, exactly one month later the same journalist
was sticking to the NATO line of argument and claimed US negotiators had
departed because they were frustrated by Milosevic’s ‘hard line’ stance. This
was despite the fact that Milosevic’s position had not changed at all (Ackerman,
Naureckas 2000).
In another
chapter from the same book, ‘Nazifying
the Serbs, from Bosnia to Kosovo,’ evidence of a demonization of the enemy
is further illustrated. The way that the Serbs were linked to the Nazi’s was
through the accusations that they had committed genocide. British foreign secretary
Robin Cook further added to this by stating that “NATO was born in the
aftermath of the defeat of fascism and genocide in Europe. NATO will not allow
this century to end with a triumph for fascism and genocide (Hume, 2000, p.72).
It was also noted by the author how implication of Nazi parallels by
politicians or NATO spokesmen were snapped up by journalists. For example, the
Daily Mail’s March 29th front page spoke of Albanian children’s
faces evoking memories of the holocaust. There was also references in the Daily
Mirror on April 1st to ‘Nazi style terror in Kosovo’ and in the Sun
the same day of ‘Serb cruelty having chilling echoes of the holocaust’ (Ibid,
p.72).
Further research
has shown how media in different countries reported on the conflict in
different ways. For example, in ‘Framing
the NATO Air Strikes on Kosovo Across Countries,’ Jin Yang showed that US
newspapers presented a picture of a just war providing humanistic aid to
Albanians and the legitimacy of the action was taken for granted, as opposed to
the Chinese media which challenged the legitimacy of using force and made the
claim that air strikes on the basis of humanistic aid sound very suspicious (Yang 2003,
p.244). The research
further suggested that US newspapers had more stories from the Albanian point
of view as opposed to the Chinese having more from the Serb point of view. The
research concluded by suggesting that by highlighting certain aspects of the
events and ignoring others, the media screened the reality for the audience
(Ibid, p.245).
In a similar
line of thought was to be found in the research, ‘A Narrative Analysis of US Press Coverage of Slobodan Milosevic and the
Serbs in Kosovo,’ which was carried out by Richard Vincent. In his
research, Vincent found that the coverage of the Kosovo conflict was often
“peppered with potential bias.” He also concluded that many US media used
‘official’ sources over alternative sources, which typically spun a pro-US and
pro-Western point of view, with heavy reliance on government and military
officials from Western countries. Further to this he stated that instead of
being objective and unbiased, “the US media demonstrated that it was quite
vulnerable to serving as an organ of political propaganda and putting national
interests over the higher quest for truth and objectivity” (Vincent, 2000,
p.20).
Each of the
research pieces have taken a critical analysis of the media and the role they
played in the Kosovo conflict. They each imply that the dominant narratives
running though media reporting of the conflict was overwhelmingly supportive of
the official NATO line, and failed to meaningfully critique and analyse the
information that they were provided by ‘official sources.’
The Media and
Libya:
Although the
level of research on the role of the media during the recent Libya conflict is
not near the level on the Kosovo conflict, there are some articles emerging
slowly. For example, writing in Kenya’s ‘The Nation,’ in his article ‘BBC’s Wartime Propaganda in Libya
Illustrates Need for Pan-African Media,’ Murithi Mutiga speaks about how
Western media painted a very different media picture of the ‘civil war’ in
Libya. In his article he suggests that most Africans would not know that the
South African government had petitioned the International Criminal Court to
investigate the American, British and French governments for war crimes in
Libya. He suggests that this is because most people get their news from the
BBC, CNN or Sky News, who have engaged in a “frenzied propaganda war” (Mutiga 2011). He goes on to cite a number of
outlandish claims from Western media including the UK’s Daily Mail reporting
“Troops fuelled by Viagra”, a story that Gaddafi had distributed thousands of
Viagra pills to fighters so that they could rape women. There was also the
story that Gaddafi had recruited thousands of black African mercenaries to
fight his side, a story which led to the rounding up and execution of many
innocent black migrant workers (Ibid).
In another
article from ‘The Nation’ (USA), titled ‘Libya:
An Old Fashioned Colonial Smash-and-Grab,’ Alexander Cockburn suggests that
despite the endless disclosures of NATO’s lies regarding its onslaughts on the
former Yugoslavia and Iraq, “the press was more gullible regarding Libya, less
inclined to question official claims” (Cockburn 2011). In a similar vein to what
Herman and Chomsky described in ‘Manufacturing Consent,’ Cockburn suggests that
US media is happy to suppress reports of ‘democracy protesters’ in US allay
Bahrain, while at the same time reporting the official line on Libya. He
illustrates this by pointing out that “Libya” appears fourteen times in the
three major declarations at the G8 summit in France, “Bahrain appears not once
(Ibid).
John Pilger, a
long standing critic of Western imperialism and media bias has added to the
debate with his article ‘Hail to the true
victors of Rupert’s Revolution.’ He points out that far from having
‘humanitarian’ ideals, in September 2011 the British government controlled
‘Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)’ hosted an preview to an arms fair entitled ‘The
Middle East: A Vast Market for UK Defence and Security Companies,’ in which
they lauded the potential profits in selling arms to states in the Middle East.
He points out the irony of selling arms to the region yet intervening when
states use those arms. Pilger goes on to suggest that journalists happily
accepted the story that Gaddafi was about to commit genocide while not
investigating claims of massacres by the rebels of black Africans accused of
being mercenaries (Pilger 2011).
More in-depth
research has been carried out by Raeesah Cassim Cachalia in the paper ‘The Role of the mass media in armed
conflict: A Libyan case study.’ In the study the author refers to the lack
of in-depth reporting or analysis of the broader issues of the conflict such as
the formation of the rebel force, the economic costs of the war and the profits
that Western states will make. The author further highlights what he calls
“utterly ridiculous” reporting such as reports on the bombing of Mizda harbour
by Libyan warships, when Mizda is three thousand kilometres from the Libyan
coastline, and hence has no harbour. He also highlighted what mainstream media
failed to report, such as, in contrast to the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings;
the Libyan uprising was violent from the start with government buildings being
attacked. He asks how any state would respond in such a situation? The author
also raises serious questions about the lack of media investigation and
analysis of the rebel ‘National Transitional Council’ (NTC), and how they came
together so fast, and came to be so “well-armed, well-organised and
well-funded” (Cachalia ,
2011, p.1).
This final piece
of research that adds to the overall criticism of the Western media during the
Libyan conflict was ‘The Media War on
Libya: Justifying War through Lies and Fabrications,’ by Mahdi Darius
Nazemroaya. In his research he points out that the events that sparked off the
uprising in Benghazi were not critically examined. He points out that in any
country, including the United States or Britain, soldiers will fire on people
who attack a military compound with the aim of acquiring weapons. This is
precisely what occurred there yet was reported as the Libyan government
shooting peaceful democracy protesters. He also highlighted the demonization of
black Africans in Libya by the media through the stories of huge numbers of
mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi, stories which led to widespread murder of
these people by rebel forces (Nazemroaya ,
2011).
In a similar way
to the research articles on the Kosovo conflict, these articles take a critical
stance on the NATO intervention in Libya and the media’s role in reporting that
conflict. Each suggests that far from learning from past mistakes of the Kosovo
conflict, the Western media has stuck to the same narrative of uncritically
reporting the official NATO line, and failed to fully investigate and analyse
the stories that they were reporting. So, according to these researchers, the
dominant media narratives had not changed between the two conflicts. It is the
task of this research to analyse if this is in fact the case, and to discover
if there is a difference in the media narratives of the two conflicts.
Methodology
In order to
undertake this research it was decided to use both a qualitative and
quantitative approach using primary research. The research used a method of thematic
critical discourse analysis to discover the dominant media narratives during
the NATO interventions in Kosovo and Libya. The research focused on newspapers
from two English speaking member countries of NATO, the United States and the
United Kingdom. To access these publications I have used the Lexis Nexus
database. To start, I used the search for ‘Major World Newspapers’ (English). As
the number of publications from the United Kingdom is vast, I had to be
selective in my choice of newspapers. To do this I focused on newspapers
published in England. As the selection was still quite vast I then decided to
choose the remainder based on circulation figures. From the publications that
were available, I chose four from the top ten selling newspapers in the UK.
Applying the same logic to US publications I choses four papers from the top
ten selling papers in the US. The final list, with national circulation rating
in brackets is as follows;
1.
Daily
News (7)
2.
The
New York Times (3)
3.
USA
Today (2)
4.
The
Washington Post (6)
5.
The
Daily Telegraph (5)
6.
The
Guardian (8)
7.
The
Daily Mail (2)
8.
The
Sun (1)
In order to
further narrow down the search I then used the search terms "NATO"
and "Kosovo" in the Headline for articles relating to that
intervention. I then used the search
terms "NATO" and "Libya" in the headline for that
intervention. As this search was still producing a very large number of
articles, I then narrowed down the search further by using dates between
17/03/1999 to 31/03/1999 for Kosovo, and 12/03/2011 to 26/03/2011 for Libya, a
week before and a week into the conflict
in each case. These search terms and dates produced twelve articles for the
Kosovo conflict and fourteen articles for the Libya conflict. Out of each of
these groups, a random sample of seven articles for each conflict was used,
with some articles from both before and after the start of each NATO campaign.
Discussion of discourse analysis method
With the
articles that this search produced a critical thematic discourse analysis was
conducted that searched for words, phrases, sentences and terms that fitted
into four different frames or themes of analysis. These themes of analysis were
largely influenced by the previous research that has been conducted on both
conflicts individually.
- 1. The first theme was to look for evidence of a ‘journalism of attachment’ in the articles. This includes reporting the ‘official’ line in an uncritical manner and minimal voices from opposing sides. It also includes explicitly taking sides in the conflict.
- 2. The second theme was the ‘demonization of the enemy’. This included the use of emotive terms such as ‘genocide’, Nazi, massacre, slaughter and the use of war propaganda that paints the conflict as a war between ‘good and evil’.
- 3. The third theme was a ‘propaganda of moralism’. This included the evoking of a responsibility to protect (R2P), the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and democracy versus dictatorships.
- 4. The fourth theme was ‘opposition stories’. This refers to any form of story that gives voice to the opposition side, and some critical analysis or support of opposing sides.
In order to
conduct this thematic critical discourse analysis, each of the newspaper
articles was scanned line by line and grouped into one of the four themes.
With each
article I decided to allocate a point to each theme if it was present in the
article. So for example, if an article contained elements of a journalism of
attachment and demonising of the enemy, I would award each a score of one
point, with both other themes receiving zero points. The results would allow a
percentage guide for how often each theme appeared in the overall analysis.
Discourse analysis on the each of the
articles on the Kosovo conflict.
The first
article analysed on the Kosovo conflict was taken from the Daily News, March 29th
1999 titled ‘NATO steps up its air attack:
Called bid to stop ‘Genocide’ against Kosovo Albanians’. This article
displayed overwhelming evidence of a journalism of attachment with over seventy
percent of the article devoted to reporting the official line uncritically and
minimal voices from the opposing side. In particular, large portions of the
article were devoted to official sources from NATO, as well as quoted from
President Bill Clinton, Sectary of State Madeline Albright, the US National
Security Advisor and two US Congressmen.
The final section of the article also discussed in depth the weapons
that NATO would need to “go after Serb tanks and troops”, listing a collection
of “laser-guided bombs, rockeye cluster bombs, hellfire missiles and stinger
missiles” amongst others. There was also evidence of a demonization of the
enemy in the article with the word ‘genocide’ in the headline as well as twice
in the text. The article suggests that NATO was in a “race against time” to
stop genocide against ethnic Albanians.
Quotes from President Clinton also speak of “the continued brutality and
repression” by the Serb forces. The article also showed evidence of the theme
of a propaganda of moralism with NATO Secretary General Javier Solana stating
that NATO was trying to stop a “humanitarian catastrophe” taking place. The
fourth theme of opposing stories was present however; the four sentences of
opposing voices did not challenge or question the authority of the official
stories from NATO or government sources (Appendix 1, Kosovo, 1999).
The next article
came from the New Your Times on March 29th 1999 and was titled ‘Conflict in the Balkans: The Overview – NATO
planes step up Attacks on Serb Troops: Allies Shifting the Focus to Halting
Atrocities Reported in Kosovo’. This article also displayed an overwhelming
sense of the journalism of attachment. The article included quotes from NATO’s
Javier Solana, US President Bill Clinton and his National Security advisor, a
Pentagon spokesman, a British Air Commodore, the UK’s Defence Secretary, US
Senators John McCain, Kay Baily, Joe Lieberman and Mitch McConnell as well as
NATO Press Secretary Jamie Shea. This was contrasted with a statement from the
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic praising his people and armed forces and
another from his Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic denying accusations of
genocide or ethnic cleansing. The theme of a demonization of the enemy was
present with words such as “large scale atrocities in Kosovo” and “Serbian
repression underscores the need for NATO to persevere”. The word genocide was also mentioned three
times in the article. A propaganda of moralism was also in evidence with NATO
spokesmen and the UK Defence Secretary speaking of a “humanitarian
catastrophe”, “the deteriorating humanitarian situation”, villages being
systematically emptied, looted and permanently destroyed” as well as “reports
that civilians may be used as human shields” (Appendix 1, Kosovo, 1999).
In the next
article taken from USA Today on March 26th 1999 and titled ‘Milosevic presses on in Kosovo - Next target
for NATO: Serb troops’ there is less evidence of the journalism of
attachment although it is evident which side the journalist is taking with much
more space devoted to the official NATO line than opposing views. The author
also seems to have a fetish for military hardware and went into great detail of
the weapons in the US and NATO’s armoury which would be used to target Serb
troops as the headline suggests. The article also demonises the enemy with a
number of references to Serb aggression, whilst not once mentioning any form of
NATO aggression while it was dropping its bombs without UNSC sanction.
Presumably this is because NATO bombs for peace and not aggressive instincts?
Reference is also made to Serbs sweeping “through ethnic Albanian villages
where they executed civilians and set houses on fire” (Appendix 1, Kosovo,
1999).
In the first
English newspaper article taken from the Guardian on March 24th 1999
and titled ‘Crisis in Kosovo: No choice
but to act, says Solana; NATO chief / The West has a duty to end ‘this
humanitarian catastrophe’ and restore stability’, there is a quite
astounding level of the journalism of attachment. The article reads exactly
like a NATO press release and it is devoid of any form of journalistic
commentary. The article re-produces word for word a speech from NATO’s General
Secretary Javier Solana. In it Solana demonises the enemy in a number of ways
by referring to the “Yugoslav government’s refusal of the international
community’s demands”, including the Rambouillet peace deal. However there is no
criticism of this statement and no mention of the Yugoslav government being
open to peace until NATO called for a military presence all throughout
Yugoslavia as part of the deal. Solana also mentions the necessity of the
“ending of excessive and disproportionate use of force in Kosovo”, and the
“intransigence of the FRY government”. The article (speech) also draws heavily
on a propaganda of moralism used to justify the military action with Solana
stating NATO will take whatever measures necessary to “avert a humanitarian
catastrophe”. He went on to say that “our objective is to prevent more human
suffering and more repression and violence against the civilian population of
Kosovo”. Solana concluded his speech stating “we must stop an authoritarian
regime from repressing its people… we have a moral duty to do so. The
responsibility is on our shoulders and we will fulfil it” (Appendix 1, Kosovo,
1999).
In another
article from the United States, from the New York Times on March 23rd
1999 titled ‘Conflict in the Balkans: In
Kosovo; Top Ethnic Albanian Rebel Asks NATO to Start Strikes’, there is a
different scope to the reporting. This article shows no signs of the journalism
of attachment displayed in other articles. This author relies heavily on
opposition stories, but not from the Serbian side. This article is mostly made
up of eye-witness accounts and an interview with commander from the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA). Although the article does demonise the enemy from the perspective
of the KLA commander when he suggests, the Serbs “aims are ‘ethnic cleansing’
of the Albanian population and the destruction of the KLA”, the article uses a
number of non-official sources to gain confirmation of Serbian crimes. The KLA
commander does not however draw on a propaganda of moralism to support his
case, he instead argues that a NATO intervention will even out the fighting and
give his side more of a chance (Appendix 1, Kosovo, 1999).
The next
article, from the Guardian on March 22nd 1999 and titled ‘NATO attack ‘only hours away’; Civilians flee as Serbian forces put
Kosovo to the torch’ takes a similar journalistic approach to the previous
article. The author is wholly reliant on ‘unofficial’ sources, i.e. sources
from eye-witnesses and not those in authority. The theme of opposing stories in
very prevalent in the article and the author also writes of what he has
witnessed himself while on the ground. He speaks to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
and asks them their opinion on what is occurring around them. There are stories
of a woman “cowering and cradling her children… to escape detection by the Serb
forces”. As well as this we read of men “taken to the police station where some
of them were kicked and beaten”. The author also takes time to point out that
violence is occurring on both sides when he states that “three Serb policemen
were killed and one wounded in an apparent reprisal”. The author however, while
showing opposing stories also does his best to demonise the enemy by using emotive
phrases semiotics such as “a noose of Serbian tanks, armour and troops is hour
by hour tightening its grip in open defiance of the international community”,
and “eight M84 tanks and eleven armoured vehicles now waited like birds of
prey”. He seems to be taking sides when he downplays the significant violent
possibilities of the KLA when he states “this is to crush ill-trained
guerrillas with only Kalashnikovs, a few rocket-propelled grenades and little
fighting spirit” (Appendix 1, Kosovo, 1999).
The final
article comes from the Guardian again, on March 18th 1999 and is
titled ‘No way out for NATO: Bombing will
only strengthen Milosevic’s hold on Kosovo’. Again this article takes on
the theme of opposition stories throughout the article. The author takes on a
critical analysis of NATO’s possible air strikes and concludes that even if
NATO did proceed, “it is already too late for this alone to be a solution”. He
goes on to suggest that Milosevic’s position would be strengthened, not
weakened by such an attack. The author does however show elements uncritical
reporting when he suggests that the so-called ‘Racak massacre’ was the product
of Serbian executions, the victims he suggests “were not guerrillas, 22 of whom
were killed in a gully that was so narrow they much have been shot at close
range” when subsequent investigations have revealed that thirty-seven of the
dead had gunpowder residue on their hands (Appendix 1, Kosovo, 1999).
Discourse analysis on the each of the
articles on the Libya conflict.
The first
article analysed from the Libya conflict was from the New York Times, on March
26th 2011 and was titled ‘NATO
Takes Lead ON Libya Campaign; Obama Defends His Policy’. This article,
perhaps understandably takes quite an American centred approach to this story.
However, there is a huge degree of a journalism of attachment contained within
the article. We get quotes from ‘Senior NATO and American officials’, the White
House, State Department spokesman Mark Toner, Pentagon Administrator William E.
Gortney and the American Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz. In contrast to this
there is one quote from a Libyan government spokesman Musa Ibrahim. In sticking
to the journalism of attachment theme, the author of this article uses the
words ‘official’ sources or ‘officials’ from nine times in the article. The
author also shows a lack of any real form of critical reporting on the official
line and fails to challenge any of the authoritative discourses that are
displayed in the article (Appendix 2, Libya, 2011).
The next article
came from the Guardian on March 25th 2011 and is titled ‘Libya: Nato to control no-fly zone after
France gives way to Turkey: Climbdown by Sarkozy ends infighting among western
allies’. This article also shows strong evidence of a journalism of
attachment with a strong focus on the reporting of official statements. Rather
than focussing on the reasons for the conflict, this article mainly focusses on
in-fighting and squabbles within NATO over control of the mission. The article
also to a small degree evokes an idea of a propaganda of moralism. In this
regard we see a quote from Hillary Clinton who suggests that NATO would take
responsibility for “protecting civilians, enforcing an arms embargo and
supporting the humanitarian mission”. As well as this we receive a quote from
French President Nicolas Sarkozy who suggests that NATO is “protecting
civilians through air strikes”. The article also has some elements of the
opposing stories theme with five paragraphs devoted to an on-going argument
between the Turkish and French governments over the French role in the military
action. In particular, a critical quote from the Turkish Prime Minister is used
where he states in relation to France “I wish that those who only see oil, gold
mines and underground treasures when the look in Libya’s direction, would see
the region through glasses of conscience from now on” (Appendix 2, Libya,
2011).
The next article
from the same authors comes from the Guardian again, on March 25th
2011 also and is titled ‘Libya: France
give way to Turkey as deal is struck to put NATO in charge’. This article
takes on a more critical stance than the last article and has large elements of
the opposing stories theme. Over fifty-percent of the article is of a critical
nature towards France, with that criticism coming from Turkey. In particular,
the quote “I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground
treasures when the look in Libya’s direction, would see the region through glasses
of conscience from now on” was used again. As well as this, there were other
quotes such as “the aim of the air campaign is not the liberation of the Libyan
people, there are hidden agendas and different interests”. The words of French
interior minister Claude Gueant were also cited. He stated that the French
President was “leading a crusade” to stop Gaddafi massacring Libyans. The
article points out that the use of the word ‘crusade’ caused outrage amongst
the Turkish government and in the Muslim world (Appendix 2, Libya, 2011).
In another
article from the New York Times on March 25th 2011 titled ‘NATO To Assume New Role in Libya’,
there is evidence of a journalism of attachment again. In the first five
paragraphs of the article, the words “officials said” are used five times. The
article also quoted a range of ‘official’ voices inside the US administration,
the US military, NATO, The French Defence Ministry and a spokesman from the
Libyan rebel group. None of the other themes of analysis were present in the
article (Appendix 2, Libya, 2011).
The next article
was from USA Today on March 25th 2011 and was titled ‘As NATO takes over in Libya, Gaddafi’s fate
remains fuzzy’. In this article there is a strong journalism of attachment
from the author. A summary analysis of the article reveals that the author is
clearly taking sides. For example, it is stated that “the news is good” that
Gaddafi’s forces have little likelihood of standing up to the firepower of
NATO. It goes on to state “if the allies remain aggressive rather than limiting
themselves to the inadequate no fly zone, Libyan ground forces should run out
of tanks, heavy weapons, ammunition, fuel, will-power or all five”. Further to
this, the author laments the fact that the UNSC resolution authorising “all
necessary means” is confined to protecting civilians. This implies that the
author would like to see more than the protection of civilians such as a total
defeat of Gaddafi. The article also has strong elements of the demonization of
the enemy theme. For example, Gaddafi is accused of using mercenaries to
supplement his army. As well as this, the tactics being used to punish Gaddafi
such as sanctions and asset freezes are compared to those employed on Saddam
Hussein and South Africa’s apartheid regime. This implicitly implies that
Gaddafi is similar to both (Appendix 2, Libya, 2011).
The next article
came from the Guardian on March 24th 2011 and is titled ‘There's nothing moral about Nato's
intervention in Libya: The western attacks risk a bloody stalemate and are a
threat to the region. The alternative has to be a negotiated settlement’.
This article takes on a strong theme of opposition stories. It is highly
critical throughout the article on all aspects of the NATO led military
operation. The author suggests that US, British and other NATO countries have a
“habit they can’t kick” of attacking Arab countries. While doing this, the
article states, they are “incinerating soldiers and tanks on the ground and
killing civilians in the process”. It goes on to state that these states insist
that humanitarian motives are crucial, yet the media are baying for the blood
of a pantomime villain and regime change is quickly replacing the stated
mission. The author further questions the legitimacy of the military action and
points out that far from having the support of the international community,
Russia, China, Brazil and Germany did not support the UN vote and have
criticised the bombings along with the Arab League and African Union. In
particular the author emphasises the hypocritical nature of the intervention,
and states that “it’s that such double standards are an integral part of a
mechanism of global power and domination that stifles hopes of any credible
international system of human rights protection. Further to this the article
suggests that “A la carte humanitarian intervention” has nothing to do with
human suffering, but depends on how reliable an ally the regime is (Appendix 2,
Libya, 2011).
The final
article came from the Guardian on March 19th 2011 and is titled ‘Libya On the ground: Jets prepare to deploy
despite ceasefire by Tripoli regime: Warplanes head for Mediterranean as Nato
envoys meet to back no-fly zone’. The article has a strong theme of
journalism of attachment running through it. The majority of the article is
compiled of a discussion of military strategy for a possible upcoming campaign.
This strategy discussion includes a quote from a ‘Middle East expert’ from the
Royal United Services Institute who suggested that any involvement of an Arab
state in the military operation was “important as a way of countering the
accusation that this is an intervention which is colonialist and imperialist in
nature”. The article also suggests that British SAS and SBS soldiers are
already in Libya “on the ground”, however the author does not question the
legality of this at all (Appendix 2, Libya, 2011).
Results and findings.
The Kosovo case:
Overall the
thematic discourse analysis produced some interesting results. As well the
qualitative thematic discourse analysis above, a quantitative analysis was also
conducted. This allowed the gathering of statistics about how often each theme
appeared in the analysis in percentage terms. The table is reproduced below as
Table 1.
As illustrated
by the table, seventy-one percent of the articles analysed on the Kosovo
conflict showed evidence of a journalism of attachment. This perhaps
illustrates that journalistic practices during this conflict were not as
independent and unbiased as they should have been. In a large majority of the
cases, journalists reproduced the official line without questioning and gave
minimal space to opposition sources. As well as this, eighty-six percent of the
articles showed a demonization of the enemy. Perhaps this is a product of the
journalism of attachment, with the official line having to fulfil such a
demonization process to legitimise the intervention. Only forty-three percent
of the articles displayed evidence of a propaganda of moralism theme. This was
quite surprising because as there was no UNSC sanction for this intervention,
it seemed logical that the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’ would have been
used more often. However, as the research sample was quite small at seven
articles, it is possible that a higher percentage could have been recorded with
a larger sample. Finally, only forty-three percent of the articles showed
evidence of opposition stories. This illustrated a lack of critical reporting
and an underreporting of stories that challenged the ‘official’ propaganda.
Table
1:
Another
interesting result was the difference between the articles in American
newspapers and in English newspapers. The percentages for this are reproduced
below as Table 2.
Table 2:
As this table
above shows, the articles in American newspapers showed a strong journalism of
attachment in seventy-five percent of the articles. This perhaps illustrates a
stronger bond between American journalists and their politicians and a stronger
sense of national pride that precludes a journalist from taking an overly
critical line for fear of being branded ‘unpatriotic’. English reporters seem
to trust the official line a little less with sixty-seven percent, although
this is still quite a high number and illustrates the lack of critical
reporting. The American articles also showed a strong demonisation on the enemy
in one-hundred percent of the articles. This seems in line with the strong
journalism of attachment score. The English press was less inclined to demonise
the enemy but still showed a high score, on a par with the level of journalism
of attachment. A propaganda of moralism was again higher in American articles
with fifty percent compared to thirty-four percent of English articles. And
finally, showing a trend, American articles displayed much less evidence of
opposition stories than English newspapers at twenty-five percent compared to
sixty-seven percent in English newspapers. This seems to imply that the English
newspapers took a much more critical line than their American counterparts.
The Libya Case:
As a comparative
study, it would be interesting to find out if the themes had changed between
the two conflicts. The articles on Libya again produced interesting results.
The results are reproduced in Table 3 below.
Table 3:
The articles of
the Libyan conflict produced some different results to the articles on Kosovo.
This time, seventy-one percent of articles showed the theme of a journalism of
attachment compared with the same percentage score during the Kosovo conflict.
There was however a huge drop in the theme of demonising the enemy with only
fourteen percent of articles doing it compared with eighty-six percent During
Kosovo. The theme of a propaganda of moralism was also surprisingly low at
fourteen percent compared with forty-three present during Kosovo. This is even
more surprising when one considers that the Libya intervention had UNSC
approval and the growth on the international norm of a R2P since the Kosovo
intervention. Finally, the level of opposition stories has stayed the same at
forty-three percent since Kosovo and shows that critical voices are still not
being heard enough.
Again, when we
split the articles up between American and English articles (Table 4), we find
some key differences.
Table 4:
As this table
shows, when the articles are divided up, the journalism of attachment was
present in one-hundred percent of the American articles. This was compared to
just fifty percent of the English articles. This shows that since the Kosovo
conflict, there has been an increase in the journalism of attachment on the
American side and a decrease on the English side. The demonisation of the enemy
was present in thirty-four percent of the American articles but not present in
any of the English pieces. This shoes a drop in this them from both Americans
and the English. The theme of a propaganda of moralism was not evoked at all in
the American articles, yet it was present in a quarter of the English articles.
This again, showed a drop on both sides when compared with the Kosovo
reporting. Finally, and quite
shockingly, the American articles showed no signs of opposition stories, in
line with their one-hundred percent journalism of attachment rate. This dropped
from twenty-five percent during Kosovo. The English articles had improved on
their Kosovo score with seventy-five percent opposition stories.
Conclusion:
This research
set out to discover what the dominant themes were within the media narratives
during both the NATO interventions into Kosovo and Libya. The researched was strongly influenced by the
previous research that had been undertaken on the role of the media during the
Kosovo conflict. It was decided to undertake a thematic critical discourse
analysis as this had not been done in any of the previous studies that had been
completed. The choice of critical discourse analysis was strongly influenced by
the work of Norman Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk and John Richardson, in particular
their ideas on how power works through discourse to benefit those in authority.
The thematic analysis that was chosen took influences from the previous
research that had been done and the four frames of analysis were chosen as a
way of understanding the dominant narratives within articles during both
conflicts. As a method of analysis this worked quite well and it produced some
interesting qualitative and quantitative analysis.
The most
noteworthy of the results that emerged was that a majority of journalists
during both conflicts showed evidence of a journalism of attachment. However,
during both conflicts the American articles showed higher levels of this form
of journalism. Both the American and the English articles showed high levels of
demonising the enemy also, with eighty-six percent of articles displaying this
theme during Kosovo. Again the American journalists were the worst offenders
with one-hundred percent of their articles displaying evidence of this.
However, during the Libya conflict, this number had dropped to fourteen percent
of articles demonising the enemy. The propaganda of moralism theme was also
higher during Kosovo at forty-three percent as opposed to fourteen percent
during Libya. Perhaps most interesting was the instances where the theme of
opposition stories appeared. During both conflicts, only forty-three percent of
articles showed evidence of opposition stories. This suggests a lack of
critical engagement from journalists in American and English newspapers.
However, when the results are broken down, it reveals that during both
conflicts, English articles displayed sixty-seven and seventy-five percent
respectively, and it was the American articles that dragged the overall average
number down. During the Kosovo conflict, American articles only displayed
opposition stories in twenty-five percent of the articles, and this number
dropped to zero percent during the Libya conflict. The results seem to imply
that the English press takes on a more critical role in war reporting than
their American counterparts, although both sets of journalists display high
levels of a journalism of attachment, with this being the dominant theme
throughout the analysis.
Bibliography:
Ackerman,
S. & Naureckas, J. 2000, "Following Washington’s Script: The United
States Media and Kosovo", Degraded capability: The media and the Kosovo
crisis, , pp. 97-110.
Cachalia, R.C. , The role of mass media in armed
conflict: A Libyan case study. Available: http://www.consultancyafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=870:the-role-of-mass-media-in-armed-conflict-a-libyan-case-study&catid=60:conflict-terrorism-discussion-papers&Itemid=265
[2012, 05/02].
Cockburn, A. 2011, "Libya: An Old-Fashioned
Colonial Smash-and-Grab", Nation, vol. 292, no. 26, pp. 9-9.
Fairclough, N. 2001, "The Discourse of New Labour:
Critical Discourse Analysis" in Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis,
ed. Wetherell, M. Taylor, S. Yates, S.J, Sage / Open University, London, pp.
229-- 266.
Hammond, P. & Herman, E.S. 2000, Degraded
capability: The media and the Kosovo crisis, Pluto Pr.
Hammond, P. 2000, "Reporting “Humanitarian”
Warfare: propaganda, moralism and NATO's Kosovo war", Journalism
Studies, vol. 1, no. 3.
Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. 2002, Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, New York.
Hume, M. 200O, 'Nazifying the Serbs, from Bosnia to
Kosovo' in Hammond, P. & Herman, E.S. 2000, Degraded capability: The media
and the Kosovo crisis, Pluto Pr.
Mutiga, M. 2011, "BBC's Wartime Propaganda in
Libya Illustrates Need for Pan-African Media.", Nation (Kenya), vol.
September, no. 1025-1227.
Nazemroaya, M.D. , The Media War on Libya:
Justifying War through Lies and Fabrications. Available: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24566
[2012, 05/01].
Nohrstedt, S., Kaitatzi-Whitlock, S., Ottosen, R. &
Riegert, K. 2000, "From the Persian Gulf to Kosovo - War Journalism and
Propaganda", European Journal of Communication, vol. 15, no. 3, pp.
383.
Pilger, J. 2011, "Hail to the true victors of
Rupert's Revolution", New Statesman, vol. 140, no. 5070, pp. 21-21.
Richardson, J.E. 2007, Analysing newspapers: an
approach from critical discourse analysis, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Taylor, S. 2001, "Locating and Conducting
Discourse Analytic Research" in M. Taylor, S. Yates, S.J, Discourse as
Data: A Guide for Analysis, ed. Wetherell, Sage / Open University, London,
pp. 6-- 48.
Van Dijk, T.A. 2008, Discourse and Power, Palgrave
Macmillan, London.
Vincent, R.C. 2000, "A Narrative Analysis of US
Press Coverage of Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs in Kosovo", European
Journal of Communication, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 321-344.
Yang, J. 2003, "Framing the NATO air strikes on
Kosovo across countries comparison of chinese and US newspaper coverage", Gazette,
vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 231-249.
Kosovo
1999
NOTE:
17-03-1999 to 31-03-1999
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Source: Daily
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Results
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1.
|
NATO STEPS UP ITS AIR ATTACK CALLED BID TO STOP
'GENOCIDE' AGAINST KOSOVO ALBANIANS Daily News (New York), March 29, 1999, Monday,
902 words, By HELEN KENNEDY, With Kenneth R. Bazinet
|
CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: THE OVERVIEW -- NATO
Planes Step Up Attacks on Serb Troops; Allies Shifting the Focus to Halting
Atrocities Reported in Kosovo The New York Times, March 29, 1999, Monday, Late
Edition - Final, Section A; Page
1; Column 6; Foreign Desk , 1452 words, By ADAM CLYMER
|
Milosevic presses on in Kosovo Next target for
NATO: Serb troops USA TODAY, March 26, 1999, Friday,, 746 words,
Andrea Stone
|
CRISIS IN KOSOVO: No choice but to act, says
Solana; NATO CHIEF/ The West has a duty to end 'this humanitarian
catastrophe' and restore stability The Guardian (London), March 24, 1999, The
Guardian Home Page; Pg. 3, 556 words
|
CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: IN KOSOVO; Top Ethnic
Albanian Rebel Asks NATO to Start Strikes The New
York Times, March 23, 1999, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final, Section A; Page
10; Column 1; Foreign Desk , 992 words, By CARLOTTA GALL
|
Nato attack 'only hours away'; Civilians flee as Serbian forces put Kosovo
to the torch The Guardian (London), March 22, 1999, Guardian
Home Pages; Pg. 1, 941 words, CHRIS BIRD IN GORNJA KLINA
|
No way out for Nato; Bombing will only strengthen Milosevic's
hold on Kosovo The Guardian (London), March 18, 1999, Guardian
Features Pages; Pg. 18, 765 words, ISABEL HILTON
|
1 of 7 DOCUMENTS
Daily News
(New York)
March 29, 1999,
Monday
NATO STEPS UP ITS
AIR ATTACK
CALLED BID TO
STOP 'GENOCIDE' AGAINST KOSOVO ALBANIANS
BYLINE: By HELEN
KENNEDY, With Kenneth R. Bazinet
SECTION: News; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 902 words
NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia yesterday
in a race against time to smash Serb military units and stop what it called
"genocide" against ethnic Albanians of Kosovo.
The escalation to "Phase 2" on the fifth
night of bombing increases the risk to fighter pilots flying lower and slower
to strike the Serb ground troops who are reportedly forcing tens of thousands
of civilians from their homes.
"We're entering a phase which is more focused
on trying to stop the humanitarian catastrophe which is taking place on the
ground," said NATO Secretary General Javier Solana.
Thousands of refugees, mostly women and children,
flooded into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo, telling of Serb soldiers who
torched their villages. Men were reportedly being rounded up separately.
"Genocide is starting," warned German
Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping.
NATO said more than 500,000 ethnic Albanians, a
quarter of the population of Kosovo, had been driven from their homes 50,000 of
them in just the past few days.
President Clinton said, "The continued
brutality and repression of the Serb forces further underscores the need for
NATO to persevere."
When asked whether five days of NATO air strikes
were pushing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to step up his attacks on
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Clinton shot back: "Absolutely not."
Secretary of State Albright said Milosevic
"was planning to do this anyway. It is just simply an upside-down argument
to think that NATO or we have made this get worse."
Albright called the plight of the ethnic Albanians
"a very, very bad scene."
"There are terrible reports about men being
separated from women and children, then they being taken off and executed,
villages being torched, people arriving across the border with no shoes,"
Albright said.
Albanian President Rexhep Meidani pleaded for NATO
ground troops to stop the carnage, but U.S. officials continued to reject that
possibility.
"I do not believe that sending several hundred
thousand soldiers in to occupy Serbia for the next five or 10 years is the
right way to deal with this problem," said national security adviser Sandy
Berger.
The Yugoslav government denied it was carrying out
"ethnic cleansing" or pushing ethnic Albanians from the province.
Instead, Bratislava Morina, Serbia's commissioner
for refugees, said ethnic Albanians were fleeing the NATO attacks. "There
is no humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo whatsoever," Morina said.
Officials said the air campaign would not be
deterred by Saturday's downing of an F-117A Stealth fighter near the Yugoslav
capital of Belgrade.
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the
Foreign Relations Committee, estimated the bombs would keep falling for at
least a month. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Armed
Services Committee, said the campaign could go on for "many, many
weeks."
In the stepped-up bombing runs in which six of the
Stealth fighters participated NATO warplanes and missiles took aim yesterday at
some ground troops and military targets, like headquarters and command bunkers.
The Kosovo Liberation Army's news agency said NATO
planes had attacked a Yugoslav Army column and destroyed four tanks. A NATO
military official could not confirm the report but said it was "entirely
possible."
NATO planes were still trying to find and destroy
elements of Yugoslavia's sophisticated air defense system. NATO needs to take
out the air defenses so that slower and lower-flying planes like the A-10
Warthog can go in to attack the 300 or so Serb tanks shelling Albanian
villages.
Opposition to the air strikes continued to be
voiced around the world. In his Palm Sunday address, Pope John Paul said,
"It is never too late to meet and negotiate."
In Sydney, Australia, 7,000 demonstrators marched
on the U.S. Consulate, pulling down the U.S. flag and setting it ablaze. In
Moscow, unidentified gunmen aimed a rocket launcher at the U.S. Embassy before
being chased away by cops.
Graphic: MORE MUSCLE IN THE AIR
If NATO makes a concerted effort to go after Serb
tanks and troops, a primary weapon will be the A-10 Thunderbolt, a slow-flying,
low-flying jet that is highly maneuverable. They would be joined by EA-6B radar
jamming Prowlers. Tank killing Apache helicopters could also be added to the
force.
A-10 THUNDERBOLT
Nickname: Warthog, for its unlovely appearance, or
Tank Killer, for its remarkable record in the Gulf War.
Speed: 420 mph.
Length: 53 feet.
Wingspan: 57 feet.
Range: 800 miles.
Armament: Maverick missiles and laser-guided bombs;
can also carry Rockeye cluster bombs or 2,000-pound bombs. Armed with
seven-barrel Gatling gun.
Cost: $ 8.8 million.
Maker: Fairchild Republic Co.
EA-6B PROWLER
Its radar tracking equipment has been key to the
U.S. and British success in knocking out missile and radar sites in Iraq.
Speed: 610 mph
Length: 60 feet
Wingspan: 53 feet
Range: 1,100 miles
Armament: Carries up to four HARM missiles.
Maker: Northrop Grumman Corp.
AH-64 APACHE HELICOPTER
Earned a fearsome reputation in Iraq and Kuwait,
killing hundreds of tanks and radar sites during the Gulf War.
Rotor diameter: 48 feet
Speed: 162 mph
Range: 253 miles
Armaments: Can carry 16 Hellfire missiles, and has
room for Stinger or Sidewinder missiles. Also has machine gun in its nose.
LOAD-DATE: March 30, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: [Map by DAILY
NEWS/KRT]
AP SERB women dance on wing of U.S.
F-117a Stealth jet that crashed Saturday in Yugoslavia, possibly downed by
anti-aircraft missile. Pilot was rescued unharmed by U.S. teams hours later.
Copyright 1999
Daily News, L.P.
2 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The New York
Times
March 29, 1999,
Monday, Late Edition - Final
CONFLICT IN
THE BALKANS: THE OVERVIEW -- NATO Planes
Step Up Attacks on Serb Troops;
Allies
Shifting the Focus to Halting Atrocities Reported in Kosovo
BYLINE: By ADAM
CLYMER
SECTION: Section
A; Page 1; Column 6;
Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 1452 words
DATELINE: WASHINGTON,
March 28
Allied warplanes braved bad weather tonight to step
up attacks on Yugoslav troops while NATO officials repeatedly accused Serbian
forces of large-scale atrocities in Kosovo.
The United States and Britain committed additional
aircraft to the allied force, and NATO's Secretary General, Javier Solana, said
its mission was shifting from neutralizing air defenses to stopping "the
humanitarian catastrophe which is taking place on the ground."
President
Clinton, in a brief statement before boarding a helicopter for Camp David, said
he supported the decision to hit a broader range of targets, including
"forces in the field." He said continuing Serbian repression
"underscores the need for NATO to persevere." When a reporter asked
if the bombing was accelerating the atrocities, he replied, "Absolutely
not."
The shift in targeting, according to Kenneth H.
Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, meant that attacks on military and police
targets -- like barracks, headquarters and fuel and ammunition depots -- would
now account for more than a third of all strikes, compared with about a fifth
in earlier raids. While there may be occasional attacks on tank columns or
artillery, the basic plan was to cut off such forces from their supply lines
and communications, he said.
In a fifth straight night of bombing tonight, NATO
mounted attacks that included cruise missile strikes by B-52 bombers.
Hours after the first allied plane loss of the war,
an American F-117 stealth fighter whose pilot was rescued, Britain announced
that it would add 4 Harrier fighters to the 8 already based in Italy, and also
assigned 8 Tornado bombers and a Tristar air-to-air refueling tanker to the
force. The United States followed with an announcement that it was adding
between 6 and 12 B-1 bombers and B-52 bombers.
At NATO headquarters in Brussels, Air Commodore
David Wilby of Britain said, "I'm sure we will get a few more
contributions."
In Yugoslavia, state television insisted repeatedly
that the stealth plane had been shot down, and several times aired footage of
the burning wreck. Yugoslavia's President, Slobodan Milosevic, defiantly
praised his people and his armed forces for their defense of Serbia, and staged
a celebration in downtown Belgrade -- a rock concert to show solidarity with
the armed forces and to mark the 10th anniversary today of his 1989 move to
strip Kosovo of broad autonomy.
Air raid sirens wailed several times in Belgrade,
and state-run media gave some details of Saturday night attacks. But no new
casualty figures were announced. Yugoslav state media previously have spoken of
dozens killed in the NATO raids.
On both sides of the Atlantic, officials were being
asked what they would do if air power failed to halt the violence against
Kosovo's Albanians. Clinton Administration officials, as well as those at NATO
headquarters, insisted they had no intention of committing ground troops.
In Washington, Samuel R. Berger, the President's
national security adviser, was asked on the ABC News program "This
Week" if he could "rule out the use of ground forces in the
future?" He replied: "We have no intention of doing that. I don't
think it would be advisable."
In London, Defense Secretary George Robertson said
NATO was "disrupting the violence," adding, "We have to make
sure that we keep doing it until the genocidal attacking stops." But when
asked about sending NATO troops in to stop the atrocities, he said, "There
are absolutely no plans for an opposed entry into Kosovo."
The United States has agreed to take part with NATO
allies in a Kosovo peacekeeping force should Belgrade relent and join delegates
of the Albanian majority in Kosovo in signing a peace agreement.
Mr. Solana, also appearing in the ABC program, said
the NATO allies "are not in a position to deploy troops on the ground
prior to a settlement, to an agreement," adding: "This is a position
all the countries maintain until this moment. I don't know how things are going
to evolve, but at this point troops will not be deployed on the ground."
One strong voice from the Senate disagreed.
"We're in it, and we have to win it," said Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, appearing on "This Week," adding, "That
means we have to exercise every option."
He said: "The American people have to know
that these young men and women that are piloting our airplanes are prepared to
go into harm's way to get the job done. And I would, all of us would, grieve at
the loss of a single American. But when you go into these things, your primary
purpose cannot be the safety of your forces. It has to be the achievement of
your strategic and tactical goals."
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Texas Republican,
appeared on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" and suggested that
"troops on the ground" from other NATO countries might be the right
response, because the United States has taken the leading role in the air
campaign.
European politicians tend to express less fear of
public reaction to military casualties than American leaders do, accepting loss
of life as a part of fighting a war. But even so, they would demand American
participation in any attacking force, as they have for peacekeeping missions in
Bosnia and Macedonia.
And the subject has been discussed, at least
gingerly. A minister in the Cabinet of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany
said that the Chancellor had told him before the air campaign began that
everyone had to be aware that bombing might not stop Mr. Milosevic, and that an
invasion by NATO troops might have to be considered.
Another option -- urged by Senators Joseph I.
Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, and Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican
-- is for the United States to arm the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army to fight
Mr. Milosevic's forces.
But Mr. Solana said, "I don't think at this
point, with a U.N. resolution preventing the deployment of arms, I don't think
it would be a good idea to help in that direction."
Before the President left for Camp David, he met
with his national security advisers. First he saw Mr. Berger alone, and then he
spent an hour with Mr. Berger, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen; George J.
Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence; Gen. Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, and Jim
Steinberg, a foreign policy adviser.
They briefed the President on the details of
Saturday's rescue operation and on the situation in Kosovo, and they reviewed
tonight's military plans. An aide said that they had not discussed the
possibility of sending in ground troops, but that the President was
increasingly concerned about the refugees fleeing Kosovo.
Briefings on Saturday night's attacks were
conducted today in Brussels and London. In Brussels, Jamie Shea, a NATO
spokesman, said 66 aircraft had flown in two waves, attacking 17 major targets.
Both he and Air Commodore Wilby focused their remarks less on military matters
than on what Mr. Shea called "the deteriorating humanitarian situation in
and now around Kosovo."
He said it was particularly disturbing that hardly
any men of fighting age were among the refugees fleeing into Albania and
Macedonia, who are mostly women and children.
Mr. Shea asked, "What has happened to the
males between the ages of 16 to 60?" Air Commodore Wilby said,
"Villages are being systematically emptied, looted and permanently
destroyed."
In London, Mr. Robertson made a similar case,
beginning his briefing by telling reporters: "I am sorry to have to report
that Yugoslavia's campaign of repression against the Albanian population is
continuing. Seven towns on the Albanian border are reported to be burning, and
on the Macedonian border, as we have all seen on television, Dakovica is in
flames."
"Thousands of refugees are streaming across
the border from Kosovo into Albania, and there are also reports that civilians
may be used as human shields to protect Milosevic's military machine," he
said. "If that is true, this would of course be a war crime in its own
right."
Vuk Draskovic, the Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister,
denied accusations that Serbia was committing genocide against ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo or that its security forces were carrying out systematic "ethnic
cleansing."
"No, absolutely no," he said in an
interview with CNN. "We need Albanians in our state. No one has that genocide
strategy." He added, "Albanians are doing that crime against us, I
mean Albanian terrorists."
In his briefing, the British Defense Secretary also
renewed his warning to Serbian security forces that they were committing war
crimes and that evidence of that was being assembled. He did not say how.
http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: The
wreckage of an F-117A in the village of Budjanovici, about 35 miles northwest
of Belgrade. NATO would not confirm whether the stealth fighter plane had been
shot down. Royal Air Force crew under a Harrier GR-7 fighter at Gioia del Colle
air base in southern Italy. NATO said it would keep bombing Yugoslavia. (Photos
by Reuters)(pg. A8)
Map of Yugoslavia highlighting some
of the sites attacked by NATO. (Source: NATO)(pg. A8)
Copyright 1999
The New York Times Company
3 of 7 DOCUMENTS
USA TODAY
March 26, 1999,
Friday, FINAL EDITION
Milosevic
presses on in Kosovo Next target for NATO: Serb troops
BYLINE: Andrea Stone
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 3A
LENGTH: 746 words
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON -- Operation Allied Force may aim to
halt Serb aggression
in Kosovo, but that clearly has not
sunk in yet with Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic.
On the second day of the biggest air offensive in
Europe since
World War II, Serb military and
special police forces intensified
their nearly two-week offensive in Kosovo.
They swept through
ethnic Albanian villages where they
executed civilians and set
fire to houses. Yugoslav forces also
shelled neighboring Albania.
The NATO attacks are designed to force Milosevic to
stop killing
ethnic Albanians and sign a peace
agreement. More than 2,000 have
died, and 400,000 have been left
homeless, in Kosovo, a province
of Serbia. Serbia and Montenegro make
up Yugoslavia.
Now Pentagon officials say NATO is about to switch
the focus of
its attacks from air defense and
command-and-control centers to
the troops behind the violence in
Kosovo.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said Thursday that
about 20%
of targets hit in the first attack
Wednesday were military or
security forces. The gradual switch
to targeting troops and tanks
will require allied pilots to fly
closer to the ground. That is
far riskier than the high altitude
runs of the past two nights.
NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark warned Thursday,
"There is no
planned sanctuary" for Serb
aggressors.
"We are going to systematically and
aggressively attack, disrupt,
degrade, devastate and ultimately,
unless President Milosevic
complies with the demands of the
international community, we're
going to destroy these forces and
their facilities and support,"
Clark said in a news conference in
Brussels, Belgium. "The operation
will be just as long and difficult as
President Milosevic requires
it to be."
The assault resumed after dark Thursday when sea-launched
cruise
missiles and Stealth bombers swarmed
across the Adriatic to targets
deep inside Yugoslavia.
Four U.S. surface ships and two submarines in the
Adriatic launched
Tomahawk cruise missiles at a far
faster pace than the night before.
The destroyer USS Gonzalez fired 16
half-ton warheads. A 17th
misfired, tumbling in flames into the
sea.
Two jets from a fleet of 21 B-2 Stealth bombers
made the 30-hour
round-trip from Whiteman Air Force
Base in Missouri to unload
2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs over
Yugoslavia.
From Aviano and Istrana in northern Italy and Gioia
del Colle
in southern Italy, dozens of NATO
jets roared off into the night.
Among them were F-117 Stealth
fighter-bombers, F-15 and F-16 jet
fighters and EA-6B radar-jamming
jets.
In NATO's first damage assessment of Wednesday's
strike, Clark
said allied missiles and bombs hit
more than 40 targets, including
air defenses, command-and-control
centers, a power plant, arms
factories and military and
ministerial police forces. Yugoslav
officials say 50 targets were hit.
Yugoslav authorities also reported at least 10
civilians killed
and 60 wounded. Bacon said allied
strike and support aircraft
made 150 sorties Wednesday, and
officials were satisfied with
the results. The Yugoslav commander
in Kosovo, Lt. Gen. Nebojsa
Pavkovic, said the first night's
strike did "minimal" damage.
But the Russian General Staff in Moscow said NATO
bombs badly
damaged five military airfields, two
factories, a communications
center, several barracks and a
police-training base. Clark denied
reports that a pharmaceutical plant
had been bombed.
He did confirm that an aircraft repair plant was
hit. So were
three fighter jets from Yugoslavia's
small air force of 15 modern
MiG-29s and 64 older Russian-made
fighters. Clark raised the number
of Russian-made MiG-29 jet fighters
downed by allied aircraft
on the first night from two to three.
Two American pilots and
one Dutch pilot got credit for the
kills.
Despite dogfights in the skies, all NATO aircraft
returned to
base safely Wednesday and were
accounted for Thursday.
By contrast to the first night, a defense official
said that no
air-to-air confrontations were
reported Thursday.
One element of the Serb military that wasn't moved
was its tiny
navy of four submarines, four
frigates and an assortment of small
patrol and missile-firing boats.
Clark said he called the Yugoslav
army chief of staff, Gen. Dragoljub
Ojdonic, on Wednesday before
the strikes began and warned him that
if Serb vessels entered
the Adriatic they would be attacked.
They stayed in port.
LOAD-DATE: March 26, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, B/W,
Stefan Rousseau, AFP; GRAPHIC, B/W, Grant Jerding, Dave Merrill, USA TODAY,
Source: USA TODAY research (Map); Heading out: A British pilot boards his
fighter jet to take off from Gioia del Colle, Italy, on Thursday.
Copyright 1999
Gannett Company, Inc.
4 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian
(London)
March 24, 1999
CRISIS IN KOSOVO: No choice but to act, says Solana;
NATO CHIEF/ The
West has a duty to end 'this humanitarian catastrophe' and restore stability
SECTION: The Guardian
Home Page; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 556 words
Nato's
Secretary-General, Javier Solana, yesterday explained to reporters at the
organisation's Brussels headquarters the background to his ordering of air
strikes against Yugoslavia. He said:
'I HAVE just
directed the Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark, to initiate air
operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).
I have taken
this decision after extensive consultations in recent days with all the allies
and after it became clear that the final diplomatic effort of Ambassador
Holbrooke in Belgrade has not met with success.
All efforts
to achieve a negotiated, political solution to the Kosovo crisis having failed,
no alternative is open but to take military action. We are taking action following
the Yugoslavia government's refusal of the international community's demands:
Acceptance
of the interim political settlement negotiated at Rambouillet.
Full
observance of limits on the Serb army and special police forces agreed on
October 25.
Ending of
excessive and disproportionate use of force in Kosovo.
As we warned
on January 30, failure to meet these demands would lead Nato to take whatever
measures were necessary to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.
Nato has
fully supported all relevant UN Security Council resolutions, the efforts of
the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and those of
the contact group.
We deeply
regret that these efforts did not succeed, due entirely to the intransigence of
the FRY government.
This
military action is intended to support the political aims of the international
community.
It will be
directed towards disrupting the violent attacks being committed by the Serb
army and special police forces and weakening their ability to cause further
humanitarian catastrophe.
We wish
thereby to support international efforts to secure Yugoslav agreement to an
interim political settlement.
A viable
political settlement must be guaranteed by an international military presence.
It remains
open to the Yugoslav government to show at any time that it is ready to meet
the demands of the international community. I hope it will have the wisdom to
do so.
At the same
time, we are appealing to the Kosovar Albanians to remain firmly committed to
the road to peace which they have chosen in Paris. We urge in particular
Kosovar armed elements to refrain from provocative military action.
Let me be
clear: Nato is not waging war against Yugoslavia. We have no quarrel with the
people of Yugoslavia who for too long have been isolated in Europe because of
the policies of their government.
Our
objective is to prevent more human suffering and more repression and violence
against the civilian population of Kosovo. We must also act to prevent
instability spreading in the region.
Nato is
united behind this course of action. We must halt the violence and bring an end
to the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Kosovo.
We know the
risks of action but we have all agreed that inaction brings even greater
dangers. We will do what is necessary to bring stability to the region.
We must stop
an authoritarian regime from repressing its people in Europe at the end of the
20th century.
We have a
moral duty to do so. The responsibility is on our shoulders and we will fulfil
it."
LOAD-DATE: March 29, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1999
Guardian Newspapers Limited
5 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The New York
Times
March 23, 1999,
Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
CONFLICT IN
THE BALKANS: IN KOSOVO;
Top Ethnic
Albanian Rebel Asks NATO to Start Strikes
BYLINE: By CARLOTTA
GALL
SECTION: Section A;
Page 10; Column 1; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 992 words
DATELINE: POLJANCE,
Serbia, March 22
The general commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army
called on NATO today to carry out air strikes on Serbia to put an end to the
violence, as Yugoslav Army and police forces continued their ransacking and
burning of villages.
Special police units were setting houses and farm
buildings ablaze here this afternoon, leaving a trail of dead cows and downed
fences before pulling back to their base in Srbica.
"There
are no terrorists here," said the officer, referring to the ethnic
Albanian rebels. "It is all calm," he added as he led out a column of
20 armored vehicles and police jeeps packed with armed men.
Almost every second house in this sprawling village
was on fire. Flames leapt from the windows of houses beside the main road,
while others were already gutted shells, still smoldering, their blackened
rafters collapsed.
Late this afternoon police officers wearing
camouflage and carrying automatic weapons, spare magazines strapped across
their chests, walked wearily up the road and gathered at the top of the
village. They climbed into jeeps, the day's work apparently over.
Two dark blue armored troop carriers and a vehicle
mounted with an antiaircraft gun accompanied the column out of the burning
village.
Officers riding on top waved their guns and raised
a Serbian three-finger salute as they passed. Further down the road two
stragglers walked away from a burning house and fired a burst of gunfire into
the air.
While the operation was going on the top commander
of the Kosovo force, Suleyman Selimi, accused the Serbian military of using
heavier weaponry against his people than ever before. He called on the
international community to act to stop the violence in Kosovo.
"They are using more modern weapons," Mr.
Selimi said of the Serbian military today. "The kind of tanks are more
sophisticated and they are using new mortars, 120 to 200 millimeters, as well
as ground-to-ground missiles."
He said that his forces had signed the peace
agreement because they trusted the West and that he thought NATO air strikes on
Serbian military hardware would stop the violence. "I think if they want
to stop the violence, they should do that," he said of the NATO threat of
strikes. "If we did not trust them we would not have signed the peace
deal."
Sitting in a two-story house high in the Drenica
region, some 18 miles northwest of the provincial capital Pristina, Mr. Selimi
-- who is known among fighters and villagers by his nom de guerre, Sultan --
has a view of villages for miles around.
This morning missiles fired from a multiple rocket
launcher were audible, as were the whoosh and detonation a few seconds later on
impact. Smoke rose from Poljance and the surrounding area.
Mr. Selimi said Serbian forces had fired
ground-to-ground missiles from positions near Istok, 25 miles away near the
provincial border with Montenegro, the day before. Three hit the village of
Likovac, where the Kosovo force's headquarters are, but landed harmlessly in a
field, he said.
A doctor from a French relief group, Doctors of the
World, who was running a clinic in a nearby village confirmed that mortars were
hitting civilian areas, saying he had treated two wounded civilians on Sunday.
The fighting in recent weeks has been some of the
heaviest since last summer. Mr. Selimi said he had lost 47 men in the last
three weeks. But he said his forces had inflicted casualties on the Serbs as
well.
Mr. Selimi, 28, who is over six feet tall and a
former soccer player, cuts an athletic figure. He wears combat fatigues and a
short military haircut. Soft-spoken, even shy, he said he studied metal
engineering in college and helped found the Kosovo force in the early 1990's
when he was a student. He commands obvious respect from fighters and civilians
alike.
He said his forces had knocked out three Serbian
tanks in a battle for the village of Prekaz on Saturday.
As for his strategy, he said it was to try to
defend villages as long as possible, as a conventional army would, to delay the
Serbian advance. But he acknowledged that his fighters were in no position to
compete with Serbian heavy guns.
"In the end the most important thing is not to
lose any men," he said.
He accused the Serbs of carrying out a
scorched-earth policy, trying to clear the area and then sending in infantry to
raze villages, burn crops and kill livestock.
"Their aims are 'ethnic cleansing' of the
Albanian population and the destruction of the K.L.A.," he said. "By
this they aim to keep Kosovo under their control."
There were unconfirmed reports of killings of
ethnic Albanians in Srbica over the weekend.
Mr. Selimi said that he had heard about six deaths
at Serbian police hands in Srbica on Saturday, but that he had only personally
interviewed one witness. She told him that her husband had been shot in front
of her and her children, he said.
A teacher, Sabit Veliki, whose family lives in
Pristina, was killed in Srbica on Saturday, according to the chief editor of
the Albanian language daily Koha Ditore. The editor, Baton Haxhiu, said he had
interviewed a man arrested with the teacher and later released.
The Council for the Defense of Human Rights and
Freedom in Pristina has collected a list of 15 men reported arrested or missing
by their relatives.
Without intervention from the West, Mr. Selimi
said, the Serbian offensive would escalate and sweep not just the Drenica
region but the whole province.
But he maintained that it could not defeat the
Kosovo force. "We will be here no matter how they react," he said.
"We will hang on as long as we can. Kosovo never belonged to the Serbs.
The Albanians will be here always."
Violence exploded in Pristina late tonight when two
attacks occurred on an ethnic Albanian cafe and a restaurant. One person was
reported killed and several wounded. A heavy police presence scared people off
the streets amid reports of beatings and harassment of civilians.
http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: March 23, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: Like
this little boy forced to leave home and these patients at a clinic run by a
French relief agency called Doctors of the World, ethnic Albanians throughout
the Drenica region sought help and safety yesterday. LIVES LOST -- Serbian
police units set fires across the Drenica region of Kosovo yesterday, leaving a
trail of dead livestock and smoking farms. The ethnic Albanian military leader
Suleyman Selimi accused the Serbian military of using heavier weapons than ever
before. Serbian forces have stepped up their attacks since international
monitors withdrew last weekend. FAMILIES TORN -- Like this little boy forced to
leave home and these patients at a clinic run by a French relief agency called
Doctors of the World, refugees throughout the Drenica region sought help and
safety yesterday. (Photographs by Tyler Hicks for The New York Times); Serbian
police units set fires across the Drenica region of Kosovo yesterday, leaving a
trail of dead cows and smoking buildings. The Kosovo military leader, Suleyman
Selimi, accused Serbian military of using heavier weapons against his people
than ever before. (Photographs by Tyler Hicks for The New York Times)
Map of Kosovo shows location of
Poljance: Poljance was one of several villages attacked yesterday.
Copyright 1999
The New York Times Company
6 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian
(London)
March 22, 1999
Nato attack 'only
hours away';
Civilians flee as Serbian forces put Kosovo to the torch
BYLINE: CHRIS BIRD IN
GORNJA KLINA
SECTION: Guardian Home
Pages; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 941 words
THE Serbs
did not want us to see it. But there was no mistaking the hellish fires raging
in Kosovo yesterday as ethnic Albanian villages were torched by Serbian
security forces.
Our vehicle
was turned back a fifth time from a different approach when we tried to drive
to Srbica, to where about 5,000 refugees from surrounding villages had fled a
push by Serbian forces late last week.
But we could
see smoke rising in grey plumes from villages nearby. Then, as we retreated
back down the road and up a dirt track, the Serbian security forces' hidden
assault came into view. The horizon was obscured by thick smoke after Serbian
forces set light to the village of Prekaz. The fumes fanned out over the tops
of the low houses, a sea of grey which rippled up over the surrounding Cicavica
mountains.
Prekaz is
where ethnic Albanian guerrillas of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army say
the war started just over a year ago. And it is here that a noose of Serbian
tanks, armour and troops is hour by hour tightening its grip in open defiance
of the international community.
Nexhmije,
aged 35, fled Prekaz at 6am on Saturday morning. Her husband, a guerrilla, had
advised her to leave after a shell landed behind the school. She grabbed a bag
of bread and cheese and walked out of the village with her six young daughters
and eight-month-old son, heading for the next village.
She stopped
to hide in a field, thinking she might be able to return home later on. She
waited in vain for 18 hours, cowering and craddling her children flat on their
faces to escape detection by Serbian troops.
'We had to
wait until 2 this morning until the fighting ended before we could move on,'
said Nexhmije, now with relatives in the nearby town of Mitrovica. 'We had no
blankets to keep warm. Two of my daughters couldn't stop screaming, they were
so scared by the shooting.' She has no idea where her husband is. 'He is in the
hands of God.'
In the past
week, there have been 40,000 other such stories. The United Nations refugee
agency (UNHCR) says 40,000 people have been displaced by a Serbian offensive
Western states had hoped to halt last October with the threat of air strikes.
The
ceasefire and the deployment of 1,400 international monitors last October put a
flimsy lid on the Kosovo conflict. But yesterday, with the monitors evacuated,
taking with them any sense of security that remained, it was as if the lull of
the past few months had never existed. Nexhmije was on the run with her
daughters for a third time in under a year.
In Srbica,
where only last week children were playing in the snow, eight M84 tanks and 11
armoured vehicles now waited like birds of prey.For even as the monitors were
leaving on Saturday, the tanks and heavily armed Serbian police units were
sweeping in. 'We woke up on Saturday morning when we heard tank engines,' said
Miftar Korolli, aged 57. His family were barely out on the street when he said
the Serb police marched into his house.
'They asked
me what I was waiting for. I told them I was waiting for nothing, that this was
my house but they told me to get out,' Mr Korolli said. Outside, he and his son
were separated from his wife and mother.
The men were
taken to the police station, where he said some of them were kicked and beaten.
Fernando Del
Mundo, head of the UNHCR's operations in Kosovo, was yesterday trying to get
food and other aid to the new ethnic Albanian exiles. 'I saw a group of about
20 tractors and trailers with families heading for Glogovac, I saw houses
burning in Srbica. I talked to two women who said the soldiers had taken their
husbands, they were crying, and they said after the men had been taken away,
their houses were set on fire,' he said.
'This has
been going on for two weeks now. Everyone expected this to happen after the
talks were delayed and a lot of people have left.
The refugees
were still trickling out. Down from Gornja Prekaz, an ethnic Albanian family
was taking no chances and hurriedly left their home. 'We are afraid,' said Veli
Uka, aged 49. 'There are so many police on the road.'
The women,
tearful, clutched a few plastic bags of clothes and food. The family's 19
members climbed into a minibus and sped off, not waiting to fix a punctured
tyre.
You could
see Mr Uka's point. Everywhere we drove round the edges of Drenica yesterday we
saw tanks, anti-aircraft guns, soldiers, trucks: Kosovo has been turned into
one vast armed camp. Armoured cars careered down the middle of the roads. This
to crush ill-trained guerrillas with only Kalashnikovs, a few rocket-propelled
grenades and little fighting spirit. An attempt to drive down a back road past
a checkpoint on the main road failed when Serb villagers crowded round our vehicle,
swiped the keys and called the police on a walkie -talkie. Most of the Serbs,
outnumbered nine to one by ethnic Albanians in the province, have quietly been
supplied arms by the military.
As darkness
fell over the capital Pristina last night, automatic weapon fire rang out.
Despite braving grenade attacks in the past few weeks, most of the shops and
restaurants had finally given way to fear and were shuttered. The streets were
empty.
Three Serb
policemen were killed and one wounded in an apparent reprisal on a quiet street
not far from a Serbian Orthodox church. The call to prayer which floated
briefly and gently over the streets was haunting.
The last
Serb police officer to turn us away politely yesterday could not resist giving
his view on the West's air strike threat: 'I pray God that Nato bombs. Then we
could finish these Albanians.'
LOAD-DATE: April 30, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1999
Guardian Newspapers Limited
7 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian
(London)
March 18, 1999
No way out for
Nato;
Bombing will only strengthen Milosevic's hold
on Kosovo
BYLINE: ISABEL HILTON
SECTION: Guardian
Features Pages; Pg. 18
LENGTH: 765 words
THERE was a
curious reluctance to name names in yesterday's forensic report on the Racak
massacre, but the message came through loud and clear: the victims were not
guerrillas, 22 of them were killed in a gully that was so narrow that they must
have been shot at close range, the angle of the wounds on some victims
suggested that they were kneeling when they were shot and on others that they
were running away.
Despite Dr
Helena Ranta's reluctance to blame the Serbs outright - a hesitation some
reports attribute to pressure from the German government - the evidence she was
allowed to publish points, of course, to Belgrade.
There are
already loud cries of 'unfair' from the Yugoslav government. They claim that
the timing of the report - coinciding, as it does, with the Paris talks - is a
political manouevre and that there is ample evidence (provided by themselves)
that the victims were not the innocent villagers that the rest of the world
perceives. All this is wearisomely predictable.
More than
2,000 people have died in Kosovo in the past year, but then, recent history
suggests that mass death is perhaps the only spur to diplomacy in the Balkans.
The problem now is that we seem to be fatigued by the sight of mutilated
civilian corpses and lost as to how to proceed.
AFTER what
Robin Cook hailed as the diplomatic triumph of the interim settlement last
autumn, the international community sat with its fingers crossed, hoping -
against all reason and experience - that the plaster would stick. Racak was the
dismal result. Now, in Paris, with the Albanians on side, we are back where we
have been so many times before, trying to persuade Milosevic to sign a deal
that nobody believes he will keep to, under threat of Nato action that may not
happen and will achieve little if it does.
Echoes of
Bosnia, of course, are never far away. Through the miserable years of the
Balkan wars, European and American diplomacy was hampered by two things -
disagreements over troop commitment and tacit sympathy for Milosevic's desire
to prevent the fragmentation of Yugoslavia - an objective the West supported,
even while (reluctantly) being convinced that his way of achieving it was
unacceptable.By the time Nato got around to telling Milosevic, in language he
understood, that enough was enough, all sides had lost heavily. Hard to
believe, then, that the same slow-motion mistakes have been repeated, but there
are striking similarities.
The main
problem is that Europe and the United States do not want an independent Kosovo,
but seem to be doing all they can to bring it about. The US first threatened
Nato action over Kosovo in 1992. Perhaps had they meant it, they could have
reinforced the moderate Kosovo Albanians. As it was, the moderates lost ground
and now the West is forced to deal with a radical independence movement that
promises to be a difficult and unreliable partner in any deal and is fighting
for an outcome that the West does not support.
Milosevic
worked this out a long time ago. His moves in the last few weeks have been
familiar: he has built up his forces in and around Kosovo - there are now up to
21,000 Yugoslav army troops on the perimeter and up to 18,000 inside Kosovo -
six times as many as he is allowed under the October agreement. All this could
be read as preparation for a military defiance of Nato, but a more likely
explanation is that he plans an intensive assault on the KLA, similar to the
one he conducted before the interim settlement last October. Already Serb
forces are attacking a KLA area in the north and a growing number of Albanians
are being abducted, killed, and their bodies dumped at roadsides. All of this,
of course, is in breach of last autumn's deal, in which Milosevic promised to
withdraw his forces from Kosovo. That alone could trigger Nato action, let alone
the fact that Nato has now threatened it so often that there's a matter of face
involved now. But even if Nato does proceed with air strikes against Serb
military targets, it is already too late for this alone to bring a solution. If
Nato were to bomb, Milosevic's position in Belgrade will be strengthened, not
weakened, and his forces are in position to move wholesale into Kosovo, defying
Nato to come in and get him out. There will be more massacres, more marketplace
bombs, before he graciously agrees to better terms than the ones he is now
being offered.
If that is
the outcome, will the KLA still agree to any 'peace' deal the Contact Group
cobbles together and Milosevic signs? Put it this way - would you?
LOAD-DATE: April 30, 1999
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1999
Guardian Newspapers Limited
Appendix 2
Libya 2011
NOTE: 12-03-2011 to 26-03-2011
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Terms: NATO, Libya
Source: Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday;Daily News (New York);The Daily
Telegraph (London);The Guardian (London);The New York Times;The Sun;USA
Today;The Washington Post
Combined Source: Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday;Daily News (New York);The
Daily Telegraph (London);The Guardian (London);The New York Times;The Sun;USA
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|
|
1.
|
NATO Takes Lead on Libya Campaign; Obama Defends
His Policy The New
York Times, March 26, 2011 Saturday, Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg.
4, 1346 words, By STEVEN ERLANGER and ERIC SCHMITT; Steven Erlanger reported
from Brussels, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mark Landler contributed
reporting from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli, Libya.
|
2.
|
Libya: Nato to control no-fly zone after France
gives way to Turkey: Climbdown by Sarkozy ends infighting among western
allies The
Guardian (London) - Final Edition, March 25, 2011 Friday, GUARDIAN
INTERNATIONAL PAGES; Pg. 26, 912 words, Ian Traynor in Brussels, and Nicholas
Watt
|
3.
|
Libya: France gives way to Turkey as deal is
struck to put Nato in charge The Guardian (London) - Final Edition,
March 25, 2011 Friday, GUARDIAN INTERNATIONAL PAGES; Pg. 27, 685 words, Ian
Traynor in Brussels, and Nicholas Watt
|
4.
|
NATO To Assume New Role In Libya The New York Times, March 25,
2011 Friday, Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 9, 1193 words, By
ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK; Elisabeth Bumiller reported from
Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli, Libya. Reporting was
contributed by Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya; Thom Shanker from Cairo;
Alan Cowell, Scott Sayare and Steven Erlanger from Paris; and Mark Landler
and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
|
5.
|
As NATO takes over in Libya, Gadhafi's fate
remains fuzzy; OUR VIEW USA TODAY, March 25, 2011
Friday, EDIT; Pg. 10A, 573 words
|
6.
|
Comment: There's nothing moral about Nato's
intervention in Libya: The western attacks risk a bloody stalemate and are a
threat to the region. The alternative has to be a negotiated settlement The Guardian (London) - Final
Edition, March 24, 2011 Thursday, GUARDIAN COMMENT AND DEBATE PAGES; Pg. 37,
1077 words, Seumas Milne
|
7.
|
Front: Libya On the ground: Jets prepare to
deploy despite ceasefire by Tripoli regime: Warplanes head for Mediterranean
as Nato envoys meet to back no-fly zone The Guardian (London) - Final Edition,
March 19, 2011 Saturday, GUARDIAN HOME PAGES; Pg. 4, 867 words, Richard
Norton-Taylor Nick Hopkins Robert Booth
|
1 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
March 26, 2011
Saturday
Late Edition - Final
NATO Takes Lead on
Libya Campaign; Obama Defends His Policy
BYLINE: By STEVEN ERLANGER and ERIC SCHMITT; Steven
Erlanger reported from Brussels, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mark Landler
contributed reporting from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli,
Libya.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1346 words
BRUSSELS -- Resolving internal divisions, NATO
prepared on Friday to assume leadership from the United States of the military
campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces as allied officials scrambled
to work out the precise command arrangements, senior NATO and American
officials said.
The agreement came as President Obama, facing
criticism from his political opponents, began trying to seize control of his
message about the Libyan conflict. On Friday, he defended his handling of the
Libya crisis in a White House meeting and conference call with more than 20
Democrat and Republican Congressional leaders.
The White House also announced that he would give a
speech to the nation on Libya on Monday night. And his two top foreign policy
advisers -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates -- prepared to appear on the Sunday talk shows to explain the
administration's Libya policy.
Mr. Obama has come under criticism from Republicans
in Congress for failing to provide a coherent explanation of the operation,
which is in its seventh day. Administration officials portray it as an already
successful effort to prevent the Libyan leader from attacking his own people.
But the military campaign has been dogged by friction over its ultimate mission,
and which of the disparate countries involved should command the operation.
The allied effort won rare military commitments in
the Arab world on Friday when two Qatari fighter jets flew on patrol with the
Western allies and the United Arab Emirates said that it would send warplanes
to join them.
NATO had agreed late Thursday that it would take
over not only command and control of the no-fly zone, but also the much riskier
campaign to protect civilians through aggressive coalition airstrikes on Colonel
Qaddafi's troops on the ground, the officials said. Details of the second part
of the operation will be worked out in a formal military planning document in
time for a meeting of coalition foreign ministers in London on Tuesday, the
officials said.
''It's been handed over to military planners,''
Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said on Friday.
As the air campaign entered its seventh day, allied
warplanes and Tomahawk cruise missiles pounded Libyan air defenses,
communications posts and troops. At the Pentagon, Vice Adm. William E. Gortney,
the director of the joint staff, said that the airstrikes were making it harder
for Colonel Qaddafi to supply and communicate with his troops, but that they
had not yet seriously weakened the Libyan military forces or pushed them to
heed the Americans' call to defy their leader.
In an apparent bid to bolster the loyalty of
Colonel Qaddafi's armed forces, Libyan state television said Friday without
details that the military would promote all its officers, implying a raise in
pay. A government spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, said that similar raises were
carried out during earlier crises, like Colonel Qaddafi's failed war with Chad
in the late 1980s.
The London meeting of coalition foreign ministers
and subsequent meetings will deal with the larger political campaign, including
sanctions and other measures intended to put more pressure on Colonel Qaddafi
to quit. It will also have representation from the United Nations, the Arab
League and the African Union. But that meeting of what the British are calling
''the contact group'' will not be running the military side of the operation,
the officials said.
Left unresolved, of course, is how long the
campaign will last, because Colonel Qaddafi shows no sign of obeying the United
Nations Security Council resolution demanding a cease-fire and refuses to pull
his troops back to barracks. At the same time, the ragtag opposition may not be
strong enough, even with the coalition's air power, to force the colonel from
his redoubt in Tripoli.
NATO officials said Friday they thought the no-fly
zone would last about three months, but Pentagon officials privately expressed
fears that it could last much longer.
A sticking point in the negotiations to broadening
NATO's control was what military officials call the ''no-drive zone,'' the
bombing of Colonel Qaddafi's ground forces, tanks and artillery outside Libyan
cities. France wanted to have a clearer leadership role in the campaign, while
Turkey was concerned about the operation's evolving into one involving ground
troops. Many countries, like Italy and Norway, however, said they would
participate only if NATO ran the entire military operation.
France was placated by the London coalition, while
Turkey's fears were allayed by putting the military campaign under the full
control of NATO, which operates only by the unanimous consent of its member
nations.
The United States, which contributes most of NATO's
military capability and traditionally dominates behind the scenes, is in this
case eager to hand off responsibility and will have more limited roles,
officials said. Reinforcing that point, Canada said Friday that one of its
officers, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, would be taking command of NATO no-fly
operations in Libya.
The United Arab Emirates agreed on Friday to commit
12 aircraft -- six F-16 and six Mirage warplanes -- to join patrols enforcing
the no-fly zone, the official Emirates News Agency reported. The United Arab
Emirates and Qatar are the only members of the 22-nation Arab League that have
committed planes to an active role in enforcing the no-fly zone. On Friday,
British and French officials said their planes had conducted assaults on
loyalist forces around the beleaguered eastern city of Ajdabiya, which controls
the approaches to the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi. Pro-Qaddafi units
have been holding their easternmost line against rebels in Ajdabiya, thwarting
any rebel advance to the west toward Tripoli, but rebel forces say they have
been trying to negotiate the withdrawal or surrender of one loyalist unit in
the strategic crossroads town.
Gene Cretz, the American ambassador to Libya, said
on Friday that the United States was in regular touch with leaders of the
Libyan opposition, and stood ready to offer them political training and legal
advice as they try to form a provisional administration. But Mr. Cretz said the
United States had not yet decided whether to recognize the rebels as the
legitimate government of Libya, saying that raised legal questions.
He also said no decision had been reached on
whether to provide weapons to the rebels. ''The full gamut of potential
assistance that we might offer, both on the non-lethal and the lethal side, is
a subject of discussion within the U.S. government,'' he said.
Mr. Cretz, who left Tripoli last year amid fears
for his safety after the release by WikiLeaks of secret cables with
embarrassing details about Colonel Qaddafi, praised the so-called transitional
national council for getting off to a good start, noting that it had organized
people in rebel-held towns to provide services, and pledged its commitment to
democratic principles, human rights and women's rights.
''I don't think we're at a point where we can make
a judgment that this is a 100 percent kosher, so to speak, group,'' Mr. Cretz
said. But he added, ''the personalities that we are dealing with, the actions
that they've taken, the statements that they have made have all led us to
conclude, at least at this beginning stage, that they are a positive force and
one that we should be engaged with at this point.''
The administration has named a special envoy to the
Libyan opposition, Chris Stevens, and Mr. Cretz said he hoped Mr. Stevens would
be able to travel to Benghazi in coming days for meetings with opposition
leaders.
Mr. Cretz said officials from Colonel Qaddafi's
government had reached out to American officials in recent days. ''I'm not
exactly sure what the message is, but it clearly indicates, I think, at least
some kind of desperation,'' he said. In his conversations with Libyan
officials, Mr. Cretz said he reminded them of President Obama's warning that
they would face consequences if they did not break with Colonel Qaddafi.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: March 26, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Libyan rebels watched for coalition planes
on Friday near Ajdabiya on the road to Benghazi. Fighter jets from an Arab
nation, Qatar, flew with a Western patrol. (A4)
Despite British and French forces' attacks on
loyalist positions, the Libyan government's shelling around Ajdabiya led many
rebel fighters to flee the area on Friday. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY GORAN
TOMASEVIC/REUTERS) (A10)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company
2 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
March 25, 2011
Friday
Libya: Nato to control
no-fly zone after France gives way to Turkey: Climbdown by Sarkozy ends
infighting among western allies
BYLINE: Ian Traynor in Brussels, and Nicholas Watt
SECTION: GUARDIAN INTERNATIONAL PAGES; Pg. 26
LENGTH: 912 words
Western allies and Turkey secured a deal last night
to put the entire military campaign against Muammar Gaddafi under Nato command
by next week, UK and French sources have told the Guardian.
The US, Britain, France and Turkey agreed to put
the three-pronged offensive - a no-fly zone, an arms embargo, and air strikes -
under a Nato command umbrella, in a climbdown by France that accommodates
strong Turkish complaints about the scope and control of the campaign.
The deal appeared to end days of infighting among
western allies, but needed to be blessed by all 28 Nato member states. At the
end last night of a four-day meeting of Nato ambassadors in Brussels, Anders
Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general, said Nato had agreed to take command of
the no-fly zone from the Americans. Disputes have raged at Nato HQ every day
this week. Rasmussen contradicted leading western officials by announcing that
Nato's authority was limited to commanding the no-fly zone, but he signalled
there was more negotiation to come.
"At this moment, there will still be a
coalition operation and a Nato operation," he said. This meant Nato would
command the no-fly zone and police the arms embargo. But on the most
contentious part, air strikes and ground attacks against Gaddafi, consensus
remained elusive.
The agreement emerged from phone calls yesterday
between William Hague, the foreign secretary, Alain Juppe, the French foreign
minister, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, and Ahmet Davutoglu, the
Turkish foreign minister, following rancorous attacks from the Turkish
leadership on French ambitions to lead the anti-Gaddafi war effort.
The agreement also gives political oversight of the
military action to a committee of the international coalition in the campaign.
Since the no-fly zone and air attacks on Libya began last Saturday, Washington
has been in charge of operations, but is eager to surrender the role.
Under the scheme agreed yesterday, the transfer to
Nato will take place by the latest on Tuesday, when the parties to the
coalition gather in London for a special "contact group" conference.
French sources said the Benghazi-based Libyan rebel leadership would be in
London to attend. The conference will consist of two meetings: a war council
made up of the main governments taking part in the military action, as well as
a broader assembly including Arab and African countries devoted to Libya's
future.
Hillary Clinton welcomed the Nato decision to take
command of the Libyan operations and police the no-fly zone, and she expected
that it would eventually take over responsibility for protecting civilians,
enforcing an arms embargo and supporting the humanitarian mission. She said the
United Arab Emirates was to join Qatar in sending planes to enforce the no-fly
zone.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had tried to
diminish the role of Nato, conceded, in the face of Turkish opposition, that a
two-tier structure would run the operation: Nato "assets" will
co-ordinate all aspects, including enforcement of the no-fly zone, protecting
civilians through air strikes, and enforcing a UN arms embargo. Juppe agreed
that Nato would be in control of the entire operation.
Political oversight will be in the hands of a
committee of a smaller number of countries involved in the military campaign.
There had been bitter attacks from the Turkish
government on Sarkozy's leadership of the campaign, accusing the French of
lacking a conscience in their conduct of operations, with criticism from the
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the president, Abdullah Gul.
France had insisted on Tuesday that the operations
would be "non-Nato". Turkey was emphatically behind sole Nato control
of the operations. In Istanbul, Erdogan said: "I wish that those who only
see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in (Libya's)
direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now
on."
This week, Claude Gueant, the French interior
minister who was previously Sarkozy's chief adviser, angered the Muslim world
by stating that the French president was "leading a crusade" to stop
Gaddafi massacring Libyans. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin also used the
word in reference to air strikes on Libya.
Yesterday Erdogan said: "Those who use such
hair-raising, frightening terms that fuel clashes of civilisations, or those
who even think of them, need to immediately evaluate their own
conscience."
The Turks are incensed at repeated snubs by
Sarkozy. The French failed to invite Turkey to last Saturday's summit in Paris,
which preceded the air strikes. French fighters taking off from Corsica struck
the first blows. The Turkish government accused Sarkozy of launching not only
the no-fly zone, but his presidential re-election campaign.
The dispute over Libya appears highly personal.
Sarkozy went to Turkey last month for the first time in four years as
president, but the visit was repeatedly delayed and then downgraded from a
state presidential event. He stayed in Turkey for five hours. "Relations
between Turkey and France deserve more than this," complained Erdogan.
"I will speak with frankness. We wish to host him as president of France.
But he is coming as president of the G20, not as that of France."
Captions:
Air combat
A French Rafale fighter returns to base in Corsica
after a Libyan trainer plane was shot down with a missile as it was coming in
to land at an airbase in Misrata within the no-fly zone
Photograph: Francois Mori/AP
LOAD-DATE: March 25, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2011 Guardian Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
3 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
March 25, 2011
Friday
Libya: France gives
way to Turkey as deal is struck to put Nato
in charge
BYLINE: Ian Traynor in Brussels, and Nicholas Watt
SECTION: GUARDIAN INTERNATIONAL PAGES; Pg. 27
LENGTH: 685 words
Western allies and Turkey last night reached a
breakthrough deal to put the entire military campaign against Muammar Gaddafi
under Nato command by next week, senior UK and French sources told the
Guardian.
The deal being finalised last night at Nato
headquarters in Brussels gives political oversight of the military action to a
committee of the international coalition involved in the campaign.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had tried to
diminish the role of Nato, conceded, in the face of determined Turkish opposition,
that a new two-tier structure will be established to run the operation:
Nato "assets" will be used to co-ordinate
all aspects of the military campaign against Libya, including enforcement of
the no-fly zone, protecting civilians through air strikes and enforcing a UN
arms embargo. Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, conceded that Nato
would be in control of the entire operation.
Political oversight will be in the hands of a
Nato-led committee modelled on the body that oversees the International
Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan.
The breakthrough came in a conference call
yesterday between Hillary Clinton, William Hague, Alain Juppe and their Turkish
counterpart. The agreement reached by the four key countries was put to a
meeting of Nato ambassadors.
Hague had told MPs he was hopeful of a breakthough.
He said: "We have made a great deal of progress.
"We should understand this is a new coalition,
put together very quickly for obvious reasons last week, and so there are bound
to be issues to sort out in its management. But we are getting through those
pretty well."
Earlier, Turkey attacked Sarkozy's and France's
leadership of the military campaign, accusing the French of lacking a
conscience in their conduct of operations. The vitriolic criticism, from the
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the president, Abdullah Gul, followed
attacks from the Turkish government earlier this week and signalled an
orchestrated attempt by Ankara to wreck Sarkozy's plans to lead the air
campaign against Gaddafi.
With France insisting that Nato should not be put
in political charge of the UN-mandated air campaign, Turkey has come out
emphatically behind sole Nato control of the operations.
The clash between Turkey and France over Libya is
underpinned by acute frictions between Erdogan and Sarkozy, both impetuous and
mercurial leaders who revel in the limelight, by fundamental disputes over
Ankara's EU ambitions, and by economic interests in north Africa.
Using incendiary language directed at France in a
speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said: "I wish that those who only see oil,
gold mines and underground treasures when they look in (Libya's) direction,
would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on."
President Gul reinforced the Turkish view that
France and others were being driven primarily by economic interests. "The
aim (of the air campaign) is not the liberation of the Libyan people," he
said. "There are hidden agendas and different interests."
Earlier this week, Claude Gueant, the French
interior minister who was previously Sarkozy's chief adviser, outraged the
Muslim world by stating that the French president was "leading a
crusade" to stop Gaddafi massacring Libyans.
Erdogan denounced the use of the word crusade
yesterday, blaming those, France chief among them, who are opposed to Turkey
joining the EU.
The Turks are incensed at repeated snubs by
Sarkozy. The French failed to invite Turkey to last Saturday's summit in Paris
which presaged the air strikes.
The dispute over Libya appears highly personal,
revealing the bad blood simmering between the French president and the Turkish
prime minister.
Sarkozy went to Turkey last month for the first
time in four years as president. But the visit was repeatedly delayed and then
downgraded from a state presidential event. He stayed in Turkey for five hours.
Sarkozy has declared loudly that culturally Turkey does not belong in Europe,
but in the Middle East.
Captions:
Erdogan was especially offended by a French
minister's use of the word 'crusade' in reference
to the attacks
LOAD-DATE: March 25, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2011 Guardian Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
4 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
March 25, 2011
Friday
Late Edition - Final
NATO To Assume New
Role In Libya
BYLINE: By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK;
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from
Tripoli, Libya. Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya;
Thom Shanker from Cairo; Alan Cowell, Scott Sayare and Steven Erlanger from
Paris; and Mark Landler and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 9
LENGTH: 1193 words
WASHINGTON -- NATO will assume leadership from the
United States of patrolling the skies over Libya but the military alliance
remains divided over who will command aggressive coalition airstrikes on Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi's ground troops, NATO and American officials said Thursday.
After a day of confusion and conflicting reports
out of NATO headquarters in Brussels, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
announced late Thursday in Washington that NATO had agreed to lead the allies
in maintaining the no-fly zone. Effectively, that means that planes from NATO
countries will fly missions over Libya with little fear of being shot down
since Tomahawk missiles, most of them American, largely destroyed Colonel
Qaddafi's air defenses and air force last weekend.
But NATO and American officials said NATO had
balked at assuming responsibility, at least for now, of what military officials
call the ''no-drive zone,'' which would entail bombing Colonel Qaddafi's ground
forces, tanks and artillery that are massing outside crucial Libyan cities, and
doing so without inflicting casualties on civilians.
Late Thursday night a senior Obama administration
official insisted that NATO had agreed to assume responsibility for the no-fly
and ''no-drive'' zones but said the details remained to be worked out. The
official's statements appeared to contradict those of the secretary-general of
NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said in Brussels earlier Thursday that NATO
was still considering whether to take on ''broader responsibility'' for the
war.
A NATO official said that two member nations,
Germany and Turkey, objected to NATO participating in strikes that they
consider beyond the mandate of the United Nations Security Council resolution
that authorized the military action in Libya.
The announcement of at least a partial handoff of
responsibility to NATO came only five days after the conflict started and
reflected the intense pressure on President Obama to deliver on his promise
that the United States would step back ''within days, not weeks'' from command
of the effort.
Mrs. Clinton, in her comments on Thursday night,
said the United States was already cutting back its role. ''As expected, we are
already seeing a significant reduction in the number of U.S. planes,'' she
said.
At the Pentagon earlier Thursday, Vice Adm. William
E. Gortney, the director of the joint staff, said that American fighter jets
would continue bombing Libya and that American surveillance planes would
provide reconnaissance even after NATO, in partnership with other coalition
members, assumes leadership of the coalition. He also said the United States
would provide airborne refueling tankers for coalition warplanes as well as
other logistical support.
As the United States and its European allies tried
to work out a coherent agreement for control of the war, the allies continued
to pound Libyan ground forces, tanks and artillery outside three key Libyan
cities -- Misurata, Ajdabiya and Zintan. Admiral Gortney said the airstrikes
were aimed at cutting off the communications and supply lines of the Libyan
forces. The coalition was not bombing inside the cities to avoid inflicting
civilian casualties, he said.
Admiral Gortney said the coalition would continue
to attack Libyan ground forces as long as the Libyan forces threatened the
lives of Libyan civilians. He said the United States and its allies had
repeatedly told the Libyan forces to cease and desist -- he did not say whether
the communications were by radio, leaflets or other means -- and that they had
been ignored.
''Our message to regime troops is simple: stop
fighting, stop killing your own people, stop obeying the orders of Colonel
Qaddafi,'' Admiral Gortney said. ''To the degree that you defy these demands,
we will continue to hit you and make it more difficult for you to keep going.''
In Libya, it appeared that the barrage of coalition
airstrikes -- the Pentagon said there had been 49 strikes on Libyan targets on
Thursday -- had begun to shift momentum from the forces loyal to Colonel
Muammar el-Qaddafi to the rebels opposing him.
In Misurata, rebels said they were feeling
reinvigorated by a second night airstrikes against the Qaddafi forces that have
besieged them. The rebels said that they continued to battle a handful of
Qaddafi gunmen in the city but that the armored units and artillery surrounding
the city appeared to have pulled back, their supply and communication lines cut
off by the airstrikes.
Earlier on Thursday a French Rafale fighter jet
fired on a Libyan warplane that had been detected by reconnaissance aircraft
flying above the embattled city of Misurata, the French Defense Ministry said
in a statement. The plane was hit by a missile shortly after landing at a
nearby military airbase, the Defense Ministry said.
At a news conference in Tripoli, the Libyan
capital, Khalid Kaim, the deputy foreign minister, issued sweeping denials that
the rebels had made battle gains. Contradicting the reports of residents in Misurata,
Mr. Kaim said the Qaddafi government had controlled the city for a week
''except for pockets of violence.''
Again contradicting residents, he said that utility
companies had turned on the power and water, and he faulted the rebels and
international airstrikes for turning them off.
Mr. Kaim also denied that French fighters had shot
down a Qaddafi warplane, saying that no Libyan warplane had taken off in days
in observance of the United Nations resolution.
Rebels in Libya said that Qaddafi warships that had
closed the port in Misurata ( had departed, opening a vital supply outlet and
allowing them to make arrangements with an international aid group, Doctors
Without Borders, to evacuate 50 of their wounded by boat to Malta on Sunday. A
rebel spokesman in Misurata said that only two residents were wounded on
Thursday, after 109 deaths over the previous six days.
In Washington, Mrs. Clinton said that a group
supported by the Agency for International Development would soon be able to
provide humanitarian relief to Libyan civilians, but she gave no details.
In what was potentially one of the first signs of
breakdown in discipline among the Qaddafi forces, rebels near the eastern city
of Ajdabiya said they were in negotiations with a unit of pro-Qaddafi troops
who have offered to abandon their position and withdraw further west. The unit,
stationed at the northern entrance to the city, had lost contact with its
commanders, said a rebel spokesman, Col. Ahmed Omar Bani.
The negotiations, which were being conducted
through a local imam, hit a snag on the issue of whether the troops would keep
their weaponry and withdraw further west or simply surrender, as the rebels
were demanding. ''We are trying to lead them to peace,'' Colonel Bani said.
The rebels have made inflated claims in the past,
and these reports have not been corroborated by independent sources. As rebel
leaders continued to plead for weapons, along with communications and
night-vision equipment from abroad, they said that no foreign experts had been
sent to help train their fighters. ''The only foreign expert we use is Google
Earth,'' Colonel Bani said.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: March 25, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Rebel fighters near Ajdabiya, on Thursday.
''We are trying to lead them to peace,'' one rebel officer said of negotiations
with a government military unit. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS) MAPS:
Rebel forces reported making gains after coalition airstrikes.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company
5 of 7 DOCUMENTS
USA TODAY
March 25, 2011
Friday
FINAL EDITION
As NATO takes over in Libya, Gadhafi's fate remains fuzzy;
OUR VIEW
SECTION: EDIT; Pg. 10A
LENGTH: 573 words
A week after the U.S. and its allies attacked
Libya, progress is evident, but the outcome remains predictably and troublingly
fuzzy.
In purely military terms, the news is good. Moammar
Gadhafi's forces are still attacking rebel strongholds, but there seems little
likelihood that they can stand up to firepower from NATO, which is moving to
assume control of the still-murky mission.
On Thursday, the U.S. military proclaimed the
Libyan air force crippled, and armored columns that had been crushing
rebellious regions are under steady attack. Sooner or later, if the allies
remain aggressive rather than limiting themselves to the inadequate no-fly
zone, Libyan ground forces should run out of tanks, heavy weapons, ammunition,
fuel, willpower, or all five. A naval blockade and attacks on airfields,
meanwhile, might cut off the flow of mercenaries Gadhafi has used to supplement
his army.
But NATO's ability to crush an inferior military
force has never been in doubt. The question is what will happen once civilian
populations are no longer under attack, either because Gadhafi's forces are
destroyed or because the besieged Libyan leader recognizes that a strategic
retreat could limit and potentially split the alliance attacking him.
Much as the U.S. and its allies want Gadhafi gone,
they are not fully committed to evicting him. Therein lies a quandary. The
United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing "all necessary
measures" is confined to protecting civilians, and the Arab League, whose
support is critical politically, has already objected to the ferocity of the
attacks.
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it
Thursday evening, the U.S. role is "limited in time and scope."
When that limit is reached, it's safe to assume
Gadhafi will no longer control eastern Libya, or even rebellious parts of the
west. But he could retain power over a vast area surrounding Tripoli, where he
enjoys popular support.
On their own, the rebels seem unlikely to depose
the dictator. It has become increasingly clear that they are far less
formidable than they once seemed, perhaps having as few as a thousand trained
soldiers. So in the worst case, Gadhafi would still have means to cause
familiar problems, and the freed area of Libya would be fractured among various
tribes contesting for power and settling scores, creating the potential for
civil war or a failed state.
To be sure, there are brighter scenarios, and the
situation remains fluid.
The Obama administration says its policy is that
Gadhafi should go, and while it doesn't say how or when, it is pursuing that
goal by several means: embargoes, sanctions and blockades; freezing of Libyan
assets worth billions of dollars; blunt warnings to people around Gadhafi that
they will be held accountable for war crimes; and, presumably, inducements to
Gadhafi to leave voluntarily. In doing this, the U.S. has unusually broad
international support.
Such tactics sometimes succeed, but they tend to
take a long time. After the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein survived 12 years
of sanctions and no-fly zones before the U.S.-led invasion deposed him in 2003.
South Africa's apartheid regime lasted even longer despite broad international
condemnation.
That is not reason for the U.S. to plunge into
full-scale war. It is a reminder that removing dictators is never as simple and
easy as imposing a no-fly zone might seem, and it's always hard to be confident
about what comes next.
LOAD-DATE: March 25, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, B/W, Aris Messinis, AFP/Getty Images
DOCUMENT-TYPE: EDITORIAL
PUBLICATION-TYPE: NEWSPAPER
Copyright 2011 Gannett Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
6 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
March 24, 2011
Thursday
Comment: There's nothing moral about Nato's
intervention in Libya: The western attacks
risk a bloody stalemate and are a threat to the region. The alternative has to
be a negotiated settlement
BYLINE: Seumas Milne
SECTION: GUARDIAN COMMENT AND DEBATE PAGES; Pg. 37
LENGTH: 1077 words
It's as if it's a habit they can't kick. Once again
US, British and other Nato forces are bombarding an Arab country with cruise
missiles and bunker-busting bombs. Both David Cameron and Barack Obama insist
this is nothing like Iraq. There will be no occupation. The attack is solely to
protect civilians.
But eight years after they launched their
shock-and-awe devastation of Baghdad and less than a decade since they invaded
Afghanistan, the same western forces are in action against yet another Muslim
state, incinerating soldiers and tanks on the ground and killing civilians in
the process.
Supported by a string of other Nato states, almost
all of which have taken part in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, the US,
Britain and France are clinging to an Arab fig leaf, in the shape of a Qatari
airforce that has yet to arrive, to give some regional credibility to their
intervention in Libya.
As in Iraq and Afghanistan, they insist
humanitarian motives are crucial. And as in both previous interventions, the
media are baying for the blood of a pantomime villain leader, while regime
change is quickly starting to displace the stated mission. Only a western
solipsism that regards it as normal to be routinely invading other people's
countries in the name of human rights protects Nato governments from serious
challenge.
But the campaign is already coming apart. At home,
public opinion is turning against the onslaught: in the US, it's opposed by a
margin of two-to-one; in Britain, 43% say they are against the action, compared
with 35% in support - an unprecedented level of discontent for the first days
of a British military campaign, including Iraq.
On the ground, the western attacks have failed to
halt the fighting and killing, or force Colonel Gaddafi's forces into submission;
Nato governments have been squabbling about who's in charge; and British
ministers and generals have fallen out about whether the Libyan leader is a
legitimate target.
Last week, Nato governments claimed the support of
"the international community" on the back of the UN resolution and an
appeal from the dictator-dominated Arab League. In fact, India, Russia, China,
Brazil and Germany all refused to support the UN vote and have now criticised
or denounced the bombing - as has the African Union and the Arab League itself.
As its secretary general, Amr Moussa, argued, the
bombardment clearly went well beyond a no-fly zone from the outset. By
attacking regime troops fighting rebel forces on the ground, the Nato
governments are unequivocally intervening in a civil war, tilting the balance
of forces in favour of the Benghazi-based insurrection.
Cameron insisted on Monday in the Commons that the
air and sea attacks on Libya had prevented a "bloody massacre in
Benghazi". The main evidence was Gaddafi's threat to show "no
mercy" to rebel fighters who refused to lay down their arms and to hunt
them down "house to house". In reality, for all the Libyan leader's
brutality and Saddam Hussein-style rhetoric, he was scarcely in any position to
carry out his threat.
Given that his ramshackle forces were unable to
fully retake towns like Misrata or even Ajdabiya when the rebels were on the
back foot, the idea that they would have been able to overrun an armed and
hostile city of 700,000 people any time soon seems far-fetched.
But on the other side of the Arab world, in
western-armed Bahrain, security forces are right now staging night raids on
opposition activists, house by house, and scores have gone missing as the
dynastic despots carry out a bloody crackdown on the democratic movement. And
last Friday more than 50 peaceful demonstrators were shot dead on the streets
of Sana'a by government forces in western-backed Yemen.
Far from imposing a no-fly zone to bring the
embattled Yemeni regime to heel, US special forces are operating across the
country in support of the government. But then US, British and other Nato
forces are themselves responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Last week more than 40 civilians were killed by a US drone attack
in Pakistan, while over 60 died last month in one US air attack in Afghanistan.
The point isn't just that western intervention in
Libya is grossly hypocritical. It's that such double standards are an integral
part of a mechanism of global power and domination that stifles hopes of any
credible international system of human rights protection.
A la carte humanitarian intervention, such as in
Libya, is certainly not based on feasibility or the degree of suffering or
repression, but on whether the regime carrying it out is a reliable ally or
not. That's why the claim that Arab despots will be less keen to follow
Gaddafi's repressive example as a result of the Nato intervention is entirely
unfounded. States such as Saudi Arabia know very well they're not at the slightest
risk of being targeted unless they're in danger of collapse.
There's also every chance that, as in Kosovo in
1999, the attack on Libya could actually increase repression and killing, while
failing to resolve the underlying conflict. It's scarcely surprising that,
outgunned by Gaddafi's forces, the Libyan rebel leadership should be grateful
for foreign military support. But any Arab opposition movement that comes to
power courtesy of Tornadoes and Tomahawks will be fatally compromised, as would
the independence of the country itself.
For the western powers, knocked off balance by the
revolutionary Arab tide, intervention in the Libyan conflict offers both the
chance to put themselves on the "right side of history" and to secure
their oil interests in a deeply uncertain environment.
Unless the Libyan autocrat is assassinated or his
regime implodes, the prospect must now be of a bloody stalemate and a
Kurdistan-style Nato protectorate in the east. There's little sympathy for
Gaddafi in the Arab world, but already influential figures such as the Lebanese
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have denounced the intervention as a return
to the "days of occupation, colonisation and partition".
The urgent alternative is now for countries such as
Egypt and Turkey, with a far more legitimate interest in what goes on in Libya
and links to all sides, to take the lead in seeking a genuine ceasefire, an end
to outside interference and a negotiated political settlement. There is nothing
moral about the Nato intervention in Libya - it is a threat to the entire
region and its people.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
LOAD-DATE: March 24, 2011
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2011 Guardian Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
7 of 7 DOCUMENTS
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
March 19, 2011
Saturday
Front: Libya On the ground: Jets
prepare to deploy despite ceasefire by Tripoli regime: Warplanes head for
Mediterranean as Nato envoys meet to back
no-fly zone
BYLINE: Richard Norton-Taylor Nick Hopkins Robert Booth
SECTION: GUARDIAN HOME PAGES; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 867 words
British Tornado and Typhoon ground attack aircraft
are expected to fly to bases in the Mediterranean today as Britain, France and
the US step up military pressure on Colonel Gaddafi despite his announcement of
a ceasefire.
The UK is also expected to set up a joint command
centre with the US and France to co-ordinate operations that will be supported
by a number of other countries, including Canada and Denmark. In further
evidence of mounting determination to confront Gaddafi, ambassadors from Nato's
28 member countries are due to meet today to lend added support to the
UN-backed plans for a no-fly zone.
Nato also emphasised humanitarian operations, but
suggestions that ground troops from Britain and other countries could be
deployed in Libya were dismissed last night.
"The absolute priority is to enforce the
no-fly zone, and to secure maritime supply routes," said a defence source.
"Nothing else is in the mix at this stage."
Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen said the UN
resolution sent "a strong and clear message from the entire international
community" to the Gaddafi regime to stop his "systematic violence
against the people of Libya immediately".
To this end, an array of other British military
assets, including reconnaissance aircraft and air-refuelling tankers, will be
deployed to bases in the Mediterranean. Military commanders in the UK have
called the entire effort Operation Ellamy.
Though the MoD never talks about special forces
operations, it is understood that SAS and SBS soldiers are already on the
ground in Libya, providing information on likely first targets for any bombing
raids. They could include airfields, supply routes and Libya's anti-aircraft
defence batteries. "Any operations will be highly targeted to ensure that
civilian casualties are avoided," said the source.
Yesterday it became clear that the complexity of
co-ordinating joint operations with so many countries would stymie any immediate
plans for air strikes to help the rebels. One strategic priority was to find a
way of binding in Arab help for any attacks, even though this is likely only to
be at a logistical and support level.
The prime minister told the Commons yesterday morning
that British Tornado and Typhoon aircraft were within hours of being deployed.
However, Whitehall sources later admitted that no planes had left the UK, and
nor were they likely to until the weekend.
The day began with no clarity over the command
structure for any operations - and whether they would be led or supported by
Nato. These details were being frantically developed in the hours after the UN
resolution was passed. General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff,
worked through Thursday night trying to secure agreement over who would do what
and when, before attending the Cabinet meeting in Downing Street.
He has been liaising closely with Air Marshall Sir
Stuart Peach, chief of joint operations, who is based at the permanent joint
headquarters of the three services in Northwood, to the north-west of
London.The most likely scenario is that British fighters will be stationed at
the British sovereign base at Akrotiri in Cyprus, where the RAF already has
E3-D long-range air surveillance aircraft that are monitoring Libyan airspace.
Nato is also operating 24-hour surveillance of
Libya with Awacs reconnaissance aircraft based in Germany. British fighters may
also be stationed at the Nato airbase at Sigonella in Sicily - Canada is
sending six fighters there.
The Royal Navy still has two ships in international
waters off Libya - the frigates HMS Cumberland and HMS Westminster. There are
no plans to increase the number at this stage.
However, the navy is working up a response force
task group, which will include up to six different support and warships. That
may be deployed in the weeks to come, sources said.
The US already has a strong naval presence in the
Mediterranean: a battle group of five vessels led by the ageing aircraft
carrier USS Enterprise includes the nuclear-powered submarine USS Providence
and the destroyer USS Mason.
The USS Kearsarge is also in the area with a
contingent of US marines on board while the USS Mason, a guided missile
destroyer, was in port in Haifa, northern Israel on Wednesday.
"Surveillance will be 60% of the strategy if
the plan is to dissuade Libyan aircraft from taking off," said Professor
Trevor Taylor, head of the centre for defence management and leadership at
Cranfield University. "And ground surveillance will be much more important
still if the Libyans start using armoured vehicles because that will multiply
the number of targets."
Barak Seener, a Middle East expert at the Royal
United Services Institute, added: "Symbolically it's very important to
include an Arab element in any attacks.
"Logistically they cannot provide very much,
but it is important as a way of countering the accusation that this is an
intervention which is colonialist and imperialist in nature."
Diplomats have said Arab countries that could participate
in possible strikes might include Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Captions:
Libya Foreign minister Moussa Koussa addresses a
press conference
Libya A checkpoint on the road from Benghazi to the
front line
LOAD-DATE: March 19, 2
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