Daryl wrote:Anecdotal I know, but I served with several special forces people who had served in the UN forces over there, and they were totally sickened by what they saw the Serb militias doing. Rules of engagement meant that they officially had to stand aside while atrocities were done in front of them. Unofficially in talks over a few drinks, it seems that after nightfall without TV cameras, some of these militia failed to make it back to base.
Oh, bad things happening there was never in question. I know people who were there in the Swedish Battalions that went there.
The problem is with how it was presented and getting the "full picture".
One of the reasons for Milosevich to be posthumously exonorated was because Serbians under orders, as in military and police doing what they were commanded to do were rarely responsible, it was when they did NOT follow orders that bad shit happened.
You also nailed it right off, so called "militias", really just mostly thugs that fought against the Serbian military and police about as much as against anyone else. They spent most of their time killing and stealing. Calling them "Serbian" militias however is mostly just ridiculous. Most of them couldn´t care less about the finer details of national politics.
Then there´s how just about ALL sides involved did nasty stuff. The Serbs were probably not even the worst of them, probably not even by far, yet they were portrayed as scum of the earth massmurderers and the SOLE instigators of anything bad in the area.
But hey, the likely worst of them were the plucky heroes of the story selected as USAs golden boys, so obviously THEY couldn´t be THAT bad, right?
And the blatant "fixing" the news was on a level that would have made Goebbels and Baghdad Bob envious. As an example, there was a picture that drew some fame, showing a bunch of people inside what was suggestively looking very close to a concentration camp, with the people suitably thin and despondent appearing.
This was used to further sell the notion of the Serbs being Hitler wannabes.
The problem is, that the picture in question was of refugees. And if the camera had shifted its view just a little to the side, it would have showed the fence ending in an unguarded opening big enough to drive a truck through,
sideways.
The place was a ramshackle refugee camp, but to the rest of the world it was used as proof of how evil the Serbians were, because "obviously", that was a death camp, nazi-style.
The sad thing is that the photographer even tried to get his OTHER photos posted as well, including the ones showing what it really was, but only the one picture that was the easiest to make into something it wasn´t, was actually published en masse.