Toronto, Wednesday, November 10, 1999

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Nato’s Stenographers

By Nicholas Tutor

Toronto — Retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie’s article on NATO’s exaggeration of the number of deaths in Kosovo (Where Have All The Bodies Gone? — Comment, Nov. 9) only begins to scratch the surface of Nato’s massive propaganda war, which was designed to maintain support for its bombing campaign.

But what I find even more troubling was the media’s eagerness to accept unverified allegations of mass graves and genocide. As one wry commentator said during the war, journalists acted more like “stenographers” as they simply rewrote what Nato spin doctors told them.

Thanks to Nato’s bombing of Serbia, the Albanians of Kosovo have won their freedom to hate. They are now expelling and murdering Serbs, Turks, Gypsies and non-Albanian Muslims with impunity and all under Nato’s watch. Where one form of ethnic cleansing was vigorously denounced, the current form is ignored.

The sad truth, as Lewis MacKenzie and other writers have concluded, is that Bill Clinton’s “victory” in Kosovo was a monstrous disaster. This flawed policy irreparably damaged Canada’s peacekeeping reputation by aiding an extremist group in achieving its ultimate goal of an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo.