Russia's reaction to Kosovo
By Bronwyn McLaren Posted Wed, Sep 1 1999
NATO’s intervention in Kosovo propelled Russia into the throes of anti-Western hysteria. The U.S. Embassy was splattered with paint and eggs, and the sidewalk outside crawled with protesters. Politicians from across the spectrum condemned NATO actions, and some warned that Russia was next on the hit list. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov accused NATO of “genocide.” The popular Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper even suggested that President Bill Clinton had launched airstrikes as a result of sexual frustration and appealed to Monica Lewinsky to intervene.
In the week following the launch of airstrikes, the Russian media provided a strong pro-Serbian slant to their coverage. For once in post-Soviet Russia, there was a common enemy: NATO.
Much was made of Russia’s ethnic and traditional religious ties to Serbia, and footage focused on Serbs under the threat of NATO attack. The images of Albanian refugees fleeing ethnic-cleansing campaigns in Kosovo were markedly absent.
“Russians are ignorant about the roots of this conflict,” says Andrei Piontkovsky, a political scientist and head of the Center for Strategic Studies.
Piontkovsky wrote an article blasting Russia for not taking the “victims’” side in the conflict and warning ominously of reactionaries using the moment to restore their grip on the country. Only one newspaper, the feisty Novaya Gazeta, decided to run the story. Editors took out only one comment, in which Piontkovsky compared Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign against the Kosovar Albanians to Russia’s bloody experience in breakaway Chechnya.
Then, two weeks into the conflict, the influential news and analysis show Itogi (on NTV, Russia’s only private television network) broadcast grim footage of Albanian civilian refugees murdered by Serb militias.
The show’s respected anchor, Yevgeny Kiselyev, who also serves on NTV’s board of directors, says they decided to air the footage in response to the increasing threat of Russian communists and other nationalist groups profiting from the anti-NATO hysteria.
Other stations such as the state-run RTR and ORT channels then increased their coverage of Serb atrocities. Oleg Panfilov, a media analyst at The Glasnost Defense Foundation, says, however, that NTV was the only station providing Russians with objective coverage. Five or six prominent newspapers, including Izvestiya, Kommersant Daily and Novaya Gazeta, also strove for objectivity in their coverage.
Panfilov, who compiled an analysis of Russian reporting of the Chechen war, adds that much biased coverage arises from the poor financing of the Russian media after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most journalists are simply unable to report from the scene because they lack the financial resources of their Western colleagues. Instead, he says, they fill in the gaps with analysis and commentary. That leads to propaganda, he says.
An April survey of 1,800 people, conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Fund, found that only 14 percent of Russians believed NATO was acting to prevent atrocities committed against Kosovar Albanians. The majority, 56 percent, said NATO’s motivations were strategic military objectives. Many similar conspiracy theories have surfaced in the Russian press.
Others, however, disagree about the existence of bias in Russian coverage of Kosovo. They point out that many of the larger papers and television stations did in fact find the money to send their own reporters to Yugoslavia. Russian reporting, they say, is no more biased than that of their Western colleagues, especially those from the United States.
Masha Lipman, deputy editor of the weekly newsmagazine Itogi, which is published in cooperation with Newsweek, says her magazine sent a reporter not only to Belgrade but also to the refugee camps and the troubled region Montenegro. She says the magazine also translated a wide range of Western opinion, including Henry Kissinger’s condemnation of NATO actions, to show readers the diversity of opinion in America.
“I don’t think the (Russian) coverage has been as biased as most people expected,” Lipman says. “Ninety percent of Russians are against NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia. That is a consensus unheard of in this country. Russian reporters and editors share the opinions of their fellow countrymen.”
In another survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Fund in April, only 7 percent of Russians said they thought the media were reporting the issue with a pro-Milosevic slant. Twenty-two percent said the reporting reflected Russia’s internal political interests, but 44 percent said the media were objectively reporting the situation. The Communist-dominated Duma doesn’t agree. In May it lambasted the country’s media for what it called biased, NATO-influenced coverage of the war. It called on President Yeltsin and the Cabinet to rid Russia’s broadcasts of “propaganda” and to limit the use of television and written material provided by Western news agencies and television networks.
“The biased coverage of the Balkan conflict apparently reflects NATO’s desire to use the Russian media for propaganda purposes in order to justify the bloc’s aggression against the Yugoslav Republic,” the Duma said in a resolution approved by a 260-0 vote. Itogi’s Lipman, however, says the cash-strapped Russian government, which recently underwent yet another Cabinet reshuffle and appointed the fourth prime minister in little over a year, is in no position to influence journalists. “(Editors) may listen to their owners but not the government,” she says. “The government is too weak to collect taxes, and it is too weak to impose censorship. Why would journalists listen to them?”