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UNCLE CHUTZPAH AND HIS MEDIA MINIONS ON THE YUGOSLAV AND
OTHER ELECTIONS
By Edward S. Herman
There is no better place than foreign elections to observe
the brazenness of U.S. interventionism abroad, its crude
double standard as between targets and client states, and
the mainstream media's propaganda service in support of
their country's imperial policies. One feature of this
service is the media's rush to focus attention on elections
that officials declare important. Thus when the Reagan
administration was trying to validate its intervention in El
Salvador by an election to demonstrate that Salvadorans
approved our local political instrument, some 700
journalists attended that election in 1982; and attention to
Salvadoran elections only ended after the United States had
accomplished its purpose there of ending a radical threat
and installing a neoliberal regime. With the leadership of
Yugoslavia now a target of U.S. destabilization policies,
once again the media jump to attention.
Of critical importance, also, is the fact that not only is
the direction of attention determined by the official
agenda, that agenda also dictates the character and specific
content of media coverage. As their government assumes the
right to intervene in foreign elections, the media also take
this as a given, and rarely if ever mention the fact that
foreign money pumped into U.S. election campaigns is
prohibited by U.S. law. This was never discussed during the
intensive U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan elections in
the 1980s, nor has it been mentioned in connection with the
open expenditure of at least $77 million in the Yugoslavian
election this month. This silence represents a media
internalization of official imperial arrogance and
privelege.
Both the EU and United States have promised that sanctions
would be eliminated if Slobodan Milosevic is ousted by
Yugoslav voters. The United States and Nato have also
engaged in sabre rattling, with reinforcement of military
forces in the Mediterranean and troop exercises in
neighboring states like Croatia. This is justified on the
ground of the threat of an unlevel playing field and
possible fraud by Milosevic, but of course these
interventions could be said to make the playing field
unlevel, and the policy of conditioning the removal of
sanctions on a specific election result is a form of
blackmail. When George Bush did the same in 1990, promising
to lift sanctions and call off the contras only if
Nicaraguan voters voted the Sandinistas out of office in
favor of the U.S. choice, the mainstream media never once
suggested that this threat was blackmail and perhaps immoral
and vicious. And here again in the case of the Yugoslavian
election, a blackmail threat and other forms of intervention
are seen as perfectly reasonable.
In covering the Yugoslavian election the U.S. mainstream
media have repeatedly voiced the fear of U.S. officials and
opponents of Milosevic that the election was being rigged
and that the demonized leader threatened to steal the
election by fraud (e.g., Erlanger, "Fears Deepen Milosevic
Will Rig Vote," NYT, Sept. 24; Fleishman, "Under the world's
scrutiny, Yugoslavs go to the polls: Some fear Milosevic
will try stealing the election," Phila. Inquirer, Sept. 24).
This is a possibility, but was based on no evidence offered
in the media or on the scene in Yugoslavia. Two Canadian
observer delegates found the electoral conditions there as
open and free of any police interference as in any Western
elections, and delegate observers were free to visit any
polling places and representatives of all parties were
active at such polling places. The basic conditions of a
free election were much more closely met in Yugoslavia than
in El Salvador in 1982 or 1984 or in Russia in 1996 and
2000. In El Salvador, transparent voting boxes and the need
to sign in for numbered ballots compromised ballot secrecy
in a society where the army was killing 800 civilians a
month, and the left was off the ballot by virtue of
straightforward state terror and death threats--but the U.S.
mainstream media never noticed, and found these elections a
"step toward democracy."
The case of Russia is equally revealing. The Yeltsin victory
of 1996 was accomplished by serious violations of the rules
on campaign spending, bribery of journalists, media bias and
one- sidedness favoring the incumbent far more serious than
anything in Yugoslavia, and possible fraud in counting. But
in this case Western intervention was on the side of the
incumbent, so the mainstream media here never spoke of fraud
and rigging and found once again that this was "A Victory
for Russian Democracy" (NYT ed., July 6, 1996). The same
happened in Putin's election in 2000. As the appointed heir
of Yeltsin and a "reformer" (in the special Western
meaning--favoring market openings and privatization at
whatever social cost) he was approved by the United States
and its allies. The fact that he was a former KGB operative
and had achieved his popularity by killing many more Chechen
civilians than Milosevic did Albanians in Kosovo was
therefore irrelevant. Once again, therefore, the U.S. media
did not get agitated over either the ethnic cleansing or the
dubious features of the electoral process--no headlines
about the threat of rigging or fraud. This was a "reformer"!
On September 9, 2000, the Moscow Times published a massive
expose of the Putin election triumph based on a six-month
investigative effort ("And the Winner Is?"). Their reporters
traveled through the provinces talking to officials and
comparing official voting figures with those released by the
federal government. In a number of cases this yielded solid
prima facie evidence of fraud, which was supplemented by
much anecdotal evidence of stuffed and destroyed ballots.
They noted a 1.3 million inflation of voters within a few
months just prior to the election, a set of voters they
termed "Dead Souls" after Gogol's famous story, but they
noted that Gogol's were real though dead people, whereas
Putin's were just imaginery. This sensational article was
reported only in the Los Angeles Times, which did so under
the revealing title "Russia Election Chief Rejects Fraud
Claims in Presidential Vote." In other words, the paper does
not put the findings of this detailed study first, it gives
priority to an official Russian disclaimer. But this was the
relatively honest paper--the others that had found Putin's
election another step toward democracy preferred the black
hole treatment for this inconvenient news.
As one relevant sidelight, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had sent several hundred
observers to watch both the Yeltsin victory of 1996 and the
Putin election contest, both of which they declared free and
fair, although imperfect, and in the case of the Putin
election they asked Russian authorities to look into the
possible flaws! The Russian media the OSCE found
"pluralistic and diverse." Matt Taibbi points out in his
"OSCE--The Organization for Sanctioning Corrupt Elections"
(The Exile, Issue #18/99, Sept. 14-28, 2000), that the OSCE
even issued apologetics for the December 1999 Uzbeck
parliamentary election, with its 93 percent vote in favor of
the state parties, a 98 percent turnout, and a "genuinely
Soviet statistical profile" (Taibbi), but which OSCE found
"fell short" (not "fell far short") of democratic standards.
On the other hand, the OSCE found that the Serb election of
1997 was "fundamentally flawed," and that State TV there
showed a "clear and consistent bias," although "there was a
commendable effort to provide all the candidates with free
political advertising, in proportion with their
representation in parliament," and an opposition radio and
TV stations did exist. On the OSCE contention that "the
media in the Russian federation remain pluralistic and
diverse," Taibbi comments that "If you lived here in Russia
during the past year and a half or so, you know that state
television and radio programming not only campaigned
exclusively in favor of the Putin regime, but actively
assassinated its political opponents..." Furthermore, "there
was no 'commendable effort' of any kind to provide other
candidates with free political advertising." In fact, these
candidates were kept hidden. And outside of the big cities
"the press in the Russian regions could hardly be farther
from being 'diverse and pluralistic.'"
Taibbi notes also that in discussing the Serb election of
1997, OSCE was much focused on discrepancies in the vote
count. No such concern was displayed in its report on the
Putin election, and the numerous obvious fraudulent elements
disclosed in the Moscow Times report entirely escaped them.
Looking at their treatment of the 1997 Serb election and
Putin's election, Taibbi says "it's hard to come to any
conclusion that does not involve a conscious effort on the
OSCE's part to whitewash a dirty election."
In short, the pattern of systematic bias and propaganda
service applicable to the U.S. mainstream media in dealing
with foreign elections like those in Yugoslavia and Russia
also characterizes the U.S. and Nato dominated OSCE, which
with the aid of William Walker, the U.S.-appointed head of
the Kosovo Verification Mission, who in early 1999 helped
create the ground for the Nato bombing war and arranged for
KLA-Nato liaison and cooperative operations during the
bombing that ensued.
*************************************************
Alternative Press Review - www.altpr.org
Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
PO Box 4710 - Arlington, VA 22204
Mid-Atlantic Infoshop - www.infoshop.org
Infoshop News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/news.html
"Our first work must be the annihilation of everything
as it now exists." - Mikhail Bakunin
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed,
debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own." - No.6
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