Author: Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com
Publication: Canada Free Press
Date: August 30, 2004
URL: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2004/cover083004.htm
Was the "River Incident" in Yugoslavia,
widely reported by the media, the work of a well-paid public relations
firm?
It was on March 15 when the media
reported that at least two Serbs and a dog had chased four Albanian boys
into the river Ibar in Mitrovica. According to the heart-catching story,
three of the boys drowned, and only one made it to the safety of the other
side.
"Revenge followed swiftly. Reprisal
attacks on Serbs claimed 30 lives and wounded 600," said Canadafreepress.com
in its May 3 cover story.
When United Nations representative
Derek Chappell bravely stepped forward to say the river event of March
15 was "definitely not true", he was promptly pulled by the UN and transferred
to another job.
"The UN said he was too frank in
telling the truth," said James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia
and member of a minority trying to get the truth out on widespread lies
and deception about Kosovo.
Add the voice of Marjaleena Repo,
a freelance writer with a special interest in justice issues. A national
organizer of Citizens Concerned About Free Trade, Repo also happens to
be Canadian.
"The world was shocked to find out
that a PR firm, Hill and Knowlton had manufactured the `incubator babies'
incident in Kuwait, which precipitated the Gulf War; Iraqi soldiers ripping
Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in a genocidal fashion. Even Amnesty International
was taken in by the falsehood, which was later exposed as such, but only
after the military damage was done.
"Yet the shock of being duped (by
Hill and Knowlton) soon wore off and gullibility returned (to the American
public). In no time another American PR firm, Ruder-Finn Global Communications,
working for the Croatian and Bosnian separatists, publicly bragged that
it had been able to turn world opinion against the Serbs."
Ruder-Finn is a substantial PR firm
with offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
Says Repo of Ruder-Finn: "The PR
firm was piling hoax upon hoax. The famous story of Serb concentration
camps was built on a photo of a gaunt man surrounded by others, staring
at the viewer from behind barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to
the bones. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in
an article titled The Picture That Fooled The World, described how the
famous photo was staged by its takers, British journalists, who were photographing
the inhabitants from inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural
products and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp; the men
stood outside of it; and at no time was there a barbed-wire fence surrounding
the camp. But by that time the image had done its deed, terminally slamming
the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers."
The staged concentration camp photograph
eventually found albeit small limelight, but as Repo points out there are
countless other stories out there masquerading as truth.
"These stories and photos of `genocide'
and `ethnic cleansing' (a la Hitler) in a civil war, in which Serbs are
as guilty as sin and others are their innocent victims, are repeated ad
nauseum by western reporters without the slightest evidence, and have provided
the grounds for the public's (hopefully only temporary) acceptance of the
illegal and brutal war against the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia. They
continue after NATO's bombing began, unabated, with new absurdities such
as the suggestion that the Serbs are really bombing themselves! Perhaps
in the war crimes court there will soon be a place for journalists and
PR firms who, with their inflammatory reporting and fraudulent actions,
cause wars to begin."
The cunning of Ruder-Finn Global
Public Affairs in Yugoslavia knows no bounds. Ruder-Finn director James
Harff was interviewed by French journalist Jaques Merlino.
"The essential tools in our work
are a card file, a computer and a fax. The card file contains a few hundred
names of journalists, politicians, academics, and representatives of humanitarian
organizations. The computer goes through the card files according to correlated
subjects, coming up with very effective targets," Harff told Merlino.
"The computer is tied into a f ax.
In this way we can disseminate information in a few minutes to those we
think will react (positively). Our job is to ensure that the arguments
for our side will be the first to be expressed.
"Our work is not to verify information.
We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation
of information favorable to us, to aim them at carefully chosen targets.
We did not claim that there were death camps in Bosnia, we just made it
known that Newsday claimed it."
Journalists telling the truth don't
survive their jobs. With no explanation, new director Jean Pierre El Kabasch
removed Merlino from his job as deputy editor-in-chief at France's Antenne
2 Network. At the same time, unidentified humanitarian organizations demonstrated
in front of Antenne 2, shouting "Merlino, the people are after your hide."
Executives of unscrupled PR firms
have let it be known that they'd work for Satan if he's paying.
Osama bin laden is not short of
money.
