Tag: truth

Ukraine reporting shows bias of Western media

Posted on by Martin Newman

In the space of a few months Ukraine has been embroiled in two uprisings.

Both have appeared equally legitimate, both have been bloody and both have had the backing of differently aligned foreign governments.

So why has the media characterised the US-backed one as a democratic right and the other as troublemaking by Russia?

And why does one bloody crackdown provoke press outrage and another not?

Reporting on Ukraine has been singularly one-sided with the media and the government moulding public perceptions by omitting information, or slanting it one way or another.

At the height of the first uprising in February Viktor Yanukovych was portrayed in the strongest terms as a corrupt leader responsible for killing civilian protestors. Those civilian deaths were seen as a catalyst for a change of government by force.

There has been no such outrage expressed for the more than 100 pro-Russian separatists killed by the new government, the most recent in heavy-handed attacks on Donetsk.

The Maidan protests, backed by the US, Germany and Britain, have been given fair, at times favourably biased, coverage, while those of pro-Russians have been scandalously under-reported or ignored.

More so the language used to describe each varies damningly.

It has been accompanied by a concerted and completely over-the-top demonisation of Russia, which culminated last week in Prince Charles comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler and ‘Red’ Ed Miliband seeming to support the remarks.

Opponents of Yanukovych were often described in the media as peaceful protesters, despite scenes of some of the most ferociously violent attacks on Ukraine’s police – attacks for which the only UK parallel might be the Broadwater Farm riots in which PC Keith Blakelock was murdered.

In Kiev 16 police officers were killed by protesters. Can you imagine the reaction to that if it had occurred in Britain?

By contrast the western media routinely describes pro-Russian separatists as rebels, militants, insurgents, Chechens, terrorists, militia.

It is often slyly suggested they have less claim on being Ukrainian, that they are insurgents from across the border or puppets of Russia, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are local, multi-generational Ukrainian residents with real gripes against the new right-wing government.

Earlier this month a fire in the Odessa Trade Union building killed 38 pro-Russian protesters, but the media quickly accepted the Kiev government’s claim they were killed by a blaze they had begun.

Pictures of teenagers merrily making molotov cocktails outside the building didn’t change the media’s attitude. Nor was there much comment on the chants about roasting ‘Colorado beetles’ (a derogatory term for the pro-Russians) that rang out as the protesters burned. Video showed those trying to flee the blaze set upon by right-wing thugs.

The apparent strangulation murder of a pregnant women in the same building in a room in which government supporters unfurled a flag out the window, has not been investigated or commented on in the press.

And though video evidence emerged on the web of government supporters in collusion with police staging false attacks dressed in pro-Russian armbands it was not written about or reported in the mainstream media.

The truth about what happened at Odessa has only emerged through social network sites.

Instead there was an overriding willingness by press, broadcasters and online news groups to not blame government supporters for the deaths and to quickly move on.

By comparison the shooting of civilians during riots in Kiev against Yanukovych were denounced in the harshest of terms around the world. Germany and the US piled pressure on the government with threats of sanctions, and when Yanukovych eventually retreated from the capital an arrest warrant was issued accusing him of ‘mass murder’.

Days later, when a leaked EU phone call raised the prospect some civilians may have been deliberately shot by the Maidan opposition to inflame the situation, little was said. An investigation by the new authorities into deaths in Kiev during the protests has so far gone nowhere.

Each day across Ukraine’s restive east more and more pictures are posted on Twitter of the bodies of civilians  – middle aged women, casually dressed men – lying dead by the roadside.

But how many do we see in the press, on TV or online news agencies?

Typically such reports are omitted or tempered with claims of trouble being stirred up by Russian infiltrators – legitimising the killings.

It’s a common propaganda technique, but we see it more and more from our governments and our media.

While the referendum in Crimea and the east for more autonomy was decried as illegal by the West and reported as such, the election of a new government in Kiev has been given legitimacy by the world’s media, even though breakaway regions boycotted the vote.

Residents in those regions have now been dubbed ‘bandits’ and ‘terrorists’ by the newly elected hardline president Petro Poroshenko.

Underlying the entire conflict are claims the US encouraged the Maidan revolution to create another Nato state on one of Russia’s most sensitive borders, and where its Black Sea Fleet is moored at Sevastopol in Crimea.

In the press Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea was denounced as a shameless land grab and Vladimir Putin accused of trying to rebuild the old Soviet Union.

Despite there being a majority of Russian citizens living in Crimea and clear parallels with the Nato-backed independence of Kosovo, relations between Russia and the US deteriorated to the point of talk about a new Cold War.

That has filtered down to the man in the street and one in the palace.

Ironically, the groups now in control in Ukraine are more right-wing than any European government since the Nazis.

But this bias in the media has existed for a long time and extends beyond the Ukraine today.

Reports on the Syria conflict are horrendously one-sided. Unsubstantiated charges of chemical weapons use by the Assad government are reported as fact.

The killing of pro-Assad voters at an election booth last week given no more than lip service.

Yes Assad has committed some terrible acts, but what of the al-Qaeda groups ranged against him? What of the beheadings, the mass killings, the torture and religious discrimination they have brought with them?

When rebels fighters deliberately cut off the water supply to 2.5million residents of Allepo a fortnight ago, only The Independent reported on it. Even Ban Ki Moon’s condemnation of this act went unreported in the mainstream media.

Similarly there has been no outrage about the Kiev authorities attempts to cut off the water supply to the Crimea.

These are actions that can force a humanitarian crisis, and yet there is no outrage and the general public remain uninformed.

Going back to the reporting on the Balkan wars, Serbia was demonised and accused of ethnic cleansing and running rape camps. The latter was not proven and the former described tactics used across the board by all sides in the conflict.

And while the massacre by the Bosnian-Serb army at Srebrenica is the worst and defining atrocity of the wars, little is ever mentioned of the 50 villages razed to the ground and 5,000 Serb civilians murdered by muslim raiding parties in the same region in the run-up to it.

Decades on Serbia is still characterised simplistically as the bad guy while equally reprehensible war crimes committed by other sides barely get mentioned. To do that would muddy the narrative that the media demands.

Having worked in Fleet Street for almost two decades I know there is no one pulling the strings. There is no secret plot to subvert particular information while promoting the other.

No one calls up editors to exert pressure, and nor do the editors dictate to their journalists. And yet with great predictability they fall in line with a prevailing mood.

The media promotes a concept of good and bad, with no in-between.

It needs a simple, familiar narrative for its readers to understand (perhaps for its journalists too), one that is often, although not exclusively, still based on old world prejudices.

Known story patterns are repeated with rare deviation.

Passion, outrage and righteous indignation sell papers and (today) get page hits.

But what of the full facts? What of the other side of the story?

Our written history is at risk if it is based on the perception given by media and governments pushing their own blinkered or negligent agendas rather than the true, full story.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in the current reporting on Ukraine.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)

Groundhog Day for the Middle East

Posted on by Martin Newman

We’ve seen it all before. It’s like Groundhog Day, the location is different – Syria not Iraq or Libya – but the rhetoric remains the same.

While the discredited ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ mantra is gone, in its place the same humanitarian tipping point pared down – chemical weapons.

It is widely agreed that historic stockpiles of chemical weapons still exist in military facilities in Syria, but there has been no evidence of the Assad regime carrying out the attack on Ghouta or any other locations.

There have been indications, however, over the past year that Syrian rebels themselves may have obtained, tested and even used chemical weapons.

In May it was reported members of Syria’s militant Al Nusra group were arrested in Turkey with 2kg of sarin. While in July a Turkish jihadist site claimed rebels had obtained chemical weapons from a military base they had overrun in Allepo.

Further back in 2012 of last year the purported rebel faction Kateebat A Reeh Sarsar (Brigade of Chemical) released a propaganda video showing poison gas tests on rabbits.

The video showed an array of chemicals from the Tekkim company, including sodium nitrite, potassium permanganate and potassium chlorate (all oxidisers that can be used in the creation of gas). Masked militants threatened to use them on Assad’s people if the West did not intervene.

But this isn’t talked about.

William Hague instead insists the rebels have no chemical capabilities and do not possess the ‘weapons systems’ or motivation to deliver them.

In saying this he ignores documented evidence of the rebels use of median range rockets, never mind the fact sarin nerve gas (if that’s what it is) can be disseminated into the atmosphere using a simple handheld humidifier (something the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo demonstrated in its 1994 attack over a wide area in Matsumoto that killed eight and injured 200).

On other points the Foreign Secretary has misled.

“Over the past year we have seen evidence of the repeated small-scale use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime,” he said.

In actual fact there has been no documented evidence of the Syrian government using chemical weapons against the rebels, only the claims of the rebels.

An investigation in May by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria into an alleged attack by the Syrian government on a rebel area concluded that it was in fact probably carried out by the rebels.

The UN’s Carla del Ponte, one of the world’s most respected war crimes investigators, said: “There are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated. This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

Despite this previous finding of rebel groups possibly gassing their own people and then blaming Assad, Britain, France and the US have stuck steadfastly to the line that the rebels could not kill their own people.

No evidence has been produced, nor a motive for the Syrian government carrying out an act that would almost guarantee Western military intervention.

For it to happen on the day weapons inspectors arrived made even less sense.

Over the past few months the Syrian government has staged several convincing defeats of the rebels, recapturing the city of Qusair and the Baba Amr district of Homs.

Though the New York Times reported in February that large shipments of arms, paid for by Saudi Arabia, had been smuggled to the rebels across the Jordanian border, the Government still enjoys overwhelming military superiority.

It begs the question: Why would the Assad regime need to deploy chemical weapons at all?

Since Saddam Hussain’s gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988 there have been few more incendiary actions to initiate then a chemical attack. Any government in the world understands the significance of it, but so does the opposition.

The prospect of Colonel Gaddafi using chemical weapons was also raised in the build-up to bombing Libya, further demonising a regime that had primarily been criticised for shelling rebel towns in its civil war. Gaddafi was repeatedly accused of breaking a ceasefire with rebels, even though it was clear from reports by journalists on the ground that the rebels were continuing to attack government positions.

Rebel groups have learnt how to get the upperhand in the PR war against their enemy, particularly where it fits in with foreign policy objectives in the West. Such tactics have been honed since the Yugoslav conflict, when Bosnia and Croatia, and then the rebel ‘Republic of Kosovo’ were represented by American PR firms such as Ruder Finn, who lobbied on their behalf in the US.

Unquestioning acceptance of the inaccurate and of the unsubstantiated has become the norm.

Even the alleged death toll of up to 1,300 from the chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Ghouta remains unproven and backed mainly by YouTube footage. Doctors Without Borders have independently estimated 355 dead.

And yet the higher undocumented figure is still repeated ad nauseum to further dramatise the tragedy and increase the drive for military action.

Without wanting to suggest there wasn’t a gas attack (because there clearly was) there has been a lack of the most basic factual indicators including no autopsy findings of the physiological changes that sarin gas causes in the human body. In the rebel-controlled area where it occurred facts are being obscured.

What we have had are the highly emotive pictures of dead children, evidence of a brutal atrocity but on what scale and carried out by whom?

Last night’s reluctant decision by the government to delay missile strikes and allow UN weapons inspectors more time may only prove a hiccup in the snowballing momentum to bomb Syria.

The US say they believe the Assad regime has perpetrated chemical weapons attacks based on samples taken from various sites, but again this is not proof of who did it. Instead the very existence of chemical weapons is being taken as a tacit example of the Syrian government’s culpability.

Perhaps the most galling aspect of Hague and David Cameron’s bullish pursuit of military action against Syria is its transparency.

They use the same tactic Tony Blair employed in the build-up to the 2nd Iraq War – ‘repeat an accusation enough and you can pass it off as fact’. Perhaps like Blair the PM wants to believe the public too callow to tweak to this lack of substance.

In the meantime Blair, the Middle East’s so-called envoy for peace, is advocating missile strikes on Syria by employing the bogus assertion that by not taking action we instead dither and allow a humanitarian crisis to unfold.

“We have collectively to understand the consequences of wringing our hands instead of putting them to work,” he intoned in his most evangelical pronouncement yet.

Hague has parroted the same view stating we “cannot allow diplomatic paralysis to be a shield”.

Blair also claimed Syria would become a breeding ground for extremists, ignoring video footage of summary executions of soldiers and civilians by the rebels, some factions of whom have vowed to wipe all Alawite Shias off the face of the earth.

And much like Blair’s ‘Dodgy Dossier’ claim, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussain could launch chemical weapons strikes on UK targets within 45minutes, Hague has more subtly introduced the concept of a direct threat to the UK.

“We must proceed in a careful and thoughtful way, but we cannot permit our own security to be undermined by the creeping normalisation of the use of weapons that the world has spent decades trying to control and eradicate,” he wrote in the Telegraph.

The lone voice of common sense has been Russia, which quite rightly has asked for evidence before action.

There is a long and chequered history of opposition groups providing false information to the West or staging outrages to justify military assistance.

Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi admitted he made-up WMD claims that were the basis for the invasion of Iraq – in order to oust Saddam. And in Libya rebel claims of massacres of the civilian populace were not supported by recorded mortality rates.

It must be asked if the chemical attack in Ghouta was planned by Syria’s rebels to escalate US and European intervention, paving the way for the type of rout we saw in Libya.

If Iraq taught us nothing else it should be that our leaders respect the truth and not regard manipulation of the facts as a justifiable means to an end – the means to a war.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post.)