Down in Sandino s, just back from the High Court in London where named Bloody Sunday Paras were looking for anonymity, I had my routine off to a T within hours of the Nato liberators going into Kosovo. But the Paras were too quick for me.
Nothing new in all that argument over Nato strategy, I remarked to chortling acolytes. All strategists emphasise the role of their favoured armed service.
The air force will have urged reliance on an air campaign. The infantry will have wanted ground troops in a.s.a.p. And the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment will have been on the lookout for unarmed people to shoot dead.
Then we turned on the BBC and heard that Paratroopers were forced to open fire in Pristina in an incident in which a man is reported to have died . Journalism students should cut that out and keep it, as an example of how to report a simple fact while leaving open the possibility that it s not a fact at all, but if it is, our boys weren t to blame. All in a single sentence, too.
The following day, the propaganda sheets had independently chanced on the same formulation. The pressure in Kosovo reached boiling point yesterday when a young Paratrooper was forced to kill a Serb policeman , the Mirror s man in Prestina intoned.
Forced to kill him, eh? Is there no end to the evil these Serbs drive people to?
How did Mirrorman know that the deceased, dressed in civvies, was a cop? Army sources , apparently. Ah yes, I remember them well.
The Serb , the Mirror s Simon Houston continued, whose comrades have carried out some of the worst atrocities of the war . . .
Did they now, the bastards? So this chap had kept very bad company. Whether that s a good enough reason for killing him, well . . . It had been firmly estabished he was a Serb.
The dead man had apparently waved a semi-automatic pistol as he angrily confronted a Para control. In spite of being warned to drop the gun, he fired towards the patrol. One of the Paras from 1 Battalion returned fire, killing the man instantly .
According to the Yugoslav news agency, BETA, the man s name was Veselin Jovovic, 35, married, with three children. He had emerged from a bar, drunk, and had begun shouting insults at a number of Yugoslav policemen who were talking, too cordially for Mr. Jovivic s liking, to the Paras. When the Paras pointed their guns at Jovivic, the policemen backed away. He began trying to unlock his car, ignoring Para instructions to put his hands up. One of the Paras opened fire and killed him.
You wouldn t know which version to believe.
Yes, you would.
The death of Mr. Jovivic is no more important than any other in the Yugoslav conflict. And no less important either. What lends it a fleeting significance is that his was the first killing by Nato forces on the ground to be described in contemporary news reports. It gives an indication of what to expect from the British and Irish media in their coverage of the occupation over the next weeks and months.
Mind you, we can t say we haven t been prepared to take casualties. The broadsheets have been more than a match for the tabloids in presenting all Serbs as suitable cases for killing.
I referred last month to an astonishing polemic by the Observer s man in Belfast, Henry McDonald, in which he called for total war against the entire nation of Serbia, and made it explicit that he had in mind the carpet-bombing of the civilian population.
The Guardian published a piece by Polly Toynbee which dismissed the land of Serbia with contempt that godforsaken, dirt-poor, hate-ridden blot on the map of Europe .
The same paper printed historian Daniel Goldhagen s view that The majority of Serb people, by supporting or condoning Milosevic s eliminationist politics, have rendered themselves both legally and morally incompetent to conduct their own affairs .
Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Times, raging against Robert Fisk for suggesting that it s as unacceptable for Serbs as for Albanians to be driven in terror from their homes, referred to the Kosovo Serbs most of whom went along with ethnic cleansing . . .
Should we scorn pleas for no indiscriminate retaliation against Protestants for Loyalist bombing of Catholic homes: The Northern Protestants most of whom went along with sectarian assassinations . . .
Or, in comparable circumstances: The English whites most of whom went along with racist murders . . .
The sick fantasy of a whole people s collective guilt is commonly invoked to provide advance justification for retalitatory mass murder.
Ethnic cleansers come in all shapes and guises. Some do it with a leer in the dead of night, some with a smirk on Sunday mornings. n