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.