Martin Bell, the BBC's distinguished former foreign affairs correspondent, complains that the wars he has covered were the result of failed politics and diplomacy. "The Bosnia war," said Bell, "has left me with the conviction that a foreign policy based only on considerations of national interest, and not at all of principle, is not only immoral but inefficient." Just before leaving TV journalism and becoming a member of the British Parliament, Bell actively promoted the need for what he christened a "journalism of attachment." Many colleagues, however, have rejected the concept.37 Others continue to argue that without TV coverage, looming conflicts and humanitarian crises would not appear at all on the government radar screen and therefore would be ignored by the international community.
Such expectations are wholly reasonable, of course. And they do make for a powerful argument.
However, once again, putting a conflict on the governmental radar screen is not the same as forcing that government to do something about it. The U.S. definition of "vital" or "extremely important" national interests is not the only one to rule out virtually any conflicts without direct relevance. British national interests, for example, are little different.38 Additionally, it is hard to find evidence that preemptive media coverage has explicitly led to preemptive diplomatic action designed to prevent a conflict from exploding. Almost none of the covert preparations made in advance of a conflict (e.g., secret weapons deliveries or plotting by adversaries) are ever known to or discovered by diplomats and NGO's, let alone journalists, until it is too late, and the conflict has exploded.39
Underlining the chasm between governments of leading world powers and the likes of Bell, Douglas Hurd wrote:
Martin Bell's principle cannot surely be that we should intervene against horrors only when they are televised? . . . Bosnia is far from unique. I can think of eight civil wars raging at this moment, with others simmering. Britain cannot be expected, even with allies, to intervene each time.40
Often the international community, once it sees the images, turns away, invokes international law, and declares that the conflict is an "internal matter" for the "sovereign government." Chechnya in November and December 1994 is the most vivid example. Burundi in July 1996 is another. For a variety of reasons underpinned by international law, governments with the power and capability to intervene cited "sovereignty" as a primary reason for doing as little as possible. Such nonresponses are the hallmark of what Martin Bell complains is the "nothing can be done club." Many journalists like Bell take a robust and emotive stand against such negativists. "It is in the interests of all our children -- theirs as well as ours -- that they do not prevail" he wrote.41
Nevertheless, the record suggests that despite emotive and often brilliant reporting, the government negativists have prevailed. This author questions whether the kind of moral stand taken by the likes of Bell, whether implicit or explicit, influences politicians who make costly decisions about whether to commit effort and resources to intervene in some way in a conflict. For the many journalists who have witnessed and reported conflicts as they unfold, there is no doubt, however. They want the bloodletting halted in an impartial way. "The case for intervention is not to help one side against another, but the weak against the strong, the armed against the unarmed; to take the side of the everyday victims of war who, until now, have had no protection. It is really a question, finally, of whether we care," wrote Bell.42
Except for a few rare moments of policy vacuum, politicians by and large take a starkly different view. Both in Chechnya (claimed as part of the territory of a former superpower) and Burundi (a tiny independent nation with no strategic importance to any great power), the international determination to respect the right of a sovereign nation to reject offers of outside assistance overrode any personal ministerial revulsion at the unfolding horrors being reported by the international media.
It can be argued that, in Chechnya, the key moment to send a decisive political signal to prevent a wider conflict -- including a veiled threat that military action might be part of a determined diplomatic initiative -- was squandered. Political fears and caution among Western nations about intervening in the horrors taking place on the sovereign territory of a great power overrode any emotional reaction being generated by TV pictures that "something must be done." This situation emphasises the clear limitations of intervening in conflicts where a major power like Russia has its own clear national interest.
As a result, apparent European indifference -- based on the hope that Russian defence minister Pavel Grachev was right in saying he could secure Grozny in two hours -- effectively sent a green light to the Kremlin to continue its planned offensive in Chechnya. Less than two months later, Ambassador Audrey Glover, head of the first OSCE delegation eventually allowed into Grozny, described the horror she had witnessed as "another Dresden."
If graphic TV reporting of the carnage throughout Christmas and New Year 1994 had created an impact on the international community to do something, then "another Dresden" might have been prevented. It did not have that effect. TV's impact was minimal.
As Thomas Friedman wrote in a New York Times column on double standards in U.S. international diplomacy:
Excuse me, but President Yeltsin kills more people in Chechnya on a slow morning than ever died in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Yet for some reason a U.S. president can go to Moscow to support Mr. Yeltsin and no one says boo. But if Mr. Clinton were to stop off in Beijing he would be pilloried.43
Thus one "legitimate" policy option is to ignore the TV pictures and have a policy to do nothing. Constructed wisely, such a zero policy can always be sold politically to a public in developed countries that is both ill-informed on foreign affairs (especially in the U.S.44) and increasingly numbed by images of subregional wars in which they have no interest.
Rare reporting like the emotive TV coverage by the BBC's George Alagiah of a period of mass slaughter in Burundi in October 1993 created no international resonance. In some respects, it might be argued that Alagiah's coverage was inadvertently mistimed. When he filed his reports, diplomatic prevention had failed, but the rate of killing might have been described as still only "getting up to speed." To many people, such a suggestion seems obscene. But the level of slaughter in a distant country few knew about had not reached a sufficient critical mass to mobilise international public opinion. So no one else bothered to follow up Alagiah's findings, even though one leading nongovernmental organisation (NGO) said that Burundi 1993 was "the only crisis which caught us by surprise."46
After Alagiah, the tragedy of Burundi continued virtually unrecorded by the world media. But the killing got worse, and further warnings from NGOs were ignored.
We now know that the murders Alagiah reported in October 1993 were early warnings of a developing pattern of violence in the Great Lakes region of Africa that the international community was unable or unwilling to acknowledge, let alone tackle in an effective proactive manner. It was part of a similar regional pattern that led eventually to the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
The international community only gave signs of stirring after the massacre of at least 304 people in Bugendana in July 1996.47 President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya was then stoned at the mass funeral and forced to seek refuge at the U.S. embassy. Journalists and television satellite dishes descended on Bujumbura. The Tutsi army pulled off a coup, and the international community held its breath.48 The best that Western ministers could do was to "hope"49 things would not slide into the full-blown genocide that many feared.
On the night President Ntibantunganya was deposed, the UN secretary-general's spokesperson, Sylvana Foa, urged that the international community act before they saw appalling TV images of slaughter. "Unfortunately, it is not until we see babies being macheted to death on TV, that public opinion forces their governments into action," Ms. Foa appealed explicitly on one TV news programme with an air of desperation. "We do not want to see that this time."50
But what international impact did Foa's appeal have? Did international TV coverage of the massacres and coup in Burundi in late July 1996 lead to any additional and sustainable diplomatic effort to prevent a Rwanda-style process of mass slaughter? The answers are not encouraging for conflict prevention.
Led by the then head of the UN Peacekeeping Department, Kofi Annan, and Foa, the United Nations harnessed the media to put emotional pressure on the U.S. and other Western powers. The UN's aim was to shame them into providing the political and logistics commitment on Burundi that they had refused for Rwanda in 1994. The UN failed. "It is not possible for the U.S. to lead everywhere and in every situation," U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns responded in the face of UN appeals for at least logistics support. "We have led where we think U.S. interests require: in Haiti, and in Bosnia, and we will not hesitate to lead in future situations, where our national interests are directly and in some cases vitally affected."51
In other words, on Burundi, despite intense media coverage for a few days, the U.S. answer was "No!" Subsequent analysis and revelations following the Great Lakes crisis of late 1996 and early 1997, which led ultimately to the overthrow of President Mobutu of Zaire, have illuminated an unannounced strategic U.S. policy towards Central and East Africa that supported the Tutsi interests in the region. This ensured that U.S.-backed intervention was always considered a nonstarter.
The UN continued to warn that, after Rwanda two years earlier, history would judge the international community "rather severely" if it failed to "move very quickly before everything blows up in our faces" and mass slaughter ensued in Burundi.52 At the same time, NGOs warned of a failure of international "courage" and "will," and a Burundi "steadily slipping towards genocide before our eyes."53 But Western capitals prevaricated. Leading East African nations imposed economic sanctions instead of ignoring the legal technicality of Burundi's sovereignty and imposing a conflict-prevention force as they had earlier committed themselves to doing.54 Burundi returned within a week to its former lowly position as barely an also-ran in the news agenda: the same rating it had during three years of slaughter in which an estimated 150,000 people were killed.
Thus in Burundi, as elsewhere, the effect of TV coverage on focusing international political action was limited and marginal at best. It did not overcome the new international instinct of caution that is driven by negligible political will and national interest.
Two months later, in September 1996, the UN secretary-general and the United Nations Association (UNA) were reporting that the massacres continued.55 In view of a high level of ethnic slaughter, the UNA asked:
Why so little international media coverage of events in Burundi? How many Burundians have to be murdered before the story becomes newsworthy? It is difficult to believe in claims that we live in an era of global communications, when none of the major TV channels appears even to have sent a camera crew to Burundi.56