CDSM: Letter of Complaint to the BBC

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Johnson [mailto:i-johnson@lineone.net]
Sent: 23 March 2006 22:43
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: CDSM: Letter of Complaint to the BBC



Dear Friends,
Please find below a copy of the Letter of Complaint that has been filed
against the BBC in regard to their coverage of the death of Slobodan
Milosevic.  IJ.


 BBC Complaints Department,
Glasgow,
BBC Information,
P.O. Box 1922,
Glasgow G2 3WT

22nd March 2006

Dear Sir/Madam,

We, the undersigned, would like to make a formal complaint about the very
one-sided BBC coverage of the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic.

From the moment his death was announced on Saturday 11th March, the BBC
seemed determined to paint a  biased and factually incorrect portrayal of
Milosevic. A succession of virulently anti-Milosevic 'experts' and
politicians were wheeled out- (Lord Ashdown seemed to be permanently camped
 in the BBC studios) all parroting the same 'Butcher of Belgrade' line.

 Ashdown claimed that Milosevic's death provided us with 'closure'. But how
 impartial a commentator was Ashdown? Only last autumn, when appearing as a
 witness at the Hague Tribunal, Ashdown was exposed by Milosevic to be a
liar
 (his testimony can be found at the url :
 hague.bard.edu/past_video?09-2005.html). Milosevic also played a video tape
 in court which showed Ashdown inspecting a Kosovan Liberation Army weapons
 cache in 1998 and in which he could be heard saying he would 'do his best'
 to procure the drug-running terrorist group assistance. Why did those
asking
 for Ashdown's opinion on Milosevic not mention these revelations when
 interviewing him?

We did not see or hear a  single commentator on the BBC who put forward a
different viewpoint on Milosevic. Two of our number, the journalist  Neil
 Clark and Dr John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group have
 been asked to appear on the BBC before to talk about Milosevic and the
Hague
 Tribunal, but this time they received no invitation. There were plenty of
 other speakers the BBC could have asked too to get a better balance in its
 coverage.

For example, Professor Mark Almond, a Balkans expert from Oriel College,
 Oxford;  Ian Johnson of the British branch of the International Committee
 for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic, Misha Gavrilovic of the British Serb
 Alliance; former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who has conceded that
 the Western powers deliberately engineered the break-up of Yugoslavia and
 George Kenney, former official of the US State Department, who was due to
 testify in Milosevic's defence at The Hague. Why did the BBC not invite any
of these people to give their verdict on Milosevic?

In the week following President Milosevic's death a number of lies were
repeated on the BBC.

The first was the statement, which appeared in News bulletins and on the BBC
 News website that 'few will mourn Milosevic'. This was clearly nonsense-and
 may we say racist- the world is not just people in the corridors of power
in
 the US and Europe- but a much larger place. In many countries, like China,
 where one-fifth of the world's people live, Milosevic was regarded as a
hero
 of the anti-imperialist struggle, ditto in India, Africa, South America and
 the Middle East. Why was this global opinion not reflected in your
coverage?
 If the BBC had taken the trouble to read the comments posted on its news
 blog- it would have seen that there are plenty of people throughout the
 world who do not hold the standard Western governments line on Milosevic.
We
 enclose two tributes to Milosevic from your news blog, from a Kosovan
 Albanian and a Sri Lankan.
(1) "I say - Rest in peace my friend, Milosovich, be happy. You surpassed
 this cruel, corrupt, hypocritic world". Sridhara Senarath, Colombo & Sri
 Lanka.
(2) "With all due respects to people in various parts of the world, the
 strong condemnation of this man is solely based on what the media has
dished
 out to them, how a hostile media can turn people with no connection to be
so
 damning about the only man of that region who tried to hold it together. As
 a Kosovo Albanian when he was in power we were in peace, now after Nato we
are left with a similar fate of Iraq. Rest in peace mr President." rexep
 rexepi, Hobart.

Then there was the claim that President Milosevic was a 'dictator'.
This term was used  by Kim Barnes in her video report of Milosevic's funeral
 on the BBC News website on 18th March.  Milosevic won three democratic
 elections in a country where over twenty-one political parties freely
 operated. Even Adam Lebor, in his hostile 2002 biography of Milosevic
 concedes that the use of the word 'dictator' is factually incorrect. So why
 on earth did the BBC's correspondent use it?

Barnes also claimed in her report that 50,000 people attended Milosevic's
funeral ceremony in Belgrade. The ceremony's organisers claimed 500,000 were
 present (a figure supported by Focus News Agency), whereas the Serbian
 authorities themselves put the figure at 100,000. Gavin Hewitt in the BBC1
 News that evening talked of 80,000. From which source did Kim Barnes obtain
 her figure of 50,000?

Neil Clark mentioned BBC's one-sided coverage of Milosevic's death in an
 interview he gave for Sky News on 12th March. He also made a telephone
 complaint on the same day to the BBC line 'Newswatch'.

His  complaint was featured by Raymond Snoddy in his Newswatch programme
of 18th March, but in a most unsatisfactory manner.
Snoddy introduced the programme by asking  "How should news coverage reflect
 the death of a man who was universally reviled"! The whole point is that
 Milosevic was not 'universally reviled'. His complaint was then glossed
over
 by the BBC Obituaries correspondent and a correspondent who both  said that
 'the weight of evidence' pointed to  Milosevic's guilt. This again, was
 simply not true. A four year trial in which over 100 prosecution witnesses
 were called failed to produce a single scrap of compelling evidence that
 Milosevic was guilty of the crimes he was charged with.
The 'weight of evidence' supports Milosevic's innocence- not his guilt- yet
 one would never have thought so from the BBC's coverage.

On the day of Milosevic's funeral, Saturday 18th March,  BBC News again
showed its  bias. Reporter Gavin Hewitt, in his report shown on BBC1's
 10.15pm bulletin said  that Milosevic's funeral seemed 'more like a rally
 for Serb nationalism' -despite the picture of communist era Yugoslav flags
 flying in the foreground. Rather than concentrate on these visible
 demonstrations of pro-Yugoslavism- the BBC cameras instead zoomed in on
one,
 isolated placard showing Milosevic with Karadzic and Mladic- which Gavin
 Hewitt commented on to back up his thesis. And when the pictures of
 Milosevic's coffin being loaded into the ground were shown, Hewitt
commented
 'some of the mourners were indicted war criminals'. Were they? Can he
 produce evidence for this assertion?
Milosevic's burial was attended by a large crowd of mourners, many in tears.
 Yet rather than comment on the genuine sadness that those who were present
 at the burial felt- Hewitt instead preferred to make unsubstantiated jibes
 about 'war criminals'.

Overall, we believe the BBC's coverage of the death of President Milosevic
to have been totally disgraceful. A man who enjoyed widespread support, not
just in the former Yugoslavia, but around the world, was demonised and
 treated as if he had already been found guilty of the charges the NATO
powers laid against him.

Yours faithfully,


Neil Clark, Name & Address supplied

Countersigned:

Dr John Laughland, Name & Address supplied
Zsuzsanna Clark, Name & Address supplied
Roy Clark, Name & Address supplied
Joan Clark, Name & Address supplied
Julia Hammett, Name & Address supplied
Kim Cooling, Name & Address supplied
Stuart Carr, Name & Address supplied.