The CNN Effect in Action Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication Series Editor Philip Seib, Marquette University (USA)

Home , CNN effect

The CNN Effect in Action Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication Series editor Philip Seib, Marquette University (USA)

From democratization to terrorism, economic development to conflict resolution, global political dynamics are affected by the increasing pervasiveness and influence of communication media. This series examines the participants and their tools, their strategies and their impact. It offers a mix of comparative and tightly focused analyses that bridge the various elements of communication and political science included in the field of international studies. Particular emphasis is placed on topics related to the rapidly changing communication environment that is being shaped by new technologies and new political realities. This is the evolving world of international political communication.

Editorial Board Members: Hussein Amin, American University in Cairo (Egypt) Robin Brown, University of Leeds (UK) Eytan Gilboa, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) Steven Livingston, George Washington University (USA) Robin Mansell, London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) Holli Semetko, Emory University (USA) Ingrid Volkmer, University of Otago (New Zealand)

Books Appearing in this Series Media and the Politics of Failure: Great Powers, Communication Strategies, and Military Defeats By Laura Roselle The CNN Effect in Action: How the News Media Pushed the West toward War in Kosovo By Babak Bahador The CNN Effect in Action

How the News Media Pushed the West toward War in Kosovo

Babak Bahador THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION © Babak Bahador, PhD, 2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7519-5 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53580-4 ISBN 978-0-230-60422-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230604223 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bahador, Babak. The CNN effect in action : how the news media pushed the West toward war in Kosovo / by Babak Bahador. p. cm. Based on the author’s Ph. D. dissertation—London School of Economics. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Kosovo (Serbia)—History—Civil War, 1988–1999—Press coverage. 2. Kosovo (Serbia)—History—Civil War, 1998–1999—Mass media and the war. I. Title. DR2087.6.P72B34 2006 948.7103—dc22 2006049547 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2007 10987654321 Contents

List of Tables ix List of Graphs xi Foreword by Steven Livingston xiii Acknowledgments xix Introduction xxi Abbreviations xxiii

PART I The CNN Effect in Theory 1 The CNN Effect 3 Defining the CNN Effect 4 What is the Agent? 5 What is Affected? 6 Effect or Effects? 7 The CNN Effect and Globalization 12 Reach 13 Density 14 Speed 17 The CNN Effect and Global Awareness 17 2 Demonstrating the CNN Effect 21 Research Approaches in the CNN Effect Literature 22 Interview-Based Approaches 22 Media-Based Approaches 24 Quantitative Approaches 26 The Policy-Media Interaction Model 27 The Challenging CNN Effect Model—A New Research Approach 31 The Quantitative Test 34 The Coding Test 34 The Policy Substance Test 35 vi CONTENTS

The Linkage Test 35 The CNN Effect and Macro Influences 37 Alternatives to the CNN Effect 41 3 The CNN Effect and War 47 The People and the CNN Effect 48 The Rise of Public Opinion 49 The Military and the CNN Effect 51 The Government and the CNN Effect 53 Diplomacy and the CNN Effect 54 Foreign Policy and the CNN Effect 57

PART II The CNN Effect in Action 4 The Kosovo Crisis 67 Background 68 Macro Influences 71 Western Political Culture 71 Political Cost 72 Political Context 73 5 The Media during the Kosovo Crisis 75 The CNN Effect Media Criteria and the Kosovo Civil War 76 Incident 1: The Drenica Massacre 79 Incident 2: The Gornje Obrinje Massacre 83 Incident 3: The Racak Massacre 85 Events or Their Media Coverage? 89 The Accumulating Effect 91 6 The Government during the Kosovo Crisis—The Macro Review 97 The Quantitative Test 98 Media Coverage versus Government Actions 102 The Coding Test 108 Framing 109 Blame 111 Propensity for Intervention 121 7 The Government during the Kosovo Crisis— The Micro Review 129 Phase 1: January 1 to February 27, 1998 130 Phase 2: February 28 to March 27, 1998 131 Policy Shift after the Drenica Massacre 133 Western Decision-Making and the Media 135 CONTENTS vii

Phase 3: March 28 to September 27, 1998 137 Phase 4: September 28 to October 27, 1998 142 Policy Shift after the Gornje Obrinje Massacre 143 Western Decision-Making and the Media 145 Phase 5: October 28, 1998 to January 14, 1999 147 Phase 6: January 15 to February 14, 1999 149 Policy Shift after the Racak Massacre 150 Western Decision-Making and the Media 153 Phase 7: February 15 to March 24, 1999 158 Conclusion 163 The CNN Effect and the Kosovo Intervention 163 The CNN Effect and Foreign Policy 166 Insights on the CNN Effect 169 Concluding Remarks 171 Appendix: Government Sources Coded 175 Notes 185 Bibliography 217 Index 229 This page intentionally left blank List of Tables

5.1 American Television Coverage of Kosovo on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): January 1, 1998–March 20, 1999 78 5.2 American Television Framing of the Drenica Massacre on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): March 5, 1998–March 11, 1998 82 5.3 American Television Framing of the Gornje Obrinje Massacre on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): September 29, 1998–October 5, 1998 85 5.4 American Television Framing of the Racak Massacre on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): January 16, 1999–January 22, 1999 88 5.5 Television Coverage of Kosovo Massacres versus Total Coverage on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): March 1, 1998–March 20, 1999 90 5.6 Massacres as Proportion of Overall Death and Destruction during the Kosovo Civil War: March 1, 1998–March 20, 1999 90 5.7 American Television Coverage of Kosovo as Leading Story on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): January 1, 1998–March 20, 1999 93 5.8 American Television Coverage of Kosovo as Leading Story versus Total Coverage in Percentiles (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): January 1, 1998–March 20, 1999 94 6.1 Western Government Actions Preceding the Kosovo Intervention: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 100 6.2 Review of Major Spikes in both Media Coverage and Government Actions over Kosovo: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 104 x LIST OF TABLES

6.3 Western Government Policy (Press Releases and Statements) versus Diplomacy: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 107 6.4 Review of Western Government Postmassacre Framing versus Entire Period: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 110 6.5 Western Government Framing in Press Releases and Statements: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 113 6.6 Western Government Assignment of Blame in Press Releases and Statements: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 116 6.7 Western Government Assignment of Blame in Press Releases and Statements: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 120 6.8 Western Propensity to Use Force in Press Releases and Statements: January 1, 1998–March 23, 1999 124 7.1 Change in Western Policy Aspects between Phases 1 and 2 135 7.2 Change in Western Policy Aspects between Phases 2 and 3 141 7.3 Change in Western Policy Aspects between Phases 3 and 4 144 7.4 Change in Western Policy Aspects between Phases 5 and 6 153 7.5 Change in Western Policy Aspects between Phases 6 and 7 160 List of Graphs

2.1 The Challenging CNN Effect Time Line 32 2.2 The Challenging CNN Effect Model 36 3.1 Aspects of Foreign Policy during Third-Party Military Interventions 60 3.2 Different Media Effects in Relation to Policy Change in Third- Party Military Intervention 63 5.1 American Television News Coverage of Kosovo on Leading Networks 77 5.2 American Postmassacre Television Framing of the Kosovo Conflict 89 5.3 American Television Coverage of Kosovo as Leading Story versus All Coverage 92 6.1 Western Governmental Actions Related to Kosovo Preceding NATO Intervention 99 6.2 American Television Coverage of Kosovo versus Government Actions 103 6.3 Western Diplomacy and Policy Leading to NATO Intervention in Kosovo 106 6.4 Western Government Postmassacre Framing 110 6.5 Western Framing Leading to NATO Intervention in Kosovo 112 6.6 Western Assigned Blame Leading to NATO Intervention in Kosovo 115 xii LIST OF GRAPHS

6.7 The Degree of Western Blame on Serbs Leading to NATO Intervention in Kosovo 119 6.8 Western Propensity to Use Force Leading to NATO Intervention in Kosovo 123 6.9 Propensity of Clear Threat to Use of Force Leading to NATO Intervention in Kosovo 126 Foreword

In the opening scene of Hamlet, Shakespeare conjures up the ethereal form of the young king’s murdered father. The ghost appears first to Marcellus and Bernardo, the two night watchmen, and to Hamlet’s friend and counselor Horatio, all of whom gaze at it with great appre- hension and dread. Horatio commands: “Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee, speak!” but the apparition says nothing. It is only during a second appearance when Hamlet is present that it speaks, bidding Hamlet to follow. For fear of what the apparition may become, Horatio expresses his fears should Hamlet comply.

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o’er his base into the sea,1 And there assume some other horrible form, Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness?2

The ghost beckons Hamlet to avenge a wrong: his own politically motivated murder. At the heart of the matter is revenge, bloodlust, and honor. Horatio, Hamlet’s counselor, tells his young protégé to, essentially, let sleeping dogs be, for we do not know what results tomorrow will bring from impetuous actions taken today. This desire to right wrongs, to address blood grievances will, Horatio fears, tempt him toward disaster. Great spectacles concerning honor, revenge, and duty to one’s bloodline have been the stuff of great political storytelling from time immemorial. Their relevance to politics today is as great as ever. With some liberties, Horatio might be understood to express the concerns of the Realist school of foreign policies regarding the role of similar emotions in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Sentimentality, accen- tuated by dramatic media coverage, might drive political leaders to the brink of the summit’s cliff that beetles over its base. Emotion in foreign policymaking invites disaster. xiv FOREWORD

In the ramp-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, ghosts of Saddam’s brutal rule began to appear with great regularity in the American media. Among other references to Saddam’s history of vio- lence and repression, President George W. Bush and others in his administration invoked the March 1988 gassing of Kurds in the town of Halabja: “What we’re telling our friends is that Saddam Hussein is a man who is willing to gas his own people, willing to use weapons of mass destruction again Iraq citizens.”3 Estimates of casualties in the Kurdish town of Halabja range from several hundred to 7,000 people. It was, indeed, a barbaric act. But what George W. Bush and others in his administration failed to mention was that, at the time, his father, George H. W. Bush, as both vice president and president, ignored Saddam’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and even helped convince the Senate to drop plans to cut off all aid to Iraq in response to the gassing of Kurds in Halabja.4 Instead, the son invoked the ghosts of the father’s inactions. Emotion, death, honor, revenge, revulsion, anger, disgust: these are all the messy emotions of war and, at times, foreign policymaking. Babak Bahador does a brilliant job describing how and when ghosts of the dead call leaders into action and in the process give pause to political counselors. While a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, I wrote an essay that I hoped would offer a clearer way of thinking about the possible effects of dramatic and emotional media coverage on foreign policy decision-making—particularly those involving the use of force. To that point, too much of the scholarly and public debate concerning media effects on foreign policy decision-making and policy processes was disjointed and conceptually vague. Some, particularly political leaders, took the position that there were clear and strong effects, while others argued just as forcefully that there were none.5 It went back and forth, but with little headway. In reviewing these arguments, I was struck by their lack of conceptual coherence. Rather than having a dialog about the same phenomenon, observers were carrying on serial monologs about several loose categories of effects, all somehow tied together by global real-time media. I wanted to sort this out. I proposed a two-dimensional matrix of media effects: on one dimension was a typology of potential media effects; on the other was an array of politico-military policy options. Richard Haass inspired the policy matrix.6 Haass outlined a linear escalation of military interventions, beginning with the almost wholly benign interventions in FOREWORD xv humanitarian crisis where all parties are in agreement to the presence of troops (what Haass calls consensual military operations) to nuclear war. What I brought to Haass’s work was a series of potential media effects and their most likely pairings with his policy options. As a result, rather than one effect, I spoke of three CNN effects:

1. Agenda-setting manifestation of the CNN effect: Global, real- time media may entice leaders to engage in distant conflicts or crises, even those lacking a clear rationale of national interest. Instead, sentimentality—the abandonment perhaps of sovereign reason, the bedrock principle of Realist foreign policy—prevails. I argued, as have others since, that this almost never occurs. 2. Impediment manifestation of the CNN effect: At times media coverage undermines public and elite support for an extant operation. Casualties, for example, have long been thought to undermine public support for military operations. It is in a sense inversely related to the agenda-setting manifestation of the effect. Agenda setting gets countries involved in conflicts owing to media coverage; impediment undermines the willingness to be involved in conflict, again, owing to media coverage. 3. Accelerant manifestation of the CNN effect: When in war, media accelerates the pace of decision-making. Decision cycles match the expectations of 24-hour media coverage, rather than some other more rationale measure of relevance. In the process, the rapid-response rush to meet the demands of global media bypasses intelligence agencies, counselors, and the more deliberative elements of governance.

Rather than speak in general terms about a poorly defined CNN effect, the essay paired different effects with different politico-military operations. For example, low-intensity conflicts (or operations other than war) seem particularly vulnerable to one form of impediment effect, given this type of warfare’s dependence on stealth and secrecy, something difficult to maintain in a media saturated environment. What Bahador does in this insightful book is expand this typology of potential media effects on policy processes to include what he calls the challenging CNN effect. This is a significant but nuanced theoretical contribution to the literature on media effects on foreign policymaking. Resting somewhere between the agenda-setting and impediment manifestations of the CNN effect, the challenging effect involves third-party military interventions in humanitarian crises or war. As Bahador puts it, “Through the emergence of unexpected and emotive images framed in a sympathetic manner to a particular party xvi FOREWORD who are presented as victims, this effect makes an official policy appear ineffective or even misguided, exposing gaps between media represen- tation and policy claims. These gaps challenge the policy’s credibility, creating the environment in which policy decision makers are pres- sured to alter policy in order to fill the void.”7 The key to understand- ing Bahador’s contribution is to appreciate the role of policy. The impediment effect presupposes the existence of a clearly articulated and established policy: usually war at some level of severity. In Bahador’s apt phrase, policy is “interrupted by media content.” But there is a policy. On the other hand, as I formulated it in 1996, the agenda-setting manifestation of the CNN effect can be read as a media effect on policy when there is, in essence, no preexisting policy preference, or at least not an articulated one. Indeed, much of the early CNN effect literature placed considerable emphasis on the pre- sumed demise of ordering principles of U.S. foreign policy following the antiquation of the Truman Doctrine and Containment after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the cold war, the United States fell into a state of conceptual drift as it looked for a new way to order the international system and, in the process, make sense of its own foreign policy objectives.8 Into the void flowed dramatic media images from Kurdish north- ern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and other bloody wars. Without a clearly articulated guide to U. S. foreign policy preferences, media filled the void left by the collapse of the foreign policy rationale of the cold war. The challenging effect begins with an entirely different premise. It says the starting point is an articulated policy of nonintervention. Policymakers in this case have decided to, in a sense, follow Horatio’s advice and not give in to the temptations of revenge and righting past wrongs. As Bahador states it in the language of policy analysis, “As policy is often formulated in an atmosphere where subsystems have competing agendas and interests, media images can play an important role in favoring certain policies over others, making it difficult at times to maintain commitment to an official policy of nonintervention.” Put another way, in the rough and tumble of bureaucratic debates, compelling images of massacres and the like can provide ammunition to opponents of a policy of nonintervention. This is a subtle but important distinction to make regarding the CNN effect. It is made all the more relevant by more recent events in Iraq where righting wrongs became part of the rallying cry of the Neo- Conservative interventionists who saw the mere policy of containment of Saddam’s Iraq as immoral and wrong. The rise of the challenging FOREWORD xvii effect in Kosovo was a dress rehearsal for a much grander presenta- tion in the 2003 Iraq war.9 But that is not the full extent of Bahador’s contribution. He also emphasizes the “macro influences” on the CNN effect. One macro influence was the well-established narratives about villains and victims in the Balkan wars. “By 1995, villains in Yugoslavia were clearly established in Western minds and media frameworks. After the Bosnia conflict, notions of good and evil were further reinforced as the full scale of the devastation that had taken place in Srebrenica unfolded. This led to a kind of collective guilt and shame in much of the West.” Furthermore, there was, in a sense, the geopolitical luxury of being able to debate the Kosovo crisis. After all, part of the CNN effect argument rests on the fact that the cold war was over. The Eastern Bloc had collapsed. The Balkans was, for the first time since World War II, a fully European concern, rather than a quasi-satellite region of the Soviet Union. Alternatively, had the Kosovo conflict erupted after 9/11, “Allegations of links between the KLA and Osama Bin Laden and his network would also have been much more detrimental to the Albanian cause in this new period.” Context is everything. Another contribution made by The CNN Effect in Action is Bahador’s painstaking reconstruction and analysis of media coverage of key events in the Kosovo crisis. In particular, he offers a convincing argument concerning the role played by media coverage of the Drenica massacre of late February and early March 1998; the Gornje Obrinje massacre of September 26, 1998; and the Racak massacre of January 15, 1999. These are the events that pushed the Clinton administration over the edge and set a new course for policy, putting aside the cautious policy of nonintervention that had, for the most part, ruled in U.S. policy regarding the Balkans. In reconstructing this history and putting it in a sound theoretical context, Babak Bahador has made an important contribution to the CNN effect literature. Steven Livingston

Notes 1. The verb “beetles,” indicates a cliff’s summit that “juts out promi- nently,” that “projects” beyond its wave-worn base, like the head of a wooden “beetle” or mallet. 2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4. 3. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020322- 10.html. March 22, 2002. xviii FOREWORD

4. William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston, “Establishing the Gulf Policy Debate,” in Taken By Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, ed. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 66. 5. For an example of the first position, see George Kennan, “Somalia: Through a Glass Darkly,” New York Times, September 30, 1993, A25. For an argument on the second position, see Steven Livingston and Todd Eachus, “Humanitarian Crises and U.S. Foreign Policy: Somalia and the CNN Effect Reconsidered,” Political Communication 12, no. 4 (October–December 1995–96): 413–429. 6. Richard Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment Book, 1994). 7. Emphasis added. 8. For better or worse, whether considered an example of academic prescience or an idea that policymakers have turned into a self- fulfilling prophecy, Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations has filled the void. 9. Among the plethora of books about the Iraq war and the role of Neo-Conservative ideology, see Thomas Rick, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). Acknowledgments

This book could not have been completed without the support of many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife Sharon for her love, encouragement, and sacrifice. Besides allowing me to take the time required to complete this project, Sharon was also a great listener and proofreader, patiently hearing and reading many times over the ideas contained in this volume. I would also like to thank my daughters, Carmel and Ellie, who both entered the world as this book was written and edited. Although they did not know it, they gave me tremendous motivation every day. I would also like to pay tribute to my parents, who encouraged me to pursue an area of study that interested me, instead of a particular vocation, when I began university. This led me to the field of international relations, a subject that has fascinated me ever since I learnt of it and continues to interest me greatly. Besides my family, I would also like to thank Paul Taylor, my PhD supervisor at the London School of Economics, who provided encouragement and useful advice over the years it took to sharpen the focus of my research and finish my dissertation—the basis for this book. I would also like to thank a number of individuals who were kind enough to sacrifice their time and to either read or to offer feed- back through conversation as my dissertation evolved. In this regard, I would especially like to thank Piers Robinson, Jan Art Scholte, Phil Seib, Peter Wilson, Fred Halliday, Nelson Michaud, Ramin Kaweh, Zhand Shakibi, Chris White, Martin Shaw, Bita Watts, and Nicky Short. Special thanks also go to the staff at the Television News Archive at Vanderbilt University, who provided access and organized the videos needed to conduct my research. Furthermore, I would like to thank Christopher Coker and Robin Brown for their efforts as my PhD examiners and for providing beneficial advice and recommenda- tions for turning the dissertation into a book. Next, I want to thank Phil Seib for encouraging me to submit this manuscript for publication with Palgrave Macmillan, and Steven Livingston, who generously took time out of his busy schedule to xx ACKNOWLEDGMENTS provide a detailed review of my entire manuscript and write a foreword. Their encouragement and advice were critical in bringing this book to print. Finally, I would like to thank my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Heather Van Dusen and Toby Wahl, and the rest of the production team for guiding me through the publication process with patience. Introduction

In 1998 and 1999, television images of human suffering from Kosovo shocked the Western world. At the time, the story presented in main- stream Western media seemed relatively straightforward. An ultrana- tionalist government in Belgrade, led by Slobodan Milosevic, had used brutal force to suppress the Albanian majority in Kosovo, a rump province of the fragmenting former Yugoslavia. This perspective was supported by images of massacres that were widely displayed and con- demned on television screens throughout the West. In subsequent years, speculation emerged regarding the nature of the massacres, which many saw as a potent force in galvanizing Western support against the Serbian side. Although the Albanian community of Kosovo experienced much suffering, some observers questioned whether the images of carnage were part of a deliberate strategy by an insurgency group called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to gain the West’s attention and sympathies for its independence cause.1 If true, these sacrifices appeared to have garnered their desired outcome by the spring of 1999 when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiated an air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)2 over the Kosovo issue, in tacit alliance with the KLA. This was, in some ways, a surprising policy reversal. Only 13 months before the first bombs fell, the West had been making conces- sions in order to bring the FRY back into the international community and openly referring to the KLA as a terrorist organization. So what happened? Were the governments of the world’s greatest military alliance really pushed into war by the CNN effect?3 This is the central question that this book attempts to answer. Its primary method of addressing this question is through a case study of Kosovo- related Western media coverage and foreign policy during the Kosovo civil war—the period from February 1998 to March 1999 in which significant clashes took place between forces from the Serbian Ministry of Interior (MUP) and Yugoslav Army (VJ) and the KLA.4 The employment of this particular case study also opens up two other areas of potential insight. The first concerns foreign policy and how xxii INTRODUCTION the CNN effect influences its traditional role and function. The second relates to the CNN effect itself and its pattern of operation. This book is arranged into two sections. The first, which comprises chapters 1 through 3, is largely theoretical. It defines the CNN effect, outlines the central methods used to demonstrate cases of its occur- rence, presents a novel approach to reviewing such cases, and assesses the relationship between the CNN effect, war, and foreign policy. The second section, which incorporates chapters 4 through 7, uses the model outlined in the first section to assess if the CNN effect played a role in pushing the West into war over Kosovo. Abbreviations

ABC American Broadcasting Corporation ACTORD activation orders ACTWARN activation warning AFP Agence France-Press AP Associated Press BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CBS Columbian Broadcasting System CICs Coalition Information Centers CNN Cable News Network EU European Union FRY Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ITN International Television News KDOM Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission KLA Kosovo Liberation Army KVM Kosovo Verification Mission LDK Democratic League of Kosovo MUP Ministry of Interior NAC North Atlantic Council NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NBC National Broadcasting Company NSC National Security Council OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe SECI Southern European Cooperation Initiative UN United Nations UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization US United States VJ Yugoslav Army