Looking like Flames and Falling like Stars: Kosovo, ‘the First Internet War’

Wednesday, 28 March 2001 01:00 |

Presse - zur kosov@ & balkan sunflowers

THOMAS KEENAN
Bard College
For the last decade or so of the twentieth century, many of us were gripped by a powerful idea, an ideology even: that the new media of communications technology, writing, imaging, and data storage would not only revolutionise \the way large armies fought wars and big powers conducted politics, but

would also open up new spaces and times for less traditional political actors,

activists, humanitarian and human rights movements, ‘independent media’,

non-governmental organisations, even an international citizenry. Unpre-

cedented opportunities, and new political possibilities. Real-time television,

camcorders, fax machines, and the Internet seemed to be creating new forms

and zones of the political, new rhythms and speeds, new data con icts and

new rules by which to wage them. If economic globalisation was propelled, at

least in part, by the new digital media of information, then, it seemed, these

media might in some meaningful way be capable of being put to other uses,

enlisted in the struggle against the twin forces of homogenisation and of

division.

A lot has happened in that decade. The impression was not necessarily

wrong — indeed, this experiment has still only now begun — but the trials

through which it has passed, from the Romanian uprising in 1989 to the

Kosovo war in 1999, seem by now to demand some revisions to the axioms of

publicity, civil society, and free information which largely underwrote the new

net movements.

Is the Internet a new public sphere? If we answer yes, at least in a sense, we

need to account for its failures, and what they imply for these axiomatic

de nitions of publicity and freedom. These failures — and the 1990s were, in

this sense, a decade of failures — are not necessarily reason for pessimism, at

least not unless we subscribe to the idea that free information makes free

societies and free citizens, somehow automatically. And not unless we strive to

recreate, technically, some allegedly destroyed unity of the authentic, unmedi-

ated, public. Those are the axioms and projects which this decade has mortally

endangered. Counting on civil society, putting our faith in information —

whether it proposes real-time television or alternative media or anything else

as the ground for reason and deliberation — seems unwise, even intolerable,

today. There may be little to learn in the way of ‘lessons’ of the wars in former

ISSN 1350-4630 print/ISSN 1363-0296 online/01/040539-12 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1350463012010769 2

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540 Thomas Keenan

Yugoslavia — somehow the idea of drawing morals from those catastrophic

stories seems particularly inappropriate — but if there is one, it might be

simply that information, communication, publicity, is never enough. There

were no technical xes there, no matter how important the media of infor-

mation were, only altogether too belated political ones.

But if open channels are not enough, the new digital media have certainly

changed the situation, the times and spaces of action. How can we analyse the

Internet in order to learn something about our new public spaces, about the

possibilities for politics when information, transparency, and the dissent

necessary for democracy cannot be taken for granted — but must be fought

for?

Few who read it, and many did, will forget the broken English and the

particular mixture of terror and excitement which characterised the e-mail that

Kosovar human rights activist Sevdie Ahmeti sent from Pristina to the

, women-east-west . listserv of the Network of East-West Women, just hours

after NATO’s air campaign began on 24 March 1999. ‘Missiles and Kosova’, she

called it, and it began:

Last night at around 20.00 CET NATO threats came true. Messiles

started to fall like rains on Prishtina. Some ve of them were seen and

they were furtive. They looked like ames and falling like stars. One of

them some perhaps one hour later, before the start of the NATO air

strike, was so furtive that those watching from the windows felt the rush

of the windblow on their nose and chest. Some few moments later, a big

smoke and re was observed on the Western side of Prishtine. Right at

the start of the strike, Prishtine was out of electricity, which came now

at about 08.25 CET of the 25 of March.

So far there is no report from the eld, but the one very con dential and

fearful from Gjakove, where the old part of the town was set ablaze.

[…]

As feared from retaliation, it happened. Now in anxiety, we are waiting

for other reports. There is a need to report also that Gjakove town had

electricity all the time. People were engaged in watching CNN reporting

the attacks. Many arrests have happened. No one knows to what

direction arrested people were sent. (Ahmeti, 1999)

The message bore witness to the event, with remarkable rhetorical power and

a striking immediacy, which it marked with the reference to its own condition

of inscription: ‘electricity … came on now’.

Already in its January 1999 issue, Wired magazine had suggested that ‘the

struggle engul ng the provinces of the former Yugoslavia is the rst Internet

war’ (‘Inside the First ‘Internet War’’, Wired, 7.01, January 1999, p. 70).

Now it

had really begun.

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Looking like Flames and Falling like Stars: Kosovo, ‘the First Internet War’ 541

Reporting for the New York Times from Tirana in mid-July 1999, David

Bennahum described an International Rescue Committee project, called the

Kosovar Yellow Pages, an on-line and printed document of the deportations

which gathered the names of Kosovar Albanians, their hometowns and current

locations (Bennahum, 1999). The headline called it ‘an online phone directory

of a people in exile’, and it was, Bennahum wrote,

essentially a phone book of an entire country on the move. For refugees

cut off from the rest of the world, this information was precious, a rst

step toward retracing the bonds of family and friendship.

The project sought to take advantage of the fact that information could move

more quickly than people, and unlike them could occupy more than one

location at once. This differential in speed, and the virtualisation of place,

seemed paradoxically to slow down the violent dispersal of people, the

calculated production of refugees, which was a central dimension of ethnic

cleansing in Kosovo.

That was interesting, while it lasted, a rigorous effort to make use of

something actually new about the Internet. The end of the war and the return

of the deported soon rendered the directory less important, but it lived on —

because this Internet project was also an example. The foundation executive

who nanced the project explained what it meant:

Technologies like the Internet allow us to rapidly deliver solutions to

public needs without huge infrastructure costs. […] It changes the way

we address social problems by enabling people to take action in a

decentralised way.

The funder’s optimism, not to mention her enthusiasm for technical means of

addressing issues, was not unique. Technologies, ‘like the Internet’, might

convert politics into problems, and rapidly deliver solutions. In this sense,

many of the wartime Internet projects in Kosovo took their place in a long line

of digital efforts to address the political struggles and military catastrophes

which had engulfed former Yugoslavia over the decade then ending. From

Wam Kat’s diaries to the ZaMir network to Berserkistan and the fabled Internet

Revolution of winter 1996 in Belgrade, a multitude of websites and chat rooms

and listservs had sought to create new spaces for and new ways of responding

to the odd mixture of geopolitics and personal tragedies precipitated by

genocide in Europe fty years after the Shoah. Some had even seen in the wars

of the Yugoslav succession a new species of ‘data con icts’ (Wark, 1997, p. 30;

Weilnböck, 1996, p. 18).

Masha Gessen had written in Wired in November 1995 of the ‘Balkans

Online’, referring to Wam Kat’s sense that ‘the whole region is a virtual reality’,

and hence that it made a certain amount of sense to create an electronic

network that could ‘connect groups ghting against war in a country that was

being ripped apart by it’ (Gessen, 1995, pp. 220, 160). And so the ZaMir net was

built, a dramatically low-tech system that somehow ironically shadowed the

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542 Thomas Keenan

spectacular hi-tech humanitarian interventions of UNPROFOR and the inter-

national agencies which so over-populated the region in those years. People

talked to people, often across the most violent of borders; friends were

re-united, the dead accounted for, and messages of survival transmitted. Even

alternative media were created, with access to decidedly unof cial, and often

more reliable, sources of information. But Gessen was cautiously sceptical: you

might think, she wrote, that this was

the stuff of exquisite inspiration: journalists and activists succeeding

against wartime odds in making an alternative perspective public.

Except the wartime odds are winning. The antiwar groups and indepen-

dent media in the region may have succeeded in getting hooked up, but

this does not appear to have moved the war any closer to its end. The

most tangible things activists do is mend people and buildings broken

by war, often only to have them smashed up again.

For Gessen, the technology, however interesting and inventive, was no way

around politics.

This allegory of networks and ruins was already forgotten a year and a half

later, after the ghting had stopped (or so it seemed then) but as the political

fallout was only getting started. The headline on Chris Hedges’ front-page

piece in the New York Times, ‘Serbs’ Answer to Oppression: Their Web Site’,

exempli ed with admirable economy the information ideology, the longed-for

replacement of politics by the Internet (1996, p. 1). Wired christened the Bel-

grade student protests of December 1996 ‘the Internet Revolution’, and in a

long report under that title David Bennahum proposed that the student

demonstrations constituted ‘the rst large-scale con ict where the Internet is

playing a signi cant role’ (1997, p. 124). And not just any role: ‘it appears clear

that access to the Internet is incompatible with authoritarianism’. This theorem

proved to have remarkable staying power, such that two years after the

unequivocal failure of that ‘revolution’, journalists, activists, and political

professionals continued to promote it. In September 1998, Bruno Giussani

wrote in the New York Times (on the Web) that in spite of this failure,

‘something was left from 1996: technology’ (Giussani, 1998). And it was as if

the technology were more important than the revolution, the very embryo of

the democracy that the society had not yet been prepared for.

‘It’s like a new level of public sphere’, explained Bela Marias, an ethno-

musicologist from Yugoslavia who took refuge in Hungary.

People don’t protest anymore by standing in front of a policeman, but

they keep on working, exchanging ideas, disseminating information that

are not available through the state-controlled media — all by way of the

Internet.

Serbia was very well informed indeed. That much is true, no matter how

nationalist, loud, and violent the of cial state and many private media were.

The cultural opposition ourished, and the free ow of information was surely

at its core. At the digital level, and at the speed of light, new elds of action

emerged and were robustly populated. The channels were open. It was this

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Looking like Flames and Falling like Stars: Kosovo, ‘the First Internet War’ 543

alternative public sphere that was put to the most extreme test a few months

later, in the spring of 1999, when the war that had circled around Serbia and

Kosovo for so many years nally landed. Looking like ames and falling like

stars.

In the midst of the war in Kosovo, the President of the United States explained

what his air forces and their allies were doing:

Are we, in the last year of the twentieth century, going to look the other

way as entire peoples in Europe are forced to abandon their homelands

or die, or are we going to impose a price on that kind of conduct and

seek to end it? […] We are on the edge of a new century and a new

millennium where the people in poor countries all over the world,

because of technology and the Internet and the spreading of infor-

mation, will have unprecedented opportunities to share prosperity and

to give their kids an education and have a decent future, if only they will

live in peace with the basic human regard for other people that is

absolutely antithetical to everything that Mr Milosevic has done.

(‘Clinton’s Speech on Kosovo: ‘We Also Act to Prevent a Wider War’’,

The New York Times, 2 April 1999)

What the President didn’t say, though, was that ‘that kind of conduct’ and ‘the

Internet and the spreading of information’ did not themselves seem to be

absolutely antithetical. Far from it. Indeed, if Kosovo was in fact something like

the rst Internet war, it deserves the name only because the medium became

a battle eld and information a weapon, for almost all of the combatants … and

the basic human regard for other people had very little to do with it. The free

ow of information was in fact quite conducive to the project of forcing people

‘to abandon their homelands or die’. No wishing, ghting, or epistemology will

change that fact. The publicity afforded by the Internet served both the forces

of ethnic cleansing and those of high-altitude bombing, and some of those who

were their targets. That unpredictability and openness of the medium is what

makes it a political space, and what exposes those who operate within it to

decision, action, and responsibility.

But war is not just politics, even if it is politics as well. And war on the

Internet, war with the Internet, deserves its own analysis. Surely the battle over

Kosovo, and the mass murders and expulsions within and from it, were

also fought in the new media of the digital age. From NATO’s multimedia

extravaganza of a webpage to new voices from the front in everyone’s e-mail,

including the infamous Serbian hackers, the elds of action proliferated. Few

journalists were hesitant to see in the Internet the proper postmodern sup-

plement to traditional reporting, an answer to censorship and a reservoir of

new voices. I think Robert Uhlig was the rst, in the Daily Telegraph just three

days after the bombing began, to give the war its subtitle:

the bombing of Serbia has become the rst Internet war, with e-mail

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544 Thomas Keenan

missives from local people providing day-by-day accounts of the con ict

from the front lines in Belgrade and Pristina. (Uhlig, 1999, p. 4)

Not everyone was chatting, though. Neil MacFarquhar noted in the New

York Times of 29 March that

the Internet’s power to reassure equals its ability to spread unease.

Many Web correspondents who had been communicating with ethnic

Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo nd that their previous

E-mail correspondents have fallen ominously silent. (MacFarquhar, 1999,

p. A12; see also Frey, 1999, p. C1)

And as Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch told the Boston Globe just a

couple of days after the bombing began,

the Internet is still functioning sporadically. It’s working in Belgrade,

but in Pristina, the phone lines are more erratic and there is little

opportunity to get e-mail from Kosovo. (Hartigan, 1999, p. A9)

Ominously silent.

What difference does the Internet make in a war? Not for the war- ghters or

their targets, but for citizens, civilians, people, as they say, at home? For

soldiers, and for the civilians who suffered at their hands, the war in Kosovo

was somehow just as terrible as any other. ‘For the citizens of the NATO

countries, on the other hand, the war was virtual. They were mobilized, not as

combatants but as spectators.’ Thus Michael Ignatieff, in his critical dissection

of the war in Kosovo, Virtual War, asks whether the advanced communication,

media, and guidance technologies of post-modern warfare have so de-realised

the experience of war for its spectators that they may no longer ‘care enough

to restrain and control the violence exercised in their name’ (Ignatieff, 2000,

p. 4). And that they may no longer care enough to be mobilised in support of

war when it matters — ‘war endures because human interests, values and

commitments are occasionally irreconcilable’ — which is to say, that they may

no longer be willing and able to ‘get [their] hands dirty’ (pp. 212, 215). Dirty

hands, bloodstained ones, and the risks and stakes they metonymise, he says,

are necessary for responsible democratic citizenship, and he worries that the

virtualisation of reality and of the reality that is war can induce the very

fantasies of cleanliness and invulnerability that are the most dangerous of all

to democracy. ‘We need to stay away from such fables of self-righteous

invulnerability’, he writes in the moral of his own counter-fable.

And who could disagree? Vulnerability, which is to say, the experience of

risk, the collapse of self-con dent identity and the exposure to undecidability,

is the irreducible core of any responsibility worthy of the name — of impli-

cation, contamination, and obligation toward the other. We might ask, though,

whether these fables are really the fault of virtualisation, and whether the

evasion of and resistance to the virtual is a meaningful way of addressing

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Looking like Flames and Falling like Stars: Kosovo, ‘the First Internet War’ 545

them. After all, as Ignatieff points out, the problem of the virtual, if it is one,

is as old and as profound as that of language itself:

We live our lives in language and thus in representation. We always see

through a glass darkly, never face to face. Yet even if the real is hidden,

it exists and by inference and patient study, we can make out its shape.

Only the most devoted attention to the real can help us make judge-

ments and take actions which are both responsible and ef cacious.

(p. 214)

But what if the virtual wasn’t simply a problem to be solved? If it were really

like language — not simply hiding the world and its bloody reality, darkening,

obscuring, effacing it, but giving it to us, letting us live it — then the

epistemology of revelation and Enlightenment, even one compromised by

patience, modesty, and inference, would not suf ce. To the extent that it

promises to let us ‘make out its shape’, this ethico-epistemological realism all

too subtly avoids the most important and irreducible events of judgement,

action, and responsibility that it seeks to grasp. For decisions open up, and we

enter the space of responsibility, only when devoted attention is not enough,

when the rules fail and our cognitive mastery of the situation breaks off.

Although he does it in a nostalgic, somewhat obscure mode, Ignatieff

happens on an insight about this in the midst of a strange tribute to what he

calls the ‘state of relative transparency’ induced by mobile telephones and

e-mail to and from the war zone. Although he goes unmentioned, the spectre

of Carl Schmitt hangs over this analysis. What happens to war when the

distinction between friend and enemy becomes uncertain? What happens to

politics, to taking sides, to making decisions and taking ‘actions which are both

responsible and ef cacious’? The virtualisation of war tends toward the dissol-

ution of the enemy — not just in the disappearance of the human reality of the

target, its de-realisation, but in the reduction of distance and the abolition of

difference, of opposition, as communications vectors overwhelm the absolute

opacity that enmity demands. Electronic ‘contact reduced the moral estrange-

ment between the two sides’, he writes, but unlike the effects of passivity and

carelessness introduced by virtual spectatorship, this seems to increase the

dif culty, escalate the trouble, and challenge the abstractions:

Channels with the other side remained open throughout the war […]

and that made it more dif cult to conserve a state of righteous abstrac-

tion toward what they were going through. E-mails, faxes, and phone

calls all continued to ow across the battle-lines. (p. 139)

Transparency goes both ways, then. Virtual technologies reduce us to specta-

tors and make killing unreal; but on the other hand, they also tend toward the

erasure of abstraction and re-present ‘the enemy’ in ways that erode ethical

certainty. The technologies of communication thus introduce a basic confusion

into the analysis, the dissolution of the opposition between real and virtual on

which Ignatieff’s interpretation is premised. ‘We live our lives in language’,

which means, radically separated from others, and in contact with them.

Neither real nor simply virtual — it is the reliability, the moral sureness, of this

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546 Thomas Keenan

distinction which is withdrawn from us, and which makes our predicament

political. This confusion is precisely the condition of any signi cant decision,

and it is the normal state of language. The state of relative transparency means

getting our hands dirty, vulnerability in the most extreme sense.

Journalist Charles Arthur assessed the performance of the network in wartime

three weeks after Sevdie Ahmeti’s powerful e-mail:

A common aphorism among Internet geeks is that the network ‘treats

censorship as damage, and just routes around it’. That is, if you try to

stop the ow of information, all that happens is that you get less

information — but nobody else does. If the war in Kosovo is truly the

‘ rst Internet war’, as is being claimed in some papers, how does it

measure up against the geeks’ rule of thumb? The early signs are: very

well. (Arthur, 1999, p. 13)

Geert Lovink has correctly noted, though, that however truly the war was

fought with the Internet, a lot of the combatants were absent. Networks went

down, phones and e-mails went unanswered, people went missing, voices and

traces went away, some never to return. This is not just a technical problem.

Ten years after the Romanian television revolution: ‘The Internet is with

us’. Not quite. In the case of the Kosova war, this new medium has

proven particularly vulnerable. Not yet warproof. Not much ‘routing

around’, as the of cial Internet ideology [stated] it so simply […] With

Serbian ‘dissident’ media being shut down, journalists killed and

intimidated, and Kosova destroyed and emptied of people, who is there

to do the ‘authentic’ Internet reporting? (Lovink, 1999, p. 36)

Of course, there were a lot of words and pictures and sounds on the Internet,

and many of them came directly from the war zone, but Lovink’s point is that

they weren’t exactly the sort of things that the ideologists of the new media had

been promising all these years. Not the authentic voices of dissidence, the

emergent civil society making its way out from under and around the party

lines, the protests from the places unseen and unknown by what was nick-

named the mainstream media, the tactical interventions that bypassed the big

networks. At least not much of that. The big networks were there, the military

ones and the media ones, and some smaller voices emerged from places where

the infrastructure remained intact. But the voices of those in Belgrade — who

had stayed silent for ten years while soldiers and paramilitaries roamed

unchecked through Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo, killing and ‘cleansing’ in

their name — who now discovered that they too could be, and wear, targets,

wasn’t really all that we’d been led to expect from the new democratic culture

of the Internet. A certain civil society ourished, even discovered new re-

sources in its adversity, and lively debates ensued, but the people from Kosovo

were missing. Not a lot of message traf c in or out of Pristina, not much

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Looking like Flames and Falling like Stars: Kosovo, ‘the First Internet War’ 547

bandwidth in the mud of the camps at Kukes and Stankovec. Laptops and cell

phones were lacking, it seemed, and so the technological and cultural revol-

ution that should have heralded the dawn of a rigorously independent media

— reporters at or behind the front lines, eyewitnesses transmitting from hiding

or on the move, investigators freed of their cumbersome materiality or the

leashes that kept them immobile — didn’t quite get started.

There were exceptions of course, all the more valuable for their rarity

(Natasha Kandic, the anonymous correspondents of the IWPR, testimonies

collected by Human Rights Watch at the border). But Kosovo remained, more

or less, a blank on the information map. With astonishing rapidity it was

emptied of its people in the days and nights following 24 March, and all that

killing and all those deportations took place without a lot of documentation.

Terrible things were happening surely, but where were the witnesses? A

handful of foreign journalists remained in Pristina, most notably the APTV

cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora (later killed in Sierra Leone), and

activists like Kandic drove in from Belgrade: ‘Whenever I show up in Pristina,

people can hardly believe it possible. It amazes me that I manage to do it’, she

wrote in one of a series of remarkable e-mail communiqués (Kandic, 1999,

p. 20). Two or three pieces of camcorder video made it out of Kosovo — the

evidence of the Izbica massacre was the most striking — but that was about it.

The rest of the computers, satellite phones, and digital cameras were parked at

the borders or in the brie ng rooms.

Journalists tell you that it makes a difference which side of a war you cover

it from, no matter how hard you try to compensate for the asymmetry. Kosovo

found itself trapped on neither side. Between Belgrade and Blace, Novi Sad and

Kukes, a territory was emptied out. Of people and their means of communi-

cation. Ominously silent. But the problem is not merely empirical, and nally

not technical. Suppose the Internet had ‘routed around’ not simply the re-

pression but the violence of the war itself; it did sometimes. What difference

would it have made, and on what register or scale? Seeing and hearing more,

would we have known more, known differently, known better? Even without

it, though, it’s not like we didn’t know what was happening. We heard and

saw and read more than enough, and what we couldn’t get, the silence told us

more eloquently than any words or images or sounds. The question is: what

are we asking for when we ask for information, when we put our faith in free

media and the electronic civil society? What happens to politics, to rights and

to responsibilities?

Ignatieff’s answer — that they disappear — is surely too hasty, too realist

and nally incapable of resisting the very automatisation, technisation, of the

political that he seems most to fear. Surely new spaces and times do open up,

and it is important to ght to keep them open. But that is only the beginning

— a never-ending beginning perhaps — and it is never enough. After infor-

mation and its new public sphere comes the labour of reading it, re-inscribing

it, mobilising it in political struggles: against ethnic cleansing and identitarian

nationalism, against the ravages of nancial globalisation. We cannot today do

this without the Internet and the technologies of which it is the icon, but they

will not do it for us.

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548 Thomas Keenan

A nal image, a set of images: no matter how silent Kosovo fell, there were

plenty of warnings, anticipations, and echoes.

Just a week before the bombing began, Serbian forces in Kosovo taught the

world a lesson about open channels, the politics of information, and virtual

war. They taught it using those very media. On 16 March, correspondent Bill

Neely of Britain’s Independent Television News reported from a village in

Kosovo called Mijalic. His camera crew — along with another crew from the

BBC with reporter Angus Roxburgh — was video-taping as Serbian policemen

and nearby villagers, watching the cameras that watched them, and thus in full

knowledge of the fact that their deeds were being recorded, looted and

destroyed it. He reported, simply and eloquently: ‘The Serbs know we’re

lming them, but they make the law here and break it, so they burn Mijalic to

the ground’.

Roxburgh said something similar: ‘The village was razed before

our eyes; they knew we were lming them, they didn’t care’. The ITN video

log reports the scene succinctly: ‘Looters out of house waving to cameras’. With

this simple gesture of the hand, not simply cynical or ironic, not simply

nihilistic no matter how destructive, these policemen announced the effective

erasure of a fundamental axiom of the human rights movement in an age of

publicity: that the exposure of violence is feared by its perpetrators, and hence

that the act of witness is not simply an ethical gesture but an active interven-

tion. At Human Rights Watch this principle is called ‘mobilising shame’, and

presupposes that dark deeds are done in the dark, and that the light of

publicity — especially of the television camera — thus has the power to strike

preemptively on behalf of justice. With a wave, these policemen announced

their comfort with the camera, their knowledge of the actual power of truth

and representation.

In the midst of the war, in a text bearing the witty title ‘Saving Private Havel’

that was widely disseminated on e-mail lists like , nettime. and the Syndi-

cate, Boris Buden sought to draw a lesson from the ten years of war that had

made ex-Yugoslavs like himself experts in the politics of information (Buden,

1999, p. 30). He tried, once and for all, to ruin ‘the illusion that people in a

democratic system never make a false choice — or, if they occasionally do

make one, it is only due to a lack of objective information.’

Do we know enough? Yes, and no. We know more than enough, and yet,

somehow, what we know is not nally suf cient. Buden writes:

Certainly, the Serbs of Belgrade know about the ethnic cleansing of

Albanians in Kosova — no less, at least, than they knew about what

happened to Vukovar or, later, in Sarajevo […] If there is a lesson to be

learned from the Yugoslav disaster, it is about the transparency of evil.

Nothing has happened in these ten years of war that wasn’t ‘entirely

predictable’ — if it wasn’t announced outright and in advance.

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Looking like Flames and Falling like Stars: Kosovo, ‘the First Internet War’ 549

A veritable army of examples, some enumerated here, bear witness to this

other side of transparency. The war put the Internet to the test, and if it did

indeed emerge as a new space of battle, it also proved to be an uneven and

unstable eld of operations. Stark voices like that of Sevdie Ahmeti were heard,

and when they disappeared, NATO’s satellite imagery on the web testi ed

silently to the catastrophe underway, off-line. But signi cant gaps in the

network emerged, not just technical ones, and no routing-around could com-

pensate for them. From the well-wired citizens of Belgrade and Novi Sad,

wearing their targets, to the publicity-conscious policemen of Mijalic, in full

view, and including the deported Kosovars in the cyber-cafes of Skopje and on

cell-phones in the camps, information spread freely, channels remained open,

and very little remained altogether unknown. Zones of silence notwithstand-

ing, there were few mysteries in Kosovo. Almost everything was entirely

predictable, predicted, and still the political response was late, slow, halting,

high-altitude, not quite nished. On the ground and overhead, technical means

were necessary, but they were not suf cient. Information technologies did not

simply convert us into voyeuristic spectators, but neither did they solve our

political problems for us. Media and new media, free information, even with

their unprecedented opportunities, are never enough for politics.

If indeed new possibilities, not simply to know but to testify, to bear

witness, have emerged — exempli ed by Sevdie Ahmeti’s e-mail, the telephoto

lens of those British cameras, the camcorder at Izbica, and the effects of

transparency noted by Ignatieff — then our task is to begin assessing the ways

in which these acts of witness cannot be reduced to the status of information.

Because information is not what it used to be, if it ever was. With more of it,

and at higher speeds today than ever before, we are once again confronted

with the challenge of reading the texts that carry it, not in the vain hope of

replacing or circumventing the political, but in order to rediscover it.

Thomas Keenan can be contacted at the Human Rights Project, Bard College, PO Box

5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000, USA, e-mail: keenan@bard.edu.

Notes

1. Many people have noted that if any con ict properly deserves the adjective

‘ rst Internet’ it would be the struggle of the EZLN in Chiapas.

2. Bill Neely, Independent Television News, Mijalic, 17 March 1999; also

broadcast by CNN, The World Today, ‘Serbs Ravage Kosovo Village’,

Tuesday, March 16, 1999; 8:39 pm ET; Angus Roxburgh reports for BBC

News, 6 O’Clock News, 17 March 1999.

References

Ahmeti, S. (1999) ‘Missiles and Kosova, Gjakova Old Part of Town Set Ablaze’,

Pristina, 25 March, http://www.egroups.com/message/kosovo-reports/10.

Page 12

550 Thomas Keenan

Arthur, C. (1999) ‘Do You Read Me, Comrade?’, The Independent (London), 13

April.

Bennahum, D. (1999) ‘For Kosovars, an Online Phone Directory of a People in

Exile’, The New York Times, 15 July.

– (1997) ‘The Internet Revolution’, Wired, 5.04, April.

Buden, B. (1999) ‘Saving Private Havel’, Bastard Global Edition, May/June.

‘Clinton’s Speech on Kosovo: ‘We Also Act to Prevent a Wider War’’, The New

York Times, 2 April.

Frey, J. (1999) ‘ ‘Subject: We Are All In Danger’; in E-mail From Kosovo, a

Terrifying Message’, The Washington Post, 29 March.

Gessen, M. (1995) ‘Balkans Online’, Wired, 3.11, November.

Giussani, B. (1998) ‘Born From ‘96 Opposition, Serbian Internet Effort Thrives’,

The New York Times on the Web, Eurobytes, 8 September.

Hartigan, P. (1999) ‘Media, Rights Workers use Internet to Defy Bans’, The

Boston Globe, 27 March.

Hedges, C. (1996) ‘Serbs’ Answer to Oppression: their Web Site’, The New York

Times, 8 December.

Ignatieff, M. (2000) Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, New York: Henry Holt and

Co.

‘Inside the First ‘Internet War’’, Wired , 7.01, January, p. 70.

Kandic, N. (1999) YHRF Report #11, 12 May, Bastard Global Edition, May/June.

Lovink, G. (1999) ‘War in the Age of the Internet: Some Thoughts and Reports’,

BastardGlobal Edition, May–June.

MacFarquhar, N. (1999) ‘For First Time in War, E-Mail Plays a Vital Role’, The

New York Times, 29 March.

Uhlig, R. (1999) ‘Front-line News now Travels by E-mail’, The Daily Telegraph,

27 March.

Wark, M. (1997) ‘Data Trauma’, 21 C, 24.

Weilnböck, H. (1996) ‘Lust am Kabelverkehr’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21–22

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