The political causes and effects of any war are not only difficult to convey, they also fly in the face of one of the most important criteria for a news story: they aren't all that riveting. What makes good copy? Generally, it's something we can relate to, something which stirs the emotions. This goes some way to explaining the media focus on the plight of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees who have fled Kosovo since the air strikes began. In an RTE Prime Time special, and countless other television programmes and newspaper articles, the conditions of these refugees has been highlighted, along with their accounts of horrific abuse suffered at the hands of Serb soldiers.
They describe being forced from their homes, walking with nothing but the clothes on their backs for days and nights, sometimes carrying dying children who had been shot by Serbs - only to arrive in cold and muddy border refugee camps, lucky if they have plastic covering to sleep under. As one Irish Times headline put it: "Grieving, carnage and terror overshadow political efforts".
But neither ethnic cleansing nor the resulting exodus of refugees are exactly new. From Biblical times, both have been a fairly constant fact of life in this world. Europe, including the Balkans saw millions of refugees during the second World War. Closer to home, only 30 years ago, about 80,000 people from both communities in Northern Ireland were displaced. This decade has seen massive refugee movement in the Balkans, including the removal of hundreds of thousands of Serbians from eastern Croatia.
In general, in all these cases the focus of media coverage was on military strategy or paramilitary violence, rather than people fleeing their homes night after night.
Opinion polls suggest that the focus on the plight of the ethnic Albanians has helped justify the NATO air strikes - which have themselves led to so many civilian deaths. The ethnic Albanian refugees interviewed in the media overwhelmingly say they are in favour of the NATO air strikes. They see them as the only way to end the persecution and slaughter they have had to endure under Milosevic. In Ireland we are very familiar with media coverage of refugees. But when they arrive in our country, destitute, overwhelmed with grief and laden down with stories of torture and brutality, we look at them suspiciously, and resort to words such as "spongers", "deluge" and "flood". The first Kosovar refugees arrive in Ireland this week.
It's safe to say none of them put Ireland as their first choice of refuge: countries nearer to home, or at least with an ethnic Albanian population, were preferred. But when asked about Ireland, many said they did think of it as a country of friendly people. Let's hope we live up to the way we've apparently been portrayed in Balkan media reports.
