The Media in Bosnia: Signs of Change?

By Alan Heil

U.S. Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: “Sunlight is the most powerful of all disinfectants.” Informed opinion, he said, is absolutely essential to prevent the abuse of government. That is particularly true in the heartland of former Yugoslavia, where nationalist- and entity-controlled media have fostered ancient enmities and the whole truth often has been among the wartime casualties of the 1990s.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the differing Serb, Croat and Muslim versions of history converge on the airwaves and in the newspapers. Now, nearly four years after the horrific conflict of 1992-95 ended, it is fair to ask: can Bosnians break the mold?

On one hand, as Tina Rosenberg wrote in The New York Times earlier this year, the Bosnian war has strengthened each ethnic group’s sense of victimization.“Because Bosnia’s schools and media reinforce these nationalist myths,” she wrote, “the children who are absorbing them will be tinder someday when a demagogue like Slobodan Milosevic comes along to incite them to kill rather than to be victimized again.”

On the other hand, Bosnians have available reportage, investigative accounts, and a framework of sound journalistic principles which are relatively balanced, when compared with the information diet available to readers, listeners and viewers in neighboring Serbia and Croatia. It’s even possible to call what is happening in Bosnia the prelude to a kind of Balkans-style perestroika, the beginnings of truth-telling about the immediate past.

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London notes that the Banja Luka independent daily newspaper Nezavisne Novine in August courageously published the first detailed account of mass crimes committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims to appear in Republika Srpska and asked why, seven years later, no one had been brought to account. The paper, on its front page and two inside pages, printed eyewitness survivor accounts of the execution by Serbs of 200 Muslim men at the Koricani cliffs on Mount Vlasic. It’s no accident, perhaps, that Nezavisne Novine is the most widely read newspaper in the Bosnian Serb Republic.

Similarly, the Sarajevo weekly Dani has carried several accounts the past year or so of Muslim crimes against Serbs in Sarajevo. Radio Mostar last November broadcast news about the sudden dismissal of Bosnian Muslim workers of an aluminum plant and the Soko aircraft factory there. The employees had been fired without cause, and replaced overnight with Croat workers. The radio reported that the sacked employees complained to then-international High Representative Carl Westendorp “in the expectation that you will stop the clear division of this country by interconnected businessmen who are unscrupulously playing with our fate.”

Signing on to Journalistic Codes of Accuracy

There are dozens of newspapers and 280 radio and television stations in Bosnia and Herzegovina—more electronic media outlets per capita than in the United States.Of these, there is a critical mass of about 50 independent FM radio stations struggling to survive financially—those which are not funded by entity governments, provincial nationalist leaders or political parties. The Office of the High Representatives and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), assisted by international agencies, are working closely to support the media and encourage them to adapt common Western journalistic standards.

A year and a half ago, the International Media Commission began hosting regular inter-entity joint meetings of six existing journalistic organizations based in Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Mostar. According to executive director Bob Gillette of the internationally funded IMC, this has developed into an ongoing nationwide forum among professionals on a broad range of print journalism issues. The major accomplishment, he says, has been a voluntary press code upon which the six organizations agreed and which was signed last April by Croat, Muslim and Serb editors.

Consistent with practice in Europe and the United States, print media in Bosnia are not subject to licensing, but electronic media are. So the IMC, in consultation with Bosnia-Herzigovina (BiH) broadcasters, has established a licensing system, designed both to allocate frequencies in what is a helter-skelter frequency environment and to craft common editorial and programming standards. In August 1998, the IMC and the stations issued a Broadcasting Code of Practice. All 280 electronic media outlets have signed the code, and pledged to follow it in exchange for initial licenses to broadcast.

The code says stations “must not broadcast programs that by any reasonable judgment are intended to promote, or over the course of time systematically promote, the interests of one political party or any group or individual to the exclusion of other parties, groups or individuals.” About a dozen stations have been fined, and in one case a station was suspended, for code violations. But by and large, executive director Gillette says, “the injunctions against incitement of violence, hatred and intolerance in the broadcast and press codes are generally accepted here.

“We have a constructive working relationship, even with the stations we’ve had to warn or otherwise penalize for violations of the Code,” Gillette said. “During the Kosovo crisis, when emotions were running high in Republika Srpska, most of the TV stations whose programming was seriously unbalanced did, in fact, take positive steps to broadcast additional, balancing information as IMC requested. The result, I think, was that viewers were better served.”

Accelerating Reform

A majority of BiH media outlets still broadcast official statements reflecting the myths and stereotypes spawned by the four Balkans wars of the 1990s. But there are three factors which may help transform the media environment into one where truth-telling and intercommunity dialogue in the press and on the airwaves are the rule, rather than the exception:

The emergence of national networks. The internationally-assisted FERN and OBN networks have a nationwide, or nearly nationwide, reach in BiH. They are available throughout all three entities, and FERN carries programming produced by the U.S.-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Europe as part of its schedule. RFE’s South Slavic Service provides a daily two-hour morning block of programming in a network called Radio 27, the original number of BiH subscriber stations. Today, that RFE network has grown to 37 stations in the Federation and the RS and 10 more stations are about to come on line. VOA’s Bosnian- and Serbian-language services have 28 radio affiliates and 14 TV affiliates throughout the BiH. Many of them carried a VOA interview last month with New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges on his reportage of corruption and financial irregularities in Bosnia, and responses by national officials.
International broadcasting. A survey late last year indicated that about a third of the adults in Bosnia listen to VOA or RFE at least once weekly, making these U.S.-sponsored stations the principal international broadcasters to the region. Listening is thought to have surged earlier this year during the Kosovo crisis. Many may hear the broadcasts via local FM stations.
Improved financial support and technical distribution systems linking stations across entity lines. On Sept. 22, the OSCE and Internews announced the formation of a nationwide cooperative of 24 local FM stations and the FERN national network. The cooperative is known as the Bosanskoherceogovacka Radio Mreza (BORAM). Thirteen of the stations will be in the Federation, and 11 in the Bosnian Serb republic. OSCE senior adviser for media affairs Regan McCarthy says by the end of the year or early in 2000, after an initial marketing phase, BORAM will begin operations. It will be linked to FERN via satellite, or in the case of some villages surrounded by mountains, via telephone lines. “Given just the right amount of [international] support,” she adds, “the stations themselves took a truly significant leap: to cooperate across entity lines, ethnicity lines, and audience lines so that all of them would have a chance for long-term survival and mutual accomplishment.”
Enhanced news sources and programming quality. “Overall,” McCarthy says, “there is growing space for the pronouncement of opinions that support more open and accepting views of different groups [in Bosnia].”She cites a FERN call-in program, which has become very popular across entity lines, especially among young adults and teenagers. FERN, funded by Switzerland and other donor nations, also is supplying a steady stream of documentaries, and the OSCE, BBC, RFE and VOA have held professional workshops in BiH in recent years to encourage accurate, objective journalism. Many of the BiH stations are FM outlets, featuring mainly music programming and operating with very limited funds and equipment. This makes supply of high-quality cultural and public affairs programming all the more important.

Conclusion

There’s cautious hope that Bosnia will move into a new era in which past injustices are addressed more freely by the media. Leaders of both the print and electronic media in BiH have established a dialogue which appears to have been fueled mainly so far by a need to survive financially. If the Bosnian economy can reform and advertising rate increases can make independent media profitable and less dependent on outside aid, there is a chance that media captains of the country will, in time, enter into programming exchanges which confront the very real grievances of their immediate past. That—like the prosecution of war criminals still at large—is essential for reconciliation. Reporting of the whole truth is a disinfectant indispensable to the healing of a devastated land.

Alan Heil is a former deputy director of the Voice of America who has traveled twice to Bosnia and Croatia since his retirement last year.

SIDEBAR 1

Getting at the Whole Truth

During the 78-day NATO bombing campaign in Serbia and Kosovo earlier this year, most Republika Srpska electronic media refused initially to report anything other than anti-West diatribes, damage reports and civilian bombing casualties. The IMC focused on the imbalance. As a result, RS radio stations began to broadcast some statements from European capitals and the U.S. For example, video clips from daily NATO briefings in Brussels, satellite-fed by the U.S. government-funded WORLDNET television, were aired by Republika Srpska TV outlets.

Last year, Vladimir Santak, an official of the Bosnian Republican Party, wrote to the Voice of America Bosnian Service: “Last night in your TV program (fed via satellite to homes in Bosnia), you reported about the exhumation of those killed during the war in Kakanj. We follow closely your programs. The main reason we are turning to you is the fact that, as far as we know, you were the only media in Bosnia-Herzegovina who reported this information. Thank you for your help.”

—A.H.