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THE WASHINGTON POST, Monday, April 3, 2000; Page A08
Anti-Serb Newspaper Riles Kosovo Peacekeepers
Western Officials Say Harsh Tone Undermines Multi-Ethnic Goals
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia-Confronted by chaos, confusion, frustration and grief
every day in postwar Kosovo, ethnic Albanian residents can walk to a news stand
and find an easy way to make sense of it all.
Through the pages of a paper called Bota Sot, readers can enter a
philosophically tidy, hate-filled world. It is a place where every Serb is born
a demon, the concept of ethnic tolerance is a sure path to renewed repression by
Belgrade, and Kosovo's foreign overseers are conspiring against all ethnic
Albanians.
All Serbs "who are living today in Kosovo are criminals," the
newspaper wrote last month. "Retaliation is a natural instinct," it
said in January. Foreigners running the province are operating "in
solidarity and open cooperation with the Serbian criminals," it asserted,
with NATO peacekeepers even going so far as to stage attacks on Serbs so that
the blame will be directed at innocent ethnic Albanians.
In the more than nine months since the United Nations took control of Kosovo, no
other source of news has vexed Kosovo's international overseers as much as Bota
Sot, Western officials here say. Daan Everts, who heads the local office of the
55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has repeatedly
denounced the newspaper for what he has described as its "vitriol and bile"
and its "outright lies and slander"--words Western officials use more
typically to describe the official media of Serb-led Yugoslavia.
But the newspaper, printed in Germany and Macedonia under the direction of a
longtime Albanian nationalist, has proved immune to the criticism. Officials say
that while the paper is read by only 15,000 of Kosovo's estimated 1.5 million
residents, its inflammatory language is helping to undermine any hope of
coexistence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
Wanting to encourage free speech in Kosovo, Western officials have been unable
to find easy solutions to the issues raised by Bota Sot's invective. In February,
largely because of Bota Sot, the OSCE and the United Nations imposed a new
regulation banning the spread of "hatred, discord, or intolerance"
whenever it seems likely to disturb public order. Violators can be fined and
sent to jail for up to five years, but no one has been charged under the new
statute, and Bota Sot has led the Kosovo Association of Journalists in a chorus
of protest against the regulation.
Everts has been reluctant to take the extreme step of blocking distribution of
Bota Sot, aides say, partly out of concern that to do so would smack of
censorship and invite comparison with the recent government closures of
independent media outlets in Yugoslavia. In the past 2 1/2 months, Belgrade has
shut down at least 10 independent television and radio stations and threatened
or fined 20 others that diverged from the state-approved point of view.
Part of the West's dilemma in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant
republic of Yugoslavia, is that Bota Sot is not the sole offender. Other ethnic
Albanian news outlets sometimes present distorted accounts that rarely attribute
provocative claims or seek a reply from those who are aggrieved. If Bota Sot is
closed, where would the line be drawn?
Bota Sot, which means the World Today, was created in 1995 as "a paper
where everyone could say what they want," editor-in-chief Teki Dervishi
said. Asked if the newspaper has promoted hatred, he answered indirectly. "Hatred
is a very subjective category. . . . Hatred was not created by an article, but
by the historical experience of Serbian-Albanian relations."
There's little question that Dervishi's own experience with Serbs has been grim.
In 1963, when he was 13, he was arrested by Serbian police for posting Albanian
flags throughout the southern Kosovo city of Djakovica. He was sent to a
notorious camp known as Goli-Otok on an otherwise uninhabited island in the
Adriatic Sea that he describes as being "like Auschwitz."
Dervishi spent 3 1/2 years there, he said, including eight months in solitary
confinement, where he met only with an interrogator determined to pry loose the
name of the adult who told him to put up the flags. "But that person did
not exist," Dervishi said.
After his release, he bounced around several newspapers in Macedonia and Kosovo,
serving as a theater critic and columnist. But editors found his views too
radical. The editors "were for the democratization of Serbia to solve the
problem of Kosovo," he says, dismissing the idea as absurd. "There has
never been a ruler of Serbia that is democratic, and no Serbian intellectual
ever said . . . good things about Albanians."
The irony of this blanket stereotype--a mirror image of what radical Serbs
propound about ethnic Albanians--is lost on Dervishi, who adds that he does not
trust West Europeans because historically "they are always on the Serbian
side." He claims further that "French propaganda" is behind the
idea that ethnic Albanians are forcing Serbs out of Kosovo, while numerous
investigations conducted by U.N. police refute that assertion.
Dervishi persuaded Xhevdet Mazreka, a Kosovo travel agency owner who moved to
Zurich in 1986, to put up the money for his newspaper, which now claims a staff
of 20 in Pristina, the provincial capital, as well as correspondents in most
Kosovo municipalities. In addition to its readers in Kosovo, the paper claims a
daily circulation of 30,000 expatriates in Europe and the United States, giving
it a large profile among a group of people that traditionally has been more
radical than Kosovo's resident population.
Serbs are typically described as shkije in Bota Sot, a rude designation. But
other deprecating adjectives--barbarous, brutal, blood-sucking--are also piled
on. The paper has alleged, without substantiation, that 12-year-old Serbs are
trained to plant land mines; that Serbs in Kosovska Mitrovica have castrated
captive ethnic Albanians; and that the crash of a World Food Program plane in
November was caused by Serbian artillery.
The paper consistently takes positions that many U.N. and OSCE officials say are
racist. "Serbian children were born killers and as such will remain for all
their lives," claimed one of the Bota Sot editorials that provoked outrage
among foreigners here.
A series of OSCE reports on other ethnic Albanian newspapers notes that they
indulge in such slurs less frequently, but often do "not bother to check
rumors and dubious information or carry responses" from those who have been
accused. The reality in Kosovo "is terrible enough," said one recent
report, "but the press has done much . . . to inflame passions."
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