Reinforcement Instead of Disintegration of the Media Apartheid: 

Building Public Television in BH

Kemal Kurspahic

 The Dayton Agreement for a peaceful Bosnia had a very limited although high ambition by itself which was, I guess, most fully expressed in the title of the book by the main Dayton negotiator Richard Holbrooke: To End a War. Created with all the restrictions of an agreement acceptable for “the boy with arms” – such as Milosevic or Tudjman, who never admitted to having any role whatsoever in the Bosnian war, while it was only them who could have stopped it – in the name of peace, Dayton has sacrificed many high principles, including the principle of open-free-pluralist media. Why would it otherwise devote just a single half-line to the media, in the annex addressing the creation of a politically neutral environment for elections, “including free media as well”? Or –much more drastically – why would it, for instance, leave the Radio and Television of Republic of Srpska under supervision of Momcilo Krajisnik, today a permanent resident of the Hague, as president of the Council, and of Velibor Ostojic, a war-time converter of Foca into Srbinje with all the accompanying persecutions, as president of the Board of Directors?!

Thus, regulation of the Bosnian media domain, just like regulation of the Bosnian state and even beyond: of the territory of former Yugoslavia, has been left in the hands of some obscure guys, those most responsible ones for all the evils of the nineties.

For over four years since the Dayton Agreement, nothing good could even hypothetically happen to Bosnia. Tudjman had been firmly ruling from Zagreb and on the “Herzeg-Bosnian” territories until he died in December 1999; Belgrade and, indirectly, Republic of Srpska too were ruled by the firm hand of Milosevic, the last of the communist monarchs, until the event of the liberating street revolution in October 2000; ideologies of greater Serbia and greater Croatia, additionally legalized by the acceptance of the Bosniak political elite to take part in this triangle of interconnected but irreconcilable projects, maintained the state and all its institutions in a post-Dayton coma.

Unfortunately, the international “media intervention” followed in the footsteps of the political and military interventions, and built on their rationale. If the “bad guys” of the hardest Balkans years were to be unavoidable partners in stopping of armed conflicts, in building the institutions of a long-term peaceful Bosnia – including independent media as one of the top priorities – the world should have acted serenely and confronted them instead of accepting, and thus legalizing, their control over television stations and the public life. What good could be expected in the process of pluralization of the Bosnian broadcasting, for instance, if the main vote on the boards for media “transformation” was held by the three nationalist parties?

You certainly remember how some decisions in that long-announced transformation were endlessly delayed with a tragicomic explanation by the international supervisors that, for instance, SDA was being waited for to appoint its representative in the process?! The SDA-SDS-HDZ trinity should not have been a partner in the process that could have succeeded only if it had contributed exactly to a termination of such partnership. And it is absurd that, for instance, Mirza Hajric, former advisor of the former Bosniak third in the Bosnian Presidency – Alija Izetbegovic, was e at the position at the time that allowed him to reject even the very idea of appointing Ivica Puljic, Voice of America Washington Editor, the program editor-in-chief of the Bosnian television with a preposterous explanation: “It can‘t be him, he hasn’t been with us”. The whole situation is absurd because Hajric himself “was not with us” in the first years of Sarajevo siege, but was in London in a legitimate pursuit of fortune, whereas Puljic himself reported from the Sarajevo defense frontlines during the first months of the siege.

But to be perfectly frank and honest, it would have been ultimately naïve to expect anything good from the representatives of the ruling brains of the Bosnian “ten hardest years”, and this is why this article will focus more on the strategic errors and misconceptions of the international “media intervention” in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the first five years of the Dayton peace process. Judging by the consequences, the affirmed higher capacity of the international media interventionists in disintegration rather than in building of the Bosnian television proved to be the most harmful factor in the whole process.

By accepting the nationalist assumption that there can be nothing Bosnian and that everything and everybody must be either Bosniak or Serbian or Croatian, they wrote off the possibility to build the future PBS on the foundations of the former RTV Sarajevo at the very beginning. Namely, that very RTV BiH – despite all its embarrassing bonds with the ruling Bosniak party during the siege – could have never competed with the televisions of Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats in fuelling ethnic hatred and warmongering. Instead of taking away this “toy” from the hands of the incompetent SDA nationalists and building its staff, technical and broadcasting potentials to reflect the Bosnian diversity and equality, RTV BiH was left under control of the Bosniak politico-religious party, and an alternative TV OBN project was launched. In five years, this project will have spent 20 million dollars, and then will have been rejected before the new, cross-Bosnian public television has been created.

Foreigners have made numberless false projections and steps in this deal, and we will be listing only some of the most blatant ones.

• Arrogance

First of all, they have overrated their own while fully underrating domestic Bosnian potentials. In a paralyzing combination of incompetence/arrogance/disorientation, modern journalism promoters came one after the other to lead foreign media projects, and the majority of them had never been in the position to domesticate/teach/train/grade/punish/select journalists and editors in their respective countries. Many of them, with some honorable exceptions, had come with an assumption that “all of them” in the Balkan’s realm of journalism are participants of a nationalistic warmonger campaign and that “all of them” must be Muslims/Serbs/Croats or they are nobody or nothing and, just like with everything else related to the peace process, they completely rejected, suppressed and marginalized the very idea that – just like their own prosperous countries – the unfortunate Bosnia may also have some professionals who are both journalists and Bosnians, by contrast to being only members of one of the three Balkan tribes in conflict.

Particularly in the task of radio and television transformation, but in the overall media project as well, the foreign “media interventionists” have fully ignored the fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina had a respectable radio-television before the war, as well as journalists who had fought for and succeeded in gaining an enviable level of independence in the twilight of the single-party state. This is why Bosnian journalists themselves have never been brought to the position of equal and decision-making partners in that project.

• Neglected Essence of Media: Programming

Furthermore, internationals have been fascinated by technology and legislation: thus the transmitters, frequencies, schedules, management, taxes, regulations, sanctions, all important elements for building Bosnian PBS but not essential, got to be more important than the essence and primary purpose of RTV itself –the kind of television programs and changes that are being desired for Bosnia.

If programs, public dialogue, democratic presentation and confrontation of views on the future of Bosnia had been the top priority, it would not have happened that the most minimal share of investment into OBN be directed into what is the prime of all preconditions for success in this project – gathering of a programmatic team of editors and journalists of the highest professional reputation, democratic vision and unquestionable talents. This is why, for a long period of time, the sponsors felt satisfied at being able to brag how they “entered Republic of Srpska” or “indented the monopoly of HRT”, while completely neglecting the focus, credibility and quality of the produced programs. Although one cannot do without transmitters and frequencies – and this is why all those who have contributed to the regulation of Bosnian media jungle do deserve credit – promotion of the idea of changes and European perspective would be much more upgraded with a thorough evening TV news program, and at least one weekly political TV show that would be convincing in disseminating in Bosnia the acknowledgement of the cost of nationalism, narrow-mindedness and corruption by contrast to the idea motoring European integrations.

• Censoring the Past

The international community also indulged itself into censoring the recent past, by promoting collective amnesia, instead of disseminating knowledge on the extent of crimes committed and the responsibility for them.

So, at least in the initial years of their involvement, they accepted the suspicious “don’t rock the boat” logic, based on which documenting war crimes – and as a further consequence, arresting indicted war criminals and bringing them to trial – could risk the peace process, while not understanding that this a precondition for, and by no means an obstacle to, lasting peace in Bosnia. Thus, particularly in the areas fully controlled by SDS and HDZ, the public that for many years had been a victim to the propagandistic presentation of the war as “the defense of the sacred national cause”; war crimes on civilians of Sarajevo as “self-killing in order to instigate foreign intervention”; massacred civilians of Srebrenica as “Muslim warriors killed in battles” although, once their corpses were excavated, it turned out that their hands had been wire-cuffed behind their backs; “ethnic cleansing” of Mostar and the broader territory of Herzegovina as “the defense of the historically Croat-held territories” … even in the post-war years has been left to the mercy of the darkest history forgers. Even five years after the war, on the occasion of each delivery of indicted war criminals to the Hague, media in these areas continued to convey messages on persecution of “our guys”, while not offering to their viewers/listeners/readers even the most elementary information on the charges raised against Drljaca/Blaskic/Krajisnik/Kunarac/Kordic and all the others, whose arrests caused outbursts of collective ethnic hysteria in media and in public. Unfortunately, the international media assistance too was wasted on projects whose authors and editors had not passed even the most basic test normal in any post-war environment: test of willingness to document the evil committed, at least subsequently, in order to show as little as belated respect for innocent victims on all the sides, and to help the survivors to make the first steps towards reconciliation. Characteristic of this internationally sponsored imposed amnesia is a previous reproof by the Independent Media Commission to the BH Television for broadcasting the British documentary programme The Warriors, due to the complaint that it “depicted Croats in a unfavourable light”, particularly because this happened on the eve of elections: the essence is that the Croats who sympathize with those who had committed crimes in Ahmici, Dretelj or Stupni Dol have shown themselves in the worst possible light.

• Support

International organizations uncritically supported a large number of media projects without almost any effect on the peace process, while neglecting the need to identify and support projects of bigger symbolical or strategic importance.

How do we recognize such more significant projects? For anyone who knows at least something on the Bosnian-Herzegovinian journalism, this is not a problem at all: ask every author or media team applying for international assistance to submit to you their own selection of 5 to 10 texts/programmes from the past 5 to 10 years, showing their critical approach towards, primarily, their own regional and ethnic environment and you will see right away who has and who has not confronted the nationalist hysteria and war-waging options of the nineties. Unfortunately, foreigners here most often depended on the often incompetent and more often than not ill-willed advice of local translators and interpreters of the past and present.

• Reinforcement of Ethnic Apartheid

By cooperating on both political and media projects with the “bad guys” of the Balkans’ nineties, even unwillingly, foreigners have been reinforcing instead of eradicating ethnic apartheid in Bosnia.

There is this characteristic falling for ethnic propaganda theses on the allegedly “profound language differences”. The thesis was too long accepted that separate languages – Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian – were among the reasons for separate televisions, not only in the two respective entities, but even within Federation. Let us now not mention the already notorious fact that the three ethnic groups and the “others” – who had decided not only to give their languages different names but also to engage language experts in a hysterical search for differences – in spite of all the linguistic novelties and inventions of the past decade, perfectly – to the last word – understand each other, but the stubborn gratification of whims of the advocates of the three tribal televisions also has some long-term negative consequences to establishment of any kind of functioning civil society or state. If Bosnian Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats will watch each their own news and truths, and each of the ethnic group editors will invite only pure members of his own ethnic group in the studios, how is the dialogue to be established at all, as well as communication or understanding over the trenches dug up in the last decade? The answer is – no way. Instead of for instance gratifying an insistence on an occasion in the past by Milorad Dodik, Prime Minister of Republic of Srpska, and Rajko Vasic, his minister of information, that “information is under jurisdiction of the entities”, which – in the era of global instant communications – is a nonsense from the stone age of television, there could have long ago been an effort initiated to create a cross-Bosnian public television, which will to the largest extent comprise all the language and cultural differences and heritage of this country and use it to weave bridges instead of gaps, between people and ethnic groups. Of course, just as proposed right now, such television can also include entity-, canton-based or local programs, to express the objective diversity of interests normally existing in any pluralistic environment. 

“So where do you find an error there, this is exactly what we have been working on for all these years!” – this will be a cry of reaction against criticism from a “local guy”, released by some of those tasked with creating the public Bosnian television, in their imperial vanity and sensitivity. Well, the error is in that very answer: precisely – “all these years” and a huge amount of cash have been spent without creating a television in Bosnia, after so many rounds of local, entity and general elections, which would clear the vision of the people towards future prospects and cooperation in the Balkans and with Europe. To be honest, I doubt that even the most benevolent foreigners will ever create it, unless they recognize and employ on this project those professionally most competent Bosnian forces. I agree with an observation from a recent survey done by the Media Plan Institute that the deep misunderstanding existing between the “locals” and “foreigners” – on a symbolical plane – is also indicated upon by the colonial use of exclusively foreign terms and abbreviations in that whole project (OBN, IMC, PBS), which mean nothing to the large majority of Bosnians and Herzegovinians, so they can not identify with them nor can they accept them as their own.

Kemal Kurspahić is editor of a chain of weeklies in Virginia, USA. He used to be editor-in-chief of  the “Oslobođenje” daily in Sarajevo, 1988-1994. He is the author of the book “As Long As Sarajevo Exists”, Pamphleteer’s Press, USA, 1997, and he is just about to finish his new book: “Prime Time Crime - Balkans Media in War and Peace”. Translation by: B.R. ©Media Online. All rights reserved.   

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