RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies Vol. 1, No. 8, 6 July 2000

"Freedom of information is ... the touchstone of all the freedoms." (UN Freedom of Information Conference, 1948)

BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

CPJ PROTESTS OFFICIAL HARASSMENT OF JOURNALISTS.

In a 27 June letter to Alija Izetbegovic, the chairman of the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that the organization is deeply disturbed by several recent incidents in which individuals closely linked to his political party attacked individual journalists and a local publishing house in Sarajevo. On 11 June, Muhammed Hamo Korda, reportedly affiliated with the ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA), insulted and threatened Edic Avdic of the Sarajevo-based weekly magazine "Slobodna Bosna." Korda was reportedly incensed buy the magazine's coverage of alleged corruption associated with SDA- sponsored events in Bosnia. In front of several witnesses, Korda made a phone call after which he told Avdic to prepare for a physical assault, which occurred one hour later. (CPJ Press Release, 29 June)

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION LAW PUT FORWARD.

Wolfgang Petritsch, who is the international community's high representative in Bosnia, and Robert Barry, who heads the OSCE Mission there, unveiled a proposed freedom of information law in Sarajevo on 28 June. Opposition deputies from the Social Democrats and New Bosnian Initiative ten took the first steps to submit the measure to the parliament for approval. Petritsch, who has the authority to declare the bill a law if the parliament does not approve it, said that the proposal "will take Bosnia-Herzegovina several steps closer to Europe. It will take Bosnia-Herzegovina closer to a true civil society," AP reported. Barry added that "the initial reaction of bureaucrats is to dislike intensely a law like this because it takes away the shield of anonymity that otherwise cloaks the action of bureaucrats. [But] the public and the media like it very much." ("RFE/RL Newsline," 29 June)

SERBIA

RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS PROTEST CPJ OMISSION.

An open letter signed by Russian and foreign correspondents in Moscow on 27 June protested to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) for its omission of the names of 16 Radio Television Serbia employees killed during the NATO air raid on the Belgrade TV tower from its annual list of murdered journalists. "The sixteen people who died in the bombing were, without exception, technical staff, make-up artists, lighting technicians, etc.," the letter said. "None of them had any influence on the content of Radio Television Serbia broadcasts." (ANEM Report, 24-30 June)

SIT IN BY NIS MAYOR LEADS TO RELEASE OF ACTIVISTS.

Opposition Mayor Zoran Zivkovic led a sit-in outside the police headquarters in Nis on 28 June to demand the release of eight activists from the Otpor (Resistance) student movement and three news photographers. Police took the 11 people into custody at a demonstration which was intended to satirize the proposed presentation of the Order of the National Hero to Milosevic. An unnamed police official told Reuters that "the rally was not banned, but it was not approved, either." Police released the 11 people after holding them for two hours. ("RFE/RL Newsline," 29 June)

THE NEXT DAY, TV CREW DETAINED IN KRALJEVO.

A television crew from TV Kraljevo was arrested on 29 June by local police, along with four Otpor activists and a Democratic Party official. They were arrested after an Otpor protest, Mass Repentance, in which members of the movement tried to join the Socialist Party en mass. All those arrested were released early in the afternoon, but police confiscated a videotape belonging to the TV crew. (ANEM Report, 24-30 June)

SLOVENIA

FOREIGN JOURNALIST GROUP WARNS SLOVENIAN GOVERNMENT.

A spokesman for the International Federation of Journalists said in Ljubljana that the new government of Prime Minister Andrej Bajuk should not make changes for political reasons in the management of state-run media. The spokesman stressed that the credibility and image of Slovenia as a democratic country could be jeopardized if the government made such a move. The Bajuk government is the first one since independence in 1991 that is not led by former members of the Communist-era nomenklatura. ("RFE/RL Newsline," 30 June)

END NOTE FREE MEDIA IN UNFREE SOCIETIES

By Thomas A. Dine

Government attacks on independent media in the post-communist world are becoming commonplace... Recent attacks highlight the extreme fragility of free media in unfree or less than free societies. They call attention to the fact the foundation for all other freedoms is media freedom to which peoples of this region have so often been denied. They point out continuing, even growing importance of international broadcasting to these countries.

[B]ecause of the obvious and demonstrated power of free media to transform unfree societies, all too many people in both the post-Soviet states and in the West came to believe that nothing could prevent the domestic media from playing that role, that democracy was secure, and that the future was one of unalloyed brightness... The reason for that is that while the media are powerful, they are also extremely fragile -- and nowhere more than in the post-communist countries. Some of the reasons for that are a survival of the authoritarian political past; others are to be found in specific features of the post-communist transition; and still a third group are the result of the nature of the media themselves. But each of these reasons continues to cast a shadow not only on media freedom in these countries but on all the other freedoms on which a civil society is based. Only in the year 2000 are we beginning to face up to the destructive heritage of that system, to the impact it had on rulers and ruled, and to the difficulties of escaping from that past...

[O]ur subject here is the media, and there the problem is especially grave. Even where more or less free media have emerged, overcoming the Soviet-style training and expectations of journalists themselves, they must contend with the absence of a completely free readership or listenership. ... Many in both this region and the West thought that privatization of the media would guarantee its independence. But things have not worked out that way...

[A]lmost all of the electronic media -- radio and television -- from which ever more people get their news remains state-owned and state-controlled. As incomes have declined, people have stopped buying newspapers and journals, the prices of which have increased because the Soviet-era subsidies that kept them inexpensive are a thing of the past.

[G]iven the absence of a large advertising sector to provide diverse financing of the media, many journalists find themselves forced to advance the interests of their owners rather than the interests of objectivity and truth. ...

[Y]ou are often at risk from government pressures of the kinds we have seen ranging from the recent arrest of Vladimir Gusinsky in Moscow, to the detention of our RFE/RL's Andrei Babitsky because of his truthful, factual reporting of the war in Chechnya, to the denial of electricity or newsprint in virtually every city in this region of the world, to the raids of the tax police, to intimidation and threats of individual journalists... Because the media are so strong, we have failed to note that the media at the same time are enormously fragile. They are fragile in all countries because they depend on a bond of trust between those who produce and disseminate news and those who receive it, a bond that can be broken all too easily by those who are enemies of a free press. And they are especially fragile in post-communist countries not only because of the absence of the free reader or free listener in many cases but also because many of us -- you and we alike -- may be asking the media to do more than the media can in fact achieve on its own. All too many of us have assumed that with a free media, we will not only get a free parliament as Jefferson promised, but a broadly free society -- and therefore as long as we keep the media free, our task is relatively simple. I think it is time to confront this assumption... First, in many of the countries in this region, there is a growing gap between the existence of independent media and the rise of the other institutions of civil society--instead of the narrowing one we had expected. Second, in several of them, there has been a retreat from earlier progress toward a civil society...But third and most important, there is a growing body of scholarship which calls into question some of the most widespread notions about the rise of civil society. ...

[E]conomic growth may at least for a time stabilize existing authoritarian structures rather than lead to their replacement by the stable and independent institutions that are at the core of civil society. ...

[F]ree media can and do play a larger role than does economic growth in this process, but that even they cannot simply produce civil societies where they have not existed unless other changes take place as well. ...In a recent book with the provocative but deadly accurate title "Democracy from Scratch," Steven Fish, an American political scientist professor, suggests that the challenge of creating civil societies in post-communist countries is far greater than many of us had assumed. ...

[C]ommunist regimes were far more effective than other authoritarian regimes in suppressing the institutions of civil society and preventing their reemergence. And they left in their wake countries which "resembled less a civil society, with its established political parties, unions, and interest associations, than a movement society -- that is, a myriad of complex, interacting, apocalyptic political campaigns." In such circumstances, Fish notes, a free media often serves to advance the programmatic causes of these "campaigns" -- a term he uses to denote the informal and deeply political activities of groups defined by their opposition to the existing state rather than in terms of their own specific interests--rather than to consolidate the more typical institutions of civil society. ...Instead of providing the kind of information necessary to help to create institutions most of whose actions are independent of state power, journalists in these countries may fall into the trap of reifying the conflict with state power as the defining element of social groups. And that in some cases can serve as a brake on the development of a civil society in which groups have a more independent life. But if part of our common challenge lies in the heritage of communist regimes, another part lies in the nature of journalism as practiced everywhere. As journalists, we cover conflicts. Indeed, many of us define that as news. But such coverage, or at least such coverage untempered by the understanding Fish provides, can land us and other journalists in trouble - and can certainly lengthen the troubled transitions of the post- communist countries. Reporting on trade unions, on informal associations, on law and the courts, and on all the other elements of an emerging civil society is inevitably less dramatic than covering conflicts between the state and political movements opposed to it. No one should ignore these conflicts. But Fish's insight suggests that focusing on them alone could actually retard development of the other institutions and of civil society as a whole. And it suggests that the media must be sensitive to this lest its own freedom fail to promote or even retard the development of freedom elsewhere.

Mr. Dine is the president of RFE/RL. This was the keynote speech at the RFE/RL Affiliates Assembly in Gudauri, Georgia on 24 June 2000.

(Compiled by Catherine Cosman) (Editorial Assistant: Yulia Aleksandrovskaya)