RESTRUCTURING THE MEDIA IN POST-CONFLICT SOCIETIES:
FOUR PERSPECTIVES
THE EXPERIENCE OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL AND NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS

A Background Paper for the UNESCO World Press Day Conference in Geneva

May 2000

Edited by Monroe E. Price
Co-director, Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford

[*1]INTRODUCTION

THE CASE STUDIES: BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

Monroe E. Price

Bosnia-Herzegovina presents an unusually comprehensive case study of the difficulties, in a harsh, complex post-conflict environment, of rebuilding and reshaping the media, both to allow a peace process to go forward and, simultaneously, to rebuild institutions that create a more stable and democratic future. It is an especially important case for the study of intervention and management of the electronic media, considered to have a primary role in shaping public attitudes. Other forms of communication—newspapers, mass rallies, and the various manifestations of civil society—all played their part. But the focus here is on television and radio. The wounds of war, funding uncertainties, competition or confusion among players in the international community, governmental and nongovernmental organisations, debates about first principles of human rights—all of these play a part in a story in which there are few, if any, easy answers.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, as in elsewhere, the conditions for post-conflict administration could be found within the war and the period that preceded it. Media was used to spread terror and fan the flames of war in the former Yugoslavia. Several months before anyone in the region outwardly bore arms, nationalist leaders in the various Yugoslav republics began laying the groundwork for war by planning media campaigns. Slobodan Milosevic sent paramilitary troops and technicians to seize a dozen television transmitters in the northern and eastern parts of Bosnia in the spring of 1992. These areas are close to Serbia and had substantial Serb populations. As a result, more than half the people in the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina began receiving a television signal controlled by Belgrade rather than the usual television from Sarajevo. Bosnian leaders begged U.S. officials at the U.S. embassy in Belgrade to jam Serbian television broadcasts. The idea of a unified Bosnia information space, with a national signal emanating from Sarajevo, was immediately fractured, and the stage was set to wage a fierce propaganda war that would precede any actual fighting.

The Serbs were not the only ones who understood that the key to power and influence was television. Well before any fighting began in Bosnia, Croatian television, like Serbian, was airing nationalist broadcasts discussing how the Serbs intended to exterminate the Croat population in order to form a "Greater Serbia." These incendiary programmes suggested to Croats that they were in mortal danger from the Serbs and that they should arm themselves before it was too late.

Firmly under the control of the nationalist leaders who would lead the war, Bosnian Serb controlled Serb Radio and Television used the same tactics, during and after the conflict, as Belgrade television had before the war. Croatian television from Zagreb began broadcasting reports claiming that Islamic fundamentalists were trying to create a state where Catholic Croats would be oppressed and subjugated. Independent voices existed, taking views contrary to the official perspective, but they were routinely harassed, mostly unread or unheard, and did little to change public opinion.

[*7]A. The Dayton Accords

The war in Bosnia, a brutal combination of psychological manipulation and physical violence, ended with the December 1995 Dayton Accords. The military component of the Dayton Accords took weeks to plan and was stated in great detail. The civilian aspects of the Dayton Accords were not prepared with the same attention. The Accords stipulated that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe ("OSCE") would organise elections that the United Nations would oversee. They also called for the creation of an unarmed civilian police force to oversee the conventional police forces in each entity. Furthermore, they gave the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees power to oversee the return or resettlement of displaced peoples or refugees. A High Representative chosen by the Contact Group would coordinate the activities of the different organisations. The aim of these sections of the Accord was to reconstitute Bosnia's former multi-ethnic nature and create a Bosnian national identity against a backdrop of continuing ethnic hatred and loyalties.

          The Accords specified that the OSCE would set up a Provisional Election Commission ("PEC") to oversee the elections at the federal, entity, and municipal levels. The PEC was specifically empowered to adopt electoral rules and regulations concerning the registration of political parties, voter eligibility, international observers, and other measures to ensure that "open and fair electoral campaigns" could take place. The parties were required to obey the PEC rules stipulated in the Accords, as well as any rules and regulations the PEC would create pursuant to the agreement.

B. State of the Media After the Dayton Accords

          To maintain control over their territories, nationalist Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat leaders clung to their party-controlled media. The Serb-held parts of Bosnia were still covered by broadcasts of the rabidly nationalist Serb Radio and Television ("SRT") and the Croat-held parts of Bosnia continued to receive broadcasts from the rabidly nationalist Croatian Radio and Television ("HRT"). The Bosniak-controlled part of the country remained under the coverage of Bosnia-Herzegovina Radio and Television ("RTBiH").

          The three ethnic groups started vying for more effective use and control of the airwaves in their spheres of influence. Croats, Serbs and Muslims all repaired war-damaged television transmitters on mountains in their respective territories, attempting to broadcast their respective frequencies as far and wide as possible. The Serbian government in Belgrade set up a television transmitter in Serbia near the border of the newly-created Republika Srpska to broadcast Serbian television throughout the Serb-controlled entity. In addition, the Serbian government aided the Bosnian Serbs in repairing war-damaged transmitters. The Croatian government added additional transmitters in Croatia near the Bosnian border to broadcast Croatian television into Bosnian territory, and aided the Bosnian Croats in repairing existing transmitters and installing new ones. More important, the Zagreb authorities used a front-company under nominal Bosnian Croat control to re-broadcast the HRT signal throughout most of Bosnia. Assistance was received from the Norwegian government to renovate and repair some twenty-one television transmitters to enhance the coverage of the multi-ethnic voice necessary to facilitate reconciliation. All parties in the [*8] war were clearly intent on continuing to spread their wartime doctrines during the peace brought about by the Accords.

C. Dayton Implementation and the Media

          Just days after the Dayton Accords were signed in Paris, Ambassador Robert Frowick, the American who headed the OSCE mission in Bosnia, arrived in Sarajevo to begin planning for the elections. Frowick and the other diplomats implementing the Dayton Accords realised that changing the state of the partitioned and nationalistic media was crucial for unifying the country as envisioned by the Accords. Without a stronger multi-ethnic voice, Bosnians—Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats—could be limited to information from their respective fiercely nationalistic and separatist television programmes. If alternative sources of information were not provided across the country, the same nationalist leaders who waged the war and still controlled the airwaves were likely to be voted back into power. For the elections to be a success in terms of the Accords, the international community considered it necessary to play a role in adjusting media practices to assure a fuller and freer debate before the elections.

          The organisations involved in implementing the peace plan called on Bosnian politicians to soften their media's nationalist and provocative programming. The OSCE established a Media Experts Commission ("MEC") as a sub-commission to the PEC. The MEC issued a set of rules and regulations the media was expected to follow that included "providing true and accurate information," "refraining from broadcasting incendiary programming," and running OSCE and international election-related statements and advertisements. It also ordered the three television systems controlled by the ruling parties in Bosnia's entities to provide opposition political parties with the same amount of advertising time as the ruling nationalist parties. It then set up a monitoring group that could write citations for media violations of its rules and regulations.

          In addition to establishing rules governing the existing media, the OSCE helped finance a special broadcast network, the Free Elections Radio Network ("FERN"), part of a project initially started by the Swiss government, to provide "objective and timely information on the elections" to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina in all entities. The project envisioned reaching seventy percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina well before the elections, with signals equally split between the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska. But the Bosnian Serb leadership claimed they could not install the transmitters FERN needed because the roads leading to the mountains where they needed to be placed were mined. The OSCE and the Swiss government did manage to get FERN on the air in Banja Luka, but within days, the Serb authorities blocked its transmission. When FERN went on the air in July 1996, only two months before the vote, it reached only forty percent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all within Muslim-Croat Federation. FERN thus had no impact in Republika Srpska, where the population was most in need of alternative sources of information.

D. Office of the High Representative and the Open Broadcast Network

          Even before the creation of FERN, the Office of the High Representative proposed creating an independent television network with the stated intention of providing balanced information prior to the elections. The network's aim would be to provide [*9] "unbiased information" from both local and international journalists as well as commercial programmes from around the world to the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The network came to be known as the Open Broadcast Network ("OBN"). The then-High Representative, Carl Bildt, developed the concept during February and March 1996 and announced it in April. Governments and NGOs committed to establishing the OBN included the United States Information Agency ("USIA"), member states of the European Union ("EU"), both bilaterally and through the European Commission ("EC"), and the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute ("OSI").

          From the outset, there were two opposing concepts regarding the structure of OBN. The first was to build a new network with journalists covering all sides of the ethnic conflict, as well as a large number of staff and officers brought from outside the country. The second concept was to provide training to the existing independent stations, then build an affiliate network that would connect them. Although the then-High Representative, Carl Bildt, had advocated the first version, nearly all the donors wanted the latter. They argued that a wholly new operation would have been perceived as imposed and would therefore lack credibility among Bosnians on all sides. By August, just a month before the elections, OBN was still not on the air and both the peace mediators and the donor nations realised that the project's impact on the September elections would be negligible.

          The OHR, OSI, USIA and the EU continued with the project, finally creating a network of television stations that went on the air a few days before the election. Only a handful of stations, all but one in the Muslim-Croat Federation, agreed to be a part of the OBN. Only an estimated one-third of the Bosnian population could see it, with no coverage in Republika Srpska. And for its debut, the opening credits were written on a piece of paper, crookedly held by a pair of visible hands.

          FERN and OBN were not successful in their goal of creating a more pluralistic media across Bosnia-Herzegovina before the elections. Neither were other attempts to alter the media environment. UNESCO established a programme bank in Sarajevo. It asked European countries to donate some of their national broadcasting about history, arts and culture. These programmes would be broadcast on television stations across Bosnia-Herzegovina, helping to improve content and to avoid piracy. However, the effort had little success in producing more balanced broadcasts from the television stations. NATO troops also made an effort to spread alternative information. They created their own radio station, Radio Mir, or Peace Radio. USAID sponsored election advertisements that called on Bosnians in both entities to utilise their right to vote to ensure "peace, democracy and the future of their country." The OSCE ordered all three party-controlled television stations to air the advertisements. However, according to local Bosnian newspapers, much of the population viewed the ads as condescending.

          Despite the negligible impact of the respective efforts of OBN, FERN, NATO and the others to provide the most ill-informed public with more objective information, and despite the fact that the nationalistic, party-controlled television stations in each entity continued to have the most influence over the respective ethnic populations, the OSCE went ahead with the September 1996 national elections. Not surprisingly, the same nationalist leaders who led their respective peoples through four years of war were re-elected.

          [*10]Although the national elections were over, the international community in Bosnia-Herzegovina placed an emphasis on establishing an independent and pluralist media in the country, with preference that it could be accomplished before the municipal elections were to take place the following year, in September 1997. The donors held another meeting, this time in Brussels, in October 1996, one month after the national elections. They agreed to continue supporting OBN until it became profitable, which they estimated could take anywhere from three to five years.

          Even with the pledged support, the network was plagued with difficulties. The various sponsors started bickering with each other over how the network should be run. The Bosnia-Herzegovina state communica-tions directorate sent a letter to the OHR accusing the international community itself of violating international law by, in effect, granting a license to OBN without coordinating with the legal authorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a complaint was filed with the International Telecommuni-cation Union, claiming interference with the existing frequencies.

          As the difficulties grew, it became clear that neither the Bosnians nor the donors were happy with OBN and that few people were watching it. Finally, in April 1997, the OSI withdrew its money and support, dealing the biggest blow yet to the network. There were rumours that the whole project would collapse. But the donor nations and the EU vowed to continue financing the project and, in August 1997, OHR hired a new team of Bosnians and trained them to run the station.

E. Direct Aid- USAID, SOROS, EC/EU, and Others

          OBN was not the sole mode used by USIA and USAID, among others, to create and develop a more pluralistic press. Europe and Newly Independent States ("ENI"), part of USAID, were disbursing contracts to Internews and IREX to provide training and buy equipment for television stations other than OBN. The Office of Transition Initiatives ("OTI"), another branch of USAID, established offices in Banja Luka, Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Zenica and began providing direct grants to independent media. OTI disbursed 6.3 million dollars to media in Bosnia-Herzegovina between February 1996 and November 1998.

          By the spring of 1997, the situation had changed somewhat. Several months before the municipal elections, the U.S. had decided to back Biljana Plavsic, a one-time Karadzic associate who had turned against the war-time leader and established a stronghold in Banja Luka. A tendency on the part of a local media source to favour Plavsic was likely to yield greater U.S. financial support. In the spring of 1997, OTI gave out $4 million dollars in media grants to 19 newspapers, 27 radio stations and 8 television stations. Few, if any, independent sources of news and information had been available in Republika Srpska in the spring of 1996, but by the next year, television, radio, and newspapers supported by OTI helped inform the public about the power struggle between Plavsic and Karadzic. The alternative media financed by OTI attempted to uncover past instances of government corruption, economic distress, and lost opportunities. This laid the groundwork for Plavsic to consolidate power.

          [*11] In addition to these efforts by USAID, the EU and OSI, various governments also gave direct grants, for training and equipment, to various independent media in both Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. For example, OSI set up a broadcast training school in conjunction with the BBC where young journalists were brought to Sarajevo from all over Bosnia-Herzegovina for six weeks to receive training from BBC journalists and producers.

          In spite of these efforts to create alternative sources of information across Bosnia-Herzegovina, the media remained divided into three mutually antagonistic components based in Republika Srpska, Bosniak-controlled Federation territory and Croat-controlled Federation territory. The respective party-controlled television stations remained the most influential media outlets and the main source of news for each of Bosnia's ethnic groups. The international community's attempts to create an alternative to the party-controlled media had not been sufficient to combat the nationalist television stations, which continued to stir up hostility. Indeed, the respective media were not only hostile towards each other, but also towards the international community and Sfor. Sfor and the OHR felt that much of their work toward reconciliation was being jeopardised by the news and propaganda of nationalist television and radio.

          In 30 May 1997, the members of the Steering Board ("Board") of the Peace Implementation Council ("PIC") of the Contact Group had their semi-annual meeting in Sintra, Portugal, to review the progress of Dayton's implementation. Regarding the relationship between the media and the Dayton Accords, the Board concluded that more needed to be done to "encourage independent publishers and broadcasters," in order to prepare the ground "for the elections [and enable] wider access to information and promote political pluralism." These conclusions were formalised in the Sintra Declaration ("Declaration"), which OHR treated as an extension of the Accords, though neither the elected Bosnian officials nor the original signatories to the Accords were required to sign the Declaration.

          The Declaration attempted to encourage independent media in a variety of ways. In addition to calling for more support for the development of OBN, the Declaration called on the authorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina to "give every possible form of practical assistance with respect to licenses, frequencies, free access by the High Representative to news media and the ability of the OBN and other independent media to broadcast." The Declaration then stated that The High Representative, "has the right to curtail or suspend any media network or programme whose output is in persistent and blatant contravention of either the spirit or letter of the Peace Agreement."

F. Seizure of Transmitters

          This last extraordinary provision of the Sintra Declaration seemed to establish the power of Sfor and the OHR to block media outlets throughout Bosnia and that power was exercised in the seizure of television towers in Republika Srpska. For more than six months in late 1997 and 1998, the NATO Stabilisation Force, under orders from the Office of the High Representative controlled key broadcast transmitters there for "security protection." In the midst of a key election, a candidate, Biljana Plavsic, favoured by the international community, to oppose and succeed Radavan Karadzic in Republika Srpska was being attacked viciously on the electronic media. She was portrayed by SRT as a "traitor to the Serb [*12] nation" and a "pawn of the international community." Unless Plavsic could more effectively reach the people receiving broadcasts from SRT, her chances of winning the electoral battle were considered slim.

          For this and other reasons concerning the suppression of certain virulently anti-Sfor sentiments, calls for action and reactions to these calls escalated. On August 14, a high ranking U.S. Senator suggested that U.S. planes jam SRT signals while simultaneously transmitting "broadcasts that depict the true reasons for [the Serbian people's] isolation and poor standing in the international community." The Bosnian Serb information minister, Miroslav Toholj, stated that any U.S. administration operation to jam SRT would be considered an act of war. Several days later, on August 18, OHR requested that SRT broadcast a statement intended to inform the Serb public about the content of the Sintra Declaration and the obligation of leaders on all sides in Bosnia to abide by it. SRT refused and in a fateful report it compared Sfor with the Nazis and referred to them as "occupying forces." With the logo "SS-for" instead of S-for, the broadcast alternated images of Sfor soldiers with World War II German Stormtroopers.

          In response, on August 23, the new High Representative, Carlos Westendorp, sent a letter to Momcilo Krajisnik, the Serb member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency demanding that SRT broadcast an OHR statement explaining the Sintra Declaration by 10 PM that day. Westendorp called the broadcast comparing Sfor to Nazis "absolutely unacceptable." He suggested Sfor might take action by seizing television towers to stop the Pale media propaganda against the peace forces in Bosnia. SRT promptly submitted to Westendorp's demand, and broadcast the statement before the deadline though the station complained that the High Representative's actions exceeded the bounds of the Dayton Accords and re-broadcast the clip comparing Sfor to the Nazis.

          On August 22, in the next step of what became the transformation of SRT, U.S. troops seized a television broadcast tower in Udrigovo, a northeastern town, under the pretence that they were trying to prevent possible clashes between Plavsic's supporters and Karadzic's supporters. A week later, pursuant to an agreement, Sfor handed the tower back to the SRT authorities in Pale. Included in the agreement were the following conditions: that the media of the Serb Republic stop producing inflammatory reports against Sfor and the other international organisations implementing the Dayton Accords; that SRT Pale would regularly provide an hour of prime time programming to air political views other than those of the ruling party; that SRT Pale provide the High Representative with a daily half hour of prime time programming to introduce himself and talk about recent developments; and that the Serb Republic agree to abide by all the rules being established by what would become the international community's Media Support Advisory Group.

          On September 26, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Louise Arbour, gave a press conference in Sarajevo, which was covered by SRT. An SRT Pale announcer introduced Arbour's press conference with a commentary claiming that the Tribunal was a political instrument and that it was prejudiced against the Serbs. The United Nations, which is a member of the MSAG, considered this a breach of prior understandings and demanded that SRT Pale make a public apology on television. On September 30, SRT Pale did so, stating:

          [*13] Serb-Radio-TV in this way wishes to apologise unreservedly for its misrepresentation of a news conference given by the prosecutor of The Hague Tribunal, Louise Arbour. We will read out a statement to this effect made by the prosecutor. The statement will be followed by the complete and unedited footage of the news conference given by Judge Arbour last Friday, during her visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

          In spite of SRT Pale's apology, Sfor troops seized control of certain SRT transmitters the next day (October 1), thereby preventing SRT Pale from transmitting its broadcasts. They would not be returned from Sfor protection until there was a change in leadership among the Bosnian Serbs, and then not until April 1998.

G. Comprehensive Media Reform and the Independent Media Commission

          The OHR recognised the peril of failing to provide clear and consistent guidelines to the media actors in Bosnia but, instead, intervening on a case-by-case basis. It decided to comprehensively reform the entire regulatory media regime in Bosnia. It determined to create an entire framework—an architecture of media law—with objective standards and a mechanism to determine whether a media violation occurred and the proper sanction for each violation. The reform sought to put into place a new legal system with tribunals, enforcement mechanisms, and licensing agencies with the result that the media system would no longer be "ethnically based and directly or indirectly associated to the main mono-ethnic political parties."

          What would ultimately become the Independent Media Commission started life as the Intermediate Media Standards and Licensing Commission. This Commission absorbed the election-related functions of the Media Experts Commission and required all broadcasters to meet a set of internationally recognised standards of broadcasting in order to obtain a license. The OHR expected to create a judicial body with "powers of sanction to ensure compliance" with the rulings of the Commission. The aspiration was that international experts, and Bosnian representatives from both the Federation and Republika Srpska would staff the Commission.

          This new reform was based on a December 1997 proposal to the OHR. According to this proposal, the intermediate Commission would remain in operation until institutions that could perform the functions of the Intermediate Commission were in place at the national level, the entity level, or the canton levels. The proposal justified this comprehensive action because "monolithic control allowed broadcasting in Bosnia to be used as a means to divide the ethnic communities." Not only was it true that "the distribution of poisonous propaganda was a major contributor to the war," but "it is still used to indoctrinate the communities." The OHR considered the Commission and comprehensive legal reform necessary to avoid a situation where the media "emphasiz[ed] separatism" and thus "h[eld] back the peace process."

          Since the OHR felt that the systemic and architectural problems of the existing media model in Bosnia were so pervasive, it observed that restructuring all media, particularly broadcast media, in accordance with internationally accepted standards was the only way to achieve "pluralism and inter-entity broadcasting." The new system [*14] would include "codes of conduct for programme content," modelled on "the established practice[s] in Western European democracies and in North America." The proposal provided that these codes would also apply to the press and the Internet. Until state agencies were established (and approved), the Intermediate Commission would establish, regulate, and enforce the Codes.

          The Commission was to have three divisions. The first division was an all-media complaints commission. It would affirmatively monitor the press and broadcast media, investigate complaints regarding violations of the codes of practice, and recommend action on those complaints it found valid. The second division was a licensing sub-commission that would establish and administer structural and editorial licensing standards. All broadcasters seeking a license would have to conform to the licensing commission's standards. The third division was an intervention tribunal that would rule on disciplinary procedures and provide sanctions and penalties when appropriate.

          The tribunal would have the authority to require "one or more on-screen apologies," or "one or more apologies to be published in the press and on radio." It could prohibit rebroadcast of an "offending programme or its content" and temporarily withdraw a license for access to the transmission system. Additionally, it was empowered to curtail a license or revoke a license entirely. Finally, it had the power to impose financial penalties on either the station or the directors or principals of the station regardless of whether the station was owned by the government.

          By August 1998, the Commission had issued its first comprehensive notice with standards for programme content including a prohibition on the transmission of any material which incited ethnic or religious hatred among the communities of Bosnia Herzegovina and a requirement that general community standards of decency and civility be observed. The media were precluded from promoting the interests of a single political party. The right of reply was required when broadcast material "unjustly places a person in an unfavourable light, or otherwise if fairness and impartiality require it." A newspaper and periodicals press code incorporating many of the same principles was created but appeared to be morally, as opposed to legally, binding on reporters, editors and owners, as its terms were couched in ethics rather than mandatory obligations.

          In the almost two years since the implementation of the IMC, there have been dramatic events and changes, all underscoring the complexity of imposing an elaborate legal structure in a speech-related area in a way that is designed, ultimately to have legitimacy and community support. Stations have been shut down for refusing to obtain temporary licenses, there have been great difficulties in gaining cooperation from the entities in nominating participants, and the IMC has been accused of actions that are strong-arm and inconsistent with its ultimate goals. It is a process still in formation and in need of thorough evaluation and assessment as a model for future post-conflict interventions. Serbia and Croatia continued to seek to use their media relationships in BiH to maintain centrifugal tendencies and, in some ways, to undermine the Dayton Accords. Zagreb's activity in this respect has been even more pernicious than Belgrade's. While RTS news broadcasts from Belgrade have not always been carried into the Republika Srpska, depending on the fluctuating relationship between Bosnian Serb leaders and the Milosevic regime, all three channels of HRT [*15] television have been carried around the clock into southern, western, central, and northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the continuing attempt to make the Sfor mission effective, these retransmissions were seen as threatening the peacekeeping mission, interfering with the potential for fair elections and making difficult the possibility of shaping a multi-ethnic trans-regional identity. Ultimately, though political change in Croatia affects events markedly, this process of retransmission led to transmitter seizures and station closedowns as recently as this year.

A report on the conditions for the granting of broadcast licenses, in October, 1999, outlined problems as the IMC saw them at that time:

Partisan political control of public broadcasting: The large number of publicly-funded stations reflects continued partisan political control of most stations at the municipal and cantonal level.

Partisan political control of private broadcasting: Political groupings in both entities control or heavily influence certain private broadcasters through direct support or by guiding sponsorship and advertising funds to these broadcasters from party-controlled state enterprises (including PTTs) and nominally private firms with close ties to party leaderships.

Absence of a media market and foreign investment in media: Experience elsewhere in Central/Eastern Europe demonstrates that the emergence of a market economy and resulting advertising revenue serves to liberate broadcasting from dependence on political groups. BiH currently attracts essentially no foreign investment in any sector, including media. Few if any broadcasters currently survive entirely on their marketing skills. In lieu of foreign investment, many of the more qualified stations depend on a diminishing, still poorly coordinated, flow of donations from the international community.

Rampant piracy: Uncontrolled piracy permits oversaturation of the market with non-viable, low-grade television broadcasting, discourages participation by major international advertisers and disadvantages those commercial stations with the skills to survive in a regulated market.

Absence of country-wide frequency planning: Three uncoordinated centres of licensing operating from 1992 to mid-1998 created major problems of interference among stations and were partly responsible for obstructing orderly development of economically viable regional and country-wide commercial networks. At the same time, certain stations have taken on the character of regional networks, not through normal competitive processes driven by quality or audience appeal but either through political connections or with artificial support from the international community.

Low-level of programme production and engineering skills: The general absence of regulations to establish quality standards in broadcasting has permitted the proliferation of sub-standard stations that compound problems of signal interference and are poorly equipped to provide any degree of public service. Even commercial broadcasters should be expected to provide a measure of public service in broadcasting in return for access to broadcast spectrum—a public [*16] resource—but relatively few stations are able to do so.

CREATING NEW VOICES

Blocking virulence and reducing conflict-laden partisanship was one objective of the international community. A more affirmative role was creating a new pluralism through encouraging new free and independent media and, as well, enhancing a public service broadcasting system that would contribute to a unified and more coherent state. Numbers of outlets steadily rose. By the year 2000, Bosnia and Herzegovina contained a very high concentration of radio and television broadcasters; the IMC had given temporary licenses to 272 broadcast organisations using more than 750 radio and television transmitters, or one for every 4,700 people.

Numbers do not necessarily spell economic survival or a pluralism contributing to a public sphere. Variances existed in strategies between NGO's and among members of the international governmental community in determining how this goal of building an information-based, plural, stable and democratic state should be implemented. The OHR emphasised, though hardly exclusively, the use of its office and the IMC to restructure a publicly-funded and publicly-run public service broadcasting sector. Many of the NGO's, especially those funded by the United States Agency for International Development were geared to the support of local, ultimately commercially supported, but pluralism-enhancing private radio and television outlets.

Here the difficulties were ones of priorities, perhaps more than ultimate differences over outcomes. OHR and Sfor expressed needs for transmitter locations in areas that were on borders between entities, while the NGO's might have preferred an emphasis in population centres more homogenous. European donors and the European Broadcasting Union came from a tradition vaunting the public service national approach while U.S. change agents were more inclined to the local and the private. The NGO's (with funding from government entities to be sure), emphasised journalist training and an increase in professionalism. The institutions established by the OHR were preoccupied with structuring and implementing a legal system of licensing and modulating separatist content that persists in the further ethnicization of politics. Government institutions were more concerned with the information-content of media while NGOs like Internews were interested in finding ways of making new outlets commercially viable.
On 30 July 1999, the OHR issued a decision aimed at establishing a Public Radio and Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a FBiH Radio-Television (both resulting from the liquidation of RTVBiH), as well as requiring a transformed SRT to serve as a public service broadcaster for the Republika Srpska. A decision of 31 August 1999, designed to bring Republika Srpska activities in frequency allocation and content regulation into line, met political and constitutional resistance from the entity, and demonstrated the difficulty of easily creating or imposing new structures.
The OHR called on UNESCO to provide assistance in the drafting of a permanent country-wide public service broadcasting law which would be adopted by all entities as well as the federal parliament. The law, when enacted, would replace the temporary decisions of the High Representative. UNESCO fielded a mission to Bosnia in September 1999 (led by Marcello Scarone [*17] and with EBU and other experts), where they met with all entities and actors and submitted the draft which is now under consideration by the relevant authorities.

CONCLUSIONS

What arises from the Bosnian experience is a series of dualisms that cast light on post-conflict issues generally.

· Military strategies and needs have a different architectural form from those of most NGO's and those grounded only in civil administration. At the outset, particularly, Sfor, concerned about its own safety and the success of the peace-keeping mission, was preoccupied with security and the efficient fulfilment of its mission. The immediate post-conflict phase, in almost any context, had its own imperatives. In the longer term, the radical nature of steps to control the information space in time of crisis have to be moderated, as the goals shift to the building of more permanent institutions. Some, especially in the NGO community, captured this distinction as the difference between short-term and long-term goals.

· As a consequence of strategic differences, budgetary and planning conflicts persisted. The urgency and emergency of the initial assertion of the peacekeeping operation involved a need to use whatever tools were available, including the media, to present the authority and policy of the IGOs, especially Sfor, OSCE and the OHR. In the longer run it was necessary to engage in what might be called "peace broadcasting" or promotion of a unified public space. The funding and strategic elements of these processes sometimes were in harmony, and sometimes in conflict with the third critical element of the process: the need to engender an indigenous media sector that would maintain itself in the long run, that could make itself, ultimately, independent of the international community, and that would contribute to a renewed civil society.

· Sfor and OHR requirements to communicate affirmatively conflicted with the need of outlets to demonstrate independence and gain audience loyalty. SRT and other outlets were used to carry, directly, the communiqués of the Office of High Representative, or later, of the Hague Tribunal. The distribution and encouragement of media was governed, in part, by the official need to extend a message that was unifying, mediating, and contributed to conflict resolution. The OHR, the OSCE and Sfor had a deep, important, and fundamentally psychological mission to accomplish. They realised that to accomplish their goals, attitudes had to be changed in a broad and deep way. There had to be a reconstructed attitude toward the return of refugees, the evolution of loyalty to a unified Bosnia-Herzegovina and a respect for the actions of the OHR and international governmental organisations. An illustration: during the war in Kosovo, the OHR and the IMC wished to ensure that the broadcasts within Bosnia-Herzegovina about that conflict were "balanced," reflecting the NATO position as well as that of Serbia. Steps were taken to make sure they were.

· NGOs and, to be sure, the outlets themselves, often had different goals, though not necessarily inconsistent ones. They wished to emphasise skills in audience-building, which might mean emphasising genres not related to news, [*18] or recognising the value of sharp points of view in gaining station-loyalty. Cooperation with the IMC and the OHR, including the direct carriage of unwanted messages, might undermine listener or viewer loyalty to the station, or confidence that it was not serving conflicting masters.

· Constitutional strain between the central agencies and the entities also proved problematic in allowing the media structure in BiH to be restructured. In this respect, BiH is significant as a post-conflict case study: the Dayton Accords had designated a federated structure in which Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation had their own governments and broadcast stations, with the latter reflecting Bosniak and Bosnian Croat Perspectives. The tenuous idea of a pan-BiH perspective was not contained in Dayton as such; it has been imposed subsequently at the insistence of the High Representative. The demography was of divided populations with the desire to provide a renewed sense of ethnicity. All of this dictated some elements of a post-Accords media policy. There would have to be stations associated with the three main groups. There would have to be an effort to build a multiethnic binding media presence. The international community would have to deal with the use of media to continue conflict.

· Gaining respect for the rule of law while engaging in "top-down" implementation of rules: An emphasis on the rule of law resulted in the machinery of licensing, allocation of frequencies, establishing rules for regulation of content, and training and appointing personnel to administer the process. Post-conflict issues involved debates among the NGOs and the OHR over the sensitivity of these rules and their implementation to free speech norms. Conflicts existed between the entities and the OHR over power of appointment and scope of authority. In these ways, the imposition of law and the imposition of the bureaucracy to make law work posed special legitimacy problems.

· In the field of free speech and media law, there existed a dualism in the leadership of the international community reflecting the differences between U.S. and European models when developing media structures and regulations. When the Council of the IMC and other entities considered approaches to media regulation, a consensus between European approaches based upon article 10 of the ECHR and U.S. models based upon the First Amendment had to be found. Similarly, the debate about public service broadcasting took place against the background of two different PSB rationales.

As with many complex undertakings, much criticism has attached to the idea that the post-conflict situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was marked by chaos, too many actors, mixed objectives, circumstances in which each country wanted its own signature of representation even if that was inconsistent with a rational whole. The OHR is also criticised for being too dictatorial, too directed, and inadequately responsive. Undoubtedly all of these criticisms are true to some extent. It seems, however, a characteristic of post-conflict interventions, especially those that are multilateral and involve intergovernmental as well as non-governmental involvement, that the perils of crisis management are present.

 [*19] Evolving political change in the region, as much as maturing institutions, will alter the role and reaction of the international community to its role in indigenous media development. Political transformations in Croatia and, potentially, Serbia, will have as much influence on post-conflict media intervention in Bosnia as the direct actions of OHR and Sfor. The international community, itself, may alter its perception of how to structure the relationship between the entities and Bosnia-Herzegovina itself and this will affect post-conflict media policy. And in the best of worlds, professionalism, the building of an independent media sector, and the growth of a comprehensive, increasingly autonomous public service broadcasting sector will combine to hasten the likelihood of a mature and stable democratic state. 

PART II: THE CASE STUDIES: KOSOVO

PART III: CONCLUSIONS AND AREAS FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION

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