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Veton Surroi, Editor-in-Chief of Koha Ditore, Prishtina
Media in Kosov@ yesterday, today and tomorrow
The topics we want to address today can be described as
follows: where have we been, where are we and where will we go?
It is important that we don’t only focus on the past, on
what happened and why, but also on the present and the future. Nevertheless,
changes don’t happen so fast. Old structures and problems tend to be preserved
or change only very slowly.
I will tell you a joke about this: A Kosovar man meets his
friend. He tells him, that he was beaten up by the police the day before. The
friend says: “But today we ought to have nice, civilized and democratic police
forces.” – “I don’t know about today, but the ones from yesterday were
really rude!”
Independent media have a long tradition in Kosova, dating
back on the work under the pressure of the Milosevic-regime. Koha Ditore, for
example, was founded in the nineties as a weekly in an occupied area.
What did we do at that time?
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Open information: In a society ‘under siege’
media often reflect only the opinion of the dominant political forces. There
is a tendency of ‘a monolithic view of things, biased by a resistance
mood’, which is no journalistic attitude. In Kosova this meant, that most
of the media shared the view of the Liberal Democratic Party LDK under
Rugova, who was telling the Albanians, that the Serb rule will pass one day
and everything will be fine. But nothing was fine, and we told the people
the real facts. We told them, that there was a terrible oppression by the
Serb regime. We also told them, that without a hard struggle nothing would
change. Therefore we were not only critical about Milosevic and his regime,
but also about our own political elite.
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Regional context: Another thing that happens in a
society fighting for its autonomy is that people focus only on their own
problems and don’t perceive the problems of others. We tried to put our
own situation in the regional context and informed the public about the wars
and crisis in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia. All this conflicts are
interrelated, what happens in BiH affects Kosova and what happens here has
effects on the situation in Macedonia etc. We tried to give a picture of
this regional context.
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International context: If a society lives under
pressure, war or post-war conflicts it tends to focus only on its own
situation. People think that they and their problems and sufferings are the
most important thing in the world. And as we were in the focus of attention
during and after the war a lot of people now expect the president of the USA
to stand up from his breakfast table and declare our independence. But this
is not going to happen. The world’s attention was already drawn off by
other crisis and conflicts. We show our people, that there is Afghanistan,
there are Palestinians and Israeli, there was East Timor. A truth and
reconciliation commission was working in South Africa, gathering experiences
from which we could learn.
With the NATO-bombings all this was destroyed. This was the
end of the old story and the beginning of a new story. We face new challenges
– or better, old ones in a new form.
In particular we are confronted with three challenges:
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There is still a lot of political pressure on the media.
The relations with the new authorities are quite tense, especially if a
newspaper doesn’t simply support them but is also critical. This holds
also true for the international administration, whose members also like to
control information.
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The preservation of a professional journalistic identity
is difficult in an environment where only the ethnical identity counts. How
can a journalist remain independent and objective and not let himself
overcome by his ethnical identity?
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The third threat is the emergence of new elites in a
completely unregulated market. In Kosova there is kind of a ‘wild west
capitalism’, where successful businessmen are not the ones who graduated
from Harvard, but the ones who started in the smuggling business. This new
economic elites exert influence on existing media or found new commercial
media. Also political influence is more and more exerted by economical
means, for example pressure on firms to advertise only in certain media
outlets – or through taxes (the only media paying taxes actually are the
private ones).
In Kosova, but also in Serbia and elsewhere, civil society
has been ahead of the political institutions, which tend to remain very weak.
And media form a very important part of this civil society, they have often
proved to be its vanguard. By creating a critical edge towards the old and new
authorities, they foster the process of democratization and
institution-building. Therefore the importance of the struggle for independent
media doesn’t only signify helping them to survive, but developing a
democratic society. Of course you could say with disdain that it is easier to
build up a good newspaper than a good parliament. But without a good newspaper
we will never have a good parliament, because media are the watch-dogs of
democracy.
Media also play an important role in the process of
reconciliation. They are able to trespass the frontier of hate, help to
establish the truth and basic facts about the past. Media are also able to break
taboos and work across the borders. The cooperation between media of different
countries in the region can help to overcome old hostilities. Our TV-station
Koha Vision, for example, has a joint project with RTV B92 on a massacre in Suva
Reka. We never could do this documentary, because the corpses were brought to
Serbia. On the other hand, it is not possible for a Serb journalist to work in
Kosova. By cooperating, we can show both sides and establish the truth.
source: Medienhilfe
published by: Vanda Mathis vma@medienhilfe.ch
date of release on this site (DD/MM/YY): 26/4/2002
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