By: Nikolija Bjelica

Sarajevo, 03.02.2020. – Public media should be in the service of public interest, but in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has been under big question mark. An influence of the politics in some public media is that obvious that it could not be hidden anymore. In such atmosphere, the journalists prone to self-censorship are not able to have space for any kind of criticism, and the line of influence starts with employing „suitable“ management in public media.

In seven Eastern Herzegovinian communities there are four public media: Radio Trebinje and Voice of Trebinje newspaper (they work as one public institution), Radio Gacko, Radio Nevesinje and Radio Bileca. The other communities in eastern Herzegovina have no public media, except official web sites of the local communities.

Public media are mostly financed from the budgets of the local communities according to their organizing as public institutions. In employing of directors and editors in that media, politics always has the last word. Because of that, as the people we talked to consider, we have the programme that is disengaged of any critics to the local authorities. Public media function mostly as informers about local themes, with the accent on activites of the city or community administration, their political options and options similar to them.

Media as a smoke curtain

Changes in the government or city and municipility administration is mostly followed by replacements in leading staff of the public media, and sometimes only changing of the editorial policy will do. For example, in 2016, when the new city administration came in Trebinje, that meant a complete change of the leading staff in public media. New chiefs and director brought new editorial policy, very close to the new local administration. But in Nevesinje, changing of the local authorities did not bring the replacement of the director, but the editorial policy has changed upside down.

In some local media the position of the director is separated from editor’s, and in others the director and the editor are the same person. Radio Gacko works that way – since its foundation, one woman works as programme director and editor.

Our interviewees said that the recipe is very simple – if you do what they tell you to do, there is no fear of being fired.

One journalist that works for a public media in Herzegovina says that it is obvious that politics has main influence in the appointment of the leading staff in managerial stuctures of the media as the way of providing full control in publishing of informations. The employees have safe sallaries every month from the local budget. He adds that control of the media is not necessary anymore, because journalists are already „trained“.

– They feel what is suitable to be published and what is not, and also do not see the reason why complicate their own life by biting the hand that feeds them. That is their leading thought because the local budget for a long time is not perceived as a public money, but the money of the person or persons who are making transactions. Economy themes are presented only through statements of local administrations represents and their validity is never under doubt. It’s the same with political themes. Media are often used as a smoke curtain – to turn public attention from the important problems – says this journalist.

His colleague has the same opinion. In her media outlet, she said, many of them are aware that there is more professional way to talk about local themes, but that never happens.

– Our director is not pleased with the local administration, but he is still obedient – she said.

The former director of one public radio station told us that politics has absolute influence in the forming of leading staff in public media. It was the same when he was named as a director of the radio.

– More precisely, there is no other influence, which means that if we did not have the appropriate professional staff, someone who was not qualified would be appointed. I exclude the least likelihood that these people could be from the opposition parties. I did not seek any party loyalty for key positions. Now it is important that you have a party booklet. This was, after all, publicly promoted by the first man of the state – says our interlocutor.

He estimated that the situation in the media in that sense is getting worse by the day. He added that there is no possibility that the media financed from local budgets could ever be liberated from the political influence.

A public secret

In 2018 Mediacenter Sarajevo led research wich revealed that appointing people on leading positions in public local media is unballanced and not transparent which is fertile ground for all kinds of political involvements.

Anida Sokol form Mediacenter claimed that it is a public secret that leading political parties also name the chiefs of the public media.

– In interviews with representatives of local public media, we generally get some affirmation when it comes to the influence of local authorities on editorial policies, in the sense that they always expect some kind of good cooperation. For 25 years, the public local media has been reporting mostly affirmatively about the work of local authorities, so it has become a common practice that is difficult to change – said Sokol.

According to the law, she clarified that the procedures of appointing management are defined by the rules and the laws made for companies and public institutions. The procedures are more precisely defined by internal documents of public local media, but in practice they are uneven and non-transparent.

– Under the rules of the CRA, the functions of editors and directors of public broadcasters must be separated from political parties and organizations, but in practice this is difficult to control since the CRA does not carry out constant monitoring, and generally, formal separation does not necessarily mean that there are no political influences. Furthermore, if you look at the ads for e.g. Supervisory Board members or directors, that are very difficult to find, you will see that the criteria are very generic, which is subject to manipulation – explains Anida Sokol.

The research also showed that the public local media do not publish even key information about their work.

– They do not publish their finances, appointment decisions, and some not even impressum, nor do they submit them on request. When doing this research, we sent a questionnaire to all public local media in BiH, 81 of them, and received answers from only 14. This indicates that representatives of public local media are not instructed that they must first, as media, and then as public companies, submit and even proactively publish public information of public importance regarding their work – says Sokol.

While the former director of public media we spoke with is suspicious that public financed media and journalists can be free from political influence, Sokol believes it is important to develop awareness among local officials, politicians, and the media themselves and citizens.

– The media are in deep crisis and cannot fully rely on marketing, especially those involved in investigative journalism, and financial support from the state and various donors is necessary. To do this, transparency and clear and precise criteria are needed – she concluded.

In all of this, the consequences are primarily felt by the citizens from whose pockets the public media are funded, because they do not receive the right information to determine their views and actions in society.

(This text was created as part of a project by the BH Journalists Association and the German Embassy in BiH)

NIŠ, 01.02.2020. – Da li vozače sa stranim registarskim tablicama vrebaju drumski razbojnici na autoputu kod Ražnja, koji im naprave štetu, a onda pomoć debelo naplate – trebalo bi da otkrije istraga, pošto se Agron Beriša iz Prištine obratio Policijskoj upravi u Nišu i ispričao sve o neprijatnosti u kojoj se našao. Neprijatnost je doživela i naša ekipa kada je pokušala da razgovara sa predstavnicima ražanjskog servisa čije se vozilo, slučajno ili ne, tada našlo na licu mesta.

Vraćao se sa puta iz Slovenije i u blizini benzinske stanice od Ražnja prema Aleksincu, našao se u situaciji koja je njega, suprugu i maloletnu ćerku – mogla da košta života.

“Vidim nešto belo, kao da ga je neko bacio ispred mene. Pokušao sam da izbegnem, ali mi je to pocepalo zadnju gumu”, kaže Agron Beriša, snimatelj iz Prištine.

Zbog mraka, nije uspeo precizno da uoči šta se sa strane dešavalo, ali je siguran da je na lancu kojeg je pregazio – puno metalnih šiljaka, koje je i fotografisao. Sumnjivim dešavanjima tu nije kraj.

“Za pet minuta dolazi šlep služba, kamion. I ovaj me pita da li hoću da me odšlepa. Ja pitam koliko košta, dobijam odgovor – 150 evra. Kažem mu da je to mnogo za takvu službu”, nastavlja priču Beriša.

Onda je, navodi, vozač šlep-kamiona počeo da se “pogađa”. Kompromis je usledio – 80 evra, sa šlepanjem i gumom. A zatim…

“Umesto da vozi u servis, on ulazi u pumpu da vidi ima li još nekog sa pocepanim gumama. Ja ništa, sedim pozadi. Onda iz te pumpe se nekako okrenuo i vratio u traku za Beograd. Uđe u drugu pumpu, ista procedura, da vidi”, prepričava Beriša.

Račun nije dobio, ali je fotografije kamiona i registarskih oznaka napravio, pa se sa njima, dan kasnije, vratio u Niš i sve ispričao i policiji.

Tamo nam je rečeno da je predmet u Osnovnom javnom tužilaštvu u Aleksincu, odakle kažu da je “oformljen predmet” i da je u toku predistražni postupak provere navoda prijavljenog događaja. Oglasiće se nakon sprovođenja “određenih dokaznih radnji”, kada će i odlučiti o daljem toku postupka.

Sagovornik kaže da je mnogo ljudi sa Kosova na istom mestu doživelo isto iskustvo – sa istim kamionom, ali ne misli da su Albanci meta, već putnici u tranzitu.

“To su iste tablice, isti brojevi kamiona za koji sam čitao da se drugima to desilo”, kaže sagovornik N1.

Pošto je spomenut, obratili smo se mejlom Ekspres servisu Lilko iz Ražnja. Odgovor nismo dobili, pa je reporter uživo ponudio da javnost čuje njihovu stranu priče. Odbili su, uz pretnju tužbom.

Dok je ekipa N1 radila na javnom prostoru, jedan od radnika je prišao, zastrašivao, a onda nas i fotografisao. Nekoliko minuta kasnije, legitimisani smo od strane policije i uzeti su nam lični podaci, jer je “prijavljen upad novinarske ekipe N1 na privatni posed”.

N1, Milan Stojanović, Niš, 01/02/2020.

PRISTINA, 01.02.2020 – The Association of Journalists of Kosovo has recently received an important donation from two international organizations aimed at protecting and promoting the rights and security of journalists, Free Press Unlimited (FPU) and European Center Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF).

AJK offices were broken into on December 6, 2019, and as a result, valuable working equipment such as a camera, a television, and a laptop, were stolen.

With the help of FPU and ECPMF organizations, AJK has managed to replace the laptop and the camera which will enable the organization to conduct their daily work. Thanks to this donation, AJK offices have also been equipped with professional security to reduce the possibility of recurrence.

AJK thanks the FPU and ECPMF, who immediately expressed their readiness to assist our organization which represents the interests of over 400 media workers in Kosovo.

PRISTINA, 31.01.2020 – Representatives of the Independent Media Commission have not yet responded to concerns raised by the AJK on the Draft Code of Ethics for Audio and Audiovisual Media Service Providers in the Republic of Kosovo (Draft Code of Ethics) and Draft Regulation on the Protection of Children and Minors in Audio and Audiovisual Media Services (Draft Regulation), despite ten days have passed since the official announcement, where the legal deadlines for providing answers have been exceeded. In collaboration with media lawyer Flutura Kusari, AJK concluded that these draft regulations contain provisions that infringe on freedom of expression and the media.

The silence of the IMC against the largest organization in the country that defends the rights of journalists and advocates for media freedom, is unacceptable. This non-response is indicative of the low level of transparency of this public agency, which should not go on. As publicly reacted by the AJK on January 24 this year, these two proposals should not be approved. On the contrary, violating the freedom of expression of journalists and media in Kosovo is justified through normative acts of a public institution such as the IMC.

Any further delay makes the situation even more serious, so we are repeating the following issues that we have raised:

– What are the reasons that have driven the amendment of the Draft Code of Ethics and Draft Regulation?

– Has there been any legal analysis of the short comings of the Code of Ethics and Regulation in force which the IMC claims to address in the process of amendment? If so, share it with us.

– On what international standards was the IMC based when it proposed the prohibition of reporting by the courts?

– During the amendment, have they sought the expertise and support of any of the international institutions present in Kosovo and active in the field of media freedom?

BELGRADE, 30.01.2020. – The Alma Quattro outdoor advertising company on Thursday refused to make billboards for the #LetN1BeSeen (#DaSeVidiN1) campaign.

The advertising company received the designs for the billboards following initial contacts and reservations of several locations in Belgrade. The designs are in now way offensive, simply asking the question Who Doesn’t Want to #LetN1BeSeen Right Now and Everywhere and a sentence saying that the state-owned operator was spending public money. Alma Quattro received the designs on Tuesday morning and N1 was told that their lawyers would review the messages and contact us.

The answer came almost 48 hours later in a telephone call when we were told that the campaign can’t go up on their billboards because they “don’t want to enter into a conflict” and “take sides”.

We demanded a written explanation from the company and are still waiting for that.

N1, Belgrade, 30/01/2020.

BELGRADE, 30.01.2020. – N1 website was under a cyber attack again on Thursday late morning in the forth such incidents in the last three days.

The attacks started on Tuesday when a paid DDoS strike from China hit N1 twice during the day.

A new one, five times stronger, happened on Wednesday afternoon with up to 300,000 access requests hitting the N1 portal server a second.

In the meantime, the Independent Associations of Serbia’s Journalists (NUNS) requested that the High-tech Crime Prosecutor urgently discover who was behind those attacks.

N1, Belgrade, 30/01/2020.

By: SENAD AVDIC

Sarajevo, 31.01.2020. – Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), one of the most prominent dissident writers from the former Soviet Union, after fleeing to the United States wrote the book Compromise, which is considered if not the best, then his most illustrative book for understanding the state and social context from which he escaped and the drama of individual subjugation within such an oppressive, unleashed, inhumane order. Prior to his arrival in the United States, Dovlatov lived in Estonia within the Soviet Union, and was a journalist in a local newspaper. The book Compromise contains thirteen of his newspaper articles from that period, dry and boring, and after each one the author writes a new story the way he wanted and intended to write those articles if that was possible in such a system, with such media and social freedoms.

In touching auto-ironic, yet entertaining storytelling, the author shows that self-censorship, or as he calls it “compromise”, was not his professional and moral choice, the ketmanian cunning of the mind, but the only way and principle to (re) live and work within such an order where journalists and the media are not provided with the luxury of thinking freely with their heads and relaying events as they see them. The book Compromise, to conclude, shows that in the conditions of cruel and total communist control, it is not only journalists, public workers, artists who resorted to “self-censorship” – the whole system rested consensually and voluntarily on internal self-discipline, suppression of truth, suppression of opinion.

In his essay Censorship / Self-censorship (1985), Danilo Kis wrote that self-censorship “is invisible, but present, far from the eyes of the public, pushed into the most hidden realms of the spirit … it does its job more efficiently than any censorship.” Drawing a parallel between censorship and self-censorship, Kis writes that “both use the same means – threat, fear and blackmail – self-censorship conceals, or at least does not deny, the existence of coercion. The fight against censorship is public and dangerous, therefore heroic, while the fight against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and without a witness, therefore, in the subject it evokes feelings of humiliation and shame over collaborationism.”

The great writer Danilo Kis, himself a victim of dogmatic repression, persecution and humiliation, concludes that recourse to self-censorship by the writer creates his own double.

“This dual writer succeeds in conceiving and compromising every and even the most moral person, the one that censorship has failed to break. Not wanting to admit its existence, self-censorship is the sister of lies, spiritual corruption“, Kis wrote.

So, we have two great Eastern European and Slavic writers, Sergei Dovlatov and Danilo Kis (who knew each other well, in Kish’s legacy, as Sarajevske sveske wrote in the past, a postcard was found in which Dovlatov apologizes to him and begs him to forgive him for insults on some literary meeting in Portugal!), both grown in single-party, communist regimes, who, at first glance, have different experiences and relationship with their own freedom and censorship as its negation, but, in fact, from different angles, speak about the same. About different paths to the same goal – winning artistic and human freedom. Dovlatov accepted the rules of the play of the repressive dogmatic order in which he grew up and lived, self-censorship as a “sister of lie” was his refuge, to make himself and that order later in the auto-ironic poetics absurd, ridiculous, corrupt. Kis opted for a second, harsher and more painful battle, which despised compromises and disgusted self-censorship, from which he emerged victorious, but with scars with which he could not live long.

“Censorship has been following me like a shadow throughout my life”, another literary classic, Miroslav Krleza, said in talks with Predrag Matvejevic. In three states and as many regimes, Krleza lived to a deep old age, without the shadow of censorship retreating, or at least diminished in inverse proportion to the growth of his literary fame and social reputation.

XXX

With the global disappearance from the historical scene of the one-party communist order and its repressive control over human freedoms, including the right to think and write freely, has the monster of censorship been stored in the warehouse of history, has self-censorship in the brave new world lost its status, to quote Kis, of the “double” that drives a person into fear, humiliation and moral capitulation? Have new, more ideal boundaries of freedom been adopted in a public space made up of artistic and media productions? Or was it just a change in the system of values, the taboo hierarchy, where the untouchability of the values of a single order, such as the myth of a classless society, the working class authority, the cult of personality, was replaced by the new myths of liberal capitalism and the idols of the new world order, the value of capital, profit, utilitarianism. If it is true that with the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the utter triumph of default – capitalist, liberal values ​​that guarantee the widest range of freedoms, how come today are possible and vital phenomena like the films of Michael Moore, or Julian Assange and all that cybernetic the empire called Wikileaks, as well as a whole host of other anti-establishment movements and “underground” networks that persistently, viciously point out the imperfection of the achieved, allegedly unquestionable “empire of freedom” within the “end of history”, as announced by Fukuyama after the collapse of the communist order.

A news story from the end of last year about problems with a new movie of one director would not deserve more serious attention if his name was not Michael Winterbottom, one of the most engaged filmmakers of today, still known to the local audience here for his movie Welcome to Sarajevo made almost 25 years ago. After finishing the filming of his new movie Greed in which he problematized the exploitation of children and the inhumane conditions of their work in Southeast Asian factories, Winterbottom was censored and his film castrated by the production company Sony. Producers have asked him to drop parts of his movie in which little hero-workers for a horribly small amount of money make clothing for the global textile giant, Spanish firm Zara: Sony and Zara, global multimillionaire corporations, have serious joint ventures that would be seriously shuddered by the Winterbottom film. Within the existing liberal capitalist order, the market, that is, profit, plays the role that the state played in the etatist communist regimes: it regulates everything, including artistic and media freedoms, determines censorship and self-censorship. Maybe one day a filmmaker or other artist does the same auto-ironic project that Estonian writer Dovlatov did: make a collection of his (un)voluntary compromises and present what his film works might look like if he was allowed to create in absolute creative and intellectual freedom.

XXX

If we agree with the largely unquestionable claim that the media is a mirror of society, then we should also agree with the conclusion that the degree of freedom in the media cannot be much different from the level of overall freedom. If we focus on the experience of Bosnia and Herzegovina, then one should seriously address the fact that the greatest degree of freedom of the media, including human, economic, business freedoms in general, was achieved in the period of several years before the entire society sank into one of the darkest episodes in its history – bloody, four-year war from 1992-1995.

The previous years, from the second half of the 1980s to the beginning of the war, were marked by an unexpected weakening of the control of one-party power over the media, the collapse of the censorship technology and the monstrosity of self-censorship, which was an indicator of the loss of power of the authority rather than the systematic and planned conquest of freedom by journalists and the media. By liberalizing in the economic sphere, encouraging private enterprise and abolishing the state monopoly over all segments, including the media, the space for launching private media projects has been opened. All those years we were learning on the go, for the first time we were faced with this kind of experience – challenges, we believed, of boundless media freedoms. Gradually, however, we were taught and accustomed to the fact that the private media were not the same as free, independent media, but that they were, at best, independent of everything other than their owners, financiers and their interests. We have found in the course that in the list of private priorities in the media their freedom, the abolition of censorship and self-censorship are usually not in the first place.

The first private media, print, and I believe in general, in Bosnia and Herzegovina was the weekly Bosanski pogledi (Bosnian Views), launched immediately after the first democratic elections in early 1991 by Adil Zulfikarpasic, a longtime emigrant, multimillionaire and liberal-civilian politician (at least thus he legitimized himself and required others to treat and respect him in the same way). In that newspaper (unfortunately for its employees), as an outside cooperative, I wrote a column that, after less than half a year, would cause the newspaper to be terminated, and journalists and other employees fired brutally and without any courteous procedure as expected from the owner with the experience of living in democratic conditions and in gentlemanly manners.

The occasion was my text in which I critically treated Zulfikarpasic’s political partner at the time, Radovan Karadzic, anticipating that his politics and rhetoric were leading society and citizens in only one possible direction – war and unprecedented slaughter. In previous (socialist-self-governing) media practices and the production there were examples of newspaper bans, editorial changes, official and informal censors existed who were ejecting or “taming” texts and radio and television broadcasts, but this was a precedent, a unique example that a media has been abolished, liquidated, extinguished due to one, single article published in it.

Later, when somehow I managed to get an explanation from Zulfikarpasic for this arrogant act, from a rich-aristocratic heights he taught me a thing that today’s journalists must always keep in mind: “I am a democrat, but not so much as to allow my own newspaper to confronts and quarrels me with my political partner and ruins my interests.”

Some thirty years later, that is recently, an explanation came to me, which may not be completely accurate, about the reasons for the exclusion of one journalist and his column from the pages of the “most circulating and influential daily”: in his article he let „through the fists” his bosses friend and business partner, whom he knew neither to be a friend, nor to be a partner. Had he known this, he would have resorted to a reliable ally – self-censorship, in which few today recognize anything self-degrading, professional, or morally profound. If you’ve already agreed to play in that circuit, then it’s silly to look for a needle of ethics in a layer, not to mention a tower, of business interests…

XXX

If we abstract public media services that are viewed and perceived by the authorities as any other “good” that has reflected any general interest, that is, they are used by a rule for private political, narrow-minded and clan needs, the media image in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina is an accurate reflection of today’s society. It is a copy of the distribution of power relations, economic and political, after thirty years of transitional rampage, privatization tirany and ownership transformation following the model of a narrow circle of profiteering-mafia, interconnected groups.

Former state-owned media, which were transformed after the war into public service broadcasters under international scrutiny, are replaced by regime media which, mainly in the information and political segment, fulfill and satisfy the demands and interests of the ruling political or party castes. The only state media in BiH in the classical sense of the word, therefore, to promote and secure the interest of the country that founded them, are the ones with other countries standing behind them, such as Qatar (Al Jazeera), Turkey (Anadolia Agency, one weekly newspaper and one portal), and Russia (the Sputnik media group and the entire network of portals and similar forms of hybrid public relations).

Opposite them is the entire gallery of media projects with not very clear ownership and business legitimacy. Given that in the majority of cases behind these media projects are the caste of suspiciously enriched tycoons who, on the one hand, have no elementary experience in the media industry, and on the other, have extensive other businesses, it is advisable to ask what are their real, original interests in the media business. Especially when it is known that the viewer-reader market in this country is dwarfed and impoverished, which is why the marketing interest cannot be greater or more significant.

Such journalism which, on the one hand, serves as an ornament to its owners in their megalomaniacal greed, and on the other to (through these media) influence the political, economic processes associated with the ruling nationalist oligarchies, has deprived the media industry of some of its essential tasks, virtues and characteristics: engagement, professional curiosity, passion and ambition, free and exploratory questioning of the broadest field of social and political phenomena… Freedom and dignity, trade union security of journalists in such journalism, and the media as an instrument of wild, corporate capital are no different from the freedom of other employees with the same employers, cashiers in their malls and stores, masons on their buildings, or dealers in their drug business.

In such a depressing, disturbing picture of journalism here, every voice that something is forbidden, shortened, thrown out in a media, that someone is “slammed”, that he is reprimanded, and even fired from his job, not only gives cause for protest, but is also an encouragement because it creates some kind of illusion, the illusion that the devil has not yet taken it all and that there are individuals who pull that devil of anti-journalism by its trail and do not allow it to feel like a definitive winner. The absence of “good old” censorship in the public space here is the ultimate proof that there is no need for it, it suggests that there has been a resignation of media workers from expanding the space of freedom, a kind of fatalistic peaceful capitulation. Self-censorship, as Kis would say, “spiritual corruption”, has become even the most benign form of corruption in an order and society in which everything, including the media industry, is impregnated with real, devastating, ruthless corruption armor.

(The author is a journalist and an editor at “Slobodna Bosna”; this article was published within the project of German Embassy in BiH and BH Journalists Association)