CIVILITY BY DECREE: WHY MANY KOSOVO JOURNALISTS WANT CENSORSHIP
http://www.cpj.org/dangerous/daindex.htmlCivility by Decree
When is official control of the press necessary?
Never, say U.S. press freedom advocates. But in Kosovo, many local journalists support a new regulatory board designed to censor hate speech.by Frank Smyth
--Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist, is a former elected officer of the El Salvador Press Corps Association. He writes regularly for IntellectualCapital.com and contributed to the volume Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff (www.crimesofwar.org). His website is www.franksmyth.com.
Front page photo: AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini
Pristina --- As Kosovo's Albanian majority takes over institutions once controlled by minority Serbs, the international authorities who now police Kosovo want the power to stop Albanian journalists from inciting ethnic violence against the province's dwindling Serb population.
Though Kosovo remains a province of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it has been governed by NATO and the United Nations since June, when Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary forces agreed to withdraw in the wake of NATO's bombing campaign. Ethnic Serbs have since faced frequent revenge attacks, despite the presence of the international peacekeeping force (KFOR). As more Kosovar Serbs flee the province, their numbers have dropped from ten percent of the total population last spring to only five percent today.
NATO and UN officials believe that Kosovo's history of ethnic violence demands a formal mechanism to regulate hate speech. As a result the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which operates in Kosovo under UN authority, recently invited seven Kosovars to form a new Media Policy Board. Its function is to advise the OSCE, which retains final authority to regulate the press. The seven-member board features one ethnic Serb, the leader of a Serbian political party called the Serb Movement of Resistance. The Albanian contingent includes human rights activists, intellectuals, journalists, and one former member of the Yugoslav Communist Party.Continental Divide
Shkelzen Maliqi is a chain-smoking Albanian intellectual with a salt-and-pepper beard who writes occasionally for local newspapers, works for the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute in Pristina, and has agreed to serve on the Media Policy Board. "We need a code of conduct for the press," says Maliqi, arguing that Kosovo should adopt "a European and not an American approach to this matter."
European press freedom advocates, used to a relatively high degree of official press regulation, have not opposed the OSCE initiative. But U.S. media watchdogs have, arguing that the OSCE's action sets a dangerous precedent, not just for Kosovo but for the entire world. "The best way to combat hate speech is not to ban it," read a New York Times editorial last month, "but to ensure that Kosovo's citizens have access to alternative views."
The OSCE already polices media hate speech in Bosnia, and many OSCE officials in Pristina were transferred from similar jobs in Sarajevo. U.S. advocates worry that if international organizations are allowed to censor media in the Balkans, it will be easier for them to justify censorship everywhere else. "What they are setting up establishes a precedent for continuing restriction of the press. These structures will last long after the fighting is over," says Marilyn Greene of the Reston, Virginia-based World Press Freedom Committee. [The Committee to Protect Journalists partners with the World Press Freedom Committee in many press freedom efforts, and joins it in opposition to media regulation in Kosovo - ed.]The view from Kosovo
Kosovar journalists interviewed in Pristina this month, however, were almost unanimously in favor of press regulation. "We need rules for what is news and what is a lie," says Baton Haxhiu, the editor of Pristina's most respected daily, Koha Ditore. Haxhiu is voting with his feet, having recently agreed to serve on the Media Policy Board as one of two ethnic Albanian journalist representatives.
The other journalist on the board is one of Kosovo's leading broadcasters, Aferdita Kelmendi of the Albanian independent station Radio/TV 21. Along with nearly all Kosovo's independent media, Radio 21 emerged only last year, as Serbian control of the province began to slip. Despite having accepted the OSCE's invitation, Kelmendi has nuanced views on press freedom issues.
While Kelmendi argues that it's the responsibility of journalists to "keep a line of professional journalism," she does not oppose regulatory authority over the press. But she also suggests that bureaucracy may not be the only solution to the problem of media hate speech. After the Yugoslav army withdrawal last June, Kelmendi recalls, "we had one caller who said let's clean the Serbs," using a common slang term for ethnic cleansing. "So we asked our listeners [what they thought,] and there was a huge reaction against it."Strange bedfellows
The international presence in Kosovo has other important repercussions for local journalism. Many of the best local journalists are taking lucrative jobs as translators and media professionals for the many multilateral and non-governmental organizations that have set up shop in Pristina since the Yugoslav military withdrawal. "I can't compete with their salaries," says Margarita Kadriu, director of the independent daily Kosova Sot.
Editors and journalists at all of Pristina's major newspapers say they hope for economic assistance from the OSCE, which may be another factor in their positive view of its regulatory plans. For its part, the OSCE denies it will be a damper on press freedom. "We don't want to be some kind of Nazi overseer," says Douglas Davidson, the OSCE's Director of Media Affairs in Pristina.
But Davidson adds that Kosovo "is not a benign environment." The board's objective, he says, is to promote democratic debate by discouraging hate speech and by preventing the Albanian nationalist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) from exercising the same monopoly control of the press that the Belgrade government used to impose.
The OSCE has assumed control of Pristina's major radio and television stations, and has started producing a few bilingual broadcasts. Meanwhile, local Albanians, many of whom are loyal to the KLA, have assumed control of nearly every municipal radio station outside Pristina.
U.S. advocates support financial assistance to help rebuild independent media in Kosovo, but reject the notion that international largesse should come with editorial strings attached. In an August 13 letter to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the World Press Freedom Committee wrote: "While financial assistance would be welcome for rebuilding printing houses and broadcasting facilities, foreign direction in how to operate them is neither needed nor desirable. It could, in fact, defeat the purpose of helping independent media to flourish once again in Kosovo."
"Flourish" is a relative term, of course. Until this June, the Yugoslav government controlled nearly all of Kosovo's broadcast media, with the exception of underground Albanian stations such as Radio 21. National radio and TV stations in Pristina, along with local stations in villages and towns, were all run by Kosovar Serbs hired by the Milosevic government. The Serbs now have no local media representation in Kosovo, although Radio Kontakt, a culturally-oriented station that broadcasts in both Albanian and Serbo-Croatian and was relatively independent of Belgrade before the war, may reopen.Comparing Rwanda
Hate speech can have dangerous consequences in any society dominated by the politics of identity. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, the state-controlled Radio Television des Milles Collines (RTLM) urged its Hutu listeners to exterminate all perceived ethnic Tutsis. RTLM¹s broadcasts were considered instrumental in instigating the slaughter of between 500,000 and one million Rwandans (mostly Tutsis, along with moderate Hutus) in three months. The ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has since charged RTLM's director with incitement to genocide.
Few would disagree that RTLM crossed a red line between journalism and criminal incitement. The real question is whether any society needs an additional layer of bureaucracy between journalists and the law. On the whole, Kosovo journalists argue that their society does need such a layer. While Koha Ditore editor Baton Haxhiu says that he "opposes any form of censorship," he has nonetheless joined an official body that will effectively help the OSCE censor Kosovo's press.
So far, the worst effect of media hate speech that the OSCE can point to was the tearing down of a Serbian statue in the town of Gjilan or Djilane (in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian respectively), after weeks of Albanian nationalist broadcasts on local radio beginning in July. Recently, however, there has been an upsurge in ethnic violence there and elsewhere in Kosovo. It remains to be seen whether the new Media Policy Board will manage to discourage criminal incitement in the future.
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