TV Pluralism Could Help Rebuild Bosnia

Bosnians are scheduled to vote in September to validate the new postwar governments. If the unification of the country is the real goal of the international community (the Dayton accord leaves the door open for either the division of Bosnia or the revival of a unified state), a fair and free election is a top priority. Such an election cannot be held without a free flow of information, both within and between each ethnic sector.

There is no media circulation now across the lines dividing the ethnic territories--not only the division between the Bosnian Federation and the Serb Republic of Bosnia, but also between the Muslim and Croat territories within the Bosnian Federation. Under the impoverished conditions resulting from three years of war, people are getting most of their information from TV, and the political division of the country is paralleled by the territorial division of TV.

In the Serb Republic of Bosnia, people can watch TV emanating only from Belgrade and Pale, if they can get even that. In the Croatian area, people see TV broadcast from Zagreb or the local Croatian Mostar TV. Only in Sarajevo is there TV pluralism. Indeed, Sarajevo is the only place in virtually the entire former Yugoslavia that has TV pluralism. Even most of the Muslim areas of Bosnia are not reached by the Sarajevo stations. Muslims in the countryside, if they get any TV, can receive signals only from Belgrade or Zagreb.

Of the three TV stations in Sarajevo, the government controls one; Islamic fundamentalists (more radical than the government) control another and one is independent, with viewpoints opposing Muslim hard-liners’ attempts to establish a one-party system led by the Party of Democratic Action headed by federation President Alija Izetbegovic.

This TV pluralism is limited by the borders of the city, since TV transmitters on mountains in the countryside were destroyed during the war. Neither Serbs nor Croats will allow the use of their transmitters by the Sarajevo stations. As a result, even the Muslim part of the Bosnian Federation cannot watch broadcasts from the capital.

There is no time now to build mountaintop transmitters before the September election. However, it would not be hard to equip a dozen or more helicopters of the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) with mobile TV transmitters and locate them on the top of the main mountains every afternoon and evening. It would be impossible to jam the TV signals, and nobody would dare attack the IFOR helicopters.

Using IFOR equipment, it would be possible to cover all of Bosnia with the pluralistic TV that exists in Sarajevo. This would be much more effective than creating an international or NATO TV station to broadcast throughout the area, since such a channel would immediately be recognized as a “foreign” station.

To provide genuine pluralism, the IFOR transmitters would have to serve all three TV channels in Sarajevo, not just the government station. The Sarajevo government has already shown an attitude like that of Belgrade and Zagreb, when it refused to confirm the frequencies of the independent station, TV 99; similarly, Belgrade recently banned an independent channel, TV Studio B, and Zagreb has never had independent TV.

With the help of IFOR helicopter transmitters, it would become possible for the opposition movements in all three parts of Bosnia to be heard over the entire country, giving daily, living meaning to our talk of a united Bosnia. Lacking this pluralism, the claim that we are holding Bosniawide elections and trying to maintain a united Bosnia is rendered meaningless. To Bosnians kept under the thumbs of the parties of their own local warlords and restricted to the media of those parties, U.N. and NATO pretensions of working for a united Bosnia sound like fanciful imagining at best, hypocrisy at worse.

Establishing Bosniawide independent TV, vital to the success of the IFOR mission, would cost only a fraction of what the total mission costs--and a very small fraction of what a renewal of the war at the end of this year would cost.