Independent Journalists Fill Political Vacuum--and Pay a High Price for It

Late last month, Bosnian newspaper editor Zeljko Kopanja was shredded in a blast of smoke and steel when he turned the ignition of a BMW parked outside his house. Rushed to a hospital in Banja Luka, Kopanja’s life was saved when doctors amputated what remained of his legs. But though it appears the editor of Nezavisne Novine (Independent News) will survive, the incident raises serious doubts about the future of politically independent journalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A series of stories in Nezavisne Novine exposing Bosnian Serb war crimes had drawn the ire of radical nationalists. Based on extensive interviews, confidential documents from The Hague tribunal and court records previously thought to have been destroyed, Kopanja showed that the slaughter of 200 Bosnian Muslims in the summer of 1992 was carried out by Serb police working for Yugoslavia’s interior ministry. A subsequent article attracted even more attention. It described how a group of paramilitary thugs called “the Mice,” who terrorized the central Bosnian town of Doboj and killed 38 Croat and Muslim civilians, got their terrorist training directly from a special unit of Serbia’s state security service called the Red Berets.

That a Bosnian Serb editor living in the Serb-dominated half of Bosnia ethnically cleansed of Muslims and Croats would publish such a series was news in itself. The international community was ecstatic. The Independent Media Commission called the series “genuinely groundbreaking.” Kopanja’s stories represented “an important step forward in journalistic freedom,” asserted the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

But no international organization was able to offer protection when death threats, many of them phoned in by Zeljko Raznatovic, the indicted war criminal known as “Arkan,” began arriving.

On its surface, Bosnia seems an unlikely place for terrorism. No fewer than 30,000 NATO troops patrol the nation’s highways. The U.N.’s International Police Task Force has a presence in almost every municipality. The Office of the High Representative (OHR), which implements the wishes of the donor community and enforces the Dayton accords, has authority to impose laws, remove local officials and nullify elections. Nearly 15,000 foreign diplomats, aid workers and NGO employees labor to create a “civil society.” According to the International Crisis Group, their organizations collectively spend an estimated $32.9 million a month in salaries, rent and office overhead. The international presence is so pervasive that foreign aid accounts for 30% of Bosnia’s gross domestic product.

But what seems like an international protectorate is, in truth, a fragile house of cards. The Dayton accords have neither unified the country nor eliminated ethnic cleansing. Today, Bosnia is partitioned into Serb, Bosnian and Croat entities, each with its own army, police force, judiciary and education system. Only a smattering of refugees have returned to towns from which they were ethnically cleansed. Because the OHR has no enforcement mechanism, it must rely on the same ethnic zealots who started the war and continue to benefit from the lack of regulation. Ideally, NATO’s heavily armed stability force could enforce international dictates, but it is so wary of conflict that its generals are reluctant to apprehend even known war criminals.

The logical remedy would be to rewrite the Dayton accords to empower both the OHR and OSCE with the authority, at the point of a gun, if necessary, to compel local politicians to accept administrative reform. Ironically, a colonial protectorate is exactly what most war-weary Bosnians want. But the diplomatic community is loath to tinker with Dayton since any prolonged negotiation would expose the policy differences dividing the United States and Europe and quite possibly incite renewed conflict. Unable to eliminate the ethnic Mafias masquerading as political parties and unwilling to rule by fiat, the international community has turned to an element of society totally overlooked in Dayton: the media.

Media development is big business in Bosnia. The European Union, Holland’s Press Now, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Fund all have budgets to develop electronic and print journalism. By far the largest donor is the United States, which spends an average of $9.5 million each year to nurture politically independent journalism. A portion of the money is spent teaching basic editorial skills. Other programs explain concepts like advertising and marketing to managers mainly familiar with a centralized socialist economy. Recently, a larger percentage of the pot has gone to young investigative reporters to help them expose corrupt officials who, since 1996, have cost Bosnia and Herzegovina an estimated $3 million in lost taxes and customs revenue.

The U.S. media investment has met with mixed success. The transition has not been easy in a country where journalists were classified as “political social workers” during Tito’s years. In Serbia and Kosovo, journalists are physically under siege; in Croatia, government pressure is more often applied by tax police. The situation is brighter in Bosnia, where journalists no longer consider themselves handmaidens of the government. Though little progress has been made in Herzegovina, where the totalitarian regime of Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman monopolizes distribution, a lively public dialogue is beginning to emerge in Bosnia’s Serb and Muslim entities. In Sarajevo, three weekly magazines, plus a lively tabloid called Vecernje Novine (Evening News), challenge the government-controlled press.

Outside Sarajevo, no journalist is completely safe. Witness what happened to Croatia-based reporter Robert Frank. He wrote several stories linking Croatia’s ruling political party to suspect business deals in Herzegovina. Within hours of arriving in the divided city of Mostar last May, Frank was escorted from his hotel by two men pretending to be police detectives and taken to a forest outside the city, where his hand was smashed with a 10-pound rock and his neck burned with cigarettes. Not surprisingly Mostar’s Croat police have been unable to find any suspects.

Even when apprehended, assailants have little to fear from Bosnia’s judges. Sarajevo political journal BH Dani published a story last year describing the preferential treatment accorded local gangster and acknowledged war profiteer Ismet Bajramovic-Celo by the Muslim-Croat Federation’s ruling Party of Democratic Action. Several days after the story appeared, Celo showed up at the magazine’s office, shot editor Senad Pecanin in the face with a water pistol and vowed to use real bullets if his name ever appeared in the magazine again. Because there were witnesses to the encounter, Celo was accused of assault and found guilty. But instead of sending the mobster to jail, the judge imposed a fine equal to $33 and allowed Celo to walk.

Less than a fortnight after the attack on Kopanja, yet another journalist, Mirko Srdic, was beaten and threatened with death for producing a documentary on corruption in Doboj. The man who threatened his life is the president of the municipality. In the end, all the efforts to create a free and independent press in Bosnia may fail because of the international community’s inability to aggressively enforce the Dayton treaty. *