Muslim, Serb Factions Quash Independent TV In Bosnia

It seemed like such a noble idea: an independent TV network giving voice to free political expression in the run-up to Bosnia’s upcoming elections and in a democratic future.

But the $10 million project organized and paid for by the West has been repeatedly delayed by international confusion and a resistant Bosnian government using police raids and threats to block the network.

TV-IN is now scheduled to begin broadcasting with a single hour of independently produced news Saturday, just a week before Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first postwar election and far too late to have much impact on it.

And even after that first show, the network is likely to be struggling for air. There are indications that the government of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic intends to pull the plug once the elections are over.

His objections, diplomats say, are in part due to genuine fear of cultural imperialism and the introduction of the kind of racy TV programming common in Europe. There are additional motives: His government and the Muslim SDA party that dominates it fear loss of control of a politically powerful and lucrative monopoly on electronic media. The hard-liners among Izetbegovic’s coterie have shown little tolerance for dissent and criticism and little willingness to share power or profit with non-Muslims.

“Everyone loves pluralism until it undermines one’s own monopoly,” said Michael Maclay, spokesman for Carl Bildt, the international community’s high representative in Bosnia, whose office is putting together the Open Broadcast Network, or TV-IN.

Political obstacles turned into overt harassment last week, Western officials and employees of TV-IN said. Emin Skopljak, the deputy minister of telecommunications and trade - who also happens to be Izetbegovic’s nephew - threatened the official in charge of the state telecommunications agency where TV-IN is doing business, sources involved in the project reported.

Skopljak told the man to “remember you are a Croat,” the sources said. Recently, the board of directors of the same telecommunications company was fired and non-Muslims replaced with Muslim SDA members, the sources said.

Skopljak then threatened workers at the TV-IN site with a stop-work permit, claiming the network was operating illegally. This was followed by a similar warning from Interior Minister Avdo Hebib.

In a stern protest letter from Bildt, NATO’s commander in Bosnia, U.S. Adm. T. Joseph Lopez, and the U.S. diplomat supervising elections, Robert H. Frowick, Izetbegovic was chastised for actions that “directly affect freedom of the press.”

“Government-sponsored harassment … puts into question your government’s commitment to create the necessary conditions for the upcoming elections,” the Aug. 27 letter said.

TV-IN, a consortium of five already existing, small TV stations in Sarajevo and three other cities, was planned to share facilities with Bosnia’s state television, BH-TV, and to use $3 million in seed money from the World Bank to reconstruct war-damaged infrastructure whose repair would benefit both networks. But the Bosnian government pulled out of the project in May and, Maclay said, began putting up political and legal obstacles to TV-IN, which, abandoned by BH-TV, had to find a new, more limited system of transmitters, studios and other facilities.

One of the biggest shortcomings of the new network is that, at least at first, it will not reach a large part of Serb-held Bosnia, where the media are far more restricted and censored than in Muslim-led Bosnia.

Bosnian Serbs who waged a war of secession for 43 months were able to spread virulent anti-Muslim propaganda by seizing control of strategic radio and TV transmitters throughout eastern and northern Bosnia.

The Serbian Democratic Party of indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic still holds almost absolute control over television and most radio in Serb-held Bosnia.

Spokesmen for Bildt said they plan to have a studio and transmitter in Banja Luka, the largest city in Serbian territory, but not a production capability any time soon.

Some analysts also believe that the hard-line faction of Izetbegovic’s party is using the new network as further justification for establishing its own national Muslim TV station.

Izetbegovic assigned the Muslim project to a strident group of SDA militants who run the Ljiljan newspaper, a nationalist weekly known for attacking most opposition politicians and media as “malignant tumors on Bosnia’s healthy Muslim body” and other derogatory labels.

Izetbegovic, in a recent interview with the Slobodna Bosna newspaper, defended the need for an all-Muslim network to promote Muslim religious values but not supplant state television. Ljiljan Television, as the Muslim network will be called, will use state television’s transmitters.