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Begging for Peace in the Balkan Media
By Keith Spicer

(Op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, June 24, 1999 on the multi-ethnic TV network of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Open Broadcast Network, under the title "We’re having trouble receiving you, OBN").

SARAJEVO. So the West ‘won’ the war in Kosovo? We’ve barely begun, for the real war – the war in Balkan heads – continues to rage. And once again, as in Bosnia and Croatia (not to mention farther-afield Rwanda), we’ve seen that killing campaigns begin with, and are sustained by, media hate campaigns.

Has the West learned the simple lesson that a peaceful democracy demands free and tolerant media? It seems not, for while spending billions on bombs, and soon on reconstruction, it is slowly suffocating one of the few media voices of reconcilation in the former Yugoslavia, Sarajevo’s Open Broadcast Network (OBN).

OBN is the only multi-ethnic television network in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It has affiliates in 13 other cities in both the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation - the two wary "entities" thrown together as a kind of country by the Dayton Peace Accords and kept together by 30,000 NATO troops and billions of dollars of western aid.

OBN started almost three years ago with funding from the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Sweden and Japan, as well as backing from the Soros Foundation and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It brings together about 130 young Serb, Croat and Muslim journalists to broadcast high-quality programming with no ethnic bias.

It has struggled against horrific odds to become a respected, if chronically underfunded, instrument for peace. Its reporters have been twice beaten up by Serb nationalists and occasionally threatened with death.

Of the handful of truly independent media in Bosnia, OBN is the most popular and promising. The print media in Bosnia are in dire financial straits, notably the legendary Sarajevo daily Oslobodendje. And radio such as the Free Elections Radio Network (FERN) simply cannot compete with the ethnically-oriented TV outlets which so vividly pursue the war of ideas.

OBN can compete and does. Its programming of children's shows, sports, sitcoms, news, public affairs and documentaries enjoy solid, often high, ratings. Its news readers are media stars. Even its political adversaries on every side prize invitations to appear on OBN's news programs - by all polls the most trusted and objective available to a population inured to decades of communist and nationalist propaganda.

Astoundingly, this rare hope for building peace in Balkan minds is being starved by a short-sighted international community.

The European Union has taken almost two years to deliver much of its promised funding to OBN’s six- million-dollar (U.S.) budget. It also demands bank guarantees, and pays only in small increments. As a result, OBN's modest salaries risk going unpaid, suppliers cut off credit, and the CEO must use her personal credit card to stave off OBN's bankruptcy.

Two months ago, OBN was within three days of being kicked off the air for unpaid satellite bills.

The Americans pay half of OBN’s budget. But a few months ago, fascinated by those success-denying short-termisms of 'mission creep' and 'exit strategy', they tried to impose a cutoff date for funding by imagining that in this war-ravaged society OBN could become self-sustaining though advertising alone.

Canada, earlier a generous cash donor, is confining its future help to a $1-million (Can.) training program with related equipment, even though the BBC and others have well covered basic journalistic training. For next year Ottawa has been resisting appeals for a badly needed cash grant.

Even as the Kosovo crisis winds down, an OBN international donors’ conference on June 1 made it plain that the West was going to continue nickle-and-dimeing OBN into paralysis. Not a word of long-term vision, or even of simple understanding that Bosnia – and soon Kosovo – cannot find peace without free and honest media.

Donors sent only low-level diplomats to announce fine-tuning – or new delays – in already inadequate donations: $100,000 here, $300,000 there.

Though on a nerve-testing tightrope, OBN is facing down a disastrous Bosnian economy. And with Kosovo begging for free-media models, it shows huge regional potential. For more than most of the Bosnian media, it is achieving marketing results that make its five-year-goal of self-sufficiency seem credible – if short-term international help holds up.

Thanks to a mix of Canadian government and private help, OBN will be present at this year`s 20-anniversary Banff Television Festival June 13-19. It will seek new partners, sponsors, equipment, programming and professional solidarity from the international community.

Canada, with its multicultural, multireligious background, its pragmatic mix of private and public broadcasting, its peacekeeping traditions, and its lack of imperial ambitions, looks like an ideal partner to the young Serbs, Croats and Muslims who are trying in their ramshackle studios in Sarajevo to produce not TV, but a miracle.