Posted on 11/09/2001 11:46:31 PM PST by Pericles
Wednesday November 7 12:30 PM ET
Politicized Media Scramble Macedonia Peace Process
By Mark Heinrich
SKOPJE, Macedonia (Reuters) - When Macedonia's government decided under diplomatic pressure to withdraw a trigger-happy paramilitary squad from a cease-fire zone, eminent newspaper editors lay down in the road to prevent the pullout.
The editors had championed the paramilitaries as guardians of Macedonian villagers against ``Albanian terrorists'' who were supposedly evading a NATO-sponsored disarmament scheme.
The media men ignored the findings of international monitors that the paramilitaries had fired repeatedly into ethnic Albanian villages at night without provocation, despite the truce.
After some hours, the editors gave up their protest and the rogue gunmen left. But the episode evoked how media have moved from observer to participant in Macedonia's ethnic strife, plaguing efforts to cement a Western-brokered peace accord.
Newspapers stirred up scorn for the NATO operation that collected almost 4,000 weapons from the now disbanded National Liberation Army, or NLA, by rallying readers to deposit piles of junk at alliance headquarters in the capital Skopje.
They have retailed rumor and disinformation, casting doubt on the peace option, saying NATO airlifted guns to guerrillas during the fighting and that the guerrillas were agents of Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden.
Last month, the best-selling daily ambushed the start of a parliamentary session to ratify civil rights reforms required by the peace accord by giving prominence to an unsubstantiated story saying 12 Macedonians, earlier said to be prisoners, had been massacred by ``Albanian terrorists'' and thrown in a mass grave.
DIET OF DISTORTION
Much of the media is nominally independent but co-opted
for propaganda purposes as they cannot survive on self-generating revenue. They toe the line of ruling ethnic nationalists hostile to the peace plan for a civic democracy, experts say.
``Many Macedonians don't know what this peace agreement is all about because they're fed lies and distortions from their press. It's a legacy of communism and unprofessional politics,'' said an official in the international peace mission.
``There's no censorship but no real independence either because the financial backers are mainly political players or their cronies. He who pays the piper calls the tune,'' he said.
``Tradition here is that journalists tend to double as politicians. That makes it easy for figures in the ruling parties to exert pressure on the media,'' said Violeta Gligoroska, analyst for the U.S.-funded Open Society Institute.
Journalists in the former Yugoslav republic rebuff international criticism as misplaced and hypocritical.
They say Macedonia was victimized by ethnic Albanian expansionism exported from Kosovo, where separatists threw off brutal Serbian rule with the help of NATO bombing in 1999.
NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo, they say, failed to prevent guerrillas and guns crossing the border to foment insurrection in Macedonia, then their governments arm-twisted Skopje into granting better rights to ``terrorists.''
``The internationals just did a copy paste on what happened in Kosovo. 'The Slavs are bad, the Albanians are good. Executioners against victims','' Saso Colakovski, a senior editor at another main daily, Utrinski Vesnik, told Reuters.
``They (former guerrillas) are used to being media stars and favored pets of the international public,'' Branko Geroski, editor in chief of the daily Dnevnik which broke the ``mass grave'' story, railed in a front-page editorial on October 27.
``Now the world can be given the most convincing proof that Macedonia in this war is not fighting with fighters for human rights but with common bandits, drug dealers and murderers. Their activities cannot be called anything else but terrorism.''
WAR-LIKE RHETORIC PERSISTS
Zlatko Dizdarevic, a prominent commentator on Balkan human rights and media issues, said he was struck by how the language of war still prevails well after the peace accord was signed.
``To open a newspaper is to be confronted with unadulterated bile. It's doubly ironic this is happening in a town chock-full of international (agencies) and foreign NGOs who have poured money into training independent journalists, trying to counter a culture of propaganda,'' he wrote in the Balkan Crisis Report.
Macedonian journalism did not gain critical distance from the state after communism fell in 1991 because private media outlets proliferated beyond what the tiny market could bear, preserving a tradition of political dependence in ownership.
A country of just 2 million people now has more than 100 private TV and radio stations, four private and two state-owned nationwide newspapers plus many weeklies and monthlies.
Virtually all leading media across ethnic lines are run at least indirectly by political parties or their financiers.
``There is a typical post-socialist tendency to prescribe truthfulness,'' said Mark Thompson, who chronicled how ethnic vitriol spread by party-aligned media kindled Yugoslavia's bloody breakup in his book ``Forging War.''
Hence, every shot heard in cease-fire zones winds up in the Macedonian media as a ``provocation'' or ``attack'' by ``Albanian terrorists.'' NATO monitors say almost all ``incidents'' boil down to celebratory or drunken gunplay common in former Yugoslavia.
Newspapers said flatly that rebels with beards were foreign ''mujahideen,'' proof that bin Laden had masterminded the NLA in a conspiracy to impose Islamic fundamentalism in the Balkans.
NATO observers said repeatedly the hirsute fighters were merely Albanians from the hills who had not shaved, and that no mujahideen had been seen. Local media took no notice.
Information attributed to international officials has been invented at times to persuade readers that ``terrorists'' have been ``appeased'' and national sovereignty trampled by the West.
NATO's spokesman was quoted in a newspaper interview as saying its troops, who now protect monitors trying to heal ethnic divisions, on the ground were doing no good in Macedonia. He issued a statement denying giving the remark or interview.
NATO observers said repeatedly the hirsute fighters were merely Albanians from the hills who had not shaved, and that no mujahideen had been seen. Local media took no notice.
NATO's spokesman was quoted in a newspaper interview as saying its troops, who now protect monitors trying to heal ethnic divisions, on the ground were doing no good in Macedonia. He issued a statement denying giving the remark or interview.
Who knew NATO hd a sense of humor? But what is happening in the Balkans is not funny.
Winter is arriving into the Balkans. Camp Bondsteel is a sitting duck when the snows close the pass and the fogs ground the planes and UCK fired stingers get the rest.
Al-Qaeda will strike where the striking is good.
More to come.
With little nodes all over America, and even worse in Europe.
Hence, every shot heard in cease-fire zones winds up in the Macedonian media as a "provocation" or "attack" by "Albanian terrorists." NATO monitors say almost all "incidents" boil down to celebratory or drunken gunplay common in former Yugoslavia.
Heinrich engages in blatant ethnic caricature as he laps up the "NATO monitors" explanation of " celebratory or drunken gunplay" to explain the fire-fights breaking out up around Tetevo.
We will see some grotesque dancing and writheing by the slimey Mr. Heinrich once the Muslim forces begin to rip open the Balkans and Camp Bondsteel in earnest this Winter.
It takes one to know one!The journalist had just described himself!
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