Last weapon in Macedonia: TV

At 7 p.m., Macedonia's most popular television news program from A1 Television runs a string of pessimistic reports with one common theme - the victimization of ethnic Macedonians by ethnic Albanians and Western aggressors.

The anchor reports that an ethnic Macedonian athlete was killed on the road to Tetovo by Albanian terrorists, and ethnic Macedonians across the country are protesting an unpopular peace deal imposed by NATO.

High school teacher Sofia Stevanovska is watching the news closely, like most Macedonians. She and her family haven't been physically affected by the six-month conflict between Macedonian security forces and ethnic-Albanian rebels, but she says just watching the news has been enough to change her view of her country.

"I am frightened when I see how Macedonian people have been chased from their homes by Albanians," she says. "I thought I knew my Albanian neighbors, but now I don't trust them any more. I can't see how we can live together anymore."

The media, both news and entertainment, have played a major role in polarizing linguistic and national communities in conflicts across the Balkans. Now, even though Macedonia's peace process cleared a crucial test yesterday as parliament backed its overall framework and opened the way for NATO to resume collecting weapons from ethnic Albanian rebels, Macedonia appears to be headed down the same perilous road. Over the past few months, while the rebel National Liberation Army captured a swath of territory along the western border, the Macedonian- and Albanian-language media have diverged to the point where it might appear they are reporting on two different wars.

"The media, like everything else in Macedonia, is divided into two camps, broken along ethnic lines," says Dejar Georgievski, a media analyst in Skopje. "There used to be some media which were able to bridge the gap and claimed a large Albanian audience, primarily A1 Television. But after several recent nationalist outbursts from the editors, I doubt that is true anymore."

Technical standards are generally high in Macedonian journalism, but a proliferation of small weekly publications and local radio and TV stations has spread advertising and subscription revenues thin. The remaining advertising also divides on ethnic lines with Albanian companies rarely advertising in the Macedonia media and vice versa. "Journalists and entertainers have to rely on political parties and businesses with political agendas for their paychecks," Georgievski adds.

As a result, both Macedonian- and Albanian-language media reflect growing nationalist trends in their respective communities. "For the first time, the Macedonian media accurately reflects the local mood [among ethnic Macedonians]," says Sam Vaknin, Balkans analyst for Central European Review and United Press International. "And that mood is antigovernment, antiWestern, antiNATO, xenophobic, and antiAlbanian, not necessarily in that order."

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