TV show helps Macedonia mend

When teenager Boyan Velevski got to school last month, he found 1,000 of his schoolmates on strike out front.

The problem: Ethnic-Albanian students wanted to attend classes at his specialized computer-technology high school. But the ethnic-Macedonian students protested, voicing fear of the Albanians.

In this country, where interethnic violence almost sparked a civil war two years ago, school integration is a touchy subject.

"There is still a lot of fear and kids fighting each other in the street, and for what?" Boyan says. "The Albanians just want to learn about computers like us, but I couldn't stop what happened. I'm only one person."

Boyan may feel lonely given the problems his country faces, but he has already had an enormous impact on Macedonian society. Most of Macedonia knows him as "Ice," (pronounced "EE-tse") a character in this country's most popular children's television show about a group of kids from different ethnic groups and the magical apartment house where they live together. The series, called Nashe Maalo (meaning Our Neighborhood), is Macedonia's, and the Balkan region's, only multiethnic TV program. Ratings show that 95 percent of children in Macedonia have watched it.

Boyan couldn't stop the unrest last month that blocked Albanian students from entering several schools. But with a dozen other kids in the Nashe Maalo series, he is trying to change Macedonia's future.

"Our show is teaching kids to understand and accept other nationalities," he says. "Older people are already very frustrated and prejudiced, but I hope we can change the next generation so these terrible things won't happen again."

Playing Ice, a good-natured neighborhood hooligan on the show, Boyan has made fast friends with young people from other ethnic groups, including Albanians, Turks, Roma, and Serbs. He has become one of Macedonia's top young actors and also one of the country's most visible peacemakers. This fall he stars in an episode where he overcomes tensions between the Macedonian and Turkish communities to put on a puppet show in the Old Turkish Quarter of Skopje.

The series premiered five years ago and results are beginning to come in. Polls conducted by researchers at the University of Skopje show that after watching Nashe Maalo children are more accepting of other ethnic groups. For example, the ethnic-Macedonian children in the study were twice as likely to invite an ethnic-Albanian child home after watching the show, and many fans express interest in learning the languages of other ethnic groups.

The series, broadcast on both Macedonian and Albanian stations and translated into local languages, reaches even the most remote villages.

"The kids on Nashe Maalo are my heroes," says Fatlum Dimiri, an 11-year-old in Slupcane, an ethnic-Albanian mountain village that was almost totally leveled during the conflict two years ago. "The adults are still angry, but kids are tired of the fighting. I could play with Macedonian kids too, like in the show. If they can do it, so can we."

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