Divided Kosovo's multiethnic newspaper
As last-ditch talks over the province's future open in Vienna Wednesday, the paper offers a less divisive view.
By Nicole Itano | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the February 21, 2007 edition
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PRISTINA, SERBIA - In the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica, it's not just the UN-patrolled bridges over the Ibar river that separate Albanians and Serbs. Newsstands on either side of the river sell very different stories about life in Kosovo.
Such competing – and often inflammatory – accounts have fueled ethnic tensions between the majority Albanian population and the minority Serbs in this tiny but troubled Serbian province.
Wednesday in Vienna, last-ditch talks are scheduled to begin over a controversial United Nations plan for Kosovo's future. While Serb and Albanian politicians wrangle over the plan, in Kosovo a fledgling independent Serbian-language media is struggling to present their shared homeland's story in a less divisive way.
"We're really just trying to give them in-depth information about what is happening in Kosovo and what is happening in Serbia," says Jelena Bjelica, the editor of a year-old Serbian-language newspaper whose mixed-ethnicity staff of 14 is determined to simply run the news straight. "I'm not in line with the Serbs and I'm not in line with the Albanians."
Ms. Bjelica, originally from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia to whom the province still technically belongs, is one of the only Serbian journalists who has continued to report from Pristina since Yugoslav troops were expelled by NATO in 1999. Until then, most of the media in Kosovo had been in Serbia. Today, there is a flourishing Albanian media, but the seeds of an independent, Serbian-language media in Kosovo are struggling to sprout in a harsh climate.
There are only two local Serb-language publications produced in Kosovo other than Bjelica's Gradjanski Glasnik, or Civic Herald; one is aligned to the government in Belgrade and the other to the Serbian Orthodox Church. There are also a handful of TV and radio stations, but none of these have a broad, national audience and almost all operate on shoestring budgets.
"There is no Serbian Kosovo-wide media," says Isak Vorgucic, a former Orthodox priest who now owns Radio KIM, an independent Serbian-language radio station that broadcasts in central Kosovo. "There really is no Serbian press in Kosovo. We don't have a daily newspaper."
In the absence of a strong local media, most Serbs in Kosovo still get their news primarily from television and newspapers based in Belgrade, which are adamantly against any form of independence for the province.
Civic journalism – to inform, not incite
Bjelica – one of only about 140 ethnic Serbs still living in Pristina – and her Albanian friends thought there was a market for a quality paper specifically for Kosovo's Serb population.
She calls her paper's style "civic journalism," intended to inform, not incite. When UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari announced his plan last month, which essentially granted the Albanian majority de facto independence – a move widely opposed by the Serbs, who consider Kosovo to be the cradle of Serbian culture – many Albanian-language papers ran victorious headlines. In its next edition, the Civic Herald ran articles about the response to the plan from a wide variety of minority communities across Kosovo.
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