BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Country Summary

After the signing of the December 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, local media geared up to cover the campaigns for the fall 1996 elections. As illustrated in CPJ’s Briefing on Press Freedom in Bosnia and Herzegovina Before the September 14 Elections (see excerpt), the state and ruling parties largely controlled coverage inside Bosnia during the campaigns, and censorship plagued the minimal independent coverage. Authorities placed severe restrictions on freedom of movement for both foreign and local reporters among the three entities of Bosnia: the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Sarajevo-based government); the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Muslim-Croat Federation, including the Croat-controlled “mini-state” of Herzeg-Bosna, which was officially dismantled in December); and the Republika Srpska (Serb Republic).

After the elections, conditions remained tense among the ethnic groups, and journalists were often victims of the unrest. In October, Serb police attacked Mike Kirsch, an American free-lance journalist, while he was filming a destroyed Muslim village in Republika Srpska, confiscating his film and camera. The Peace Implementation Force (IFOR) later retrieved and returned Kirsch’s camera.

Legal maneuvers also silenced journalists. When Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic sacked the Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic in November, authorities also shut down an independent radio station with close ties to Mladic, and confiscated its equipment. The station had a reputation for critical reporting on the Bosnian Serb ruling party. Also in Republika Srpska, officials of the ruling party brought a libel suit against two reporters from Alternativa, a weekly independent newspaper, for an article that described corruption among officials of the governing Serbian Democratic Party.

A new television network, sponsored by the European Union, the United States, Japan, and the Open Society Institute in an effort to overcome heavily biased state-sponsored reporting, seemed to gain momentum by the end of the year. Planners originally intended to provide a single Bosnia-wide source of campaign coverage during the fall, but the Open Broadcasting Network (OBN) took longer than expected to overcome the Sarajevo-based Bosnian government’s bureaucratic obstacles and difficulties with personnel in order to link four smaller stations in Sarajevo, Mostar, Tuzla, and Zenica. The network officially went on the air with only a week to spare before the elections, and outside the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, its broadcasts reached only the large cities in Republika Srpska, and Herzeg-Bosna. By year’s end, the project was close to linking an additional bureau in Republika Srpska.

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