Balkan media still "Islamophobic"

After a decade in ruins, Belgrade's rebuilt Avala Tower, the tallest construction in the Balkans, was reopened Wednesday (April 21) with fireworks and ceremony.

Belgrade's residents had considered the 200-meter-tall communications tower an icon of their city, much like the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. Originally built in 1964, the tower dominated the skyline until April 29, 1999, when NATO planes destroyed the tower, an act that left Belgrade stunned, Radio Serbia reported.

"NATO went as far as to bomb the headquarters of the Radio Television of Serbia in Belgrade with a clear goal to silence a propaganda service, Balkans expert Naser Miftari told The Media Project.

The new Avala tower should not be a reminder of the past, but rather the message for the future, Belgrade Mayor Dragan Djilas told Radio Serbia.

The problem, said Miftari, is that, while public figures talk about moving on, Balkan media continue to broadcast racist propaganda. And in some ways - just as the new Avala Tower was built back even taller - the propaganda is even worse than before.

Speaking to an international gathering of journalists in Jakarta, Miftari challenged global media to learn the lessons the Balkans can teach reporters.

The place to start is by admitting that, as a case study in journalistic standards, reporting on the Balkans since the 1990s is one of the most vexing.

In fact, Miftari said that the global media’s greatest single sin in covering the conflict in Kosovo has been oversimplification of the religious elements. Western media took the lead in using shorthand religious frames to make the conflict understandable to their audience.

But local state media in the Balkans went much further and actively caricatured the factions, Miftari explained.

“In the day to day vocabulary of the state television of Serbia the Kosovo Albanians were randomly branded as ‘Siptar’ fundamentalists and Bosnian Muslims were branded with the derogatory term ‘Balije’,” Miftari said.

Though it has been more than a decade since the hot war concluded, the insults still sting the region's Muslims. The controversy over last month's apology by the Serbian government for the Srebrenica massacre clearly shows that the wounds have yet to close.

Racially and religiously provocative language has made a strong comeback, primarily in Serbian media, but in a slightly different form, Miftari said.

In his analysis of two of Serbia's largest newspapers during the 2006 Serb-Albanian negotiations, Miftari found that the reports emphasized Serbian nationalism and emphasized the notion of the Greater Serbia.

This approach came at the direct expense of Albanians, whom the papers described as "victimizers" of the local Serbs.

International journalists, in turn, are forced to deal in too-short formats with this multi-sided conflict whose roots stretch back to the Middle Ages.

And almost no one's hands are clean, according to historian Tim Judah. Judah implicates the Orthodox Church, retreating Ottoman armies, and 20th Century communists for creating, cultivating and exploiting this environment ripe for conflict through the centuries.