Media Corner

Letter to the editor regarding “An American in Europe”column

Dear Editor,

Even though your newspaper is the only real European weekly, last week’s column “An American in Europe” reflects much the mainstream thinking of Anglo-Saxon media which have sentenced Serbia and its nearly 11 million Serbs world-wide to alienation.  In this case, the name of the column reflects much its content.

To put things straight, the “immune from prosecution” Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who have not been brought to justice as yet, have been already trialed and sentenced by the international media, exactly in the same way that the international media has accepted the execution of Saddam Hussein or ignored the American atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

My point, however, is not the Karadzic-Mladic case because it does not reflect either Serbia or the people of Serbia, but is only used by British and American media to discredit Serbia in its struggle to survive, after the unfair, unjust and devastating war by NATO.

To presume that EU's chief negotiator Javier Solana is “dodging the tough issues” is not exactly the case. Solana has tougher security issues in the Balkans to deal with than chasing the two fugitives, such as stopping the enraged two million ethnic Albanian separatists frustrated that their expulsion of 220.000 Serbs from the Serbian province of Kosovo will not be rewarded by independence, much as they wishfully thought.
While mentioning “ultra-nationalists who don’t want an independent Kosovo”, your newspaper forgot to reveal that two-thirds of votes in Serbia were democratic and that out of twenty Serbian party lists the constitution was supported by nineteen expressly describing Kosovo as an "integral part of Serbia."

The Nazi allusions to Serbia might have worked during the media war financed by the late Franjo Tudjman and Alia Izetbegovic through Ruder Finn. Yet, as Croatian and Bosnian media money found its way to more constructive CNN tourism campaigns, this comparison became outdated too.
Another related update refers to the countries interested in resuming the Stabilization and Association Agreement negotiations with Serbia: in addition to Austria, Italy and Spain, your paper did not make reference to Slovenia and Greece.

It’s high time the media focused on the forward thinkers who visited Serbia and haven’t slept over its reforms. They would appreciate to read something about its present reality or indeed its future.

Borka Tomic
Serbian Institute for Public Diplomacy,
Brussels, Belgium