Abstract
Dunja Mijatović has spent more than 20 years as a champion of free speech – and is now an official advocate. Index editor
All over the world it feels as if the right to argue, discuss and disagree is not valued as highly as it has been in the past. The exceptions are few, but Germany, especially among those old enough to remember the pre-1989 era, is one of them. Others are those European nations in Europe where people have never really seen sign of the democracy that the post-Wall euphoria promised. In Belarus and Azerbaijan, the fight for a free media has never gone away. In other nations, a self-satisfied lack of concern has settled in. But Mijatović is having none of it.
With Russia and Ukraine standing eyeball to eyeball and an military offensive in Gaza covered live on daily television news bulletins, good journalism has never been more vital. Milatović, who leads the Vienna-based OSCE unit specialising in media freedom and freedom of expression, is watching closely as nations pick up propaganda tools not only to control the message, but to create it; while at the same time trying to restrict the number of channels that the public can use to find out what is really going on. Trusted news sources are often in short supply, with news agencies and TV stations under financial pressure and journalists being attacked.
The organisation she works for, the OSCE, has 57 member nations and around 2,600 staff, and despite its name, members from three continents, Europe, Asia and North America. Its mission is to work with its member states, from Russia to the US, Turkey and the Ukraine, to protect economic, political and individual security. It works with states and groups within them to create and sustain democracy, to prevent conflict and to offer mediation. The majority of its staff work in the field, rather than at its main offices. OSCE staff were some of the first international observers in Ukraine after the Malaysian Airlines crash. As media freedom improves or slides in the other direction, Mijatović is there to report on it.
Mijatović grew up in Sarajevo and attended the city’s university. After the Yugoslavian war she was one of the founders of the Communications Regulatory Agency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a media regulator, so it is natural that Mijatović keeps a careful eye on the region. Right now, she is not impressed by what she sees. There was a period of massive improvement: better legislation, promoting safety of journalists, fighting impunity and decriminalising defamation. But now she has identified a backward slide in the countries of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. “There is a huge decline in media freedoms in the region, after a very long period, almost 20 years of struggle.” The European Commission can exert pressure on those countries, because they wish to join the EU and need to meet criteria to quality. So she has suggested to the EU that it needs to step in and do so. “They are the only ones with a stick… This negative trend needs to be reversed immediately. If not, we are going to be in a big trouble,” she says. “What we have now is politics again trying to interfere, put pressure and control media in a very blunt and open way.” She appears blunt and open, though she also has highly developed political antennae.
ABOVE: Dunja Mijatović, OSCE representative on freedom of the media, in Vienna in January
Credit: OSCE/Micky Kroell
As the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, it is appropriate to review the optimism of 1989, and the belief that a wider, greater democracy was on its way. Mijatović says that optimism was justified, but the problem was that no one did enough to protect the hard-fought-for freedoms. She feels that society at large is far too blasé about freedom. Her office is in Vienna, just an hour away by road from the border of Belarus, where journalists find themselves under house arrest for publishing criticism of the government. But she worries that most people in Western countries don’t even think about that. Sometimes we take freedoms for granted, particularly in democracies and free countries, and we forget how it is when those freedoms are suppressed. “I think if we have censorship in Belarus, which is just around the corner, that also affects societies living in freedom at the same time, and much more needs to be done.”
While she spends much of her time fighting for journalists, she is not going to shy away from criticising them either. “There’s a lack of solidarity. Many journalists could do more to protect the dignity of their profession.” She would like to see journalists coming together to fight for their professional values, rather than attacking each other’s politics. She is holding meetings with Russian and Ukrainian journalists to try and get them to discuss protecting journalism. The OSCE also works all the time with the profession, and is currently holding a series of workshops on “open journalism” and its implications, attempting to help and advise on how citizens who now write and report, but have not had any formal trained, are fully informed of legal risks and protections of how they work. She wants representatives of the 57 states to listen to stories and problems that “citizen journalists” are facing. The new world of reporting has not prepared those who are doing the work for the obstacles they might face.
Use of propaganda is, of course, nothing new, but the way it is being used, particularly in Ukraine and Russia, has attracted attention from her office. Mijatović has first-hand knowledge of the impact of propaganda during the Yugoslav war. “It was mainly Milošević’s regime that was using propaganda as a tool to inject hatred amongst people, to divide people, but there was no internet at that time. Now with the internet, we’ve moved to another level.”
The mix of propaganda and censorship is in the ascendancy in Russia. Vladimir Putin’s government has placed new controls on private media, the ones most likely to carry stories critical of its actions. Under a recent proposal passed by Russia’s Duma, only TV stations that fulfil certain criteria will be allowed to carry advertising. Experts suggest this could lead to the closure of up to 150 stations. This move has the power to shut down the voices of hundreds of regional broadcasters, says Mijatović. As if Russian media were not already constrained enough, severe restrictions on income will force journalists and editors to think long and hard about running any story that threatens their business’s ability to survive.
Sometimes we take freedoms for granted, particularly in democracies. We forget how it is when liberty is suppressed
Mijatović, an enthusiastic user of social media, has her eye on the rising use of technology as a tool of censorship as well as propaganda. Her un-ending battle is to persuade states that a future with more openness and more voices competing to be heard is better for them and better for their citizens. Many might find that a depressing role right now. “I try to raise the importance of fighting propaganda, not with blocking and filtering and breaching of channels but with more voices and pluralism and reform of these old state broadcasters – which were not reformed for so many years – and offering balanced, fair and impartial views. Of course this cannot solve the problems overnight in a post-Soviet country or in the Balkans. But I don’t see any other way of fighting propaganda.” She also says that Ukrainian authorities also are pushing to control broadcasters. “I don’t think this a solution to the problem, because you cannot stop the signals, satellite, internet. So much more needs to be done in order to fight propaganda but this sort of hasty attempt to stop voices, no matter how ridiculous these voices are, is not going to help in my view.”
She has also spoken out about the EU “right to be forgotten” ruling, worried that it will increase self-censorship by intermediaries such as Google and that it will infringe upon the public’s ability to find out legitimate information. Also on her agenda is preserving net neutrality. “In the Western countries, the European Union countries, there are more and more cases that are extraordinary for democracies. In the US, I raised several cases in relation to the protection of sources and net neutrality, so it is very difficult to think about one country and say this is really is a bad guy.”
When it comes to sorting out the world’s attitudes to freedom of speech her answer is more education. “I do not think that governments are putting in enough funds and efforts in order to offer more literacy when we talk about media. And not to mention internet literacy nowadays – that should start in kindergarten. Governments would rather put funds into blocking and filtering, because they think that will solve all the problems in society.”
She is also aware of rising levels of pressure on journalists not to publish critical stories about those in power, not only in member-states of the OSCE. “What we see is that there is more and more intimidation. There are attempts to stop critical voices, provocative voices, adoption of new laws overnight, everything in the name of security, the fight against terrorism, protection of minors, all possible ways that are in a way legitimate ways of any government to protect society and its citizens but if you look at the cases that are popping out in certain countries after the adoption of those laws, you can see that they are used for everything else than actually protecting citizens.”
Mijatović, who is clearly tireless, believes strongly that we have to get better at accepting that criticism is a healthy part of life. Right now across Europe and beyond, her message appears to be falling on deaf ears.
Footnotes
