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Establishing a Public Sphere in a Croatian Borderland

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Establishing a Public Sphere in a Croatian Borderland Volume 21, Number 2 ESTABLISHING A PUBLIC SPHERE IN A CROATIAN BORDERLAND Dickie Wallace, University of Massachusetts Amherst © 2003 Dickie Wallace All Rights Reserved The copyright for individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East Europe Review is retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights other than those stated here. Please contact the managing editor for details on contacting these authors. Permission is granted for reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only the cost of reproduction is charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the authors. As an ethnographer of journalistic practice and pluralistic community, a small-scale civil society ideology, I have been exploring contested public where state citizenship may overshadow ethnic imaginings and ethno-national re- and national affiliation. In short, I expected to conceptualizations taking place in a border zone find dichotomy of sorts, with Croats on one side, Croatian territory that has been a political with media power under a flag firmly planted, flashpoint and the site of military conflicts and and Serbs on the other, without. occupations. Looking at the everyday working lives of mass media people placed at a key point for their community’s consensus-building, this Mapping the Croatian Mediascape article primarily focuses on the very limited In order to understand the emerging Croatian media choices available in the small and mediascape, I have explored these areas outside impoverished city of Knin, the regional capital of of Croatia’s main cities and media centers, the ethno-nationally contested Krajina region of beyond the mainstream of political and economic Croatia, where both Croats and Serbs historically power in the country. Border zones have a have vied for political, economic, and symbolic gravitational pull on these administrative centers dominance. and are essential to the national imagining of the Croatian nation and state. As under-settled places of economic depression with unsettled Ethno-national Radio in Disputed Regions ethno-national issues, Knin and the Krajina are The Knin broadcast area represents a particular unresolved problems which could potentially type of media situation that has emerged in the undermine the Croatian state’s political past decade in Croatian territory. Hrvatski Radio aspirations vis-à-vis the European Union, Knin (HRK) is the one local media institution NATO, and Western powers in general. As the currently functioning in Knin and it appears to movement of Croat, Serb and Bosnian have had, as its over-arching purpose and main populations continues, their state of flux and de functioning, the goal of establishing an ethno- facto inclusion and exclusion from each other’s national public sphere in its broadcast area. In local civic lives holds Croatia back from doing so, HRK thereby plants what I call an normalizing as a modern democracy. Even as “aural flag” that symbolically marks its ethno- Croatia tries to reject its ties to the Balkans and national presence in the territory. all of the instability and so-called primitiveness and tribalisms associated with the region, the In setting out to conduct research in ethno-national questions of the local public Knin in late winter of 2003, I was expecting to sphere of small cities like Knin remain integral find some kind of explicitly Serb attempt to to Croatia’s future. counteract this Croatian claim by responding to Croat assertions with parallel mass media or by This “aural flag” type of radio is one seeking inclusion in this civic community and part of the emerging and transitioning Croatian public sphere. I anticipated a number of objects mediascape that I have been mapping during my to be at stake here. Depending on each dissertation research. Through ethnographic community’s intentionality, possible outcomes research, I have come to know radio stations and of this contest would be the establishment of other media in less ethno-nationally contested either exclusive Serb or Croat ethno-national areas of Croatia, namely radio stations in cities control of the region or the building of a understood to be majoritarian “Croat”. Volume 21, Number 2 As an ethno-nationally contested space, populated, Croats have never fully occupied the Knin creates a problem for a Croatian area, yet they have seen it as theirs. Five journalistic profession that imagines itself and its hundred years ago, many Serb Orthodox people, nation as being in the process of becoming displaced by northward Ottoman expansion modern. Knin is a sore spot, where the questions settled the region and served as a “border guard” of national-statist sovereign drive towards civil for European Christendom against the infidels. society and a so-called free market are far from Much later, the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state settled. Instead, Knin’s economic and political urged more Serb in-migration. Although structures and its visions of itself are bifurcated, formally a part of Croatia, it had a majority Serb dependent on Zagreb or on contradicting foreign population. sources. Knin has no shared imaginary, its public sphere cannot be a social totality. As the largest city in the Krajina region, Working with Radio Knin journalists and with Knin had a Serb-run and Serb-language radio people trying to create other forms of media in Knin, I have explored questions of how they see their role in creating and maintaining their ethno- national and/or civic community and the public sphere, how they envision modernity and Croatia’s place in the “modern” world, how they see their agency, how they relate to the social systems and institutions within which they work. I have sought to understand how media people in Knin see (or do not see) themselves as territorially planted (as “aural flag”), yet also as part of a globalizing and de-territorializing mass media. I have asked about a range of personal journalistic purposes: is journalism primarily a means to a paycheck? Does journalism mean an ethnic and national duty to one’s people? Or is it a public and civic responsibility to all people living in one’s broadcast range? Background: Knin and Knin’s Broadcast Media The most recent power swing in the Krajina took station since the early 1960s. In 1991, as place in August 1995, when the Croatian Army Croatian President Franjo Tuđman was declaring took the region back from Serb paramilitaries. Croatian national independence from what was Within less than twenty-four hours of retaking considered a Serb-controlled Yugoslav i Knin, Croatian Radio & Television (HRT) government, Krajina Serbs, with Yugoslav army workers from Split and Zadar established help, made their own breakaway from the Hrvatski Radio Knin, which began broadcasting breakaway Croatia. Declaring their Srpska immediately, such was the perceived importance Krajina an independent state, they made Knin of having a mass media presence in the region. their capital and began broadcasting not just HRK was ostensibly meant to serve its radio, but also television. Croats, who were in community, mass-mediating a Croatian public the minority, fled the region. Meanwhile, Serbs sphere. However, HRK barely had an audience fleeing the unfriendly climate of other parts of during its first months of broadcasting as most Croatia, as well as Muslim- or Croatian- native Croats had fled from far from the controlled areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina, came to transmission range and had not yet returned. For Knin and the Krajina to occupy abandoned Croat this reason, the primary raison d’etre of Croatian homes. radio stations like HRK has been as “aural flags” symbolically laying claim to territory. Serbs controlled the Krajina until 1995, when the Croatian Army took back most of the “Krajina” can be translated loosely as occupied territories. Krajina Serbs fled into “the border region.” Historically under- Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia, putting up little Volume 21, Number 2 resistance, because they knew that Belgrade, would usually grimace, asking incredulously under international pressure from the Dayton “why?” For all the trouble in re-establishing a Peace Accords, would do nothing to support Croatian presence in Knin, including HRK's them. start-up, the town still feels like a place in flux with a population still looking for something for Taking back Knin was wildly celebrated better, but not expecting to find it in Knin. throughout Croatia. Then-President Franjo Tuđman spoke about national perseverance and Like much of Knin’s population, many millennial destiny beneath a giant Croatian flag HRK personnel are anything but permanent unfurled atop the hilltop fortress in the center of residents. Most came from somewhere else to the city. And, even though Knin was virtually a work in Knin. The only Knin native at HRK said ghost town, a triumphalist Hrvatski Radio Knin she very much missed Zagreb where she had broadcast in Croatian to the depopulated lived as a refugee. Jelena had fled Knin in 1991 countryside, a sovereign symbol of the Croatian but, encouraged by government incentives and nation-state. Soon however, domestic Croats seeing the radio work as an opportunity, she resettled the town, some had fled the Serb enthusiastically returned in 1996. Today her aggression in 1991, and others were looking for enthusiasm has all but dissipated, as she fears for some of the economic benefits the government the future as Serbs return. She will not tell me offered (housing in abandoned Serb houses, tax outwardly that Serbs are dangerous people, but breaks, etc.). A large number of the new settlers, she does not mask her dislike and fear, worrying however, were not domestic Croats, but instead about her children’s prospects if they become a Bosnian Croat refugees, mostly fleeing minority in what she sees as her homeland, not ethnically cleansed Serb-dominated areas of the Serbs’ homeland.
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