MANJINE I MEDIJI NA ZAPADNOM BALKANU - RRPP

Minorities and media
EUROPEAN STANDARDS, WITH CONTROVERSIAL PRACTICE 11
The position of national minorities in society and their presence in the media public have
identical, similar, or specific characteristics in countries in transition, i.e. in countries created
out of the former Yugoslavia (in this project BiH, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia). The
first common characteristic regards the social changes that followed the collapse of the
ideological concept of society based on a single-party system. The disintegration of the
socialist Yugoslavia, the wars, entering a society of political pluralism and rule of European
civil standards revealed in a new light many questions related to the status and position of
peoples and national minorities in the new organization of the state, as well as raising new,
often controversial issues of inter-ethnic relations.
The socialist system had given an ideological characteristic to everything, including the
notion and position of peoples and nationalities. Yugoslavia was a “state based on sovereignty
of peoples” and on “government and self-government by the working class and all working
people” and it was a “socialist, self-managing democratic community of working people and
citizens and equal peoples and nationalities”. The notion of brotherhood and unity of the
people had placed both the peoples and the national minorities in the broader context of the
state of “working people and citizens”, in which the rights of all citizens, including minorities,
were exercised in the framework of the ideological concept of socialist society. With regard to
protection of members of national minorities, then legislation mostly defined their rights in
the fields of education, culture, language and tradition, whereas all other rights were
guaranteed and protected the same way as for all other “working people and citizens”.
There is no generally accepted definition of minority in literature and some of the mostly used
definitions are only operational, developed to serve in just one particular context or study.
Nevertheless, one of the most comprehensive and most widely accepted definitions of
minorities was offered by former United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesco Capotorti,
who established that minorities are “groups, inferior in number to the rest of a country’s
population, which are not in a dominant position, whose members are citizens of that country
but possess ethnic, religious and lingual specificities that differentiate them from other
citizens.” 12
According to a Croatian expert in national minority issues, who is Serb by ethnic origin, Dr.
Siniša Tatalović, the difficultly basically lies in the question of whether subjective or
objective criteria should be accepted in defining minority. The difficulty with subjective
criteria is that they raise the question of whether each individual is free to declare himself or
herself as a member of a certain group, completely freely, even if he or she does not possess
some traits that are considered characteristic of that group. As well as the question of whether
everyone in all circumstances is able to declare themselves as a member of a particular
minority without pressure and without suffering adverse consequences? As far as objective
11
The editor of the study is Radenko Udovicic, Director of Sarajevo-based Media Plan Institute and Professor of
Journalism from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
12
Capotorti, F (1991) Study on the rights of persons belonging to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities
K3242 .C37 1991, New York
13