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MULTI-ETHNIC REPORTING IN MACEDONIA ¹
by Denise Hamilton

Macedonia is one of the few republics of the former Yugoslavia that is still at peace. But the outward stability in this tiny, mountainous nation is deceptive. Tensions between the majority Orthodox Macedonian Slavs and the large Albanian Muslim minority run high and there is little interaction across ethnic lines. As a nation in transition from socialism to capitalism, Macedonia also lacks many of the institutions that support democracy, such as a fully independent court system and an independent press. It was the latter that brought me to this obscure Balkan republic last summer.

In June 1995, I traveled to the Macedonian capital of Skopje, where I spent the month helping a team of local Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish journalists conceptualize, report, write, and edit a series of articles that would be published in the Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish language press. The aims were threefold: To expose journalists in Macedonia to Western-style reporting during an intensive, hands-on workshop; to create an environment, however brief, in which reporters of different ethnicities from different media could work cooperatively and forge bonds of respect, trust and professionalism; and lastly, to spark interest in future multi-ethnic collaborations that might continue after the project ended and I went home.

Experts agree that efforts to resolve ethnic conflict are especially crucial today in Macedonia, which has been known throughout history as "the tinderbox of the Balkans". If the Bosnian war spreads to Macedonia, there is widespread fear that Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia - all of whom have historic claims on the region - might be drawn into a larger regional conflict.

It was with these concerns in mind that two U.S. foundations joined forces in 1994 to develop a journalism project that could address ethnic tensions. They were Search for Common Ground, (SCG), a Washington, D.C. based non-governmental organization, and the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, which is based at New York University. After putting on several workshops and conducting study visits, it became clear that a more hands-on approach was needed to address two vital problems. They were ethnic segregation of the media and - at least from a Western perspective - basic journalistic shortcomings. Under contract with SCG, The Center for War, Peace, sketched out a tentative four-week journalism project. They then contacted me.

With a decade's experience as a Los Angeles Times reporter and a recent Fulbright Fellowship teaching journalism at Skopje University in Macedonia in 1993-94, I was a likely candidate to lead such a project. Prior to leaving the United States, I met with Rob Leavitt, the Center's associate director, to plan strategy and design a project that would tackle Macedonia's journalistic shortcomings by mixing practical lessons with team reporting across ethnic lines. But for all our preparation, I found that much of the actual project coalesced only after I had arrived in Macedonia and met the participants.

In Skopje, I was introduced to my team: Two Macedonians, one Albanian and one Turkish reporter, which corresponded very roughly to the population breakdown in this small nation of 2.3 million. The reporters had been selected by their editors and freed from staff duties to work exclusively with me throughout June. They would pick the topic of our project and work cooperatively on each story, with the finished series to be published concurrently in the respective papers under a joint byline. Possibly the stories also would be reprinted in the West.

Under my guidance, the team produced a series they christened "How We Survive", that examined how ordinary citizens of all classes, ethnicities, and religions were faring under tough economic conditions today in Macedonia. We made a conscious decision to stay away from politics, fearing that tackling this topic directly might inflame nationalistic feelings among the reporters and lead to a journalistic stalemate. By contrast, we believed that concern over economic survival resonated universally in Macedonia. The team took to the project with gusto, interviewing ministry officials and street children, slum dwellers and millionaires. They documented the growing heroin trade and the explosion in black market cigarettes. Along the way, they fought intensely among themselves, accused each other of partisan politics, and worried privately that their own ethnic group would come out looking badly in the series. One reporter even threatened to quit. As editor and advisor, I had to act quickly to defuse problems as they arose, mediate conflict, and negotiate solutions that were acceptable to the group. But I quickly learned one thing: Regardless of how much they distrusted each other initially, working cooperatively drew them together. They had to set aside their differences to get the job done, and since they were very excited about the project, they swallowed their pride and kept going.

The breadth and depth of our reporting - unusual for Macedonia - also forced them to confront and shatter stereotypes they might have held about the poor gypsy, the rich Albanian, or the lazy Macedonian bureaucrat. All of a sudden they felt empathy for a member of a group they had heretofore seen only as a stereotype.

At one point Macedonian reporter Julijana Kocovska confided to me, "You know, I am a human being as well as a reporter. I care about the people here. And I realize that only if Albanians get along with Macedonians can we all stay at peace here."

In addition to Kocovska, who worked as an editor at the Macedonian language daily newspaper Nova Makadonija, the team consisted of Nazif Zejnullahu of Flaka e Vellazerimit, the Albanian newspaper, Seyhan Kain of Birlik, the Turkish newspaper and Biljana Bekova of Radio NoMa, a Macedonian language state radio station. (We had attempted to enlist reporters from independent newspapers but were told that editors at the shoestring operations could not spare reporters for an entire month.) On top of their regular salaries, the reporters received an honorarium for participating in the project, which undoubtedly whetted their enthusiasm for the project. Irregardless, within about three weeks, the team produced four main stories and five sidebars. They also took photos, designed a logo, and wrote up an explanatory box to describe the project and its participants. The series began running in mid-July. One reporter even postponed her vacation in order to ensure that the stories sailed smoothly into print. Kocovska and Zejnullahu were so inspired that they asked their editors to undertake a joint investigative project into the country's growing heroin trade, a type of collaborative reporting across ethnic lines that was unheard of in Macedonia until our project.

We opted to work out of the Search for Common Ground in Macedonia office in downtown Skopje because it was centrally located, had two phone lines, and provided a staffer who could take messages and translate - which was extremely crucial since our Albanian reporter didn't speak English. Eran Fraenkel, SCG director in Macedonia, sat in on our meetings whenever possible, a boon since he spoke Macedonian, Turkish, and Albanian and understood all three cultures. Likewise, he helped me debrief every few days and provided helpful suggestions throughout the project.

The reporters and I met each morning to discuss how stories were progressing. My initial plan was that the journalists would spend two weeks reporting the stories, one week writing, and one week rewriting. However, things unfolded more slowly. We spent a full three days going over the goals of the project, picking a logo, and hammering out story ideas. Often we had two reporters engaged in a furious debate and two more hanging on the phone, trying to line up interviews. They weren't used to spending weeks developing stories and sources. And when it came time to write, they were proud to dash off their stories in several hours. I urged them to take more time on the second drafts. But clearly this was not something that their papers encouraged or rewarded.

Initially the reporters also were suspicious of each other and of me. They were afraid to suggest their own stories, to critique the suggestions of others, or to contradict anything I said. This was a cultural hurdle: Macedonians find it rude to disagree or speak directly. (You have to ask everything three times before you get a real answer. I would ask them, "Would you like to take a coffee break now?" They would say no, and I would go on with our discussion. Meanwhile, they would be seething inside, dying for a smoke and a coffee and waiting for me to ask them again.) For an American used to a robust exchange of ideas, frank talk, and fast planning, this could be frustrating. I know they would have been much more comfortable had I laid out the game plan for them and assigned them topics. But I felt it crucial to the projects success that they generate the stories and feel responsible for executing them. Initially, many of our ideas were quickly dismissed by the reporters who said, "This is not new for Macedonia. Everybody already knows that." To which I responded:

1] "Everybody talks about it but nobody writes about it so why don't we try to" and

2] "You're right, this is not new but let's present it in a new way, from a new angle".

The reporters were fervent believers in the "one-source, one-story" approach and were shocked that I expected them to interview about 50 people of various classes, ethnicities, and professions during the course of their research. I also urged them to look creatively at stories, to consider spending a night at the border, to chronicle the black market trade or to track a crop from soil to market to show the difficulties faced by farmers. To my delight, the reporters were game. Our Albanian journalist volunteered to hang out at the border and returned with all sorts of great quotes and anecdotes. And our Turkish journalist helped put us in touch with farmers and producers of tobacco. Yet although they developed many sources and leads for future stories, we found it difficult to do groundbreaking journalism in the time we had, especially with the level of skills and resources we had. For instance, our refined and ladylike Turkish reporter, Seyhan Kain, was unequipped by training, temperament, or culture for aggressive, Western-style reporting. "Haven't we done enough interviews yet?" she asked me, after completing three. (At her paper Seyhan wrote political commentary after watching Turkish TV and reading Istanbul newspapers). But we finally settled on the following stories:

1] An economic overview and introduction;
2] how women are faring in the tough economy;
3] the exploitative cycle of tobacco; and lastly,
4] the plight of young people today.

Macedonian customs and culture slowed our work pace. Phone interviews are rare here. Instead, interviews are usually done in person, last three hours, and unfold over numerous cigarettes and Turkish coffees. The reporters were also worried, as they put it delicately, that "journalism in Macedonia and America were not at the same level." They suggested that we send them all to America instead to work at U.S. newspapers. This was a great idea. However, I explained cheerfully that in this case, America had come to them.

But their concerns bring up a point that needs to be addressed for the success of future projects. Most East Bloc journalists I've met have a terrible inferiority complex coupled with a mighty sense of superiority. After attending endless workshops and conferences in recent years sponsored by well-meaning Western organizations, they are understandably prickly about being lectured to by another American journalist. As the editor of Nova Makadonija told me: "You know, our reporters are experienced professionals, they have been abroad, they have reported from Paris and London, and while people in the West may think they are "regime reporters" and not real journalists, they are just as competent as you and it annoys us when Westerners come over here and tell us how to work." So it was clear that I had to proceed diplomatically if I meant to introduce them to multi-sourced reporting and man-on-the-street interviews.

Luckily, the project itself paved the way. The reporters loved that it wasn't a static seminar but a hands-on exercise in which they worked side by side with an American journalist. Whenever possible, I accompanied them on interviews, so that when it came time to edit, I knew which great quote or telling statistic they had written down in their notes but left out of the story. That was a wise move, because despite good sources and extensive reporting, the stories required heavy editing. By American journalism standards, many stories lacked structure, displayed poor development of ideas, used page-long quotes, and failed to give examples to back up general statements. Additionally, some reporters inserted editorial and political commentary into their articles. However, since I attended many of the interviews and debriefed reporters daily, it was relatively simple to excise the politics, add context and structure, and find better quotes to illustrate their points. It only took time and patience. And because we had been in the trenches together, the reporters found my editing more palatable.

But we had plenty of heated discussions along the way. As we got into the project, I discovered that they were enamored of statistics and official government sources. They bridled at being asked to do street reporting and found it hard to believe that veteran reporters in the U.S. often drop in without appointments or just show up at cafes or villages to do interviews.

"This is work for young, inexperienced reporters; We are veteran reporters and we should be doing analysis and commentary," Kocovska told me. All of them pointed out to me that it would be a waste of time to interview average workers or peasants since they knew nothing about the economy. True, I responded. But ask them how many times a month they eat meat, if they can afford their own apartment, or if their factory pays them in cash or script redeemable only at the overpriced company store.

Eventually, the journalists grew to like street reporting. They would descend like locusts on some unsuspecting suburban apartment dweller or cafe denizen and start firing questions and writing down every word, shocked and intrigued by what they found. They developed a little preamble of introduction and found people pleased and eager to talk to them. They also realized that as a team, they gained access to people and places that would have been off-limits to them as individuals because of language or cultural barriers. For instance, the Macedonian reporters were able to interview 10-year-old Albanian boys and girls selling cigarettes at the bazaar because they had an Albanian reporter in tow. It would have been difficult to win the trust of these children otherwise, especially since most Macedonians don't speak Albanian.

To obtain the broadest cross-pollination, I split the reporters into multi-ethnic teams of two to conduct interviews whenever possible. Each was responsible for writing one story with feeds from the others. We spent a lot of time discussing how to balance out stories to include voices from each ethnic group and class and to avoid stereotyping. It paid off. By the project's end, they were coming to me to point out passages in their stories they feared would be insensitive or offensive to another ethnic group.

Our road trips also forged bonds. I asked each reporter to organize a day trip so we could travel and talk to people outside Skopje. One day, we were gone from 8 am until midnight, hitting a Turkish tobacco farming village, a tobacco processing factory and a city near the Bulgarian border known for its wealthy businessmen. At the village, our Turkish reporter arranged interviews with tobacco farmers who treated us to a fabulous home-cooked lunch and then led us out into the fields where they labor under horribly primitive conditions for 11 months out of the year. After meeting a smart young village girl who couldn't go to university for lack of money, one of our Macedonian reporters took it upon herself to try to help the young Turkish woman get a scholarship. Likewise, our Albanian and Macedonian reporters were so horrified after interviewing 12-year-old heroin addicts spawned by the burgeoning heroin trade in Macedonia that they proposed a series of joint articles on drug smuggling. Drug addiction is a new plague for the nation that is striking young Macedonians and Albanians with equal force.

In many respects the project inspired the reporters to look with fresh eyes at things they had seen all their lives but never considered before. One of our Macedonian reporters, for instance, had never realized the horrible working conditions of Turkish tobacco farmers. "Now I understand why they are so angry and why they go on strike," Kocovska told me.

But while the reporters agreed with the wisdom of setting politics aside during the project, minor ethnic tensions surfaced from time to time. If not addressed, these could quickly turn experienced professional reporters into pouty, suspicious nationalists. Words assumed ominous political proportions - for instance using the word "illegal" to describe a squatter settlement outside Skopje populated mainly by poor Muslims. Since the city had installed water and electricity to this settlement, giving it tacit permission to exist, our Turkish and Albanian journalists bridled at calling the settlement "illegal," which connoted that its Muslim residents were lawbreakers. The team also wrestled with how to describe a private university that Albanian nationalists had tried to open in Tetovo, a heavily Albanian town outside Skopje. The police had promptly torn it down, claiming that the university lacked the necessary permits, which sparked a mini-riot in which at least one Albanian was killed. So was the university illegal? Unsanctioned? Merely private?

So words were a mined thicket through which we all stumbled. As soon as I got hints of grumbling I pulled aside the reporter, found out what was wrong, then raised those concerns with the group so we could get at least a grudging consensus on how to proceed. Oftentimes, the problems could be corrected quickly. For instance, Zejnullahu, our Albanian reporter, complained that we had profiled a Turkish and a Macedonian millionaire but not an Albanian one, so I asked him to find us an Albanian millionaire to write about, which he did.

In general, whenever the reporters got into political debates that threatened to derail the project, I gently reminded them of our agreement to stay neutral but urged them to continue investigating and writing about these issues after the project ended. The Macedonian reporters - both of whom were women - seemed especially moved by the backward status of some of rural Albanian women we interviewed.

Indeed, for most of the reporters, the project was the first time they had worked and socialized with people outside their ethnic groups, and they found it an eye-opening experience. Kocovska told me numerous times how much she enjoyed working with Zejnullahu and what a good journalist he was. She seemed downright surprised to find such common ground with a Muslim Albanian. But she could see the benefits before her eyes when she went out on assignments. Eventually she became the project's most staunch ally and even made a presentation to her editorial board urging more collaborations between Nova Makadonija and Flaka.

Perhaps my biggest problem was logistical - finding time and translators to convert stories from three languages - Macedonian, Albanian and Turkish - into English - since each reporter wrote in his/her mother tongue. That took more time than I had originally anticipated. After editing, the stories were then translated back into Macedonian, their lingua franca, for group discussions, and then also into Albanian and Turkish for publication in those newspapers. The fact that our Albanian reporter didn't speak English was a psychological barrier as well as an aural one, but I tried to compensate by taking him aside with a translator frequently to discuss any concerns he had. That said, having energetic reporters who were enthusiastic about the project and open-minded enough to try a new style of journalism also went a long way.

In retrospect, I would have liked more time to debrief the reporters, to get feedback from their editors on the series, and to set up a reader hotline that would have allowed us to get response from the general public. We did hold a press conference to let people know about this unusual collaboration, which was reported in the papers and on radio, but alas, I left Macedonia before the stories started running. So I only know from anecdotal experience that the series was well-read and that many people were intrigued by the chatty Western format, the sizable number of sources and facts presented, and the personal anecdotes in each story. Some said they were especially shocked by the blunt article about drug use among the youth of Macedonia.

More importantly, the success of the Macedonia Journalism Project shows the potential of such programs to improve understanding across ethnic lines while teaching solid journalism skills. While our initial effort involved only a handful of reporters, it created a ripple effect, since those four returned to their newsrooms with knowledge and ideas to pass on to others. Additionally, the Center has successfully applied for a Knight Fellow to continue this work during Fall, 1995. That fellow, Richard Mertens, is currently in Skopje, where he has embarked on a second multi-ethnic journalism collaboration with four new reporters. This time, the topic is healthcare. Again, the resulting series will be published in the local press.

In closing, let me say that the Macedonia Journalism Project also has great potential as a teaching and conflict resolution tool in countries with multi-ethnic populations outside the South Balkans. The project could be easily adapted to suit specific needs from Burundi to Israel. It is clear that one month of intensive work with four local journalists cannot turn around distrust honed over centuries of conflict. Nonetheless, the project is helpful in developing a fact-based, independent press and in training reporters who can move fluidly across ethnic lines. And in many parts of the world today, including our own United States, that in itself is an accomplishment.

1. The Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project, Nieman Reports, Seummer 1996