BBC in Macedonian Prepares to Say 'Zbogum'

To the regret of many local listeners, the BBC Albanian service broadcast its last radio show on Monday while the Macedonian service shuts this Friday.

The BBC is shutting five language services as part of efforts to cut costs.

"I am sad because the BBC was one of the few services that I trusted,"Mirko Bandev, an architect from Prilep, in Macedonia, said.

"With all the political influence in the media these days, it is hard to find journalists in whom you can trust," he added.

"The BBC offered me a window to the world that I was not able to get elswhere, so shutting it down is a sad mistake," Milka Boskovic, a Skopje housewife, said.

The birth of the BBC Macedonian service closely coincided with the birth of the new Macedonian state in the 1990s.

”It played an important role in educating many journalists that adopted the practices of real and unbiased journalism," Atanas Kirovski, a journalist in the Macedonian language service, said. "Unfortunately, we see less and less of that kind of journalism in Macedonia."

“The BBC represented a forum that connected all sides in political and social life who were on opposite sides, so the audience stands to lose much from its closure,” Nazim Rashidi, a journalist from BBC Albanian language service, said.

The last Albanian programme that went on air matched Rashidi’s description. 

It put together in the studio the representatives of two bitter rivals, the main Albanian party in Macedonia, the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, which is in government, and the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians, DPA. The two parties have not had any direct contact with one another for over a year.

In January, the BBC announced that it was scrapping services in Albanian, Macedonian and Serbian, the English service for the Caribbean region and the Portuguese for Africa service.

A BBC Albanian language programme first went on air in 1940 but closed in 1967 before being reinstated in 1993. BBC Macedonian started broadcasting in 1996.

The BBC says it plans to save about $54 million with the closures. The corporation says the move is a response to funding cuts by Britain's new coalition government.