Macedonia Starts Talks on Media Grievances

A joint working group of officials and media professionals was formed on Monday and tasked with negotiating over journalists' demands.
 
The talks start as the government faces strong criticism for its treatment of the media. This summer the closure of a popular pro-opposition TV station, A1 TV, was widely blamed on government pressure.

“Over the one-year period that we have defined we will hopefully find constructive solutions that will benefit everyone”, the head of the ZNM, Naser Selmani, said. “If there is a good will and honest intentions, we will all come out as winners”.

Macedonia's Vice Prime Minister in charge of European Affairs, Teuta Arifi, Police Minister Gordana Jankulovska and Labour Minister Spiro Ristovski are part of the group.
 
At the first meeting on Monday the journalists presented several demands, including decriminalization of libel, strengthening the public broadcasting service and the more equal distribution of government advertizing money in the media.

The ZNM says that defamation charges against journalists are still being used as form of political pressure against the media.

The European Commission and other external bodies have also said they have noticed that the government spends most of its advertizing money on a few selected electronic media, saying this may be a way of putting political pressure on the rest.
 
The government has not released official figures on how much money it spends on advertizing government policies.
 
Concerns about media freedom mounted this summer following the closures of several anti-government media outlets, most of them owned by the same man, Velija Ramkovski, who is now on trial for tax avoidance.

First to shut in July were three dailies, Vreme, Spic and Koha e Re. In late July, the country’s most popular TV station, A1, also closed.

“The closures and the taxes demands all appear to be politically motivated,” Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International’s director for Europe and Central Asia, said in a press release in July.
 
In July, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, said that the opposition media in Macedonia had been “practically eliminated”. The Vienna-based South East Europe Media Organisation, SEEMO,  made a similar point.

In August, the France-based group Reporters Without Borders said it feared for the future of a free media in Macedonia following the closures.

Arifi said the talks were not a last-minute response aimed at impressing Brussels, ahead of the issue of the European Commission report on the country’s progress, expected Wednesday.

“I don’t treat Brussels like a small child,” Arifi said on Monday, “Our responsibility foremost lies towards our own democratic processes”.

The first issue agreed within the joint group will be to mull scrapping defamation as a criminal issue, Arifi said this will be discussed at the next session whose date is not yet determined.