SCGM's Interethnic Children's TV Program in Macedonia

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Subject: SCGM's Interethnic Children's TV Program in Macedonia

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SCGM's Interethnic Children's TV Program in Macedonia


MILS NEWS
Skopje, August 17, 1999
 
MILS SUPPLEMENT
'"Our Neighborhood" - An Attempt to Prevent Conflicts'
`Nova Makedonija' - August 15th
(Taken from `Financial Times' - `Muppet makers try to bridge ethnic
divide')

The creators of "Sesame Street" and "The Muppets", the classic US
children's television series, are turning their talents to Balkan
peace and reconstruction efforts. The award-winning Children's
Television Workshop, producers of  "Sesame Street" since 1969, is part
of a pioneering project in Macedonia designed to tackle two of the
root causes of ethnic conflict in south-east Europe: segregate
education and partisan media.

This autumn, Macedonian state television will broadcast the first of a
planned 40-part children's television drama series, based around the
lives of two families - one Macedonian and one Albanian who live in a
mixed neighborhood.

"Nashe Maalo" (Our Neighborhood) was devised by the Children's
Television Workshop and the Macedonian branch of Search for Common
Grounds (SCG) - a Washington DC-based non-governmental organization
dedicated to 'conflict prevention'. Targeted at 10-year-olds, the
series aims to bridge the gap between Macedonian and Albanian children
who are taught in their own languages in separate classrooms. It will
focus on language and customs, giving young viewers a chance to learn
about Orthodox and Moslem traditions and to learn a basic vocabulary
and set of everyday phrases in Macedonian and Albanian.

"There is nothing like it elsewhere", says Eran Fraenkel, SCG's
executive director for Macedonia, who has spent four years putting the
project together. He and his team plan to launch similar projects in
Albania and Bulgaria as part of a three-year-strategy to spread the
concept across the region.

Mr. Fraenkel is under no illusions about the difficulty of bridging
the deep ethnic divides. "What Macedonia faces, and may always face,
is what I call pluralism and segregation, rather than pluralism and
integration", he said.

Although Macedonia's ruling coalition includes an ethnic Albanian
party and tries to promote policies of ethnic inclusion, Albanians,
who make up 23 per cent of Macedonia's 1.9m population, are widely
mistrusted and disliked by Macedonian Slavs. They find it difficult to
gain access to higher education and are under-represented in state
institutions.

"It is a legacy of Yugoslavia", said Mr. Fraenkel. "All the various
communities had their own schools, newspapers and institutions running
parallel with each other but there was no intersecting. So people's
knowledge of each other was based on stereotypes, with the media being
both and expression of them and a reinforcement of them."

"Nashe Maalo" is the latest and by far the most ambitious media
project launched by SCG in Macedonia. It already works with BBC World
Service radio, bringing together Macedonian, Albanian and Roma, or
gypsy, reporters for training in London. Upon their return they work
in teams on weekly radio pieces for simultaneous broadcast on the
Macedonian and Albanian language programmes of the World Service.

Albanian, Macedonian and Turkish print journalists have also been
brought together by SCG to work on joint reports about one another's
communities for their newspapers. A result of this collaboration can
be found in a collection of articles called Reporting Macedonia, a
booklet jointly published by SCG and the London-based Institute for
War and Peace Reporting.

More recently, SCG brought together reporters from the most
influential Albanian and Macedonian-language newspapers in Macedonia
to report on the Kosovo conflict and refugee crisis. The project and
the subsequent magazine format collection of articles, was financed by
the British Embassy in Skopje.

SCG also runs a wide range of education projects. During the last five
years it has opened bilingual, multi-cultural kindergartens and run
'conflict resolution' and 'conflict awareness' games in more than 100
Macedonian schools, and is this year planning a series of
multicultural education programmes for high school students.

This sort of things is considered experimental, if not avant garde, in
a country where 14 per cent of children, mainly girls, never go to
primary school, where education is segregated by language and race,
and where university students often have to bribe their professors to
pass exams.

A similar pattern can be found elsewhere in the Balkans. Education in
Albania is under-financed and poorly administered. In south-eastern
Bulgaria, home for many of the country's ethnic Turks, poverty is so
widespread that if it were not for financial support from George
Soros's Open Society Fund many families would not be able to afford to
keep their children in school.

In some areas of rural Yugoslavia the illiteracy rate is as high as 10
per cent - which means that many Serbs rely for their information in
state broadcasting, which is controlled by Slobodan Miloshevic.

There is much talk surrounding the Balkan reconstruction proposals
about democracy and institution building. References to education and
the media, however, are scarce. Mr. Fraenkel believes that both are
crucial. So does the European Union's envoy to Macedonia, Jose Manuel
Pinto Teixeira.

Stressing the need for 'conflict prevention', Mr. Pinto Teixeira told
the Financial Times: "The international community doesn't realize the
deep divisions that exist in this society." "If there is no hope for
the younger generation of a better future it will only create more
potential for conflict".
(end)
mils news august 17 1999
 
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