“You’re not attacking people but attacking problems. And then people can solve the problem,” said the 1999 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winner.
This may not be traditional journalism but it works here, she said. An official seen as responsible for the problem is invited to the studio, along with other guests who can shed some light on different aspects of the problem. The focus is on getting audience members to question the experts and officials rather than attack them.
Problem-solving “is very important for the society, which is traumatized after the war,” Kelmendi said. “Actually, they’re not ready to accept fights any more. They want resolution.”
“Using conflict resolution techniques, you make [officials] find the way to resolve the problem, which they created, and you are involving the audience, bringing them together and letting them help find the solution.”
She uses this method for issues such as the frequent power failures in Kosovo or the broken health care system. She also puts politicians who dislike each other in the same room.
A studio food fight between politicians and the audience “can bring you an audience – for the moment. But people want to get rid of that,” she said.
The overriding need to get rank and file Kosovars to understand the problems and get involved in helping to resolve them means her station steers clear of launching exclusive investigative reports into what’s going wrong. “You cannot have breaking stories every day in a country like ours,” she said, and besides, “there are too many problems we’re facing and we have to work together to solve them.”
For the most part, therefore, Radio/TV 21 focuses on consciousness-raising rather than on staking out its own point of view.
Since the end of the Balkan war, Kosovo has been governed under a U.N. resolution. Outsiders make many of the key calls. And there is no timetable for phasing that out. “Sometime in 2005 we’re going to have a review of the political situation of Kosovo and maybe negotiations and the establishment of an independent Kosovo. And then we’d have new parliamentary elections,” said Kelmendi.
Kelmendi was chosen for the IWMF Courage Award in May 1999 after being forced into exile months earlier. She operated Radio 21 from Macedonia, saying it was “the only balanced source of information” for those still inside Kosovo as the war raged on, as well as for refugees who had fled. She was one of the major forces opposing Slobodan Milosevic.
The announcement that she had been named a Courage winner was helpful, she said, “a way of encouraging us to continue, to continue the work of getting back the refugees and the deportees.”
By October 1999, when she came to claim the award, the war had ended; she had returned from exile and was starting to expand Radio 21 into television.
“We were establishing a new media entity in the country after 10 years of silence of the broadcasting media in Kosovo. We were the first to be broadcasting 24 hours, after the war,” she said, and “it took courage to do it when we didn’t have the means – not even electrical power. We didn’t have the most important things and yet we were doing it; we were broadcasting.”
In the mid-1990s Kelmendi had helped run a media project which trained young women journalists. That project ended in 1999 but many people were absorbed into Radio/TV 21, which now has 122 employees. The station reports on Kosovo, Europe and the United States.
There are two major shareholders with two women and two men as top officials. She estimates that revenue covers up to 80 percent of the operating costs, with the rest made up of grants from the Open Society Institute and U.S. Agency for International Development.
For Kelmendi, as director of Radio/TV 21, “there is no night. Even when I sleep, I work. When you’re working in this kind of society, which is in transition, there is no rest. You are part of the society with a mission for social and democratic change,” she said.
Today, Radio/TV 21 is the most watched station in Kosovo. She said its programming is helping inform and educate the population, helping “to open visions for the future.”
She’s not abdicating the media-as-watchdog role. But she pursues it mostly as part of prodding politicians and government bureaucrats to recognize their responsibilities toward rank and file citizens.
”All of this is very complex work, in which you have to work from second to second, from minute to minute,” she said. “So it is a 24-hour life.”
The economy is a special problem. Unemployment is above 60 percent and 70 percent of the population is under the age of 29. Travel is nearly impossible because few European countries will grant Kosovars visas for fear they won’t return home.
Another major challenge is resolution of the legal status of Kosovo.
“One of my dreams is to see my country finally established. We are going to have free movement, a better economy and a better life – and not be afraid that the war will come back,” she said.
Finally, she said, she wants to see Kosovo as a country without corruption and with stability. She also wants Kosovo and its onetime enemies in neighboring countries to find ways to cooperate and pursue common interests.
“That’s the biggest challenge for all of us here. I believe this is an individual mission. Every one of us has to have the courage to do it,” she said. “I have double courage – I have the IWMF eagle on my desk, right in front of me.”