Bosnia's Cash-Strapped State TV Risks Closure

Bosnia and Herzegovina Radio and Television, BHRT, Bosnia's state television, is experiencing extreme financial hardship, which is making it difficult to support the functioning of the network and might result in it having to stop broadcasting, the network's administration said.

"Our situation is critical: we cannot even sustain our expenses for gas and electricity, not to mention the ?5 million that we should pay the European Broadcasting Union," Belmin Karamehmedovic, the director of the television station, told BIRN on Tuesday.

"If we don't find a solution to our finances, there is a concrete risk that BHRT will disappear, which would make Bosnia and Herzegovina the only European country without its own state television," Karamehmedovic said.

The management of BHRT says the top problem is the constant fall in revenues from taxes, which should represent the first source of money for the station.

"It's a problem that has been going on for years. The income from the taxes is falling by almost ?2 million a year," Karamehmedovic said.

Every owner of a TV in Bosnia set should pay around ?3.8 in taxes to the public television, but only ab0ut half of Bosnians actually pay this sum, according to data published by Aljazeera Balkans.

Until now, the tax for the state television has been collected within the bills of the three main fixed line telephone operators.

However, as Bosnians increasingly rely only on mobile phones and scrap their landline telephone contracts, the flow of funds into BHRT gets smaller every year.

Last week, the management released a statement saying that the television station had already done everything it can to cut the costs.

"The costs for human resources have been reduced by a million KM [...