Plight of Bosnia's Public Broadcaster Causes Alarm

Bosnia's main broadcaster BHRT may close down altogether, experts and journalists warn, as the financial woes that have plagued the broadcaster for years already continue to worsen.

BHRT director Belmin Karamehmedovic told local news portal Klix on Wednesday that because of rapidly falling revenues, staff now have no health insurance, and their salaries are being paid late.

"The income that the public broadcasters get from the BH Telecom and M:tel [the entity Telecoms] is not enough even for a minimal existence," news portal Klix quoted Karamehmedovic as saying.

BHRT's main source of income comes from a tax of 3.8 euros that every owner of a TV is obliged to pay each year.

Two local telecom operators, BH Telecom and M:Tel, currently collect the fee.

But the new model, which has been implemented for nearly a year, seems to have failed. The funding collected this month was only half the amount collected the previous month.

Bosnia's public electric company recently warned it might have to cut off its electricity as the broadcaster owes the company 1.3 million Bosnian Marks, according to Klix..

If BHRT does disappear, Bosnia would be the only European country without a state television - apart from the problem of several hundred employees losing their jobs.

Moreover, as Bosnia is highly fragmented into two semi-autonomous entities, home to three major ethnic groups, the consequences would be even more dire.

"Killing off BHRT would ... be one of the final steps towards the division of the country on entity or ethnic lines," Elvira Jukic, from Mediacenter Sarajevo, told BIRN.

Bosnia's two entities' television networks, RTRS (Radio-Television Republika Srpska) and FTV (Radio-Television of the Federation of...