Tiskane izdaje
PRISTINA, Kosovo - As a 22-year old, she helped BBC television crews film in and around Kosovo during the 1999 NATO bombing war against Serbia.
Now 33, Jeta Xharra has continued the punchy public interest journalism she says she learned from the likes of Jeremy Paxman, the British broadcaster known as the host of the television news program "Newsnight."
In 1999, exposing wrongdoing seemed like an ideal common to most if not all Kosovo Albanians, united as they were by their fight against the authoritarian rule of Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.
Now, Ms. Xharra finds there is scant protection for journalism, as she rakes over the mix of corruption, crime and weak governance that is her nascent country today.
In the spring of 2009, Ms. Xharra received death threats. No prosecutors would take up her case, she said, because they, too, feared reprisals.
Only this past August did European prosecutors file criminal charges over the threats.
The case illustrates the enormous challenge of trying to establish equality before the law in Kosovo. While international officials insist that they are doing everything they can to bring fair government to Kosovo, she asserts that "the internationals" don't care what the Kosovo government does, as long as they do not disturb the semblance of stability.
"The message is: the government can do whatever they want with the local population, including stealing public funds and intimidating media critics and political opponents," she said. Ms. Xharra has no fear of conflict. "I learned from early on that if massacres were going to happen, we had to make sure the cameras were there to have a reaction from international diplomacy,” she said.
She spent three months after the war reporting on how Kosovar Albanian liberators retaliated with violence against ethnic Serbs and Roma. Meanwhile, the wartime cohesion of the Kosovars soon fell apart as well.
She left Kosovo in 2000 for London, majoring in war studies at King’s College and working for three years at the BBC World Service. It was Mr. Paxman’s aggressive interviewing and reporting that, she thought, was needed in Kosovo.
In 2004, Ms. Xharra started planning her own program, to investigate corruption and crime but also to take on Kosovar taboos: violence against women, homosexuality, holding elected officials to their promises.
"People tell me that I've gotten this far because no one took me seriously," she said.
"They don't know how to react to me. If I was a man, I would have been physically beaten up.
"There is this mentality that a woman cannot be a threat, and I've used it to my advantage."
Her weekly current affairs program, "Jeta ne Kosove" ("Life in Kosovo" in Albanian, a wordplay on her name), has been on the air since 2005. Many Kosovars find her confrontational style arrogant. But after the first year, she said, the program was the secondhighest rated on Kosovo television - after the prime-time news - even though it aired at 11:15 p.m.
"All of a sudden there was this woman on TV, pushing around the politicians, the tough guys," said Kastriot Jahaj, host of a sister program, "Justice in Kosovo."
"She started a new kind of journalism here," Mr. Jahaj added. "She represented the voice of the citizenry in journalism for the first time. It was an angry voice and one that people had never heard on TV before."
