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Radio Station Bridges Ethnic Divide
Photo: Chemonics/Karen Byrne
Amna Popovac, director of Mostar’s Radio Studio 88, began the station in an attempt to broadcast news that focused beyond the city’s ethnic divisions.
“We didn’t start this radio station just to play music,” said Amna Popovac, director of Radio Studio 88 in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In 1997, Amna Popovac was having coffee with some journalist friends in Mostar, a city divided between Roman Catholic Croats in the west and Bosniaks (Muslims) in the east. Even two years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended, it wasn’t advisable for friends from different ethnic groups to be sitting together in public, but they did. The journalists were complaining about being censored by their respective state news organizations. Struck by the absurdity of having to listen to two news reports (one from the Croat side, one from the Bosniak side), Amna asked her friends, “If I start a radio station, will you work there?”
An IT engineer with a master’s degree in small business management, Amna had no radio experience, but she wrote a business proposal, and journalist Amela Rebac developed the programming. Together, the two launched Radio Studio 88 in 1999.
Today, the station is a vibrant, multiethnic, independent voice in a city that remains ethnically divided. Thanks to the station managers’ business savvy, Studio 88 is commercially successful. Recently, Studio 88 began targeting women age 25 to 45. Amna, who believes this audience segment is open to change, said, “We didn’t start this radio station just to play music.”
To help build an audience, USAID supported a promotional campaign and a daily 15-minute show dedicated to the reopening of the famous Stari Most bridge, a 450-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Site destroyed by shelling in the war and since rebuilt stone-by-stone using the original construction methods. The show (which focused on ethnic reconciliation and civic improvements) and the station were promoted on TV and billboards in Mostar, as well as other frequently visited locations in Herzegovina.
Amna says the situation has improved in Mostar. In late 2006, Croat advertisers were among those sending holiday greetings to the station‘s Muslim listeners celebrating the Islamic observance of bajram. That, Amna believes, is real news.
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