The past few days have seen a catastrophe unfolding in the UK concerning unethical and I have to add, unlawful, practices by journalists especially surrounding the use of “phone hacking”.

Centring on the News of the World newspaper, it has transpired that as well as “snooping” on the lives of so called “celebrities”, the newspaper has also hacked into voice-mail and landlines of victims of tragic, serious crimes.

There is now a growing groundswell of public opinion that this type of journalism is both obnoxious and disgusting and that such behaviour should be stopped by law.

What has transpired so far is obnoxious and disgusting, without a shadow of a doubt.

BUT there is an even greater danger looming.

That danger is a total over-reaction by government to current events and laws being passed that will seriously curtail future investigative journalism.

Challenging and investigative journalism is almost the bedrock of policing democratic systems by exposing wrongdoing and thereby holding politicians and senior public servants to account.

Here in the western Balkans (and especially in Bosnia and Hercegovina) the media landscape is controlled by “elitist groups” masquerading as “political parties”. Anyone who even considers BiH as a country with free, independent media, is certainly drinking the “Kool Aid”.

Balkan politicians and media controllers, are masters at using western European examples of behaviour as they see fit and they will certainly be watching how this story unfolds in the UK.

Their argument, I suspect, will be to tell their constituents (the Bosnian people) that free media is not needed (“just look at what’s happening in the UK”) and that having a muzzled or gagged media landscape is good for everyone.

“AND you see, the UK want to have what we have always had, so how cool are we?”

Whatever the outcome of the phone hacking saga in the UK, what’s needed is an ongoing, robust, media landscape that can continue to expose wrong doing.

A spin off of this will be, that truly independent media practitioners in the western Balkans, will still have role models and procedures to base further developments on, in this still insecure, part of south east Europe. 

Just a thought.

I am now settling into my new, “slower”, lifestyle here in north west Bosnia.

Living in a very rural environment does takes some time to get used to. Firstly, I am a city boy who was born in London and I have never sat comfortably with gardening and traditional ways of doing things and secondly, the pace of life for me has always been hectic to break point, maybe that’s why I still expect to be jumping on a plane very soon.

Of course that’s not the plan.

What is the plan however, is for me to slow down and not to focus on tasks and jobs that would take me away from my new “home” for anything longer than 4 weeks at a time (with long breaks in between).

I have designed and put together a really superb working environment just a few steps from my front door (bliss) and can work, rest, whatever I please, when I please.

I know!

It’s what most of us dream of. Right?

But these life changes are taking time. Changes do, after all, require time.

I have been, for a while, considering a potential project to follow and document (utilising social media tools) some part of Balkan culture or lifestyle.

It looks very much as if I have found my “hook” and will very shortly start to document the activities of a local ethno music group, based in the local town of Laktasi, called “Trag”.

I had my first meeting with 3 members of the group last night sat outside a coffee bar in Banja Luka. As well as discussing what could be achieved etc, we talked about the changes that this part of Bosnia has undergone.

I was very keen to describe my observations from the past 13 years, about the cleaner streets, more professional looking police force, better road and other civic infrastructure, the border crossing even looking a bit tidier at Gradiska!.

How things had changed and for the better!

The response to my observations was that they hadn’t thought things had changed that much, but now that I had mentioned it in the way I saw progress, yes, things were changing. It seemed that because they didn’t travel outside the country as much as I had these past years, their perceptions were of a much much slower progress.

Bosnia is moving forward. Well in this part of the country it is. It’s no way democratic (as northern or western Europeans would perceive democracy) in fact its just as autocratic as in the days of the late Josip Broz (Tito), where loyalty to the party over-ruled loyalty to civil society, but things are moving, slowly, towards a pluralistic environment. And that’s got to be good for everyone.

To help with speeding up change, more people from Bosnia, especially younger people, need to travel abroad, experience new lifestyles, see how others with similar problems resolve and improve situations and then come back and implement change.

A dream too far from a foreigners mind?

Maybe.

But whatever happens, you can’t get away from what Bob Dylan sang back in 1964 “The Times They Are a-Changin”