A Post Cold War Chill   

A new Cold War is brewing between East and West, but this time it is journalists who are feeling the chill.

Eastern European reporters complain that Western nations, including France, Great Britain, Belgium and Finland, are making it very difficult to obtain visas to report in those countries – a reversal from the days when Western reporters had trouble getting into Eastern Bloc countries.

In the past, the reasons were political. Governments of repressive nations sought to keep journalists from writing about conditions in their countries. But nowadays the situation is reversed, and the reasons are economic, according to journalists and press advocacy groups in Eastern Europe. Western nations, concerned about stemming the tide of economic immigrants from former Soviet states and surrounding nations, are making it increasingly tougher for Eastern European reporters to enter the West.

"They assume the worst," says Ronald Koven, European Representative of the World Press Freedom Committee in Paris. "They assume [journalists] want to be illegal immigrants."

The greatest number of complaints have come from Russian reporters, who often must wait several months to obtain a visa, says Henrikas Yushkiavitshus, assistant director for general communication for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a Paris-based agency seeking to speed up the visa approval process for Eastern European reporters.

Embassies for Western European nations cause such massive delays for foreign reporters trying to obtain visas that journalists frequently miss the event they wanted to cover, Koven says. Some nations bog down the process by requiring time-consuming paperwork – such as health certificates that require a series of medical tests before they are valid – before they will issue visas, he says. Other countries simply take as long as six months to issue a visa, without offering any explanation for the delay. Some governments even go so far as to require the journalist to provide a written invitation from someone in the destination country.

In Yugoslavia, journalists say they have an especially difficult time getting visas because there is an assumption that they are agents of President Slobodan Milosevic, a Serb whom many Western governments consider a villain in the Balkan war.

"We do have difficulty getting visas, and it is appalling, because I'm a journalist," says Veran Matich, editor in chief of the award-winning Radio B-92 in Belgrade. "Regardless of that, there is a sort of hidden opinion about us that we are potential war criminals," Matich says.

"The position for journalists from Russia and CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] wishing to obtain visas to travel abroad has never been easy, but over the last two years, it has become very much worse," the Vienna-based International Press Institute concluded in a recent report to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE].

The OSCE, comprised of 53 members, has been considering whether the alleged visa delays violate its standards but cannot force member nations to ease visa requirements. OSCE guidelines, based on the Helsinki accords of 1975, stipulate that journalists should be permitted to travel freely between and within nations.

During its Budapest meeting in December, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) heard complaints about the frustrated efforts of Eastern European journalists to secure speedy visas, and according to a Vienna-based spokeswoman for the American delegation to the CSCE, the organization has since registered some progress in the dispute. The UK delegation has apologized for the trouble reporters are having getting visas, and France and Finland have now acknowledged the problem for the first time, although they maintain that journalists are not being singled out.

The United States, which has always been very selective about issuing visas, is not considered particularly problematic by foreign journalists. "Obviously, it would be wonderful if everyone could get a visa as freely as they wanted," says the CSCE spokeswoman. But "we are very careful in checking out journalists' credentials. It's one of the primary ways people come into the country illegally."