With Your Bosnian Money: When Hayat Stops, and TV Herceg Bosne and PINK Remain on 'Moja TV'

By Avdo Avidć/Istraga.ba

Hayat TV will no longer have a place at BH Telecom starting today. TV Herceg-Bosne does. Now, the director who was involved in the international Panama Papers affair will say – it's because the television station that has in its name a para-state project known as the convicted “Joint Criminal Enterprise” does not ask for any money for the distribution of its program, which denies Hague verdicts and glorifies war crimes, while Hayat asks for money.

But the same Telecom has been paying PINK television hundreds of thousands of euros monthly for decades for broadcasting programs in which convicted war criminals are heroes. So, it's not about money. Because if it were, in the case of Hayat, the “frugal” Amel Kovačević would have terminated the contract with PINK TV, to whom he pays in half a year what he would pay for twenty Bosnian-Herzegovinian TV stations in one year.

Thus, the Trojka has officially shut down Hayat on BH Telecom platforms. When they tell you it's not politics, then ask them why the management of BH Telecom does not respect even the contract they acknowledge. Because they themselves say they do not want any commercial contracts with Hayat, as the agreement for free program broadcasting is still in effect. If it is in effect, as they claim, why then are they not broadcasting the program?

Two hundred thousand households, mostly Bosniaks, will not be able to watch Hayat TV from today. Amel Kovačević, the general director of BH Telecom, and Elmedin Konaković, the president of the Sarajevo branch of HDZ BiH, have decided this. Two hundred thousand households, mostly Bosniaks, will be able to watch TV Herceg Bosne, and Pink, and all those channels managed by Belgrade and Zagreb, but they will not be able to watch Hayat. Two hundred thousand households, mostly Bosniaks, will have the opportunity to watch Željko Mitrović's schizophrenic farms, but they will not be able to watch, for example, Ramadan programs. Because BH Telecom can allocate a few hundred thousand euros per month for Mitrović's programs, but not even half of that for twenty Bosnian-Herzegovinian television stations.

From today, therefore, there is no place for Hayat TV and about twenty other BH televisions in BH Telecom. Instead, there are dozens of vacant positions for former RTRS journalists, Mtell employees, and other cadres from the Banja Luka branch of SDP, whom Vojin Mijatović has placed in BH Telecom.

Amel Kovačević is bothered by an intermediary company from Portugal. His offshore companies opened in Panama, exposed by an international consortium of journalists, did not prevent him from becoming the Trojka's Minister of Finance of Sarajevo Canton, and then the general director of BH Telecom.

If the legal issues between Hayat and BH Telecom were not regulated until now, why then did Kovačević not shut down Hayat in the first days of his mandate? Because it was not an election year then. Now it is. And every piece of information against the Trojka must be suppressed.

But will they succeed?