Saturday, August 22, 2009

Al Jazeera..."professional" journalism

Few years ago, the European Union has announced a program called "Schengen Visa Liberalisation program" targeted mainly to the countries in the Balkans to obtain a Visa Free system between them and the EU. This step means that the nationals of the countries applying to the program will no longer need the EU VISA to enter EU, but rather just their national passport and get a stamp from the first border and then travel freely within the EU for 3 months for tourism and family visits.

The countries that applied for the program are : Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania. The EU announced the conditions of becoming part of that program. The conditions were technical and political.

Technical in the sense of improving several aspects: illegal migration reduction, reforms in issuing citizenship, introducing the new Biometric passports, connecting all borders check points with unified center and creating a national Visa center and make the entrance of foreign nationals more organized and controlled.

Political in the sense of improving Political stability in the country and corruption reduction.. in order for the EU to be able to protect itself from any illegal economic activity once they are able to travel inside the EU.

The EU created a special commission and marking scale, in which each country will be evaluated and graded.. and then the commission passes the recommendation to the European Parliament that at the end decided weather the country deserves to have a VISA free system or no.

Earlier this year.. Spring 2009, the commission travelled to all the countries and checked the progress of each country.. and graded the country based on the previously mentioned criteria and then announced the marks later. In June the commission announced which countries were qualified enough and stated the reason why each country got the visa system.. or didn't get the visa system.

The result was that 3 from the 5 countries got the Visa Program and those are : Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Whereas Albania and Bosnia & Herzegovina were encouraged to continue the reforms required and that they will be graded and reviewed again later on.

Al-Jazeera news the other day made a report about that program and made a weird conclusion : "Bosnia didn't get the Visa system.. because they are Muslims" and " Muslims are not welcomed in Europe". I wonder how the hell they get that conclusion? What about Albania.. aren't they Muslims as well..? why the stress on Bosnia? on the other hand... if they are that professional journalism they should have known that 25 % of the Macedonians are Muslims.. and since Macedonia got the grades required.. they got the VISA free system.. including the Muslims in the country..! So according to Aljazeera.. Muslim Macedonians should not be able to go to EU..! Shameful journalism.

Such report is just one of the hundred miss leading reports, in which Aljazeera is trying to create negative feelings between Muslims and Christians.. or EU in general. Its a shame that such respected news agency.. is hiring such un-professional journalists and even more they don't search the correct news.. but rather are willing to create problems between nations.. just to increase the number of their viewers.


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