Journalist and activist Petrit Saracini with a video message for the United for Diversity Initiative.
CIVIL MEDIA: What do you think about nationalism and ethnic hatred?
SARACINI: Nationalism and ethnic hatred are perhaps the greatest evils facing modern society anywhere in the world today. They are emotions, actions, organized actions from centers of power, under which people everywhere in the world fall, and which are really one of the main obstacles why humanity is not progressing as it could progress.
Nationalism and interethnic hatred create divisions among people, deconsolidate and divide societies, and thus societies do not have the opportunity to jointly respond to the challenges of today.
Unfortunately, people instead spend energy and a lot of resources, not only people, the whole society spends a lot of resources in the fight against nationalism, and those resources, that energy, those actions, those working hours at the end of the day, can be much better used to do something that is good for all of us together.
CIVIL MEDIA: Do you have a personal example, positive or negative, with which to illustrate your opinion, ie experience?
SARACINI: I would not like to talk much about the negative examples, we can simply look back a few months ago to see how some centers of power, certain media structures, certain political structures, abused the pawn with Covid to give it an interethnic or some nationalist dimension. People from different ethnic groups have been accused of causing the increase in the Covid-19 wave, and in fact all the people who are not careful are the ones who contribute to the increased number of patients and people who are affected by this disease, and not someone from a certain ethnic community, you simply have people who are not careful in all ethnic communities, just as you have people who are careful about the disease in all ethnic communities. I would much rather talk about positive examples.
In my 25 years of working in public as a media worker, as a journalist, editor, producer, etc. I have many positive experiences with structures, newsrooms, organizations that work in a multiethnic context, in an inter-cultural context, starting with CIVIL, which is an organization that has been working for more than 20 years not because someone said so, but the organization itself creates in an inter -cultural context, it is a multiethnic organization, it works projects that involve all ethnic communities, not as numbers or as percentages, but as people who substantially contribute to the work of CIVIL.
I have a similar experience with my work at Life Radio, it was also a radio that was bilingual, Macedonian, Albanian language was used, but the context we gave was intercultural. We talked about things that we are not interested in together, young people, people who participate in cultural life, in music, in all areas of social life where there is some interaction between people.
There are many such examples in our country in North Macedonia, I think we should emphasize them more, from them to build paradigms or examples that will be used by the whole society on how things can really be done both better and together.
CIVIL MEDIA: How much and in what way are nationalism and ethnic hatred harmful for the society and for the EU aspirations? How are these phenomena contrary to European values?
SARACINI: If you take nationalism and what it actually causes, it causes division, between people, it causes inequality between people, it causes the domination of a certain ethnic community or a certain social group over another. From these things we see that it is fundamentally opposed to what we call European values.
Justice for all, freedom for all, equality for all, if we start from those postulates, nationalism is not the one who says that there should be justice for all, but imagines justice only as justice to one’s own ethnic community, which is always right. those others are not the ones who are sinners, kabaetli or culprits for something that happens to the ethnic community. If we take freedom as a paradigm, nationalists do not see freedom as freedom for all, but rather as freedom for their own ethnic community or social group, often at the expense of someone else’s freedom.
If we look at equality, nationalists do not want equality, they think that, as Orwell says, some are more equal than others, they think their ethnic community is privileged, they do it from a position of power, not from a position of defense by someone. alien attack, but from a position from which it seeks to impose dominance over another ethnic community. And the benefits, I will return to Orwell, to his notes on nationalism, the benefits are often not personal, but the goal in itself is the power and dominance of that social group in which a certain individual sank his individuality, or became part of some collectivity.
CIVIL MEDIA: What is your message to the public?
Saracini: Nationalism divides us and takes us back to the past. Let’s unite in diversity and move towards the future.
