WITHIN THE REREP

Regional Ecologic Press Center

The Ecologic Press Center from Skopje is realizing the project with the basic aim of establishing the Regional Ecologic Press Center, within the Program for Reconstruction of the Environment in South-eastern Europe (REREP). The idea for establishing such center was supported at the Environment Ministers’ Conference, which took place in Skopje in the middle of March 2000.

This is a “quick start” group’s project (projects with a quick start) and is supported by Dutch donors within the Balkans Stability Pact initiative. It envisages the establishment of an eco-journalistic NGOs network into six countries-participants at the REREP program: Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Yugoslavia, with a central office in Macedonia. It will help the journalists and other interested parts to get information on the environmental conditions in the region more quickly and more easily. The project also envisages the establishment of six local offices with a central one in Skopje that will have all possibilities for processing and transfer of all information from the wider region. The key partner of this project is the Regional Environmental Central for Central and Eastern Europe from Hungary through its office in Skopje.

When initiating the project, the Ecologic Press Center started from the fact that the mass media are the basic link for communication between governments, citizens, NGOs and the business sector in the environment. The public has to be informed about the questions related to the environment if we want it to participate in the decision making processes and the mass media will probably offer objective and true information only if the journalists are completely informed.

Vesna Atanasova