MUZZLING THE MEDIA
The Milosevic regime is resorting to increasingly draconian measures to
control Serbia's media.
By Vlado Mares in Belgrade
As the gulf between reality and the official version of events becomes ever
greater in Serbia, hardly a week goes by without some journalist or medium
falling foul of the authorities or their friends.
Among the latest casualties of Serbia's draconian information law are
independent publications and stations throughout the country.
In the space of three days between 9 and 11 September, for example, the
courts fined the Cacak weekly newspaper Cacanski glas a total of 400,000
dinars (34,000 German marks) in two rulings. Given Serbia's current
environment, such fines may well put the newspaper out of business.
The newspaper's director Stojan Markovic has been ordered to pay 350,000
dinars (30,000 German marks), and editor Vesna Stepanovic 50,000 dinars
(4,000 German marks). Curiously, both have been fined for the same offence,
namely for publishing a statement by the local branch of Vuk Draskovic's
Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) criticising the chief of Cacak's financial
police, Nikola Pavicevic, for irregularities.
Although leaders of Cacak's SPO promised to appear in court to explain
their statement and furnish the evidence to back their claims, they failed
to show up at the trial.
In Belgrade, two journalists, Radmila Ognjenovic and Sonja Curic, the
weekend editor, Vukota Corovic, and the editor-in-chief, Pero Simic, of the
daily Novosti were interrogated by police after daring to publish on 12
September an article on the fall in the value of the Yugoslav dinar on the
black market.
In Kraljevo, on 11 September, broadcasting equipment belonging to the local
opposition station Radio Globus was stolen, and several thousand German
marks damage inflicted during the burglary.
Since much expensive equipment was left untouched, employees believe that
this was an attempt by the authorities to silence the station which
rebroadcasts the programmes of foreign stations, including Radio Free
Europe and Voice of America. The burglars have not been caught.
Having defeated Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS)
in the 1996 elections, the Zajedno (Together) Coalition is in power in
Kraljevo. Ever since the take-over of power, the conflict has been
simmering within the Coalition between the SPO and the Democratic Party of
Zoran Djindjic.
The evening before the theft took place, Radio Globus had a phone-in
programme in which callers listed the failures of the SPO and accused the
party of trying to place all media under its control.
In Kikinda, a town in Vojvodina about one hundred km north of Belgrade, the
independent newspaper Kikindske has also been put on trial on the basis of
the information law.
The case against the paper's editor Zeljko Bodrozic and its publisher Dusan
Francuski was brought by the editor of another local paper, Komuna, who
also works for the state Radio Television Serbia. He argued that he had
been libeled as a paranoid war-mongerer and liar in articles that appeared
in Kikindske under the headlines "Paranoid Fixations" and "Reminiscences".
In this case, however, the charges were thrown out.
In Sokobanja, a town some two hundred kilometres south-east of Belgrade,
the editor of the local television station, Nebojsa Ristic, has been in
prison for the past three months serving a one-year sentence imposed for
disseminating false information.
During the bombing, Ristic put up an ironic poster on the office's window,
with the inscription "Free Press - Made in Serbia", in protest against the
closure of his TV station on two occasions.
Another weapon is technology. On Saturday interference blanked out some
transmissions of Belgrade's Studio B's TV interview with the former
governor of the National Bank of Yugoslavia, Dragoslav Avramovic, the
Alliance for Changes candidate for premier in a possible transitional
Yugoslav government. Citizens of Belgrade and parts of Serbia were not able
to watch the programme, the station reported, because the 49th and 53rd UHF
channels were "strongly interrupted".
What worries many journalists is that the increase in pressure on
independent media was heralded in state-controlled media after Belgrade
daily Politika Ekspress ran a text on 6 September fiercely attacking the
independent weekly NIN.
The attack was in response to the publication in NIN of an interview with
the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Hashim Thaci, which appeared
under the headline "I am Mother Theresa," a direct quotation from the
Albanian.
The staff of NIN, and especially its editor-in-chief Stevan Niksic were
accused of "plotting with the enemies of Serbia" and "making the victims
and the executioners equal", whereby "they worked on the destabilisation of
the state and the destruction of the Serbian people".
At the end of March this year, at the beginning of the NATO bombing
campaign, Politika Ekspress published a text by the same journalist
Miroslav Markovic with almost identical contents. Then, it was aimed at the
independent daily Dnevni telegraf and its owner and editor Slavko Curuvija.
For six months prior to the text Curuvija had been the prime mover behind a
high-profile campaign against the regime. His newspaper had been fined
repeatedly; its equipment confiscated; its right to print in Serbia denied
so that for a while it was published in Montenegro and smuggled in.
A week after the Politika Ekspress article appeared, Curuvija - who had
already stopped publishing his newspaper since he said that he did not wish
to work for the censor - was gunned down in the entrance of the building in
which he lived.
To date, the official investigation into Curuvija's murder has failed to
turn up any leads, with the result that Belgrade's "chattering classes"
believe that the killing was ordered by the authorities in order to
intimidate and discipline the independent media.
Vlado Mares is a regular IWPR contributor from Belgrade.
IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT
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