FROM IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT, NO. 160, July 28, 2000

BREAKING THE SILENCE

The Filipovic verdict has thrust the issues of war crimes and free speech in Serbia into the open.

By Anthony Borden in London

It is a vengeful and cowardly verdict. By a sentencing a Serbian journalist to seven years in jail, the Belgrade authorities have officially criminalised the truth.

Miroslav Filipovic becomes the first-known journalist to be found guilty of espionage for reporting over the Internet. His family, friends and professional colleagues and admirers are devastated. The verdict came with an explicit warning to other local journalists - they too can expect the Filipovic treatment.

Riven with contradictions, the judgement amounts to nothing more than shooting the messenger. According to the judge himself, the information in most of Filipovic's articles was "correct and true". There was no effort to suggest that Filipovic published secret or purloined documents or obtained information unlawfully or even furtively.

As well being convicted for espionage, Filipovic was found guilty of "spreading false information". But, intriguingly, the case may have at least in part served to vindicate the accuracy of some of his reporting on Kosovo, as well as on military mobilisation over Montenegro.

Filipovic's main crime was to send (or even supposedly to intend to send) minformation on military mobilisations to foreign organisations, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting as well as Agence France-Presse. There was no suggestion that these are espionage organisations - being foreign is enough.

This is a distinction that cannot hold. In the world of the Internet, local media have equal ability to disseminate reports across the globe. The position of IWPR as a foreign organisation is thus rendered meaningless.

Local independent media - all of whom depend on international connections and support - have been put on notice. They face a difficult dilemma.

So far, none of Filipovic's key articles have appeared locally, and press stories often avoid even mentioning his Internet reporting. Would it not be more effective to pursue true solidarity with Filipovic - in the first place by republishing his key texts - than to exercise further caution and self-censorship? The same question can also be put to the Serbian opposition. The only sure way to combat attacks on free speech is more free speech.

Rather than attack a journalist, the authorities would do far more to uphold the dignity and laws of Serbia by further and openly investigating the allegations in Filipovic's reporting of atrocities against infant Yugoslav citizens in Kosovo during the NATO bombing campaign.

There are clear taboos in Serbia. One can say almost anything about Milosevic himself, but touching on the real issues that sustain the regime is strictly out of bounds. As with Zeljko Kopanja, whose legs were blown off by a car bomb in Banja Luka after he reported on atrocities by Bosnian Serbs, Filipovic has also paid a heavy price for investigating war crimes.

Serbia thus seems bent on turning only further from the world - and ensuring that its citizens, too, are equally cut off. In the days before the trial, the authorities refused to accept a meeting with the presidency of the European Union in Belgrade, at which a demarche on the case was to be presented.

For several weeks, the foreign ministry rejected the efforts of former Finish President Martti Ahtisaari - the man who negotiated the end of the bombing campaign - to serve as an intermediary in the case. Freimut Duve, the media representative for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who has also raised the case, has been accused of CIA-sponsored "media aggression."

Yet the strategy, in time, will fail. Free speech never loses. A low-key and in fact loyal Serbian professional has overnight become an international symbol for courage and honesty - and a fresh campaigning point for diplomats and human rights activists. Every single day Filipovic remains in jail will present glaring proof of the authorities' fear of their own people - not Croat or Muslim or Albanian but Serb.

More important still, the imprisonment of Filipovic is a constant reminder that the silence over the true nature of Milosevic regime has been broken - and once disturbed, cannot be restored.

Anthony Borden is executive director of IWPR.

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