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Medienhilfe Ex-JugoslawienProfessionelle
Solidarität gegen Nationalismus und Chauvinismus
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ANEM WEEKLY MEDIA UPDATESEPTEMBER 29 - OCTOBER 5, 2001
BELGRADE, September 29, 2001 Various representatives of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia were present at the celebration of the seventh anniversary of Television Pink on Thursday, despite the coalition having called this media organization 'Television of the Yugoslav Left' before coming to power, B92 reported. Democratic Party senior official Goran Vesic, who was present at the party thrown by Zeljko Mitrovic, said in the press conference that he had gone to Pink because he had been invited to the party. He added that there was not a single criminal procedure against Mitrovic, and consequently that there were no obstacles for him to attend the party, he told B92. “The moment somebody prove that those people violated any law, and the moment they are found accountable for that, my relationship towards them will change. I used to go to BK Television, and I go to TV Pink, because those televisions exist according to the law. It is not my duty to investigate why those media organizations exist, and in which way they operate. The Commission for investigation of extra profit will soon publish their report, and we will all see who is on their list. I did not see that Mr. Mitrovic was in the list of the beneficiaries of the primary emission. That is the job of some other state organs. If somebody violated some law, their accountability for that should be established,” Vesic said.
NOVI SAD, September 29, 2001 The Socialist Party of Serbia demanded that the Vojvodina Parliament hold early elections for MPs during their Saturday protest rally in Novi Sad. The protest march, attended by about one thousand supporters of Socialist Party of Serbia, was marked by the physical assaults on journalists. The president of the Vojvodina Parliament, Nenad Canak, received Socialist party representatives. The procession of protesters, which walked down the city streets, was accompanied by incidents, as Socialist Party supporters assaulted journalists and citizens in Novi Sad. Protestors also broke the windows of some apartment buildings by throwing stones, B92 reported. The participants of the protest rally and the members of the party bodyguards verbally attacked the reporter of Radio Free Europe and editor of the television production Urbans, Marina Fratucan. “They told me that I was an Ustasa who made a programme on Hrtkovci village, and that I shouldn’t be here any more, and that I shouldn’t make interviews any more. They attempted to assault me physically, but my colleagues prevented them from doing that,” Fratucan said. The correspondent of radio Voice of America, Vladimir Jesic, was hit several times. “They tried to take away my tape recorded, but the police interfered, and defended me from some fifty people who tried to assault me physically,” Jesic said. He added that the police told him to publicly reveal the name of the person who assaulted him, and he said that he found that absurd: “I cannot do their job.”
NOVI SAD, October 01, 2001 The vice president of the Regional committee of Socialist Party of Serbia, Dusan Bajatovic, and Branislav Ivkovic, vice president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, apologized to the journalists who reported from the rally held on Saturday. “I do not know exactly what happened, because I have heard different versions of the same event, but if the reactions of the protesters and of the parties’ bodyguards were inadequate, then the least we can do is to send our apologies to the journalists,” Bajatovic said. He added that the party bodyguards had been given strict orders to respect journalists, and said that the Socialist Party of Serbia certainly had not ordered anyone to harass journalists. “In the public meetings like this, there are always those who are lead by their passions, and who cannot be controlled, and we have nothing to do with the behaviour of such people. There is a media obstruction for our party, and journalists’ presence in our meetings suits us,” Bajatovic said. Branislav Ivkovic told Jagodina-based Television Palma Plus that he was embarrassed because of the things that had happened in the meeting.
NOVI SAD, October 1, 2001 Physical assaults on journalists by the participants of the rally and by the party bodyguards in the protest rally organized by Socialist Party of Serbia in Novi Sad were the motivation for the president of the Independent Association of Journalists of Vojvodina, Petar Petrovic to demand an urgent meeting with the President of the Vojvodina’s Parliament, Nenad Canak. On the occasion of the meeting of the representatives of the Independent Association of Journalists of Vojvodina and the president of the Province’s Parliament, the Independent Association of Journalists of Vojvodina issued a statement, in which they wrote that the President Canak had been informed that the Association would ask their members not to report from the public meetings of the Socialist Party of Serbia until the state organs had guaranteed their safety at work. They also mentioned the action by the Independent Association of Journalists of Vojvodina and of the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia called “Stop to Mafia”, aimed at protection of journalists on their assignments, and expressed their demand that every attack on journalists was treated in the same way as an attack on policemen or on judges. President Canak promised that he would personally do his best in order to improve the security of journalists in the public meetings and in the similar events, as well as that a special security forces would be established, called Press Security, which would provide for the civilized working conditions for journalists. It was also mentioned in the official statement that the president of the Provincial Committee of the Socialist Party of Serbia, Dusan Bajatovic, had also been informed about the physical and verbal assaults by the participants of the protest rally on the journalists. He said that he didn’t have the faintest idea about that, and that he didn’t remember the last year’s arrests of the journalists in the rallies organized by the oppositional political parties either.
UZICE, October 2, 2001 Federal Information Minister Slobodan Orlic said on the occasion of celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Uzice-based media organization Vesti that the necessary general division between the politicians and the journalists would take place only when the new democratic government found the answers to the questions of who had killed the journalists Slavko Curuvija and Milan Pantic. After saying that the media in Serbia faced an important test, in which their capability of presenting the true and democratic face of Serbia would be examined, Orlic said that the media organizations had been one of the pillars of the former regime and of Slobodan Milosevic ten years ago. Orlic added that there were some individuals in the new government too were not immune to exerting control over the media, but that there were also some journalists who wished to grovel to the government. He said that the state-run media, and especially Radio Television of Serbia, had not managed to find an appropriate solution for the new circumstances. While Slobodan Milosevic was being arrested, Orlic said, the state-run television had probably waited for Vojislav Kostunica to order them to cover what had happened, while one private TV station held the viewers throughout the country in front of their TV sets with the aid of two mobile telephones. However, Orlic expressed his optimism that the media scene in Yugoslavia could change, because, he said, one part of the journalists showed their respect for the rule according to which a commentary must be unbiased, and the facts are sacrosanct.
BELGRADE, October 4, 2001 According to unofficial information, the first issue of a daily newspaper published by former Politika director and editor-in-chief Hadzi Dragan Antic will appear on the newsstands on October 5. According to information reported by the Media Centre and published in Reporter, Antic’s former deputy, Nebojsa Curcic, will serve as the editor-in-chief of this new newspaper. The only obstacle could ostensibly be the deficiency of the work force, because the journalists have not shown too much interest in working for such a newspaper, the Reporter wrote. The same source claimed that wife of ousted Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic Mira Markovic would write articles for the paper.
NOVI SAD, October 4, 2001 Authorities confiscated technical equipment from Novi Sad-based television Most, owned by the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), after a court decision brought by the investigation judge of the District Court in Belgrade. TV Most had been operating within the system of TV Mreza S (Television Network S), and it was one of the media organizations that had been using technical equipment from state-run Radio Television Serbia, according to the agreement between the former management of RTS and Socialist Party of Serbia, B92 Novi Sad correspondent Nikola Tomic reported The District Court in Belgrade established that the owner of the technical equipment was Radio Television of Serbia, and thus Television Most must relinquish the illicitly acquired equipment. After a short dispute TV Most director Dusan Bajatovic, who is also the president of the Vojvodina SPS branch, the bailiff and police inventoried and confiscated the equipment. Bajatovic said that the acting director of Television Novi Sad, Aleksandar Kravic, who was the person in RTS who was given the equipment according to the court order to store it, guaranteed him that TV Most would be permitted to broadcast their signal using RTS equipment until they obtained the new equipment. Besides most of the employees of the television, citizens of Novi Sad also came to offer their support to Television Most, including the group of young men responsible for the physical assaults on journalists during the recent SPS rally in Novi Sad. Asked whether these men were also employees with his Television, Bajatovic responded: “There are both some citizens and some supporters of this Television, and some other journalists, and also those who yelled that they were very strong, but they would not beat the journalists.” The signal of the Television Most covers the area of Novi Sad. It was mostly broadcasting films and local information programmes, while Nemanja Djordjevic, one of the people who during the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 temporarily took over Radio B92, was responsible for their peak time.
PIROT, October 4, 2001 Two federal Ministers from the Ministry for Traffic and Telecommunications ordered Television Pirot to stop broadcasting on Wednesday. Television Pirot is a member station of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM). According B92's Pirot correspondent, Snezana Manic, it was put in the minutes that the News Public Company Sloboda, whose affiliate was Television Pirot, owned and used the radio station, which worked in the frequency of the 31st channel and was located on Crni Vrh, without the legally proscribed work license. The official order from the Inspectorate, according to the inspectors, was performed after Radio Television of Serbia complained. The acting director of the Public Company Sloboda, Miloje Nesic, told B92 that this is the third ban imposed on Television Pirot, except for the fact that the first two times that had happened during the Milosevic regime, and that this was the first ban after the democratic changes that took place one year ago During the evening that day, the meeting of the Board of Directors of the Public Company was held, in which they decided that they would continue to work, according to what Nesic told B92. They also decided that they would try to solve the problem of frequency usage as soon as possible, together with the problem of the procedure which was being initiated against the director of this media organization. Since it was written in the minutes from this meeting, which was sent to Television Pirot, that the decision on the ban would be sent within the legally prescribed period of time, this media organization continued to broadcast their programmes. “The attempt of banning the broadcasting of Television Pirot represents one of the results of the rule of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, both on the federal, and on the republic level,” the chairman of the Association of Independent Media, Veran Matic said. According to him, almost all the member stations of ANEM were at the moment in the same position as in the beginning of October last year, when the regime of Slobodan Milosevic had been in power. “During the last year, nothing has been done to improve the status, that is, to provide the temporary licenses that we asked for, so that the work of the outlets would be legalized until the new law is adopted. The expected product from denial to provide for those temporary licenses is what we have today: all those stations that were not given the permission to work by Milosevic still haven’t got the broadcasting licenses, and those that were privileged by Milosevic, and I think of Pink and BK in the first place, are still starting to use new channels, in spite of the existing moratorium, and thus they are widening their empires. We have been trying for a whole year to avoid every kind of conflict, and to open a new problem of the government that has a serious negative inheritance from the previous regime. However, we are now in the situation in which they are directly attacking some of the member stations of ANEM. This is, among other things, not only the failure of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, but also the result of the fact that the whole structure of the employees in the government bodies has remained completely intact and these are the same people who served both under Dojcilo Radojevic, and Goran Matic, and Ivan Markovic, and all those who could close down as much as seventeen radio and television stations for only one year,” Veran Matic said. According to Matic, ANEM had recently turned the attention of the international institutions that dealt with obtaining support for the democratic reforms in the region to the possibility of obstructing those reforms and the process of democratization of the society, exactly in the same way that had been experienced by the employees in Television Pirot. “If there is no freedom of media and the freedom of speech, there will be no reforms, and thus all those who should provide help for our country to become a normal and democratic state in Europe and in the world will be discouraged from their intentions,” Matic said.
BELGRADE, October 4, 2001 A radio programme called “The World of the Roma” will broadcast in both Serbian and Roma languages will be broadcast every day for half an hour after 7.00 P.M. in the First Programme of Radio Beograd starting from Monday, October 1. The programme will broadcast for ten minutes in Roma and the rest of the time in Serbian. One of the main reasons for broadcasting this programme in the two languages is to acquaint people who do not understand the Roma language with the various problems that the Roma face. source: ANEM |
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