BETAWEEK May 25

Another Wave Of Repression On News Media

JOURNALISTS AS TERRORISTS

By taking over the Belgrade radio and television station, Studio B, and shutting down the B2-92 and Index radio stations, the Serbian government has taken another step in purging independent news media and shown its readiness to resort to brute force in order to take them off the air. The restrictive Law on Public Information, which has brought drastic financial penalties on the non-government media, is no longer efficient enough to satisfy the ruling coalition's growing urge for gagging their every political rival.

In stifling Studio B, Serbia's government had taken special measures. First it declared that the station had been calling for a violent change of "the legally elected authorities" and then decided to take control over it, on those same grounds. Studio B was controlled by the Belgrade city authorities, that is, by the Serbian Renewal Movement. Its broadcasts are viewed by around 3.5 million people.

At least 150 armed policemen stormed into the Studio B premises in the early morning hours of May 17. The police are still in the downtown skyscraper housing Studio B and besides, it is no longer possible in Belgrade to hear the influential, Radio B2-92 -- which has already been shut down on several previous occasions -- from broadcasting on a frequency it borrowed from Studio B. Radio Indeks, which is located in the same building, was allowed to resume short news broadcasts on May 19. The staff at Radio Index are virtually working under police surveillance and they are banned from broadcasting any of their previous political programs.

Deterioration

Although there had been hints of a likely take-over of Studio B, the city authorities and the Serbian opposition were unprepared and their actions lacked firmness when it happened. It took only days for the Belgrade authorities and other opposition parties to practically accept the Serbian government take-over of Studio B. The city authorities advised Studio B employees to accept the new management and owners' calls and return to their original work places. A small group of Studio B reporters still barred from entering the Belgrade Palace have been entrusted the task of reading the news before hundreds of residents outside the City Hall every night.

The people and opposition parties' reactions in Kraljevo, Nis, Pirot, Pozega and several other cities were extremely volatile. The authorities were forced to re-erect a confiscated TV transmitter in Kraljevo, and had to tolerate the purchase of a new transmitter in Pirot as well as the introduction of cable television in Pozega. They never even attempted to shut down the local radio and television stations in Nis, Cacak and Kragujevac, respecting the fact that these cities are the biggest strongholds of Serbia's opposition.

Observers in Belgrade estimate that, encouraged by their success in the capital, the Serbian authorities would attempt to launch similar actions in the coming weeks to stifle independent news media in other cities. The media in those cities are still independent, which means that for the first time ever, their local population is better informed than Belgraders.

Press

Parallel to the crackdown on independent electronic media in Belgrade, the authorities are stepping up pressure on newspapers, too. The state-owned newspaper printer, Borba, on May 15 unilaterally broke off a contract with the newspaper Blic, forcing it to halve its former daily circulation of 200,000 issues. The editors at Blic said that the printing of the daily had been stipulated with a change in editorial policies, a condition the newspaper has refused.

Blic has the highest circulation in Serbia and an estimated one million daily readers. The required number of issues could now only be printed with help from the pro-government Politika, which refuses to do so. A portion of the Blic is now being printed in the Glas printing company. Blic tried to print a part of its circulation with the Novi Sad Forum company, too, but its management had been pressurized into declining the offer although its entire potential is practically not being used. Some of the Blic circulation is now being printed in Montenegro and in the Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska.

The authorities meanwhile launched a wide-scale operation to shut down the Glas printing company and Glas Javnosti newspaper -- the other major, non-government daily -- and thus prevent the final prospect of Blic being printed in Belgrade. The Commercial Court in Belgrade had recently evicted the Glas' founder, ABC Product, from its offices in Vlajkoviceva Street, where it had been headquartered for the passed ten years. Glas has filed a complaint with the Supreme Commercial Court but it received no reply, and is now awaiting forcible eviction.

The decision, which would leave Blic and Glas, but also several influential weeklies such as Vreme and Nin, without a Belgrade-based printer, was brought by the receivership management of the ABC Grafika printing company, which was declared non-liquid and taken over early this year. ABC Product had been penalized several times under the Public Information Law for printing the opposition bulletin, Promene, in the course of Alliance for Change street protests.

Pressure

The exercising of new and more drastic means in the battle to shut down independent news media has to some extent pushed out of the limelight the restrictive public information act, in past months the regime's favorite tool in pressuring the news media. Adopted in October 1998, the law was the basis for imposing fines which have amounted to almost 30 million dinars (DM5,000,000 under the official exchange rate). In the past three-month period alone, non-government media have been fined 5 million dinars.

The latest wave of penalties under the media law came after news reports on the May 2 incident in Pozarevac between Otpor activists and security guards of the local, Madonna night club, owned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's son, Marko. The police in Pozarevac on May 8 and 9 detained 13 independent journalists for what they referred to as "informative talks," and thus prevented them from reporting on the Pozarevac rally organized by Serbia's united opposition. The rally was to have been to protest against the arrests of the Otpor activists, who had been accused of attacking the Madonna security men.

On that same day, May 8, the police arrested the Kraljevo correspondent of the Belgrade-based daily Danas and the France Press news agency, Miroslav Filipovic, and accused him of espionage and spreading falsehoods. During the arrest, the police confiscated his passport, his personal computer's hard disk, and dozens of pages of written text. The regular court in Kraljevo declared itself incompetent and transferred Filipovic's case on to the Military Court in Nis, which first cancelled Filipovic's detention, but after another hearing on May 22, it ruled to give him 30-days detention and open an investigation.

That pressure on independent news media in Serbia would rise was hinted late last year in a statement by the Yugoslav Left party led by Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic, calling for a "decontamination of media space." After that, in a New Year's public address, Milosevic judged that the media law was "not being properly enforced." Additional, more drastic measures against independent news media were announced in mid-February by Serbia's vice-premier, Vojislav Seselj, who threatened reporters with murder and indirectly accused them of being behind the killing of the Yugoslav defense minister, Pavle Bulatovic. Following Seselj's threats, the independent news media in Serbia began boycotting all the Serbian Radical Party activities, which they still do.

go to top

P.O. Box, CH-8031 Zürich, Switzerland
Phone +41-1-272 46 37,  Fax +41-1-272 46 82, email: info@MEDIENHILFE.ch