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Serbian Journalism after Communism & Milosevic
12/9/2004
By Rod Amis
In June of this year, Milan Pantic, an outspoken journalist for the daily newspaper Vecernje Novosti(Evening News), was shot in the back in front of his own home. Pantic, a quiet, highly educated man was believed to have had "too sharp a pen." While the journalistic community in Belgrade mourned his assassination, it drove home something that every reporter and writer in Serbia knows: things have changed, but they also remain the same. The memory of the heroic struggle for a free press in Serbia by Slavko Curuvija, the editor and owner of Dnevni Telegraf (Daily Telegraph), was still fresh in the minds of many. Curuvija had been murdered outside of his home in Belgrade on 11 April, 1999. His assassins were never found.
The story of the Dnevni Telegraf and Mr. Curuvija is an instructive one for anyone wanting to understand the nature of Serbian media today and the atmosphere in which journalists in the former Yugoslavia must work.
During the Milosevic era and the supposed opening of Eastern Europe to the West, there were a few media centres which were focal points for criticising the dictator's regime. Foremost among these were Radio B92 and Vreme, the weekly magazine. Both were financed by various (unnamed) western or9ganizations. Milosevic didn't ban these media outlets in the beginning because he likely wanted to present an image of some "freedom of the press" to the outside world while consolidating his political base within Serbia. At that time his own power was still in question. We must recall that Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) only wrested power from Ivan Stambolic's Communist Party after 1987.
Yet neither of these "tolerated" opposition voices carried much influence with the masses of people in the former Yugoslavia. Vreme never achieved a large paid circulation. Print runs fluctuated between ten and twenty thousand copies. The weak radio frequency on which Radio B92 broadcast could not be heard in all parts of the city of Belgrade, let alone the country at large. The rest of Serbia was hentirely in media darkness, left to the mercy of the State TV which was on the top of Milosevic's propaganda machine.
The most influential newspapers of that time were the dailies Politika (Politics), in publication since 1904, Vecernje Novosti (Evening News) and Borba (Struggle) All three newspapers were controlled by Milosevic's party. The editors and directors were appointed based on their political obedience and all of them were members and officials of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) whose president was, of course, Slobodan Milosevic.
The provincial towns with miserable wages for the working people weren't good distribution targets for print magazines in Serbia, so daily newspapers dominated the country because they were cheap and almost always appeared daily. The regime made sure that large companies in the provinces �bought lots of copies of Politika and Borba to distribute -- free of charge -- to their employees. People being people, these employers were happy to get what they didn't have to buy and the regime easily reinforced its message.
Enter the first real challenge to this propaganda apparatus, Mr. Slavko Curuvija and his privately-owned newspaper, Dnevni Telegraf.
Slavko Curuvija had been editor of the independent Belgrade daily, Borba, until it was taken ove�r by the government in 1994, when he resigned. The same year he founded the weekly Nedeljni Telegraf, and later the daily Dnevni Telegraf and Evropljanin(European), a magazine.
Slavko Curuvija had written for a number of foreign newspapers, including the British press - the Guardian, the Independent and the European. In December 1998 he had expressed his concerns about restrictions on the Yugoslav press to the Political Committee of the Council of Europe. At the same time various reports indicate that until some six months before his murder he was on good terms with the wife of President Milosevic and had connections within the state security police.
Compared with Milosevic's media, which nourished obedience and paid meagre wages to its journalists, Curuvija paid high wages -- by Serbian standards, enormous salaries for journalists -- and attempted to nourish high journalistic standards and a more Western sense of professionalism among his staff. President Milosevic did not interfere at once, probably due to Curuvija's high international profile and perhaps having a sense that Dnevni Telegraf and Curuvija's other publications would fall on economic disaster with the lavish spending that had doomed so many other media ventures.
But that was not the case. The daily paid circulation numbers for Dnevni Telegraf continued to climb dramatically and --- daily.
Milosevic attempted to counter this growth by going behind the scenes to Curuvija's printer, a government stooge. Suddenly the prices for Curuvija's work rose steadily and the printer put other production demands on the table, as well. But that was not all. The paper factory which supplied the newsprint sporadically and mysteriously missed deliveries for the paper. Seeing the situation for his organization worsening in Serbia, Curuvija moved his operations to the other republic of the former Yugoslavia, Montenegro, and continued publishing.
In October 1998 when NATO threatened air-strikes, the Serbian government introduced a decree - the Public Information Act - severely sanctioning any reporting that could be seen as defamatory. It spoke specifically to "calumny, slander and aspersions" and effectively banned several newspapers, including the Dnevni Telegraf. The rebroadcast of foreign stations like the BBC, Voice of America and Deutsche Welle was also banned. The decree was quickly followed by a draconian new Law on Information which allowed for fines of up to $80,000 (USD) dollars and gave limited opportunities for appeal.
The first victim of the new law was Slavko Curuvija. In his new magazine Evropljanin (European) he had published an article critical of the regime and stating that over 100,000 young people had left Serbia due to the oppressive economic and political circumstances. Curuvija was accused and called to provide
verification for the claims in the article and where he had come up with that number, 100,000, before the court. When he could not produce the evidence immediately he was fined a few milion dinars, which he paid.
Within days, he was arrested and summarily tried again, and again, and again - each time for one article or another published in his newspaper or magazine. Slavko Curuvija's passport was confiscated and in March 1999 he was sentenced, together with two other journalists from the Dnevni Telegraf, to five months' imprisonment on charges of "spreading false information" for an article which linked a minister in the Serbian government to the murder of the director of a Belgrade medical institute. That's how Dnevni Telegraf daily died. Everything was legal.
Then in April, 1999, only a few days after the NATO bombing commenced, Curuvija was murdered in front of his Belgrade home.
That is why when Milan Pantic was similarly murdered this June, journalists in Serbia, both foreign and native, were immediately reminded of the death of Slavko Curuvija. Milosevic may have fallen with the 5 October "revolution" in Serbia, but press freedom is no more real than its ever been, in the view of many working journalists.
Understanding the Circle
A foreign journalist in Serbia this June might ask: "How can this still happen? Aren't President Kostunica and Prime MInister Djindjic bringing about reforms?" A native journalist might reply with the analogy of the Hindu tale of the tethered elephant. In the tale, the elephant grew up tied on a short chain. When he was fully grown his keepers released him, but the elephant still walked around in the short circle in which he had grown up, not able to understand that he could go wherever he wanted.
That tale displays why it has been so difficult for Serbia to shake itself politically and socially from the hang-over of a command-and-control society and why that political environment both cows and genuinely threatens the country's journalists.
Here are a few snapshots from around the media scene in Serbia today:
The newspaper Timok is published in Zajecar, a small town on the eastern border of Serbia, near Bulgaria. The newspaper was taken to court by the new democratic authorities. Local officials of of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition submitted a denunciation to the courts against Timok and another newspaper, Borske Novine for allegedly slanderous criticism of local officials appointed by the DOS coalition in the province. Neither paper has a paid circulation over 5,000.
Though the new government did abolish the heinous Public Information Act, it has instituted a new law certain to stifle press freedom and openness in much the same way. The government has rec�ently instituted a law that taxes print media per printed copy. This is atax separate from that placed on the profits of the media organization. Publishers continue to be taxed on profits, but the new law levies a charge of 20% of the value of printed copies, irrespective of sales. This new levy should most certainly drive many of the more successful publications in Serbia into illiquidity, as their earnings are only approximately 10 % of gross profit. But not one major newspaper, radio or television station in Serbia has said anything about the law... The silence has been eerie. No one is criticizing a law which effectively puts a noose around their own necks.
Most telling, as regards the state of Serbian journalism after the decline of Communism and the fall of Milosevic, is the way in which the directors and editors of most media outlets are chosen. Invariably, the top journalistic spots in the former Yugoslavia are given to political partisans willing to act as mouthpieces of the state - just as it was done during the times of Tito and Milosevic. That is the nature of the circle.
A glaring example of this latter is that of Vecernje Novosti Serbia's largest circulationdaily. The present editor is Manojlo Vukotic, a Montenegrin who distinquished himself in the days leading up to the 5 October "revolution". When the DOS coalition took power, their partisan, Vukotic was appointed to the post. (While it can be rightly argued that in the West, editors and directors are vetted by corporate media conglomerates and thus beholden to be their mouthpieces, there is also a presumption of some level of journalistic merit involved. The analogy of corporate mouthpiece and state mouthpiece being indistinguishable falls down when one considered that allegiance to the Almighty Dollar does not presuppose being completely uncritical of governmental action.)
In most of the major Serbian media the same process took place after the "revolution" following the same recipe: the old people were deposed and the new were appointed. For independent-minded journalists, the message was clear: the press still serves as an arm of the State.
The effect on Serbian journalism is that there is no incentive for demonstrating competence, or even literacy. The important thing is your political correctness. Thus, while Milosevic is now a prime target of journalistic criticism, that criticism itself echoes the model established for state media during his regime.
The greatest evidence of this regression, in some views, is that even those departments of news organizations not normally considered political, but rather cultural, such as art or music criticism, have undergone the same political vetting process. In that process, those journalists who had thought to shield themselves by choosing non-political arenas have found themselves also replaced by the new guard washed in by the wave of revolutionary ectasy last autumn.
But there is another insidious sameness in the circle that gets no mention in the Serbian press: the major players, as regards ownership have hardly changed at all from the Milosevic to the Kostunica/Djiindjic eras.
It's not hard to find this out, if one is willing to dig a little -- yet no journalists in Serbia dare do so.
EXAMPLE ONE: The owner of "Pink" TV is Zeljko Mitrovic, considered by many to be the second most powerful media magnate in Serbia, behind Bogoljub Karic, owner of BK TV. [More on Karic below.] Mr. Mitrovic is a former high official of Jugoslovenska Levica (Yugoslav Left) or JUL, the party run for years by Mirjana Markovic, the wife of Slobodan Milosevic. The television station, Pink, which burst onto the scene almost overnight runs non-political programming - mostly soap operas, music and American television series. Unlike Radio B92, it runs on a strong frequency which covers the entire country. The only other such station besides BK TV is "Kosava" TV - owned by Marija Milosevic, the daughter of the fallen dictator.
Documents which have recently come to light reveal that Pink and Kosava were financed, in part, via various state owned companies throughout Serbia. It is not a stretch to assume that Milosevic personally engineered the growth of these television stations.
EXAMPLE TWO: The case of Serbia's premier media magnate, Bogoljub Karic, spans both the former and current governments in Serbia and presents a much more intricate picture of the media landscape in that country.
Bogoljub Karic was an entertainer, playing folk songs with his band in Belgrade night spots before the rise of Slobodan Milosevic. During the Milosevic era, he miraculously amassed tens of millions of dollars and founded BK TV.
When the DOS coalition government, under President Kostunica and Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic (former Mayor of Belgrade and leader of the Democratic Party), was formed, press reform was mentioned at the top of its agenda. Out with the old,in with the new. Kosava TV stopped broadcasting on 5 October, and a few days later it was announced that Ms. Milosevic's equipment and frequency had been sold to a German media company. But Pink and BK continued broadcasting as usual. Mr. Karic continued on as a leading media mogul.
BK rapidly became the largest and most popular television station in Serbia. Mr. Karic began establishing public funds and grant programs. Each year now, he offers fellowships for achievement in culture and journalism. The winners of this year's $15,000 Journalism prizes were. Manojlo Vukotic, editor of Vecernje Novosti and Bojana Lekic of Radio B92. Ms. Lekic had distinquished herself as a fearless defender of the democratic movement during the Milosevic regime. But...
Ms. Lekic has acrimoniously left Radio B92 and is rumored to soon join BK Television.
Why are these items and examples important for people other than journalists, inside or outside of the former Yugoslavia? Firstly, because the media organizations of a nation usually reflect the strengths and weaknesses of that nation, obsessed as those organizations must be with currying favor and keeping the popular pulse. Secondly, because information is power. Thus, he, she or it controlling information controls the way power is administered.
Since the 5 October "revolution" in Serbia, most high media positions have been maintained or awarded based on allegiance to the political coalition now in power. The same was true under Tito. The same was true under Milosevic. So an objective observer might be led to assume that the democratization of the former Yugoslavia is not even skin deep as yet.
Slavko Curuvija, a journalist critical of the Milosevic government was shot dead in front of his home by unnamed assailants. Milan Pantic, a journalist critical of the DOS coalition government, was shot dead in front of his home by unnamed assailants. This is the nature of the circle in which Serbian journalists across media lines live today. It is a chilling circle. And it is a reflection of the deeper recalcitrance toward change among the power elite in the former Yugoslavia.
Rod Amis is Editor of G21: The World's Magazine and has written on political issues for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Andover News Work and other publications. He can be reached for comment at rod@g21.net
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