Reporting in post-war Balkans
By CLAIRE
SCHAEFFER-DUFFY Special to the National Catholic
Reporter Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska
Despite the constant death threats, Zeljko Kopanja, the Bosnian
Serb editor of the independent daily, Nezavisne Novine, was not afraid.
From late August to mid-September last year, Nezavisne Novine, the
largest independent daily in the Republic of Srpska, a Serb-controlled entity
in northern and eastern Bosnia, issued a groundbreaking series on a local and
highly sensitive subject -- Bosnian Serb war crimes.
Although the reports generated a rash of irate calls from readers
and death threats became commonplace, Kopanja was confident that the political
climate in the republic was ripe for confronting crimes of the past and
bringing the guilty to account. That confidence was thoroughly shaken on the
morning of Oct. 22, 1999, when a car bomb, intended to kill the editor, left
him a double amputee. On Oct. 25, headlines in a Bosnian daily read,
Zeljko Kopanja now has fear.
It has been a hazardous year for the independent media in Serbia,
Kosovo and the Republic of Srpska. During a November roundtable discussion on
the protection of journalists, Senad Pecanin, editor of a popular magazine in
Sarajevo, observed that the the risk to which journalists are being
exposed has crossed the line of reason for people who think about themselves
and their families.
After the assassination attempt on Kopanja, Pecanin had considered
leaving the profession.
Tactics for repressing the free press have ranged from the
relatively benign -- fines, imprisonments and confiscation of equipment -- to
the violent. According to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, during the
past year in the Republic of Srpska, seven attacks on journalists have been
reported to the police, but the unofficial statistic for assaults is 40. In
Serbia, within three weeks of the attack on Kopanja, cars belonging to an
independent publisher and radio editor were burned, and a bomb detonated in the
home of a correspondent for an independent daily. Nebojsa Ristic, editor at a
television and radio station, is currently serving a one-year prison sentence
for posting a sign in his office window that read, Free Press/Made in
Serbia. In Kosovo, an editorial in an independent daily condemning
revenge killings prompted thinly veiled threats from a news agency linked to
the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Vulnerability of dissent
In each region, the independent media are fighting local battles,
but their common experiences of persecution indicate the vulnerability of
dissent in places of war and political upheaval. The West has played a
complicated and contradictory role in the conflict. NATO bombings jeopardized
the independent press in Serbia and the Republic of Srpska but Western funding
and technical support has helped to keep some democratic publications afloat.
Kopanjas own publication, Nezavisne Novine, is funded in part by
the U.S. Agency for International Development because the Western-brokered
Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia included establishing a non-nationalist
media.
The Republic of Srpska established its ethnic homogeneity during
the Bosnian war through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. The region has
resisted any public re-examination of its wartime history and still harbors
many war criminals. Their prevalence makes any calls for accountability for
past war crimes particularly hazardous. Zeljko Kopanja was willing to take on
the risk.
On Aug. 25, 1999, Nezavisne Novine reported on the wartime
massacre of 200 Bosniaks (Muslims) during a bus convoy to central Bosnia. It
attributed responsibility to a renegade police force and identified some of the
drivers involved. Some of the named still reside in the Republic of Srpska city
of Prijedor. Several more investigative reports followed the convoy
exposé and resulted in the arrest and trial of members of a local
paramilitary. It is widely believed that a paramilitary organization, eager to
suppress any future investigations of their war actions, is responsible for the
assassination attempt on Kopanja.
Kopanja is doubtful that his assailants will ever be found.
I dont have confidence in the police, he said. I do not
believe the police want to or are capable of finding the assassins.
Throughout the Republic of Srpska and Yugoslavia, the line between
criminal elements and local authorities is blurred, making investigative
reporting extremely risky business.
In Serbia, opponents of an independent media operate from a legal
mandate. On Oct. 20, 1998, the Serbian Parliament passed a new Law on
Information that banned carrying material from international news agencies and
severely restricted the contents of all news reports. The passage of the law,
according to Eric Gordy, professor of sociology at Clark University, places
Serbia among the very few countries in the world which has made access to
information from other places a criminal offense.
The law facilitates frivolous charges of slander and has virtually
denied journalists accused of spreading fear, panic or defeatism a
valid legal recourse. Court trials must be heard within 24 hours after charges
are filed and sentences given within the next day. In the case of the Belgrade
daily, Danas, charges were filed Monday, Oct. 25, 1999, at 8:30 p.m.;
the trial was held Tuesday, Oct. 26 at 11:00 a.m.; and the sentence was
pronounced at 5:30 p.m.
Since the laws implementation, three independent newspapers
and approximately 10 TV and radio stations have been shut down, according to
the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Thirty-two cases against 26 media
outlets have been tried, and the total of dispensed fines exceeds $1.6 million
-- a staggering sum for the already economically beleaguered independent media.
Five hundred journalists in Serbia are currently unemployed, and 1,500
employees of the electronic media have remained jobless since the early 1990s
when the crackdown on the press first began.
Government orchestrates oppression
Joel Simon, associate director of the New York-based Committee for
the Protection of Journalists, says the Law on Information is being used
like a club to effectively crush the independent press. There are
other places in the world where journalists are exposed to greater
violence, Simon told NCR, but there are few [like Serbia]
where journalists face orchestrated government oppression.
If fines fail to subdue, more violent means are employed. In
mid-October 1998, Slavko Curuvija, editor and publisher of the now silent
Dnevni Telegraf, co-authored an open letter to Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic that criticized the crackdown on the media and promoted the
inclusion of minorities in the highest political institutions.
Curuvijas opposition to Milosevic was costly and resulted in fines, court
appearances, confiscation of printing equipment and death threats. Last April,
on Orthodox Easter, after being publicly denounced as a NATO traitor in the
state-controlled press, Curuvija was gunned down outside his apartment.
The memory of his assassination and the attack on Kopanja has
heightened the alarm among independent journalists over the recent car burnings
and bombings. In an assessment of the new Law on Information, Vladan
Radosavljevic of the Media Center in Belgrade said, If the independent
media are the mirror of the state, the regime has tried to smear it using this
law. Since it is not succeeding in that, people fear that it will try to
shatter it.
In Kosovo, the independent press, which had been subject to the
restrictive prohibitions of the Milosevic regime, is now confronting the
militant nationalism of its own people. Last August, Veton Surroi, political
figure and publisher for Kosovos independent daily Kuha Ditore,
wrote an editorial condemning revenge killings. After listing several crimes
committed against the most vulnerable members of Serb society, the editorial
said that to tolerate the systematic intimidation of all Serbs is
fascist.
Is this really what we fought for? Surroi asked.
In early October, Kosovapress, a Kosovo Liberation Army-linked
news agency, issued a scathing editorial denouncing Surroi as a traitor
at risk of eventual and very understandable revenge. In his counter
editorial, Surroi described the commentary by the news agency of the Kosovo
Interim Government as the first commentary calling for murder.
The severe repression of the independent media, particularly in
Serbia and the Republic of Srpska, has not silenced demands for free access to
information. The status of the press has been a central platform for opponents
of the Milosevic government. The government takeover of RTS (Radio Television
Serbia) launched the Belgrade protests of March 1991. During the widespread
anti-Milosevic demonstrations of 1996 and 1997, Belgrade residents banged on
pots and pans to drown out the evening broadcasts of state-controlled news.
They eagerly sought the reports of the alternative media, who were relegated to
broadcasting from sidewalks and central squares because of station
shutdowns.
The assassination attempt on Zeljko Kopanja prompted widespread
support from the Bosnian media in both entities -- the Muslim-dominated
federation as well as the Republic of Srpska. Remarkably, three days after the
attempted assassination, the non-independent Srpski Glas, along with
Nezavisne Novine, ran a blank front page emblazoned with the words
We Want to Know to show their outrage over the crime. The night
before, Bosnian television interrupted their programming and posted the same
message on a blank screen.
The struggles of the independent media are a reminder that the
crucial conflicts in the Balkans are not inter-ethnic but are fought between
the voices of reason and the voices of intolerance.
National Catholic Reporter, February 4,
2000
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