[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”89875″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]A few days before the 2 April 2017 Serbian presidential elections, a picture was posted on Twitter that caused an unexpected storm.
The picture, taken three days before the vote, which was widely expected to be won by the current prime minister Aleksandar Vucic, showed a copy of each daily newspaper from that day laid out on a table. Yet every paper looked the same. Each was wrapped in a blue, red and white election campaign poster of Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).
“It was a shock,” said Slavica Lekic, the newly appointed president of the Independent Journalist Association of Serbia (NUNS), from his office in Belgrade. “With this, Aleksandar Vucic clearly demonstrated that he can control over everything in this country.”
The mass advertising on the front page of the nation’s newspapers was for many a step too far; proof of how powerful Vucic and his party had become, and of the financial control they exert over Serbia’s media. Vucic won the election by a landslide, but the picture’s effect lingered. It was an important reason why, on the day after Vucic’ huge victory, tens of thousands of young Serbs took to the streets across the country to protest.
The protesters, at first mainly students, organised themselves on social media using the hashtag #protivdiktature, which means “against dictatorship”. Thousands have been protesting on a daily basis ever since. They’re worried about the state of democracy and media freedom in the country where the president-elect is consolidating his power over all institutions, leaving little room for critical voices.
Media freedom has declined since SNS came to power in 2012, and deteriorated further after Vucic became Prime Minister in 2014, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Journalists increasingly face economic and editorial pressure as well as threats and intimidation when they are critical of the government. Independent media are often the subject of smear campaigns by pro-government media outlets and TV stations, targeting them as foreign mercenaries and enemies of the state.
Lekic points out that most of Serbia’s mainstream media, including private media, are indirectly controlled by the government. There are strong ties between the government and the business community, giving both a huge leverage over advertising budgets, he explains. “When Vucic came to power he arrested the richest businessman in Serbia, Miroslav Miskovic,” says Lekic.“That act frightened all the other businesses, which are now doing whatever they can to please him.”
Even before the vote, there were opposition complaints about the uneven nature of the media’s coverage of the campaign. According to a report by the Bureau for Social Research, who monitored the campaign, Vucic appeared on television more than all the other candidates combined, and was usually portrayed in a positive light.
“He directly controls the most popular TV station, TV Pink, and the most read newspaper, Informer,” says Lekic. “The other media are subject to self-censorship due to the pressure of advertisers connected to the government.” Lekic is convinced that Vucic’s move from prime minister to president will lead to even more difficulties for Serbia’s independent media. “This is definitely the end of freedom in journalism in Serbia,” he says.
Aside from a few online voices, the only critical newspaper is the daily Danas, which means “Today” in Serbian. The paper was founded in 1997 during the repressive regime of strongman Slobodan Milosevic but grew to become a free voice in Serbia. But today Danas is struggling to stay alive. Like many across the world, business has been tough over the past few years. But it became a lot tougher when nearly every single advertiser pulled out, all within a few months.
“The problem is that nobody dares to advertise in a paper that reports critically on the government and the prime minister,” Lekic explained. “Vucic and his people have targeted Danas as a hostile newspaper.”
Protesters have been holding Danas papers in the air, using it as a symbol of the lack of media freedom. They’ve urged Serbs to buy Danas and stop them from going out of business. Danas is being sold during the protests, and people are queuing to get a copy from street sellers.
“The campaign to save our paper is working,” says Milos Mitrovic, a journalist at Danas. “Sales are actually going up. People are taking selfies with Danas and sending them to us. It’s incredible.”
There have even been reports of companies donating to the paper, but urging them not to print any adverts as they would rather stay anonymous.
Every evening the protesters march through the city, passing the building of the state broadcaster RTS, blaming the station for not covering the protests on TV. “At first they were not showing it at all,” said one protester in Belgrade. “Now they are downplaying the numbers or saying that we are paid by foreign powers.”
But even recognising the protests is progress. “There is more coverage of the protests in international press than in Serbian media,” says Stevan Dojcinovic, editor-in-chief for the investigative journalism network KRIK, nominees for the 2017 Freedom of Expression Award for journalism. His collective has investigated many cases of corruption and misuse of power by the Vucic government. Dojcinovic points out that their investigations are also widely ignored by Serbia’s mainstream media. “RTS didn’t publish anything on the interview we did with the wife of Belgrade’s mayor, Sinisa Mali,” he said. In that interview, Mali revealed examples of corruption in which her ex-husband was directly involved.
Meanwhile, Vucic, who enjoys support from both the European Union and Russia, has calmly addressed the protesters during a press conference. “We are a democratic country and everybody has the right to be pleased or displeased with the election outcome,” he said. “Those who have time to protest can protest as long as they keep it peaceful.”
Lekic has only recently been appointed as president of NUNS but is clear on what the big issues facing independent media in Serbia are. “We don’t have institutionalised censorship in the classical sense but we do have frightened and underpaid journalists who think they have to be obedient to be able to keep their jobs,” he says. “This is how self-censorship kicks in and we have to change that.”
In fact, Lekic has already had his fair share of threats and intimidation. He was the subject of smear campaigns by TV Pink and Informer. He’s been labelled a foreign spy more times than he can remember. “I’ve been a journalist for 37 years but only in the last decade I’ve got used to being a target,” he says. His biggest worry is the effect it has on his family. “My daughter of twelve once called me from school, she was crying because a boy in her class had told her that her dad is a criminal,” he says. “He’d heard so on TV.” [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1493107922412-e3b33cbb-00e3-9″ taxonomies=”113″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Maldives Independent’s former editor Zaheena Rasheed and KRIK editor-in-chief Stevan Dojcinovic. (Photo: KRIK)
Thousands of miles separate the Maldives from Serbia, but Zaheena Rasheed, the Index award-winning journalist and former editor of Maldives Independent, and Stevan Dojcinovic, editor-in-chief of the Serbian investigative website KRIK, but both described similar attacks on press freedom at a panel discussion at the Corinthia Hotel in London.
Rasheed lives in exile, having been forced to flee the Indian Ocean archipelago after working on an Al Jazeera documentary critical of the Maldivian government. She said she escaped just in time – a man who left a day later “barely made it out of the airport”.
Rasheed spoke of the intimidation tactics that independent news media had been subject to in the country. “Some newsrooms had gangs going inside of the newsroom and saying specifically we are not leaving until certain articles were taken down,” she said.
The Maldivian government claims that these gangs are criminals beyond their control.
As violence does not deter outlets like Maldives Independent from their investigative work, president Abdulla Yameen’s regime resorted to legal means, including imposing a draconian defamation law.
Rasheed said: “The definition of defamation is so broad that I could be sued for something I think, it doesn’t have to even be expressed. It could be a gesture. If it’s a gang or criminals after you, you can hide and avoid it, but when it’s the government you just can’t.”
On Serbia, Dojcinovic said that most in the West do not realise the extent of the country’s problems. “There’s not a real, clear picture of Serbia in the EU regarding how wild corruption and crime are,” he said.
Both journalists have seen hard-won democratic freedoms erode quickly. In Serbia this slide began in 2012 when Aleksandar Vučić was elected prime minister (this month, Vučić was also elected as the country’s president). Dojcinovic said: “The government has managed to destroy and undermine all of the democratic institutions built over 12 years within two years. We no longer have an independent judicial system and it’s the same with the media.”
In the Maldives, 2012 also left its mark. “Since the coup, a lot of democratic gains have been lost. What we saw in the first couple of years after the coup were physical assaults against journalists,” Rasheed said. “There were murder attempts, death threats and one TV station was even torched.”
She said that police turned a blind eye to these attacks. “All of the CCTV cameras were turned away from the building. The police just weren’t there.”
Whilst the threats are different in Serbia, Dojcinovic described a choked media landscape: “It’s not possible to see criticism of the government in the mainstream media. Not on any newsstand or on any TV frequency. They have destroyed all of these institutions.”
Dojcinovic said that the Serbian government is falling into the same patterns as Slobodan Milosevic’s regime: “It’s the arrests of journalists by the same group of people who were behind the murder of journalists back in the 1990s. They can’t cross this line now because it would ruin their reputation with the EU, so they find a way to make your life a nightmare without leaving fingerprints.”
Reprisals for his work have included three smear campaigns: he has been tagged as a criminal for his links to organised crime, branded a foreign agent, and had his personal life put on display.
“You cannot fight this much either because you can only publish on the internet,” Dojcinovic said. “That’s nothing compared to the newspapers which present us in this way.”
In the Maldives, however, there appears to be no such line. Rasheed said: “A member of our team was disappeared in 2014. Then a well-known gangster, who we think was involved in our colleague’s disappearance, vandalised the security cameras [at our office] and left a machete at our door. And then I got a text message saying: ‘You’re next.’”
Rasheed thinks that her colleague Ahmed Rilwan was targeted because he was seen to be in favour of secularism, and negative stories about Islamic radicalisation raise the government’s ire. “What really bothers them are these stories of growing radicalisation in the Maldives because that is what puts tourists off,” she said.
Rasheed also spoke about the difficulties of constantly fighting such repression. She told the audience that she had, to some extent, been traumatised by her experiences. However: “As a journalist, the most important thing to do is to live to tell the story.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1492769899588-d49a7ccf-cd47-5″ taxonomies=”8148, 9028, 8734″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK) is a new independent investigative website which was founded by a team of young Serbian journalists intent on exposing organised crime and extortion in their country which is ranked as having widespread corruption by Transparency International. In their first year they have published several high-impact investigations, including forcing Serbia’s prime minister to admit that senior officials had been behind nocturnal demolitions in a Belgrade neighbourhood and revealing meetings between drug barons, the ministry of police and the minister of foreign affairs. KRIK have repeatedly come under attack online and offline for their work –threatened and allegedly under surveillance by state officials, defamed in the pages of local tabloids, and suffering abuse including numerous death threats on social media.
“KRIK has become a recognised source of discoveries and news on crime and corruption in the country,” KRIK editor Stevan Dojčinović told Index on Censorship.
See the full shortlist for Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards 2017 here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content” equal_height=”yes” el_class=”text_white” css=”.vc_custom_1490258749071{background-color: #cb3000 !important;}”][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Support the Index Fellowship.” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:28|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsupport-the-freedom-of-expression-awards%2F|||”][vc_column_text]
It was late in the afternoon on 17 May when journalist Vanja Djuric heard that her job was no longer necessary. “We had just prepared the news items for the next day,” she told Index on Censorship. “They just told us, ‘You don’t have to come to work tomorrow.’”
She was not the only one. By the end of that week, 18 RTV employers had been replaced without explanation. Some received a phone call, others were stopped in the building’s hallway. “The whole newsroom, all the editors and journalists, we’d all been sent home,” Djuric added.
Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, has been the centre of protests for media freedom ever since. Thousands have taken the streets to demonstrate against editorial reforms at one of the biggest public broadcaster in the country. Protesters believe that the ruling party of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic is gradually taking control over the radio and tv station that used to be one of the few independent broadcasting media companies in Serbia.
It is believed that the dismissals of RTV editorial staff was a direct result of a shift in government in the autonomous province of Vojvodina.
Elections had taken place on 24 April and the results, which caused a dramatic shift in power when the results were revealed on 4 May. The Serbian Progressive Party had won a majority like it already had on a national level.
Over 100 journalists and editors have signed an open letter criticising the dismissals and asking the new board of directors to resign and to restore free media at RTV. A newly formed protest movement called Podrzi RTV (Support RTV) has organised four protests so far.
Vojvodina’s journalist association, the Independent Journalist Association of Vojvodina, believes that the new political leaders were intended to take over the public broadcaster. “The political takeover of one of the most objective televisions in Serbia started immediately after the elections with the non-transparent replacement of RTV’s programme director,” Nedim Sejdinovic, president of the Independent Journalist Association of Vojvodina told Index on Censorship.
“Soon after that the general director and the director of one of the most popular news programmes resigned,” he said. “It was the start of the new leadership.”
Most journalists were taken off their editorial positions and transferred to non-journalistic jobs within RTV. The programme schedule changed overnight. “Under the excuse of ‘summer shifts’, they took down almost every political and investigative programme,” Sejdinovic said.
While the majority of the journalists are still on the payroll, five prominent journalists so far have been fired.
NDNV is expecting more journalists to lose their jobs in the coming months. The association is looking into the dismissals with a team of lawyers. “We found out that most dismissals were against the law so we are preparing court cases up to the European Court for Human Rights,” said Sejdinovic. Serbia’s national journalist associations NUNS and UNS, as well as the OSCE have strongly condemned the developments at RTV.
Journalist Sanja Kljajic was working on RTV’s recently launched investigative journalism programme, which was also cancelled by the new management. She is one of the initiators of the protest movement Podrzi RTV.
“We’ve been accused that we were not objective and didn’t fulfil our role as a public service, with no evidence or arguments,” she told Index on Censorship. Her show was called Behind the Wall, the first season was about to start, dealing with the country’s problems within the judicial system. “Bearing in mind that we were doing research about terrible results of the judicial reforms over the past 15 years in Serbia, we are sure that the reason for cancelling the project is a textbook example of censorship,” said Kljajic.
RTV had a unique reputation in Serbia, where the media has become more and more unfree in the recent years. It had managed to operate objectively and has been praised for being one of the few broadcasters in the country that managed to resist political pressure. While other public media have turned into a mouthpiece for the prime minister, RTV kept broadcasting debates and critical reports. Sanja Kljajic was proud to be a part of it. “I was free to ask any question to anyone,” she said.
That started to change already in the period leading up to the elections. There were signs that control was about to get tightened. At the beginning of April, journalist Svetlana Bozic-Kraincanic was expelled and had her salary cut after asking the prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, a critical question during a press conference. It was election time, Vucic was running to be re-elected. Bozic-Kraincanic touched on a sensitive topic asking him about his ties with the Serbian Radical Party of the recently acquitted war criminal Vojislav Seselj, a party of which Vucic was a member during the 1990s war in former Yugoslavia.
“It is very disturbing that RTV is now transformed into another media that serves the regime of prime minister Aleksandar Vucic,” said Nedim Sejdinovic of NDNV. However, he also sees optimism in the response it has got. “The protests have brought out to the streets of Novi Sad not just journalists, but also citizens themselves,” he added. “The story of journalists became the story of the people. They are coming to the protest to show their growing dissatisfaction with the current government.”
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the date of the elections.
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