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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The 17 March 2016 cover of Informer featured a photograph of Stevan Dojcinovic, editor-in-chief of the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK), with accusations that he was part of a “mafia” trying to bring down the Serbian government.
The front page of Serbian tabloid Informer stands out from the other newspapers displayed at Belgrade’s countless cigarette kiosks. Its red and yellow coloured headlines scream in block capitals at everyone who passes by.
It is the word “Mafija” that attracts most attention on the morning of 17 March 2016. It’s printed on the front page, as is a blurry photo of a journalist. The journalist, Stevan Dojcinovic, is editor-in-chief at Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK). The headline translates: “Mafia is planning attack on family Vucic.” According to Informer, Dojcinovic and his colleagues at KRIK are the mafia and want to bring down the government of Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.
Psychological attacks on KRIK by the tabloid have happened so often that this was hardly surprising. KRIK has become well known throughout Serbia, not because of its investigative reporting, but because of the attention from Informer.
Informer was founded in 2012 and its editorial coverage has been called “pro-regime oriented” by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Dragan Vucicevic, is said to be a close friend of the prime minister’s.
Since its launch in July 2015, KRIK has published a series of revealing stories about corruption and misuse of office by several high-profile government officials. And ever since, KRIK has been targeted by Informer: KRIK journalists have been called foreign spies trying to bring down the government; they have been accused of spreading lies; they have been personally discredited on Informer’s front pages.
Exposing Mali, who is a political ally of Vucic’s, soon sparked a new round of allegations by Informer.
Early November 2015 Informer claimed that KRIK, as well as two other independent media organisations BIRN and CINS, were given foreign grants for publications of “false affairs against people close to the government”. Informer’s Vucicevic said on national broadcaster TV Pink, in a special 4-hour-long programme called “Bringing down Vucic”, that the media organisations were planning a step-by-step plot to bring down the government.
Serbia’s journalist unions condemned what they called a smear or lynch campaign. The chairman of the Independent Journalists Association of Serbia (NUNS), Vukasin Obradovic, said that Informer created “an atmosphere of fear and lynching in the society, which may have serious consequences for the personal safety of the journalists involved”.
But the investigative journalists from KRIK were not scared off. They were, in fact, working on their next investigation into another government official: the minister of health, Zdravko Loncar.
KRIK found out that Loncar had been involved with Serbia’s most notorious criminal gang known as the “Zemun clan” when he was still an unknown doctor working at an emergency ward back in 2002. He allegedly had received a free apartment as a reward for “finishing off” a severely wounded gang member by “injecting him with a fatal cocktail”.
KRIK published the full story on February 22. A day later Dojcinovic’s photo was featured on the Informer’s front page again. The article stated that KRIK’s editor-in-chief was “launching false scandals” and was “intentionally creating chaos in the country”. Health minister Loncar was invited to talk on TV Pink, where he did not respond to the allegations but instead accused KRIK of not paying taxes.
Up to that point KRIK had investigated cases of corruption involving high-profile state officials in Vucic’s inner circle. But what everybody was waiting for was an investigation into Vucic himself.
Then came March 18 2016. Informer once again published a photo of KRIK’s Dojcinovic on its front page. But this time it was different.
The tabloid revealed a story KRIK had not yet published about Vucic’s large real estate assets in Belgrade, which he is supposedly hiding under the names of family members.
Informer exposed details of an investigation by KRIK that they could not have obtained in an ordinary manner. According to KRIK, the Informer appears to have relied on information that could only have been gathered through secret service surveillance techniques including physically following journalists and phone tapping.
“For about a year Informer has been attacking us regularly,” Dojcinovic told Index on Censorship. “This is the first time we are being attacked before we even publish the story. Now they are using information from state intelligence agency to discredit us. I don’t care about a smear campaign, they can’t destroy my credibility with a smear campaign. But now the state is after us.”
Currently KRIK is still working on finishing their newest investigation, which is indeed about Vucic’s real estate assets. But meanwhile Dojcinovic fears for the fate of his sources.
“We’ve now seen that they know exactly who we are meeting with. There is pressure on our sources, most of them work in state institutions. Some have already been fired,” Dojcinovic said.
