By Peter Anderson
The independence of the media has been a casualty of the Serbian-inspired war in the now independent republics of the former Yugoslavia. This is the finding of an International Organisation of Journalists mission which visited Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia, Vojvodina and Kosovo in August and September.
The delegation met with journalists from the official and the independent media, trade unionists, party leaders and peace organisations. The delegation witnessed repression against journalists and sometimes brutal restrictions on the independent media.
In Serbia, news about the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina has been severely restricted. Residents of Serbia and Montenegro were informed only two hours before the UN Security Council imposed sanctions that it was Serb forces who were bombing Sarajevo.
The independent weeklies Vreme and Monitor regularly criticise "ethnic cleansing", but their combined circulation is only 50,000, compared to 3.5 million viewers of the government-controlled television service, which is used for crude propaganda. Media control has caused protests, as it did last June, when 100,000 people demonstrated against interference by the regime.
Meanwhile, the daily Politika has gradually moved away from its pro-regime orientation. When staff at the paper attempted to privatise it as a means of achieving independence, the government immediately moved to nationalise it, but was prevented by a strike of the 4000 Politika workers.
Independent journalists frequently find themselves without assignments, especially those associated with the new independent associations of journalists. Death threats are less frequent than in neighbouring Croatia, but for certain journalists it is impossible to visit the Serb krajinas in Bosnia and Croatia.
Foreign journalists are especially unwelcome in the Serb-dominated province of Kosovo, which is 90% Albanian. In 1991 special units of the Serbian police occupied the offices of radio and television in Pritina and banned the daily Rilindja. Albania journalists are out of work, and many have been imprisoned or beaten.
Both Serb and Croat forces have clamped down on the media in areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina under their control. Serb forces occupied three quarters of the broadcast masts there at the opening of hostilities to gain a television monopoly over 70% of the republic.
Many journalists have been caught in the cross-fire, like Natka Buturovic and Zeljko Vukovic, Sarajevo correspondents of the Belgrade daily Borba, who disappeared in September after being denounced as agents by both the Bosnian authorities and Bosnian Serb forces. The on Force refused to give safe passage to the journalists of Oslobodenje, Sarajevo's daily paper, and has refused to transport paper for the journal.
The mission found that the Croatian government uses all means possible to control the media and has placed members of the ruling HDZ '(Croatian Democratic Community) party in positions of power at Croatian Television, the national press agency HINA and at the government's monopoly publishing house Vjesnik.
The board of Vjesnik stopped the publication of Croatia's only critical weekly, Dunas. Economic pressure was then applied on Novi Dunas, formed privately to replace the former journal, by restricting distribution possibilities. Journalists at Novi Dunas, it was claimed by an HDZ official, were "opposed to the Croat state", "their ideal is the old Yugoslavia", were "communists" and were "the children of mixed marriages between Serbs and Croats".
Other papers to come under threat of government control are Slobodna Dalmacija, the country's leading daily, and the daily Novi List. There is a state monopoly over the electronic media.
[The IOJ delegation consisted of Argentine journalist Eduardo Gomez Ortega (IPS news agency), Anglo-Czech journalist Adam Novàk (correspondent for Raporters sans frontières) and French journalists Jean-Philippe Delalandre, Pierre Barbancey (Le Patriote) and Catherine Samary (Le Monde Diplomatique).]