New York, August 7, 2000 –To protest the repression of writers in Serbia, Homero Aridjis, the President of International PEN, is refusing the “Smederevo Golden Key” literary prize at the Smederevo Fall Poetry Festival (Belgrade, October 2000). Mr. Aridjis, internationally acclaimed Mexican poet and a columnist for the daily Reforma, was invited to come to…
New York, June 22, 2000 — Unknown gunmen shot an editor from Kosovo’s only multi-ethnic radio station in Pristina on Tuesday night, June 20, according to local and international news reports. Valentina Cukic, the editor of Serbian-language programming on Pristina’s Radio Kontakt, was shot at approximately 9 p.m. on Tuesday evening, according to local news…
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in YUGOSLAVIA. New York, April 21, 2000 — Serbian ultranationalist leader and deputy prime minister Vojislav Seselj has insinuated that an independent journalist’s life may be in danger. Appearing April 12 on a government TV program called “Fifth Column,” about the anti-Milosevic opposition, Seselj named a…
By Ann CooperAs a foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Union a decade ago, I was an eyewitness to a dramatic example of the press’ critical role in building democracy. Granted a bit of freedom by Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s glasnost policy, long-suppressed Soviet journalists set their own daring agenda: they probed forbidden history, investigated contemporary corruption,…
By Chrystyna Lapychak Wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya dominated regional and international headlines in 1999. The conflicts raised the journalists’ death toll in the region and prompted crackdowns, as governments blocked access to war zones and engaged in propaganda campaigns.
Each year on World Press Freedom Day (May 3), CPJ announces its list of the ten worst enemies of the press. Those who made the list this year, as in the past, earned the dubious distinction by exhibiting particular zeal in the ruthless suppression of press freedom. They were singled out for their unrelenting and…
[Click here for full list of documented cases] At its most fundamental level, the job of a journalist is to bear witness. In 1999, journalists in Sierra Leone witnessed rebels’ atrocities against civilians in the streets of Freetown. In the Balkans, journalists watched ethnic Albanians fleeing the deadly menace of Serbian police and paramilitaries. In…
President Slobodan Milosevic first used the threat of war, then an actual war, and finally international hostility toward his regime to justify the use of government censorship and crippling fines to decimate Serbia’s various independent media. The press crackdown was particularly brutal in Kosovo, where a 1998 military offensive by the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army…
New York, March 17, 2000 — Nebojsa Ristic, head of an independent television station in Serbia, was released from prison today after serving almost 11 months of a one-year sentence imposed last April, according to CPJ’s sources in Belgrade. Ristic was arrested in April, 1999, and charged with disseminating false information under Article 218 of…