New York, March 14, 2000 — In the latest government attack on independent media in Yugoslavia, police have shut down the opposition-run station Radio Television Pozega in the city of Pozega, 60 miles southwest of Belgrade. Police seized the station’s transmitter during the night of March 11-12, after accusing RTV Pozega of operating without a…
New York, March 7, 2000 — After a pre-dawn raid in which two employees were injured and transmission equipment stolen, the opposition station Studio B Television faced concerted legal harassment last night in Belgrade. At approximately 3 a.m. local time, five men wearing Serbian police uniforms forced their way into the Torlak broadcasting center, assaulted…
New York, Feb. 11, 2000 — Serbian deputy prime minister Vojislav Seselj, the leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, accused journalists of being pro-Western “traitors,” and blamed them for the murder of defense minister Pavel Bulatovic, according to Agence France-Presse. Addressing independent reporters at a press conference in Belgrade on February 10, Seselj told…
April 12,1999 — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a nonpartisan orginazation dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the world, is saddened and angered by the cold-blooded assassination of Slavko Curuvija, a publisher and editor in chief of the Belgrade-based daily Dnevni Telegraf and the weekly Evropljanin. Ann Cooper, CPJ’s executive director, called the…
New York, December 10, 1999 — In the latest official crackdown on local independent media organizations, financial police blocked accounts and froze assets of the Belgrade daily, Glas Javnosti, and of a printing company, ABC Grafika, this week. The organizations are charged with failing to pay taxes, a claim both deny. Managers at the newspaper…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply alarmed by recent police attacks against journalists covering this week’s political demonstrations in Belgrade, and by police attempts to close down the opposition newspaper Glas Javnosti.
I am writing once again to express CPJ’s ongoing concern about the deterioration of press freedom conditions in Serbia, and about the continued harassment and prosecution of journalists there. I last wrote on September 30, to remind you of the commitment you made during our September 20 meeting in Belgrade to investigate a number of press freedom abuses. In your October 6 response, you objected to statements I made to the Serbian press regarding the April 23 bombing of Radio and Television Serbia (RTS). As you well know, the concerns I raised about RTS officials not taking sufficient action to safeguard the security of their employees prior to the NATO attack have been voiced repeatedly in the local press, and by the families of the victims.