18. 07. 2005

WHO'S ATTACKING B92? ANEM DEMANDS INVESTIGATION

The latest in this series was a bomb hoax. On Thursday, July 14, B92 received a telephone warning that a bomb had been planted in the company's building because of what the caller described as its "anti-Serb campaign". The building was evacuated and staff returned to work only once a team of police specialists had conducted a search and declared the threat a hoax. B92 said that this was the second bomb hoax in three days, and that these had followed numerous threats made in emails addressed to the editorial staff. The same day, at a sitting of the Serbian Parliament, Serbian Radical Party MP Vjerica Radeta proposed an amendment to the Public Information Act which would introduce compulsory registration of media, in order to give the authorities a mechanism for controlling broadcasters by refusing to register certain companies. Radeta, introducing the amendment, said that under it the authorities would be able to prevent registration of media which Radeta described as "carrying the notorious lies of pathological liar Natasa Kandic", the director of the Humanitarian Law Centre. The attacks on B92 intensified after Natasa Kandic said, as a guest on a B92 program, that certain information which is still being checked links Radical leader Tomislav Nikolic to the death of civilians in the Croatian village of Antin in 1991. ANEM believes that threats to adopt repressive regulations which would limit freedom of expression and violent attacks on journalists, the media and the people they interview in their broadcasts, are yet another attempt to suspend democratic processes in the society and, especially, to silence the public debate on issues of responsibility for the crimes committed during the wars of the past decade. ANEM demands that the authorities discover who is behind the threats and bomb hoaxes and thus help create conditions in which journalists will be able to report on events and incidents of public interest, free from fear. ANEM also demands that the delegates in the Serbian Parliament respond to abuse of the speakers platform in the parliament which is used for attacks on the media and to change regulations aimed at permanently curbing free expression in the country. Slobodan Stojsic, Chairman of ANEM Managing Board