Serbia’s War on Free Media is Moving to ‘Street Level’

Vucic and his followers have created a hostile environment for newsrooms and individuals who criticize the government. Journalists who are called traitors and foreign mercenaries by members of the regime say everything is "allowed". It reminds us of the atmosphere of lynching, which we'd naively believed had gone down in history.

In Milosevic's time, it was known that the danger was coming from government structures. Now, persecution, intimidation and even physical attacks have been lowered to "street" level.

The "job" has been in effect delegated to right-wingers, hooligans, ardent supporters of the president, even to foreigners employed in Serbia.

On Thursday, last week, Snezana Congradin was attacked in the centre of Belgrade, reporting on a protest against the glorification of a convicted war criminal, Ratko Mladic.

The protest had been organized by the NGO Women in Black and by the Humanitarian Law Centre. Congradin was filming the erasure of graffiti reading: "Ratko Mladic is a hero" as an unknown man attacked her and hit her on the arm.

The attack on Congradin is only the latest in a series of acts of intimidation. One more point in the mosaic of the "fight against free media" was laid on November 10, when Filip Lukic from TV N1 was insulted while reporting from a protest against a mural that also praises Ratko Mladic. A group of hooligans gathered into the so-called "People's Patrols" (Narodne patrole) threatened the media house team in front of the police. The same thing happened the next day.

Two days later, right-wingers from the "People's Patrols" held a press conference in front of TV N1, and confirmed that they were deliberately interfering with the reporting of this television station because they had not...