A Serbian war hero: War tightens Milosevic's grip on Serbian society
Schaeffer-Duffy, Claire
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy A SERBIAN WAR HERO One writer's witness In an impassioned article for the Boston Globe (April 4), Randolph Ryan, a former Globe reporter and editorial writer who was...
...The letter goes on to list thirteen recommendations for restoring reason and order in Yugoslavia...
...But some messages remain indelible...
...His circulation in Belgrade was significantly reduced...
...Although unsparing in his denunciations, he writes with the passion of a betrayed lover, still confident that the decision makers will leave their errant ways once the wrongs are fully revealed...
...Claire Schaeffer-Duffy A SERBIAN WAR HERO One writer's witness In an impassioned article for the Boston Globe (April 4), Randolph Ryan, a former Globe reporter and editorial writer who was overseeing a program for independent journalists in Belgrade, decried the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia...
...The hunt for Belgrade's opposition journalists began in earnest last fall when NATO first threatened to bomb Yugoslavia...
...In fact, the elegant fifty-year-old editor had repeatedly condemned NATO's actions in his public appearances...
...A few days before his execution, the state-controlled Belgrade daily Politika Ekspres denounced him by name as a "national traitor...
...Reporters sped past snipers, endured the shelling of their offices, edited articles in basements: in short, risked their lives to get the story out...
...Although press reports have described the assassins as "unidentified," it is probable that Curuvija's murder was politically motivated...
...On October 14, three newspapers, including Curuvija's Dnevni Telegraf, and a radio station were banned...
...Snipers take breaks, tank artillery is impersonal, and the enemy "out there" can even embolden one's convictions...
...Your Excellency, your country, your people, and your compatriots have been living for ten years in a state of fear and psychosis, with nothing but death, misery, terror, and despair around them....It is your duty, your Excellency, to immediately oppose the atmosphere of lawlessness and despair...
...10...
...They fired shots from afar to wound him, pistolwhipped his wife who witnessed the murder, and then lodged the fatal bullets into his head...
...In October, the Serbian Ministry of Information, operating under a siege mentality, issued two directives and then passed a law prohibiting the dissemination of information from foreign media...
...On April 11, one week after Ryan's Globe report, two Belgrade assassins shot and killed Slavko Curuvija (Ch/ru'/ve/ya), a long-time Belgrade journalist and editor, and the owner and founder of the independent publications Dnevni Telegraf [Daily Telegraph] and Evropljanin [European], a news biweekly...
...The setting is Italy during the Mussolini era, and the midnight graffiti are Spina's act of love and resistance: a simple gesture to revive the soul of a people bowed under the Fascist state but momentarily swept up in its wartime fever...
...The newspaper interpreted Curuvija's apparent silence about the NATO bombing (he was not publishing when the bombing commenced, see below), as indicative of his support for the Western alliance...
...Unfortunately, Ryan was wrong...
...She thanks Professor Eric Gordy of Clark University for his assistance, and Marko Kocic of Northeastern University who provided the translation for "What Next, Milosevic...
...According to Professor Eric Gordy, associate professor of sociology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, the new law placed Serbia among the "very few countries in the world which have made access to public information from other places a criminal offense...
...Among these is the proposal that President Slobodan Milosevic promote "interethnic tolerance and include minorities in the highest political institutions...
...Spina uses the medium of charcoal to write words that are easily washed away with the next rain...
...In Ignazio Silone's novel Bread and Wine, the protagonist Pietro Spina scrawls the messages "Down with the War" and "Long Live Liberty...
...The letter begins with a stinging condemnation of the state's disregard for freedom of the press, and then goes on to address "far more serious" concerns: the erosion of Serbian society...
...The "dirty work" in Belgrade began before ethnic cleansing was a fait accompli in Kosovo...
...But Curuvija and his compatriots in Belgrade faced an even more formidable foe...
...He was appealing the sentence at the time of his murder...
...His inability and refusal to pay the fine resulted in the police breaking into the offices of Dnevni Telegraf to seize and destroy printing equipment and newspapers...
...across the church steps and walls of a town called Fossa...
...According to Ryan, they knew that "when the dirty work is finished in Kosovo, it will begin at home...
...Their history is testament to the age-old truth that war cannot tolerate the free flow of information...
...NATO's missiles had narrowed the operating ground for Serbia's independent thinkers, and advocates of democracy in Yugoslavia were pulling out, including Ryan himself...
...As the bombs rained down from above, the gunmen came out...
...During the Bosnian war, the staff of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje received international acclaim for its perseverance under siege, and rightly so...
...In January of this year, Curuvija was sentenced to five months in prison for refusal to pay a fine...
...Curuvija was fined the equivalent of $230,000 for having written a text that "threatens the constitutional order...
...Curuvija is courageously specific in his delineation of all the political choices that contributed to the decline of his homeland...
...Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a member of the Saints Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in Worcester, Massachusetts, and writes for the Catholic Radical...
...9 Shortly after publication of "What Next, Milosevic...
...On October 18, Curuvija and his co-editor, Alexsandar Tijanic, wrote an open letter: "What Next, Milosevic...
...in Evropljanin...
...Thus began an unrelenting pattern of fines and seizures that compelled Curuvija to relocate his publishing operation to Montenegro...
...Curuvija was gunned down on Orthodox Easter as he was returning to his apartment...
...But the enemy within—the courts, the police, the public slander, the numbness of one's own people—is masterful at eroding the faith and clarity of the most resilient thinkers...
...Slavko Curuvija's words and life are among them...
...Milosevic's Easter ceasefire, which NATO ignored, did not apply to Curuvija...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 10
