Shortages and Radioactivity

A day earlier, employees of the Matroz paper plant in Sremska Mitrovica blocked the main town square protesting the fact that their salaries were very late. They wanted to block the railroad as well but the police stopped them. The protest ended when Serbian minister coordinator Dragan Tomic promised them some of the money owed the plant. Matroz, Serbia’s only paper producer hasn’t been operating since October.

"This is a case of the irresponsibility of Prime Minister Mirko Marjanovic and minister Dragan Tomic," said Slavko Curuvija, editor in chief and director of Dnevni Telegraf. "Matroz is being run in the same way as the government. First they let the plant become impoverished, then they stopped production and let 2,000 hungry workers fight with the police and pushed the daily press into a situation in which they have to go abroad and spend hard currency to buy newsprint at 50% higher prices and bring it into the country by truck. The exact time that the newsprint will get through customs depends on how long the truckers spend in restaurants along the way and on whether they run into prostitutes or not."

The day the six dailies weren’t printed is the height of the newsprint shortage. Many dailies have been forced to cut down either circulation or their page numbers since December. "We have been appealing to the Serbian government for a long time to finally regulate the production of newsprint in the country," said Vojmir Joksic, Vecernje Novosti’s news desk editor. "We never got an answer. Although we have been promised that Matroz would resume production, I learned that their natural gas supply line hasn’t been restored and that the machines aren’t being warmed up."

The state was unusually fierce in collecting the plant’s debts. The Serbian Civil Alliance (GSS) said Matroz supplied the regime press with newsprint at extremely low prices during the 1990s with promises that were never kept that the government would compensate the losses through electricity and natural gas bills. The potentially very profitable plant, which is on the government’s list of 29 companies to be privatized quickly, is probably ready to be sold at a very low price, the GSS statement said.

Other political parties, the Democratic Party (DS) and Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), feel the newsprint shortage was "artificially created to endanger freedom of the press and the publication of the independent press," i.e. that "the increasing number of dailies on the market has financially endangered the regime press and now efforts are being invested to destroy all the dailies which think differently and want to have a different editorial policy".

One thing Joksic said shows that there’s something strange about the import of newsprint: "The trucks carrying the newsprint into the country are standing at the border. First they were sent from one border crossing to another and now they’re waiting for a radiologist to come examine the trucks."

Curuvija said Dnevni Telegraf is losing 150,000 dinars a day when it’s not published and agreed with Joksic that the greatest loss is the loss of credibility among readers.