Follow Orders

The Serbian authorities should have made a million German marks or so on the fines stemming from the notorious law on information. Theoretically, but not in practice. It turned out that the property confiscated from the daily Dnevni Telegraf and the weekly Evropljanin, the first two newspapers to feel the teeth of the national unity government and easily offended patriots, is worth a mere 40,000 dinars or 1.5 percent of the total fines imposed. Therefore, the confiscation of the editor-in-chief's property to account for the whole sum will last a few decades. Drasko Djuranovic, the editor-in-chief of the Podgorica weekly Monitor, said that the Serbian authorities would have to confiscate the newspaper for a very long time if they insist on collecting the 2.8 million dinar fine.

In regular circumstances it would be logical to ask how much the acts of this “legitimate state” would cost, as the state's main task in more regular circumstances is to persuade its population that its laws, their implementation as well as our rights are in accordance with the “highest world standards”. If we disregard the price in view of the fact that virtually all our values are priceless, and that it is something of a custom to not ask how much their preservation costs, the two-month-old law unambiguously implies that it has been adopted to petrify the media that’s still in business and to inflict as much damage as possible on those who have been hit by its righteous fist.

If that's true, the red-and-black coalition in power is guided by Lenin's stand that “socialist courts should not exclude terror, but explain and legalize it principally, clearly, without any lies or decorations”. Revolutionary principles have been made even clearer with the warning that “we shall not allow anyone to deceive us with echoing slogans such as freedom, equality and the will of the majority” (from the 1919 Speech on deceiving the people with slogans on freedom and equality), as well as with the unsuccessful attempt to impose the death penalty for defying Bolshevik authorities.

However, we are dealing with the penal rather than the criminal code in Serbia at this moment. Apart from all that, as the daily Politika's lawyer noted after the newspaper lost a law suit filed by DS leader Zoran Djindjic, the most important thing is that the law has been accepted. It appears that it has not been accepted by all, as judges have started to drop charges beforehand and even to acquit the accused after the daily Politika lost another law suit. Pancevo television was acquitted the other day as Stevo Lavrnic, one of the managers of the Pancevo Chemical Plant and the man who pressed charges, somehow failed to support his case. “We were guilty of broadcasting both sides to the conflict between Lavrnic and the workers who sacked him. Lavrnic was unhappy with a statement by the Assembly President, who said what the workers thought of Lavrnic”, said Ofelija Backovic, the Pancevo television editor-in-chief.

The judge didn't even get to pass a sentence in the case of Nis TV 5. The lawyer of the Socialist Party's Nis Board dropped all charges in the middle of the trial because he was allegedly unaware that one of the accused wasn't the founder of TV 5. Charges were pressed after statements by Zoran Djindjic, Vesna Pesic and Nebojsa Popov in a televised debate. Offended by their remarks was the SPS Nis Board, but the defense lawyers won the case because not one of the three participants of the debate mentioned the board in any context at any time. What makes the Nis case more interesting is the fact that the SPS lawyer decided to drop all charges after a mobile telephone consultation from the courtroom in the middle of the proceeding.

Finally, the daily Dnevni Telegraf faces another trial. This time, says the Tanjug news agency, charges against the daily's editor and four reporters  were pressed by the JUL's versatile official and the Serbian Vice-Premier Milovan Bojic. According to Tanjug, charges were pressed after “false claims that the murder of doctor Aleksandar Popovic had something to do with his criticism of Milovan Bojic's work as the manager of the Dedinje cardiovascular institute”. The criticisms have therein “upset the citizens especially those employed by the Institute”, under Serbia's criminal code - article 218 on spreading false information.

One needn't split hairs to realize what kind of justice Milovan Bojic is seeking. One also needn't be too cynical to raise the question of whether acts such as armed uprisings, rebellion and support to terrorism could fall under the penal code, while prostitution, slander against ranking officials, pick-pocketing and disrupting public law and order could fall within the criminal code and be punishable with many years of imprisonment. In Serbia today, this is quite possible. However, it is more important and better for everyone if the authorities have decided to apply the criminal rather than the penal code in this case because they too might realize that the notorious information law is quite simply ridiculous.
If experience is anything to go by, the unanimous rejection of the information law among reporters, the silence of most judges and a number of resistance activities, regardless of their effect, won't force the authorities to abandon the law. Foreign support to Yugoslav politicians, including the Information Minister Aleksandar Vucic, offers nothing but supreme evidence that the law is useful and put and end to all sensible debates on western democracy and media.

No matter how uncertain the future is in Serbia, it is somewhat easier to predict that the authorities will keep their information barriers against Montenegro. Late last month, the Podgorica weekly Monitor was sentenced and fined in Belgrade under the “Serbian” information law, for publishing an advertisement by the students' Otpor [Resistance] organization. The next issue of the Monitor was confiscated by the financial police. The weekly's editor-in-chief said that all those issuing the Monitor have been told that they would be subject to Serbia's penal law, although those who voiced the threat didn't know exactly what law. Meanwhile, the Serbian police have started a crackdown on trucks carrying the weekly Monitor and the daily Dnevni Telegraf at the border with Montenegro. The Podgorica daily Pobjeda said that readers in the Montenegrin town of Kolasin are no longer able to buy the weekly Monitor, and wonders whether this has anything to do with the fact that local authority is in the hands of the Federal Prime Minister Momir Bulatovic's Socialist National Party of Montenegro (SNP). Be what may, the Serbian information law is effective in this Montenegrin municipality.

Incidents of this kind bare a ghastly resemblance to the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, as well as all those “media wars”, “economic blockades” and “quests to defend Yugoslavia”. Once again, Yugoslavia is being defended by the very same people. The less they appear in public the more fiercely they are “defending” the country. After the adoption of laws such as those on the media and the university, the peril hanging over the heads of Yugoslavia's citizens is more than petrifying.

Just as the televised session of the Serbian parliament made the very idea of parliamentarianism repulsive to every average viewer or reader in this country, the present legislature is creating a fatal habit among citizens and party leaders alike that anyone who comes to power can change the legislature to their liking.

In that context, it is fair to say that we are witnessing the work of Lenin's great grandchildren. We shall quote the great Lesek Kolakovski. “Lenin, therefore, laid the foundations to legislature typical for a totalitarian regime, not even a despotic one. This kind of legislature is not simply strict, it is fictive. A law that applies draconian penalties for minor offenses is not necessarily totalitarian. However, Lenin's definitions are characteristic for totalitarian law, as he said that those whose views could objectively help the bourgeois should be shot. The message is very clear: those in power can kill anybody, to their own liking, meaning that there is no law. The criminal code is not strict, it is quite simply non-existent”.