Croatian Journalists’ Association (CJA) strongly condemns insults and threats against Hassan Haidar Diab, Večernji list journalist, because of his article about Islamic radicals who leave Bosnia for battlefronts of Iraq and Syria.
Our colleague Diab has been reporting about wars in the Middle East – in Iraq, Syria and Libya – and he has been insulted and discredited due to his work all along. But it reached the culmination after, at the beginning of June, he published classified document with names of jihadists who from BiH, Kosovo and Serbia went to battlefields in Syria and Iraq.
Along with insults and threats, including death threats, sent through social networks, Hassan Diab was under attack of certain Bosnian media and public figures that practically called for lynch.
CJA considers Hassan Haidar Diab to be journalist whose reporting on important topics is highly professional. Therefore he got the CJA’s prize „The best journalist in printed media“ in 2015. The very same year Hassan Diab was a candidate for the CJA’s prize „The journalist of the year“.
We consider attack against him, as attack against any other journalist because of his work, to be attack against journalism profession itself.
Saša Leković, CJA president for the CJA Executive Board