BELGRADE, 02.09.2019. – Maja Pavlovic said she would stop a 19-day-long hunger strike following a meeting with President Aleksandar Vucic who gave her “firm guarantees” for demands regarding the position of her independent Channel 9 local TV from the northern city of Novi Sad, the FoNet news agency reported on Friday.
She said that the difference between the meeting with Vucic and the previous one with Prime Minister Ana Brnabic was that she received firm guarantees that he would contact the respective institutions within the next ten days to see how the TV problem could be solved.
Pavlovic added she agreed with Vucic to meet again in Belgrade if nothing happened during that period.
She stopped her third hunger strike in several months, demanding that the regional media’s costs were adjusted to their income so that they could survive on the market.
Pavlovic first went on a hunger strike in May this year, saying her TV channel and many other media outlets in Serbia were threatened because of the inaction of the state institutions.
Among her nine demands, she requested from Novi Sad Mayor Milos Vucevic, of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) led by Vucic, to stop discriminating the independent Channel 9 which existed 20 years and provide it with equal access to state media funds.
Pavlovic had ended a 23-day long hunger strike after meeting PM Ana Brnabic, who then said the hunger strike was “serious blackmail.”