The Information and Telecommunication Minister joined a tabloid-led smear campaign against Serbian journalist Tamara Skrozza, claiming she said that some senior officials should have been killed during the uprising against Slobodan Milosevic.
Serbian journalists’ associations on Wednesday condemned a statement by the Ministry of Information and Telecommunication criticising Serbian journalist Tamara Skrozza, who has for the past two days been falsely accused by pro-government tabloids of calling for the murder of senior Serbian officials.
Zeljko Bodrozic, president of Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia, IJAS, said the statement was a “shameful action by Minister [Dejan] Ristic”, who “sided with the accusation that Tamara Skrozza called for murder, which is completely untrue”.
Bodrozic told BIRN that the unfounded targeting of Skrozza was “putting her safety into question”.
He argued that as head of the Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, Ristic is “responsible for this area [media freedom] and therefore should be careful when it comes to things like this”.
IJAS and six other media associations called on Ristic to resign, saying that his statement was “shameful” and “opens the way to further persecution and endangering the safety of journalist Tamara Skrozza”.
Serbian tabloid newspapers and television stations, starting with pro-government TV Pink on Monday, launched their smear campaign against Skrozza over a comment she made on a TV show in June.
Talking about the October 2000 uprising that led to removal of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from power, Skrozza said that the night between October 5 and 6, when the uprising happened, “should have looked completely different”.
“I won’t say how now, so we don’t get into trouble, but as far as I’m concerned, that night was supposed to be completely different, something like what we were taught in the history books. If that night had been different and if on October 6 we had woken up in a different Serbia, a Serbia without some people, I think this would be a completely different story today,” Skrozza said.
Several senior figures in the current government were officials in the Milosevic-era administration, including current President Aleksandar Vucic. In October 2000, Vucic was Serbia’s minister for information.
TV Pink and others claimed Skrozza was calling for murder of Serbian officials, particularly Vucic.
The Ministry of Information and Telecommunication said in its press release that “it is difficult to escape the impression that Mrs. Skrozza, in the part of the previously quoted statement that refers to the fact that Serbia was supposed to be ‘without some people’ on the night between October 5 and 6, 2000, and that that night should have been ‘something like what we learned in the history books’, implicitly expressed regret that in those dramatic circumstances some state officials were not deprived of their lives”.
Skrozza told Cenzolovka, a media freedom website, that she will sue media outlets for defamation.
She has also been subjected to previous smear campaigns by the tabloids, most prominently in 2018 and 2016.
Source: BalkanInsight