24 November 1998
(RFE/RL press release 11/20/98) (370) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty November 20, 1998 FOREIGN BROADCASTS, INTERNET BREAK SERBIAN NEWS BLOCKADE (Washington, DC -- 20 November 1998) In President Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, state-controlled broadcast and print media hold most of the cards, leaving independent journalists few avenues for voicing opposition in that country. As a result, international broadcasting and the Internet play an especially important role in allowing the opposition to reach the population at large. Branislav Canak, founder and Chairman of the Independent Journalists Union of Serbia, outlined both the difficulties journalists face in Serbia and also the ways in which they are making use of international broadcasts and the Internet at a Tuesday briefing at RFE/RL's Washington office. Because independent domestic stations reach such a relatively small percentage of the population, Canak said, short-wave broadcasts offer the people of Serbia their only real hope for balanced news coverage -- especially now that the Serbian government has banned retransmission of programs produced by international broadcasters such as RFE/RL, VOA, and the BBC. A broadcast journalist with Radio/TV Belgrade until he was fired in 1993 for his union activities and anti-Milosevic stance during that year's elections, Canak said that students in Belgrade can also break the state's news monopoly through access to the Internet. But in Serbia's rural areas, only one TV broadcast is available, and it remains under government control. Canak said that many independent newspapers are now printed in neighboring Montenegro -- a member with Serbia of the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." But he added that attempts to ship newspapers to Belgrade for distribution are often delayed at the interstate border by Serbian customs officials, in an effort to rob the papers of their news value. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international radio service to Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. More than 20 million regular listeners rely on RFE/RL's daily news, analysis and current affairs programming to provide a coherent, objective account of events in their region and the world. (end text)