© 1999 Global Beat Syndicate. All Rights Reserved.

Assassination of an Insider

By Anthony Borden*
April 14, 1999
 
LONDON -- Just last week, a Yugoslav journalist called Slavko Curuvija to ask if he'd been having any problems since the start of the NATO bombing. "I'm just waiting," Curuvija answered.
 
Five months earlier, Curuvija, the editor of Dnevni Telegraf, or Daily Telegraph, had been sentenced to five months in prison. He'd been convicted under Yugoslavia's draconian Information Law over an article he'd published concerning a scandal involving the Yugoslav United Front, an organization associated with Mijiana Markovic, wife of the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. He had yet to begin serving his sentence.
 
But instead of a prison cell, Curuvija received several bullets in the back -- gunned down in front of his house Sunday evening by masked youths. His companion, the historian Branka Prpa, was beaten. The assailants left 17 empty bullet casings on the street and a widespread climate of fear throughout Belgrade.
 
"The killing of Curuvija is a message for people in the inner circle who might plot against Milosevic," said one Belgrade human rights activist. "Now they are all trembling."
 
Curuvija's death may be considered the first political assassination of the war in Serbia proper (excluding Kosovo). It may well presage a crackdown on any opposition to the regime -- whether among opposition politicians, human-rights activists and the independent media or any potential plotters amid the ruling circle itself. It continues the campaign against the press which has been under way since last fall when the Belgrade regime imposed its Information Law.
 
Curuvija himself had been one of its first victims. In the days preceding the October agreement on Kosovo between Milosevic and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, Curuvija published a scathing attack on the regime's ten years in power in his monthly magazine European. "Serbia," he wrote, "is dead already." He was fined $240,000.
 
But Curuvija, 50, was not part of the clique of independent media and democracy activists. In fact, he was the consummate insider, a sometime member of the establishment. A former policeman, Curuvija had been the editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper, Borba, in the early nineties. That paper was considered semi-independent but with close ties to the regime. Large and handsome, he was known as a skilled journalist with excellent connections
 
Only a few months ago, he boasted of how he spoke by phone to Milosevic's wife Mijiana Markovic once a week. And as the editor of Dnevni Telegraph, with its circulation of 100,000, he easily fit in with Belgrade's moneyed set.
 
But his real alliance was with Jovica Stanisic, the former head of state security and a man heavily involved in the military campaigns in Croatia and Bosnia.
 
Last fall, Curuvija published an article portraying Stanisic as a moderate who opposed violence in Kosovo and favored improved relations with the renegade republic of Montenegro. A power struggle ensued within the Belgrade regime -- a struggle most likely based on personality rather than policy differences -- and Stanisic was sacked. Suddenly, Curuvija's weekly phone conversations with president's wife stopped.
 
Dnevni Telegraph was basically a tabloid scandal sheet. With big headlines often unsupported by the smaller text, it was among the first papers in Belgrade to run sensational "exclusives" on the "terrorists" of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Curuvija's insider status meant his paper was highly informed about the ins and outs of the establishment. Its articles sometimes touched a nerve among the ruling elite.
 
But when his links to the regime broke, Curuvija adopted an increasingly maverick stance, taking on the profile of a fighter for press freedoms in Serbia. In response to the latest crackdown on the media in Serbia, he moved publication of his newspaper to Montenegro. Its distribution within Serbia was spotty.
 
Last week, the regime's newspaper, Politica Express, published an article reporting a statement attributed to Markovic that one newspaper owner in Serbia supported the American bombing. A few days later, the statement was broadcast on state television. This time Curuvija was identified by name.
 
A few days later, he was dead.
 
Anthony Borden is executive director of the London-based Institute for War & Peace Reporting.
 

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© 1999 Global Beat Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, provides editors with commentary and perspective articles on critical global issues from contributors around the world. For more information, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/.

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