Firebomb, near-death experience expose Serbia’s struggle

Bloomberg

Barefoot and in pajamas, Milan Jovanovic watched flames engulf his Belgrade house after a Molotov cocktail crashed through a window in an attack before dawn.
He and his wife survived only because she smelled the smoke. “They nearly burned us alive,” said Jovanovic, a 68-year-old investigative journalist who writes about government corruption.
Jovanovic is the latest journalist in Serbia to come under attack in what opponents of President Aleksandar Vucic and his ruling party say is an increasingly hostile environment for media. His is a country with aspirations to join the European Union in the next decade.
The Balkan state has joined an unbroken strip of countries in eastern Europe stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea where populist parties have taken over state media and denounced critics as spreading lies.
Physical attacks, harassment by police and politicians and even the murder of a reporter have drawn condemnation across former communist Europe and are threatening to unravel decades of progress building the rule of law.

More Violent
Attacks against Serbian journalists rose to 102 last year, the most since 2008, including seven physical assaults, according to a database compiled by the Independent Association of Serbian Journalists. There were 72 instances of “pressure,” which includes harassment by name by politicians and state-backed media.
Many place the guilt with Vucic, who was the minister of information for the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic during the war with Kosovo in the late 1990s. The government, led by his Serbian Progressive Party, has pulled advertisement funding from state-owned companies in opposition-linked publications. He and his allies have also frequently used their public positions to denounce media figures.
That contributed to Serbia falling 10 spots in the World Press Freedom Index last year, to 76th out of 180 countries, its worst ranking since 2013. Reporters Without Borders describes the country as a place “where it is unsafe to be a journalist.” And while Vucic has pledged to clinch Serbia’s entry into the EU sometime next decade, RSF says it “utterly fails to meet EU press freedom standards.” “Attacks on journalists in the last period are getting more diverse,” Pauline Ades-Mevel, head of the EU and Balkan desk at Reporters Without Borders, said in an email. “We have noted not only physical attacks, but also death threats against journalists on social media, as well as smear campaigns against prominent independent journalists in tabloids.” Democracy watchdog Freedom House knocked Serbia’s 2018 classification from “free” to “partly free,” noting “the massive centralization of power in the hands of one person, President Aleksandar Vucic.” Premier Ana Brnabic called the criticism “insufficiently objective.”
“I absolutely do not think and do not feel that I live in a partly free country, but rather that I live in a country which is freer than it was a few years ago,” she said.
Serbia’s case highlights a growing worry around press freedom in the region.
In Slovakia, protests toppled former Prime Minister Robert Fico after the execution-style murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend last year.