After being warned that “a set-up is being prepared” for her, Jugpress editor-in-chief Ljiljana Stojanović openly talks about the pressures, threats and attempts to shut down one of the few independent media in the south of Serbia.
Ljiljana Stojanović explained to “Vreme” how the warning was sent to her by persons who are in security services, who have worked in the south for a long time and know her.
“At first I thought about what it could be, and nothing came to mind,” she said. “When you get a message like that you think that someone is actually trying to put pressure on you, not to continue doing what you’re doing, but because it’s people I’ve known for a long time, who I know are not inclined to do that, I absolutely think what it could be.”
After receiving the messages, Stojanović showed them to the public, because as she says, “you just don’t know what can happen, you see what the situation is.”
“And something that may seem like nobody can do anything to you, we know that they can do anything to us if they want to,” she added.
Stojanović explained what topics were written about in the past few days, which she believes may be the cause of the warnings she received.
“In the last few days, all the important topics that we dealt with and that had an impact were about the attacks of SNS activists, SNS batinas, on activists, since we were the first to announce it and also the conversation with the representative of the city union about the miners’ hunger strike in the Lece mine and the fact that no one is reacting from the competent institutions and that the police warned them not to block the mine”, she pointed out.
He believes that the reason for the threats may also be that Jugpres is the only one that regularly follows the protests in the south of Serbia.
“If people from the security sector inform you about something like that, then it might mean that it has something to do with that sector. Local authorities do it in a different way,” Stojanović said.
Jugpress on target
She received the threat through a message that was later deleted, because, as she believes, the person who sent it did not want there to be any trace.
The message said that they were “preparing a set-up” for her and to be careful.
“These situations are not everyday. The last threat we had was a man threatening us on Facebook because of the publication of a video of a protest by high school students in Leskovac,” she said, adding that the same man publicly declared himself, took a picture for the SNS speaker and now regrets it, because “he didn’t know to whom he was making those threats.”
“We normally try to avoid such situations because we simply try to do our work in our own way, professionally and responsibly, but we are still labeled as a media that is hostile to this government, that is oppositional, which is not true at all, because we publish everything and publish what is really happening,” Stojanović explained.
According to him, there were intentions to shut down Jugpress, as they received a flood of lawsuits, the only one among many media, but the situation was resolved in their favor last year.
“It’s an obvious pressure, because they didn’t sue ten media that reported the same thing, but only us,” she stated.
Warnings without protection
She reported the threat to the contact points of the permanent working group, the police and the prosecutor’s office.
“It’s a kind of consultation, because it’s not an open threat, it’s a warning,” believes Stojanović, stating that the threats that journalists receive are mostly dismissed, with the explanation that they are not direct threats.
“These are warnings and if it weren’t like this situation that we see every day, all around us, it might have a completely different connotation. However, in this situation when you literally don’t know if someone can, because of something you wrote in a text or on social networks, on private profiles, detain you, call you for an interview and so on, because you don’t respond to him as a journalist,” she pointed out.
Local journalism on the verge of survival
Stojanović believes that “there is almost no space for independent journalism on the local media scene.”
“It’s a tough fight, it’s like that everywhere in the bar, in all of Serbia. There are fewer and fewer of us who do journalism in this way, professionally, responsibly, in accordance with ethical standards and the law,” she explained, adding that there are fewer and fewer journalists in the bar, due to a lack of serious financial support.
“Due to these kinds of pressures, fewer and fewer people are entering the journalism profession. Why would anyone turn around when they go out into the street or check what happened to the lock on the newsroom,” asks Stojanović.
Namely, another of the pressures that the editorial office suffered was damage to the official car, in the same place, every time.
The public as the best protection
Stojanović explains that there is more pressure on Jugpres due to the fact that fewer and fewer media are reporting on student blockades.
“For the last few protests, I think we were the only ones reporting on Leskovac, in Vranje I think only a few media outlets are reporting, and I’m sure there is pressure there, because otherwise there are no media outlets that are ready to follow it. The pressures are multi-layered,” she explained.
As he says, “the public is the best protection for all of us.” “If this has already gone public and generated a lot of interest, people are writing to me, contacting me, you can imagine what that looks like.”
He believes that the public reacts differently now because people are more sensitized to attacks and threats against journalists.
“I guess the institutions should do their job and I really believe in that. That’s why I’m in the Working Group for the Safety of Journalists, and I think the most important are the reactions of the citizens, who are angry, and the anger is increasing,” concluded Stojanović.
Source: Vreme
