The 17 March 2016 cover of Informer featured a photograph of Stevan Dojcinovic, editor-in-chief of the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK), with accusations that he was part of a “mafia” trying to bring down the Serbian government.
The front page of Serbian tabloid Informer stands out from the other newspapers displayed at Belgrade’s countless cigarette kiosks. Its red and yellow coloured headlines scream in block capitals at everyone who passes by.
It is the word “Mafija” that attracts most attention on the morning of 17 March 2016. It’s printed on the front page, as is a blurry photo of a journalist. The journalist, Stevan Dojcinovic, is editor-in-chief at Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK). The headline translates: “Mafia is planning attack on family Vucic.” According to Informer, Dojcinovic and his colleagues at KRIK are the mafia and want to bring down the government of Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.
Psychological attacks on KRIK by the tabloid have happened so often that this was hardly surprising. KRIK has become well known throughout Serbia, not because of its investigative reporting, but because of the attention from Informer.
Informer was founded in 2012 and its editorial coverage has been called “pro-regime oriented” by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Dragan Vucicevic, is said to be a close friend of the prime minister’s.
Since its launch in July 2015, KRIK has published a series of revealing stories about corruption and misuse of office by several high-profile government officials. And ever since, KRIK has been targeted by Informer: KRIK journalists have been called foreign spies trying to bring down the government; they have been accused of spreading lies; they have been personally discredited on Informer’s front pages.
Exposing Mali, who is a political ally of Vucic’s, soon sparked a new round of allegations by Informer.
Early November 2015 Informer claimed that KRIK, as well as two other independent media organisations BIRN and CINS, were given foreign grants for publications of “false affairs against people close to the government”. Informer’s Vucicevic said on national broadcaster TV Pink, in a special 4-hour-long programme called “Bringing down Vucic”, that the media organisations were planning a step-by-step plot to bring down the government.
Serbia’s journalist unions condemned what they called a smear or lynch campaign. The chairman of the Independent Journalists Association of Serbia (NUNS), Vukasin Obradovic, said that Informer created “an atmosphere of fear and lynching in the society, which may have serious consequences for the personal safety of the journalists involved”.
But the investigative journalists from KRIK were not scared off. They were, in fact, working on their next investigation into another government official: the minister of health, Zdravko Loncar.
KRIK found out that Loncar had been involved with Serbia’s most notorious criminal gang known as the “Zemun clan” when he was still an unknown doctor working at an emergency ward back in 2002. He allegedly had received a free apartment as a reward for “finishing off” a severely wounded gang member by “injecting him with a fatal cocktail”.
KRIK published the full story on February 22. A day later Dojcinovic’s photo was featured on the Informer’s front page again. The article stated that KRIK’s editor-in-chief was “launching false scandals” and was “intentionally creating chaos in the country”. Health minister Loncar was invited to talk on TV Pink, where he did not respond to the allegations but instead accused KRIK of not paying taxes.
Up to that point KRIK had investigated cases of corruption involving high-profile state officials in Vucic’s inner circle. But what everybody was waiting for was an investigation into Vucic himself.
Then came March 18 2016. Informer once again published a photo of KRIK’s Dojcinovic on its front page. But this time it was different.
The tabloid revealed a story KRIK had not yet published about Vucic’s large real estate assets in Belgrade, which he is supposedly hiding under the names of family members.
Informer exposed details of an investigation by KRIK that they could not have obtained in an ordinary manner. According to KRIK, the Informer appears to have relied on information that could only have been gathered through secret service surveillance techniques including physically following journalists and phone tapping.
“For about a year Informer has been attacking us regularly,” Dojcinovic told Index on Censorship. “This is the first time we are being attacked before we even publish the story. Now they are using information from state intelligence agency to discredit us. I don’t care about a smear campaign, they can’t destroy my credibility with a smear campaign. But now the state is after us.”
Currently KRIK is still working on finishing their newest investigation, which is indeed about Vucic’s real estate assets. But meanwhile Dojcinovic fears for the fate of his sources.
“We’ve now seen that they know exactly who we are meeting with. There is pressure on our sources, most of them work in state institutions. Some have already been fired,” Dojcinovic said.
In the late 1980s, US author and activist Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore claimed, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, that she was not a “raunchy, inflexible prude”. Rappers and hair-metal rockers in the same era may have felt otherwise. What’s more, they may not have utilised such wholesome language.
Gore, then the wife of politician and future vice-president Al Gore, helped found the Parents Music Resource Center in April 1985, with the goal of increasing parental control over children’s access to music deemed too violent, sexual or even loud. Some of PMRC’s suggestions on how to purify the airwaves included developing a rating system, forcing record stores to hide albums with explicit covers under the counters, and pressuring television stations into censoring performances.
Such an act of censorship received aggressive retaliation by musicians, including Frank Zappa, John Denver and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister.
On the anniversary of the creation of the PMRC, here are five tracks so foul in the group’s eyes they were included in the “Fifteen Filthy” list from a hearing in 1985.
Twisted Sister – We’re Not Gonna Take It Lyrical content: Violence
Prince – Darling Nikki Lyrical content: Sex/Masturbation
Cyndi Lauper – She Bop Lyrical content: Sex/Masturbation
Judas Priest – Eat Me Alive Lyrical content: Sex
Black Sabbath – Trashed Lyrical content: Drug and alcohol use
Index on Censorship has teamed up with the producers of an award-winning documentary about Mali’s musicians, They Will Have To Kill Us First, to create the Music in Exile Fund to support musicians facing censorship globally. You can donate here, or give £10 by texting “BAND61 £10” to 70070.
It’s hard for many of us to imagine, but all around the world, people are being intimidated out of playing music. Here is a list of some musicians who have been prevented from expressing themselves freely so far in 2016.
Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, Turkey
The Turkish musician was denied permission to perform in Portugal by Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, according to several news media, on 1 March 2016. His performance at the Serralves Museum in Porto had been approved by Turkey’s Cultural Ministry before the Diyanet, Turkey’s religious enforcement authority, overruled their decision.
Bangy (CedricBangirini), Burundi
Cedric Bangirinama, known as Bangy, was arrested on 27 January 2016 by Burundi’s national intelligence service for statements he made on his Facebook account that were insulting to the head of state. The musician was held for three weeks and eventually released on 16 February 2016.
Elawela Balady, Egypt
A concert scheduled for 24 January 2016, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution, was to forced to cancel by the country’s Ministry of State of Antiquities. The event was to feature Elawela Balady and had received approval from the Ministry of Culture to hold the show in Cairo’s Prince Taz Palace. The band that was set to play have contributed to political and social awareness through their music.
Art Attack, Kenya
Art Attack, a Kenyan band who campaign for LGBT rights in the country and other African nations, faced censorship after the Kenyan Film and Classification Board banned their video in February for its remix of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s song Same Love. The decision was made because the video “does not adhere to the morals of the country”, Kenyan newspaper The Star reported. The video includes powerful images of LGBT protests and homophobic news headlines from the country.
Salar Aghili, Iran
Salar Aghili was banned from performing at Iran’s Fajr International Music Festival and from appearing on Iranian television because of his appearance on a Persian-language satellite channel based in London. Ali Jannati, minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, said earlier this month that “artists shouldn’t give any interviews to foreign satellite channels”.
Index on Censorship has teamed up with the producers of an award-winning documentary about Mali’s musicians, They Will Have To Kill Us First, to create the Music in Exile Fund to support musicians facing censorship globally. You can donate here, or give £10 by texting “BAND61 £10” to 70070.
“My job is to make good art,” said Belgian artist Kris Verdonck. “I have no interest in being deliberately offensive or provocative.”
Verdonck was speaking at an event at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens last week, entitled Art Freedom Censorship. Featuring a range of international speakers and organisations, including Index on Censorship, the event was inspired by recent works and performances that have been shutdown in Greece following public outcry.
In Verdonck’s case, that outcry came predominantly from one man: a local priest.
Last year Onassis Cultural Centre put on one of Verdonck’s works, Stills, a series of oversized, slow-mo nudes that move within confined spaces. The artist has been showing the images around Europe, projected on to buildings associated with historical dictators. In Athens, the show lasted just one day before a priest complained. A staff member from Onassis was temporarily held in police custody before the centre agreed to halt the projections.
Also speaking at Art Freedom Censorship was director Pigi Dimitrakopoulou, who presented a play, Nash’s Balance, at Greece’s National Theatre in January, before it was pulled mid-run after vehement protests and threats of violence. The work used text taken from a book by Savvas Xiros, a convicted member of the 17 November group, which the Greek government considers a terrorist organisation.
In one of the more heated debates of the evening, Dimitrakopoulou said she hadn’t given much thought to censorship before being embroiled in the scandal. “I always thought I was too conservative to be affected by such things.” She spoke of a “political tsunami” that engulfed the show. “I expected a reaction, but more related to the work,” she said, adding that she believed most critics hadn’t seen it.
Greek journalist and publisher Elias Kanellis, who had been outspokenly against the decision to use the 17 November text, stood by his criticism but clarified that he never called for it to be censored. “Criticism is the founding principle of democracy,” he said. “But what if I were to publish Jihadi propaganda?”
Discussions also included a look at the role of the church in Greece today. Stavros Zoumboulakis, president of the supervisory council of the Greek National Library, spoke of orthodox priests refusing to admit the nation is now a post-Christian society, with only a tiny percentage attending mass. But Xenia Kounalaki, a journalist from Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini, argued the issue was less about numbers of active worshipers, more a problem of top-down influence, which still extends into the nation’s education system.
Other speakers included former Charlie Hebdo columnist and author of In Praise of Blasphemy Caroline Fourest; Mauritanian filmmaker Lemine Ould M. Salem, who has run into difficulties with France’s film classification board over his documentary about Salafi fighters in Mali; and German director Daniel Wetzel, who is presenting a theatrical interpretation of Mein Kampf at Onassis in April.
Vicky Baker spoke at Art Freedom Censorship on behalf of Index on Censorship
