The price of truth
By Miroslav Filipovic Posted Fri, Dec 1 2000
When he was president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milo-sevic’s greatest enemy was the truth about him and his regime. As the stronghold of his regime loosened, his resolve to hide the real situation in the country strengthened. That was one of the reasons why journalists who wrote freely about the problems in Yugoslavia were targets of his attack.
Independent journalists were accused of being foreign mercenaries, traitors and NATO servants. When this did not suppress the spirit of these journalists, Milosevic and his allies decided to set an example by singling out one of them for punishment.
I was chosen probably because I was closer than the others to an invisible line of tolerance set by the regime. I was the only one who wrote about sensitive subjects. Also I was an unknown journalist from the interior, and the regime did not want to take a risk by arresting well-known journalists from Belgrade. The government was apprehensive about public outcry.
My ordeal began on May 8, 2000, when I was arrested by six officers of the National Security Service of Serbia. They took me to the National Security Headquarters in Kraljevo after a thorough, illegal search of my apartment. I was interrogated by the police all day and all night.
Then I was taken to the investigative judge of the district court in Kraljevo, where I was charged with espionage and spreading false information. After a short hearing, the judge put me under temporary arrest for 30 days. My prison days began.
The next day the district court declared itself incompetent to judge me and sent me to the military court in Nis. To my big surprise, the new court released me the following day because the military prosecutor did not bring any criminal charges against me.
I was free for 10 days before I was ordered to report again for “interrogation.” On May 22, I went to Nis with my attorney. This time I was imprisoned for almost five months.
The sentence was the harshest punishment for a journalist in Serbia since World War II. After a short investigation, there was a trial in which a board of five judges sentenced me to seven years in prison. I was imprisoned with three Kosovar Albanians in a cell that was four meters long and four meters wide.
The three articles I wrote for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), which were published on its Web site, were the reason for Milosevic’s ire. One of these articles talked about the suppression of Muslims of Sandzak by the regime.
The second was about how military and police officers were being sent to north Kosovo to destabilize the area. And the third, the most critical of the lot, spoke about the atrocities committed by individuals of the Yugoslav army.
I knew I was taking a risk by writing those stories. I knew it would expose me to the tyranny of Milosevic’s regime, even to a court trial; but I also knew that everything I wrote in those articles was the truth.
It was a political trial from the start. My sources told me that Milosevic decided to prosecute me because I wrote that the army was being used to destabilize Montenegro.
Milosevic did not expect the furor my arrest created. Thanks to the support of nongovernmental organizations and journalists from all over the world, my arrest became known to the world.
Now, I have been released and promoted to the role of a hero, a symbol of the fight for freedom of speech in Serbia. I was there on the side of justice and freedom in the final clash with Slobodan Milosevic’s regime. Now the hunter has become the hunted. The roles have been reversed.