What is the point of Information Minister Dejan Ristic’s invitation to journalism associations to, among other things, discuss the case of Tamara Skrozza when he has already sided with tabloids in a written statement and significantly contributed to the witch-hunt against her? The minister should resign, as he is doing precisely what he claims to want to eradicate - fabricating news and making unfounded accusations, the weekly Radar said in its latest issue.
Just two months into his role as Minister of Information, Dejan Ristic visited Emanuele Giaufret, the head of the European Union (EU) Delegation to Serbia, to boast about his impressive achievements in addressing threats against journalists, said Radar. He presented statistics showing the “number of threatened journalists has dropped by one-third this year.”
Neither of them addressed trivialities like the persecution of journalist Dinko Gruhonjic, which includes open calls for violence, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ findings that journalists in Serbia are subject to a “witch hunt,” or the mysterious disappearance of recordings showing the attack on journalist Vuk Cvijic by the director of the Srpski Telegraf tabloid, Milan Ladjevic, the weekly said.
These actions alone are sufficient reason for Ristic to hand in the resignation that he is being asked for. He is using the very tactics he claims to oppose – fabricating news and making unfounded accusations. The challenge is explaining this to someone who was appointed to the ministerial position precisely because of his history of such practices, said Radar.
The most notorious incident linked to him was his approval of a Ljotic march he claimed was a piece by Momcilo Nastasijevic while he was on the commission for the Victory Day program in 2021. This is a minor anecdote compared to the extent of his capabilities. His most notable display of “talent” came while he was acting director of the National Library of Serbia, where he chose to rewrite history to fit his ideological beliefs. He took over the institution after his predecessors had spent ten years creating the Wars 1991-1999 reading room and assembling a collection of printed and visual materials from the breakup of Yugoslavia. Unhappy with this setup, Ristic ordered the dismantling of the collection, dispersing it into the general library, declaring that recalling this period of history was “high treason,” the weekly said.
If academic work within a state institution can be labeled as “high treason,” why wouldn’t he accuse Tamara Skrozza, the deputy editor of FoNet and an expert in media ethics, of inciting violence and of lamenting that no mass murder occurred on October 5? This is especially relevant given that tabloids have already passed this judgment. The only difference between the Informer tabloid and Ristic, said Radar, is that the minister refrained from accusing Skrozza of calling for the murder of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who was Vojislav Seselj’s errand boy at the time. Instead, he put her “murderous urges” in a broader context.
Perhaps Ristic, like the party he serves, doesn’t grasp the concepts of lustration and democracy, interpreting any dissenting view against the government as a call for murder – a common occurrence in the administration he is part of. If that’s the case, he should play by the rules of the government he supports, rather than inviting those he views as oppressors and murderers (clearly, all independent media representatives) to a pretentious dialogue, pretending to be constructive and concerned about the media, reported Radar.
