Serbian Broadcasting Corporation Workers Seek Accountability For Berating Of Students On Air

Serbian Public Broadcasting Service (BETAPHOTO/AMIR HAMZAGIC)

Serbian Broadcasting Corporation employees rallied round the Our Protest informal organization said in a statement on April 21 that they were concerned over the fact that no-one in management had officially addressed them since the beginning of the blockade of the public broadcaster, adding that they demanded accountability for the berating of students on air and the resignations of those responsible.

The statement added that the employees had received no instruction on how to exercise their right to work in this moment of crisis, asking "why is the management committing discrimination by inviting only a smaller portion of employees to work and ignoring the larger number?"

The statement includes a demand for the names to be announced of persons editing news programming since the students began occupying Serbian Broadcasting Corporation buildings and airing the program from another location.

"We demand that the editor in chief of the news desk, Nenad Lj. Stefanovic and his assistants Gorislav Papic and Zoran Stanojevic to answer urgently who penned the text comparing student protest participants to Nazis, which was read in the Dnevnik [central news program] on April 16," the announcement read, demanding the immediate resignation of the author of the text and the editor who signed off on it.

The assembly of Serbian Broadcasting Corporation workers on April 19 sent demands to the management of the public broadcaster among which are the resignations of all editors and journalists who have not followed media laws or the Code of Journalists and allowed untruths and insults against other journalists, students and other citizens to be aired in Dnevnik 2 and other news programming.

Representatives of Belgrade municipality citizen assemblies and veterans have joined the university students who have been blocking the buildings of Serbian Broadcasting Corporation in Belgrade's Takovska Street and Kosutnjak since April 14. Students from Novi Pazar have lent their support to the blockade and came to relieve their Orthodox counterparts who celebrate Easter.