Slavko Curuvija

Curuvija, who edited the newspapers "Dnevni Telegraf" and "Evropljanin", was shot 17 times in the head and back by two masked gunmen April 11 outside his Belgrade apartment during the NATO military offensive. He was owner and editor of his newspaper, the first private daily established in Serbia. Curuvija was returning home with his wife at the time of the shooting. He had been repeatedly harassed for his articles critical of the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic and various state-owned newspapers had called him a "traitor".

The daily newspaper "Politika" has alleged that three policemen from the Republic of Srpska (a Bosnian Serb entity) are implicated in Curuvija's death, and that Luka Pejovic, a Montenegrin who was identified as Curuvija's killer by a witness, was innocent. Pejovic was gunned down outside his Belgrade home on 5 December 2000.

It is Sunday and The Bombed One seems more agitated than usual. Slavko Curuvija was killed a couple of hours ago in front of his house.

He wrote some very compromising and raw articles about Milosevic and his lunatic acts. This was one of the few but brave people who stood up and fought.

The Bombed One is right on target.

In a war where who knows how many people are being killed, the murder of 50-year-old renegade newsman Slavko Curuvija really does get my sympathy.

Curuvija, according to The Bombed One and reporters from the former Yugoslav republic, was a great journalist, one who regularly pissed off Slobodan Milosevic.

There was little reaction to this crime in Serbia. That is probably a consequence of fear that something could happen to people if they try to speak up.

For The Bombed One, Curuvija's death is symbolic.

As a publisher and editor, Curuvija had a long history of butting heads with Milosevic, criticizing the Serbian leader's policies, his connection with criminals like Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic, and the ruling party's corruption.

Bit by bit, Milosevic tightened the noose around Curuvija. On October 14, 1998, the Dnevni Telegraf was banned. Then the newsroom was sealed—and everything taken by government thugs—upon passage of a law called The Creation of Special Measures In Conditions of Immediate War Danger and NATO Threats. Curuvija and his editorial team were fined several times.

Then, on March 8, he was sentenced to five months in jail for "disturbing the public."

His appeal was in the works at the time of his death.

Most people who knew him were in a way expecting something like that to happen to him.

The Bombed One, and Serbs like him opposed to Milosevic, lost perhaps what little hope they had of ending the madness.

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Me, I lost a hero I never knew I had.

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April 14, 1999 By all accounts Slavko Curuvija was not a saint. The Serbian publisher and editor had cruised in shady circles, at times even rubbing shoulders with members of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's regime. His personal life was, well, lively. Tall and charismatic, a dapper dresser with a neatly trimmed gray beard, the 50-year-old had a reputation as a serial womanizer. The editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph newspaper crusaded against the corruption and often brutal actions of Milosevic's cronies. To liberals, he was one of the good guys.

So last Sunday, on Orthodox Easter, when masked gunmen pumped seven bullets into his head, a jolt of fear and revulsion hit Belgrade's pro-democracy elite. On Wednesday, despite rumors they would be arrested, more than 2,000 of them -- artists, opposition politicians, journalists -- flocked into downtown Belgrade's sprawling "New Cemetery" to pay respect to one of their own. No one doubted who was behind the assassination. It was a ritual murder, done on a major religious holiday, in front of his wife. It was a message from the regime to people like us that we, too, can end up like that.

There's more than one war being waged in Yugoslavia. Milosevic was fighting on at least three other fronts: war in Kosovo, Montenegro President and elimination of liberal opponents.

Milosevic liberal opposition in Serbia is on the run, either out of the country or underground. "We're virtually dead."-says one of them. Make that literally, in the case of Curuvija. Grief and shock floated through the onlookers, but the overriding emotion was fear. Nobody spoke up in protest.

As long as the war continues, the situation promises only to get worse. The airstrikes have unified most Serbs behind their leader, if only to defend their country.

Ironically, the only faint source of hope comes from a man who once betrayed them. Vuk Draskovic, an eloquent speaker who marched at the front of the pro-democracy protests of 1996, but later meekly joined Milosevic's ruling coalition, gave a surprising speech condemning the killing of Curuvija on his television station Tuesday. "Those who ordered and committed the murder of Slavko Curuvija have pointed on Serbia a weapon more powerful than all of NATO's bombs and missiles," he thundered, warning of a civil war. At the funeral, some people wondered what Draskovic's speech really meant. Only one thing was certain. "Man, he has balls," exclaimed a journalist.

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Slavko Ćuruvija, born August 9, 1949 in Zagreb.

After graduating from University of Belgrade's Faculty of Political Sciences, Ćuruvija found employment as a business secretary and PR assistant at Mašinogradnja company in Belgrade. He soon became the contributor to Zagreb's Danas weekly magazine, as well as to the Social Research Center (Centar za drustvena istrazivanja).

Between 1984 and 1986, he worked as an analyst in Federal Interior Secreteriat and State Security.

In 1986, Ćuruvija joined the staff of Borba.

He stayed with the daily paper until 1994 while regularly contributing to Komunist, Vjesnik, NIN, Večernji list, Nedelja, Pobjeda, TV Belgrade, TV Politika, TV Sarajevo, and some foreign publications.

In 1994, after the regime's unofficial takeover at Borba, Ćuruvija, along with many other staffers decided to leave the daily. While some of them quickly reconvened to form Nasa borba, Ćuruvija took another career route, hooking up with Momčilo Đorgović to create Nedeljni telegraf - a weekly tabloid newspaper. In 1996, the duo founded Dnevni telegraf - Serbia's first privately owned daily in more than 50 years.

In 1998, Ćuruvija additionally started a bi-weekly magazine Evropljanin where he gathered some notable names of Serbian journalism such as Aleksandar Tijanić, Ljiljana Smajlović, and Dragan Bujosevic.

Both Curuvija-owned publications undeniably benefited from his access to Mirjana Marković, wife of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. Ćuruvija's common-law wife Branka Prpa who was with him at the time of his murder attaches less significance to this friendship saying that it "revolved around conversations that many other journalists engaged in with Mira Marković hoping to manipulate her into revealing more than she'd originally planned". Prpa went on to add: "However, I think they became the ones being manipulated as the time went on".

Dnevni telegraf was banned on October 14, 1998 under a special new decree.

Furious with the new developments, Ćuruvija demanded to see Mira Marković and a meeting was arranged at her party's (Yugoslav Left) offices during the week Dnevni telegraf was banned as the new Information Law was being prepared. The meeting, reportedly quickly turned into a heated exchange.

Curuvija was shouting: "What the hell do you think you're doing. If you continue down this crazy path, you can be sure you'll all be hanging off lamp posts in Terazije".

The culmination of the day-long trial was a crippling DM350,000 fine.

Aleksandar Tijanic:

"A hired assassin killed him. A more interesting thing is who ordered his murder. I don't know who ordered it, but I know who his greatest enemies were. They were: court, the court jester and the court communists. Slavko had very powerful enemies. Slavko originated from Lika and he endured all of that stoically. He believed that Milosevic would fall soon. I claimed that he would hold power for years. I didn't notice his fear. He had two wrong assumptions. The first one was that this regime was dying. The second was that somebody from high circles would warn him in the case of a danger. It couldn't be expected. Such decisions are usually reached in a very narrow circle and there is no one to warn you. "

-He was mostly reproached because of your articles. Were you afraid?

"Both of us were threatened. A day before Slavko was murdered, I received twenty phone calls; a male voice repeated the same sentence: You are an imperial agent. The next day, Slavko was dead. When the threats began I allowed him to inform me if my articles endangered his newspapers.
We talked twice about it and I suggested that we should make a pause. He refused it. He said that it was our job and that we had to do it. Once, he was visited by a high official of the Socialist Party of Serbia, who told him that I had to stop writing such articles. If not, they would kill me.
Slavko called me immediately and told me the name of that man. He is director of a plant. I asked Slavko if that man precisely said that they were going to kill me and not him. Slavko said that I was the one. I told Slavko that he was to decide whether my articles were going to be published or not, but that I would write them in any case. He decided that we should go on. Later events showed that he was more important for them."

"The first anniversary of his death made a greater sensation than the very murder. Many things were accepted silently because of the war."

Slavko Curuvija was killed not because he had fought for the freedom of his newspapers and for the media freedom, but because he had fought for freedom within a society composed of deceits, failures, hallucinations and crime.
"He was killed because somebody had estimated that the Serbs' habits of speaking and thinking should be broken."

Slavko's murder is the first real political murder in Serbia and the beginning of the public degeneration of the system. With his life, Slavko ransomed the lives of several other journalists.

"He who forgets that Slavko was murdered not because of his newspapers, but because of the freedom in Serbia, becomes an accomplice in a continual crime the end of which cannot be seen."