Worries about freedom of the press

by T.J. 

When Dunja Mijatovic intervenes it is normally in countries where journalists are in real trouble. So, the fact that the Freedom of the Media Representative of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has written to the Slovenian foreign ministry demanding answers in two cases, which have come to her attention, is alarming. They both shine a spotlight on the nasty underbelly of Slovene political life.

The story begins during the general election campaign in 2011. In November Anuska Delic, a journalist for a left-leaning daily, Delo, wrote three stories in which she linked men associated with a neo-Nazi group called Blood and Honour with the then opposition Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) in the small town of Ziri. She also reported about an investigation of the ministry of defence into a small number of Blood and Honour men who were members of the armed forces. “Her articles sent shock waves through the political arena,” says Aljaz Pengov Bitenc, a political commentator who writes an English-language blog under the alias Pengovsky and is sympathetic to Ms Delic.

The winner of the poll on December 4th was Zoran Jankovic, the mayor of Ljubljana, and his new leftist Positive Slovenia party. A few days later pictures were published of Blood and Honour members posing with him, but Ms Delic says that this was done to draw attention away from their SDS links. Mr Jankovic was unable to form a government. Instead Janez Jansa (pictured), the leader of the right-of-centre SDS, which came second in the polls, formed a government. It fell in March 2013 and the baton passed back to Positive Slovenia.

In the meantime Ms Delic was questioned by the criminal police. In April 2013 she was indicted for publishing classified information on the basis of charges made by the Slovene intelligence service (SOVA) and brought by a prosecutor she believes was close to the SDS. The case, she says, is “clearly politically motivated” and revenge for her publishing stories about the “dark side of a big political party”.

If convicted Ms Delic faces up to three years in jail. Oddly, nothing has happened and so the case remains in limbo. According to Pengovsky the reason is clear: “If it was thrown out, all hell would break loose about the judiciary being infested with ‘left-wing fascists’ or some other derivative of SDS propaganda. But if the case went forward it would constitute an implicit admission that the reporting of Ms Delic was spot on and that the documents she used, regardless of their nature, do indeed prove a link exists (or did exist at the time) between the Slovenian army, the SDS and the Neo-Nazi element.”

The SDS rejects this version of events. According to Jernej Pavlin, its spokesman, the party has “nothing to do with Blood and Honour”. He says that Ms Delic and Sebastjan Selan, the former head of SOVA, have been indicted because of leaks and the publication of classified information aimed at discrediting the SDS. This way of operating, he says, is the “common policy of the Yanukovych-style leftist media which dominate Slovenia.”

But Ms Delic has a surprising defender: Mr Jansa. As a freelance journalist, he says, he was arrested in 1988 and then convicted by a Yugoslav military court. The indictment of Ms Delic is “questionable”, he says, because by lumping her together with Mr Selan, “they are actually protecting  the wrongdoing of Mr Selan”.

Mr Pavlin points to the second case over which Ms Mijatovic and the OSCE are looking for answers. The SDS alleges that the police search in January of the house of Dejan Kaloh, a close associate of the party, was politically motivated because he had revealed on his Politikis website an “illegal injunction” to carry out financial investigations of Mr Jansa, who was sentenced to two years in prison for corruption last year. Mr Jansa claims his whole trial was a political set-up and is currently appealing his conviction.

According to Reporters Without Borders, a lobby group, Slovenia ranks 34th in the world when it comes to press freedom, just behind Britain. Yet what is happening in Slovenia is alarming. Fear of prosecution leads to self-censorship by journalists. /economist