Newspaper Arsonist Strikes Again in Montenegro

A van owned by the Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti was torched on Saturday in a school carpark in the capital, Podgorica, police stated.

This was the third attack in a month on vehicles belonging to the daily. None of the perpetrators have been found, nor have motives for the attacks been established.

Saturday’s attacker poured gasoline on the van and then set it on fire.

The management of Vijesti said it was a similar attack to those done earlier, and the arsonist was probably the same person involved in the two previous attacks.

“If the authorities are not capable of doing something about these attacks, someone needs to step down," the editor-in-chief of Vijesti, Mihailo Jovovic said, on Sunday.

The attacks on cars of belonging to Vijesti began in July when unknown perpetrators poured gasoline over two vehicles and set them on fire in a parking lot beside the building of the National Security Agency.

Ten days later, in another part of town in the same way a third vehicle was burned.
 
Police still haven’t found any of the perpetrators, fuelling management claims that the attacks were politically motivated.

Police last week said they were still searching for those behind July’s attacks.

“We will continue to collect evidence and the investigation is still ongoing,” Ekan Jasavic, head of department for arson in the police, told Balkan Insight.

Zeljko Ivanovic, executive director of Vijesti, said the newpaper’s management has no new information about the investigation.

Contacts and exchanges of information with the police had lasted for a week after the arson sttacks but they hadn’t heard from the police since then.

Ivanovic called the attacks a politically motivated crime – the latest in a series of attacks on the newspaper and its staff over the past few years.

“It is clear that this is a purely political criminal act and that this [the orders] came from the top of the political pyramid of Montenegro,” Ivanovic told Balkan Insight.

The director of Vijesti was himself a victim of an attack in September 2007 when he was beaten up after leaving a restaurant in Podgorica where staff had been celebrating the newspaper’s tenth anniversary.

Police arrested two men in connection with this assault. Courts later sentenced them to a year in prison but the motives for the attack were never made ​​clear.

Mihailo Jovovic, the editor-in-chief, and a photographer, Boris Pejovic, were later assaulted in 2009 by none other than the mayor of Podgorica, Miomir Mugosa, and his son, Miljan Mugosa.

The two men attacked them when they were working on a story about the mayor’s car being parked illegally in front of a cafe.

In September 2010, several editors and directors of Vijesti said they had received threatening letters.

After a series of articles on a tobacco factory in the northern town of Mojkovac in February 2011, Oliver Lakic, a reporter from Vijesti, said he received threats over the telephone.

The director of Montenegrin police, Veselin Veljovic, said he suspected the earlier attacks on the vehicles were “the isolated act of an irresponsible individual”.

The President of Montenegro, Filip Vujanovic, and Prime Minister Igor Luksic have “strongly condemned” the torching of the newspaper’s cars.

At one stage Luksic proposed organizing a meeting with the editorial chiefs of the paper and with the heads of police.

But Ivanovic refused to take part. “We have no reason to meet Veljovic. He needs to do his job and find the arsonists,” he said.

“Those who attack Vijesti don’t like what we write and what we write about them,” he added.

“We write about organized crime in Montenegro, which is directly connected with Milo Djukanovic, which means that the orders for these attacks came from the top,” Ivanovic continued.

Former Prime Minister Djukanovic has been regularly accused of having connections with organized crime – charges he has strongly denied.

After the “terrorist attacks” on its vehicles, as the Vijesti management called it, a number of journalists, professors and NGO activists from Montenegro urged the authorities to urgently find the perpetrators and pointed the finger at Djukanovic.

In a statement signed by about 30 people from various sectors of public life, they said that if the case was not sorted out, “it will be clear that behind this attack are powerful monopolistic circles led by Milo Djukanovic, which have been intimidating the independent media for a long time.

“In this way a system is being created in Montenegro which is suffocating the professional media,” the statement added.

Montenegro’s governing Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, still headed by Djukanovic, has declined to comment on the accusations or on the conduct of the police probe.

“We are notified that police are working intensively on this case,” a party spokesperson told Balkan Insight.

Opposition leaders meanwhile have joined in the chorus of condemnations and accusations.

The head of the Movement for Change, Nebojsa Medojevic, described the burning of the vehicles as a terrorist act.

“It’s clear that this is another message from the mafia, which has absolute power in this country,” Medojevic said.

Montenegro’s record on freedom of the media is patchy. Indeed, when it comes to freedom of the media, Montenegro comes last out of all the former Yugoslav republics, according to the France-based NGO Reporters Without Borders.

In its last report in November 2010, Reporters Without Borders placed Montenegro in 104th place, next to Angola and Nigeria.