TV Anchors’ Suspension Prompts Croatian Protests

NGOs, politicians and intellectuals staged a protest in the Croatian capital Zagreb and issued complaints after a news anchor on Croatian Television’s Sunday evening news was suspended on Tuesday, December 20, over a controversy caused by the broadcasting of a TV piece about the fall of the town of Vukovar in 1991.

News anchor Zoran Sprajc's superiors at HTV, editor in chief Bruno Kovacevic and HTV's director Josip Popovac, suspended him publicly.

On November 18 this year, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar into the hands of former Yugoslav Army and Serbian forces in 1991, HTV broadcast an investigative piece in which an HTV journalist aired a recorded telephone conversations between then Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, who was in Zagreb, and then commander of Croatian forces in Vukovar, army brigadier Mile Dedakovic.

In that conversation, Tudjman refuses Dedakovic's requests to withdraw civilians and children from Vukovar.

"I remind you,” Dedakovic says in the phone conversation, “ there are two thousand children in the city, what are we going to do with them?" 

Tudjman replied that "any kind of withdrawal is out of question".

The HTV piece rekindled an old controversy as to whether Tudjman and the then Croatian government sacrificed Vukovar for such aims as the international recognition of Croatia. Ever since the fall of Vukovar on 18th November 1991, a bitter controversy has continued over  whether Vukovar could or couldn't be defended, and if Tudjman decided to sacrifice the city and it's people to show the world how destructive Serbian forces could be while attacking Croatia.

Right wing Croatian politicians responded angrily to the HTV piece, with a Croatian TV journalist receiving death threats and demands for his removal from the station.

As a result, the HTV programme council launched an investigation into the piece, and criticized Zoran Sprajc, who had allowed broadcasting of it.

On Sunday, prior to  his suspension, he responded to this criticism sharply and publicly on-air, saying that "we published the controversial piece on the anniversary of the fall of Vukovar because it seemed logical to us to publish it on that day specifically.”

Sprajc added that the Tudjman-Dedakovic conversation had already been published six years previously, and no complaints had been forthcoming.

Following Sprajc’s suspension protests followed. Former Croatian president Stjepan Mesic stated that "HTV should be a public information service, not the polygon for paranoid constructions of frustrated personalities".

A group of reputable intellectuals and writers requested "the immediate replacement of HTV chief editor Bruno Kovacevic".

The Croatian journalists’ association criticized the suspension, and human rights watchdog Documenta expressed "deep concern with the persecution of journalists because of their broadcasting of the truth."