Journalists Attacked During Karadzic Protest

Belgrade _ Journalists in Serbia are demanding urgent action from the state after reporters were attacked by protesters during a demonstration against Radovan Karadzic’s arrest.

“As far as I’m concerned, professionally, as a person, morally - this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. We’re now speaking publicly, we’ve been doing this job a long time, we’ve gone through all kinds of things. It’s never reached the stage, not even in the darkest days under [Slobodan] Milosevic, that I’ve feared for the lives of people on Belgrade streets, and I’m on the verge of deciding, as editor-in-chief, to tell them not to film, we won’t report, we won’t film simply to avoid someone getting lynched,” the director of Serbia’s FoNet news agency, Zoran Sekulic, told Serbia’s B92 network.

A cameraman for B92 television, Bosko Brankovic suffered a fractured leg, when he was attacked during the protest near the Turkish Embassy.

Brankovic was attacked when he tried to film the mob assaulting a FoNet photographer, it has emerged.

The demonstrators, mostly coming from nationalist organisations and helped by the Serbian Radical Party, held their third protest in as many days against the arrest of former Bosnian Serb President and top war crimes fugitive, Radovan Karadzic.

Firecrackers were thrown outside the Turkish Embassy and in front of President Boris Tadic's office, where they shouted insults.

It came as the Serbian Radical Party announced on its website that protests against the arrest of Radovan Karadzic will take place daily, but at the same time denying it is the organiser. Read more: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/12038/

According to reports, journalists came under attack during Wednesday’s protests as well with reporters from a Bosnian news agency and a Sarajevo television crew attacked by demonstrators.

Karadzic has until later on Friday to appeal his extradition to The Hague War Crimes Tribunal.