ENDLESS TRIALS OF HEADS OF THE SDP VERSUS DIRECTRESS

OF STATE TELEVISION

SLANDERING EACH OTHER

AIM, Sarajevo, December 19, 1995

In the past few days, in Sarajevo, the endless serial of court proceedings between the Acting Directress of RTV, Amila Omersoftic, and four members of the Presidency of the Social Democratic Party of B&H (former communists) has had another of its episode. Directress Omersoftic as one, and Zlatko Lagumdzija, Nijaz Skenderagic, Esad Zgodic and Karlo Filipovic as the other party are appearing in court in double roles. First, Miss Omersoftic sued the SDP for slander and insult of media, after which the quartet from the SDP raised charges against Miss Omersoftic. Apart from these two, at least thirty different court trials connected with this very case have also been brought. According to unofficial data, Directress Omersoftic has sued exactly that many Sarajevans.

In the case Omersoftic vs. SDP, the controversial issue is a statement made by the SDP in March this year concerning the situation in RTV B&H. Namely, in this paper, the SDP described the tendency in RTV to unite business and the editorial functions, the bureaucratic and autocratic mentality based on censorship in managing this house due to which, under direct control of the Directress, a "personnel purge" took place and the best cadre had left both the Radio and Television. The SDP claimed that information and political programs of the RTV were dominated by a single party, that political activities of the opposition parties were ignored, and that RTV B&H had a single-nation personnel structure.

According to the opinion of Directress Omerspahic, however, this statement is full of incorrect data, in order to intentionally "damage the honour and the reputation of the private suer and create a wrong image of her in public, with the aim to remove her from office". Therefore, she brought private charges for slander, but some other things as well.

The accused members of the SDP stated in court that they stood behind everything quoted in the statement and for who knows how many times (namely, this is the fifth hearing already) repeated that according to them, the court was not the right place where the truth of a statement could be established.

"This is not a private affair, but a political process", Vice-President of the SDP, Zlatko Lagumdzija declared, probably referring to the initial private charges that Miss Omerspahic brought against Nijaz Skenderagic, member of the SDP who presented the disputable statement at a press conference. But, in the statement - the SDP was decisive - only general phenomena were indicated, so this was not a matter of personal motives, but of a public good.

At the last hearing, after a rest (which was given because it was cold in the courtroom), parties in the dispute exchanged roles. A trial concerning charges brought against Miss Amila Omersoftic followed, caused by her interview to the magazine "Dani". Miss Omersoftic had said on the occasion that she had chosen those she would sue at random, as if picking the names of the members of the SDP out of a hat, since she had not known who had actually been at the meeting at which the disputable statement had been issued. The members of the SDP understood this as an insult and brought counter charges against the Directress for undervaluation and insult.

"It is true that I said that, but I don't think I insulted anyone by saying it", the Directress says.

To a question of the defence from the first trial, and the prosecution at the second, whether people can be prosecuted because their names were picked out of some hat, Directress Omersoftic answered:

"No, but they must answer for their acts", and then added that she would agree to being "picked out of a hat if she were guilty".

In fact, Miss Omersoftic explained how she had selected these four names from among the leadership of the Social Democratic Party by the fact that they were the first to spring to her mind, since they were always present in public and added that they were randomly chosen samples.

For the sake of information, among these random samples there are two university professors and all four are political and public figures. According to Miss Omersoftic, this is not signifcant, because she says, she "knows very well the methodology according to which one can become a university professor". The Directress of RTV B&H did not explain further, nor how come she had not brought charges against other leaders of the SDP who were even more exposed in public. (Some of them are members of the Program Council of RTV B&H?!)

It is especially interesting that the controversial statement of the SDP has never been published in a program of state RTV. This is the explanation for it:

"The statement arrived unsigned and we did not know whether it was authentic or a forgery. The editors reached a decision that we should stop the statement from broadcasting", the Directress said, adding that only the day after, from the daily "Oslobodjenje", she learnt that the statement was authentic. But, even that was not good enough to have it broadcast on RTV B&H with a day's delay because "I am actually not sure to this very day whether it is a statement of the SDP", Miss Omersoftic says, as well as that she sued members of that party just in order to find out who was slandering her.

And while the court in Sarajevo has been promoted into a service for establishing who, when and why is sitting at sessions of the Presidency of the Social Democratic Party, Directress Omersoftic is publicly reproached for having made a complete chaos since she came to the head of RTV (in spring '94), especially by meddling with the editorial policy, frequent discharges of editors-in-chief, suspensions. The Directress denies anything of the kind and claims that "the full-day RTV program cannot be handled by a single man, even if he wanted to", and pursuant to "the Statute of the house, there are certain issues concerning which editors need not be consulted".

The local public, though, still remembers the conflict between the Directress Omersoftic and the Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic from the beginning of this year, after the Prime Minister had forbidden RTV B&H crews to attend sessions of the Government, explaining that "the management of Television presents half-truths and misinforms the public, calling the opposition parties not to support the Government". After that, at her press conference, the Directress accused the Prime Minister of having violated the Law of the state on information, because he had arbitrarily thrown out and assessed which journalists were (un)eligible. This case was pacified by the ruling Party of Democratic Action since both the Prime Minister and the Directress were high officials of the party, with a public appeal to the "members to settle disputes between them".

The conflict within the party ended after that, and cameras and microphones were admitted into the Government conference room again. But, the process at court is not over yet. Its continution is scheduled for January next year, and to what extent everything is "amusing" is illustrated by the fact that, in the meantime, in this trial, the judge was replaced for the third time already.

SENKA KURTOVIC