Crackdown on Serbian Media Spurs Protests

Thousands of Serbs opposed to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic rallied Saturday to protest the latest move against independent media--one that left a major regional broadcaster without its main transmitter.

Nearly 10,000 people marched through the streets of the southern city of Kraljevo, chanting slogans against Milosevic and his ruling Socialist Party and demanding that the station be allowed to resume normal broadcasts.

Late Friday, four men from the Telecommunications Ministry removed the main transmitter of Radio Television Kraljevo, operated by the opposition-run municipal government in Kraljevo, about 75 miles south of Belgrade.

The nighttime raid enraged the local population. In Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, the leading opposition Democratic Party called for an “urgent and efficient action” to defend stations operated by opposition-controlled municipal governments.

The equipment was taken away from the communications tower on Mt. Goc, near Kraljevo, from which the station covered a wide area of central and southern Serbia populated by more than 1 million people. Serbia is the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

The station still has one smaller transmitter, in downtown Kraljevo, that can reach only a quarter of that audience.

A statement from the Telecommunications Ministry said its inspectors “removed the transmitter of Radio Television Kraljevo . . . because it did not have license to broadcast” from the facility.

The federal government in Belgrade has closed or restricted operations of seven regional stations in the past week. Serbia’s information minister, Aleksandar Vucic, blasted non-government media Saturday for being “pro-American” and “receiving donations from Western countries with the sole aim to destroy Serbia as an independent and free state.”

Vucic, a member of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party allied with Milosevic’s Socialists, reiterated that all media without the required licenses would be shut down. But he declined to spell out what steps broadcasters must take to obtain licenses.

Also Saturday, about 1,000 people protested for a third consecutive day in the southeastern town of Pirot, where a similar, opposition-run local station was shut down Thursday. The station’s journalists have set up a makeshift, open-air studio.

When opposition parties won municipal elections in Serbia’s main cities in 1996, they took control of many local outlets. New local elections are due this year, and Milosevic apparently wants to make sure that his opponents have no way of spreading their message.