On the administrative crossing Bela Zemlja – Konculj, the clerks of the Kosovo customs seized and threw in the trash bin the entire printing, i.e. 3,000 copies, of the “Jedinstvo” weekly, aimed at the readers in the Kosovsko Pomoravlje region. It is the only paper in the Serbian language that is published in the Province, and printed in central Serbia. The employees of this weekly have already had similar problems, but this is the first case of rude and ruthless destruction of the entire printing.
Director of the publishing company “Panorama”, which publishes the “Jedinstvo” weekly, Svetozar Vlahovic has assessed that at issue was a drastic violation of one of most important human rights – right of information, and reminds that this weekly has been in existence for more than 70 years in these parts of Kosovo and Metohija.
“It is not just the deprivation of the right of information, but also great pressure on the remaining Serb population in the Province. It is torture, and targeted this time was the ‘Jedinstvo’, which owns facilities in the very center of Pristina, from which we had been evicted and expelled. Now occupying those facilities is the Kosovo Government, and the paper is printed in Serbian towns, because there are no Serb printing houses in Kosmet. To make the irony harder, we are now deprived of right to distribute the papers in Serb environments in the Province”, concluded Svetozar Vlahovic.
The latest gesture reveals the intent of the Pristina authorities to keep the Serbs in media darkness, but also the determination to ruthlessly eliminate everything of Serb origins. The “Jedinstvo” is review that mostly reports on the difficult life of Serbs in various parts of Kosovo and Metohija, and its journalists are rare or even only guests of the Serbs that are forgotten in some parts of the Province.
The administrative crossing Bela Zemlja, located on the major road Gnjilane-Bujanovac, is used daily and without problems by Pristina distributors to transport the daily press directed to the Albanians who live in Bujanovac and Presevo. But, the only Serb paper is not allowed even once a week to find those for whom it is the only source of information about what is going on in other Serb communities in Kosmet, and which cannot be bought on newsstands.