LOCAL PRESS

Pristina “won’t get dial code until it meets obligations” (Tanjug)
Pristina has failed to meet its obligations under the telecommunications agreement and will not be able to get a dialing code until it does. The Serbian Government’s Office for Kosovo and Metohija said this on Tuesday, stressing that it would be a code for a geographic area in Serbia and not a “country” code. “The agreement on telecommunications, which was signed in Brussels on August 25, clearly explains that Kosovo is not getting an area code for a country. It is Serbia which is getting another dialing code for a geographic area inside Serbia, which will be used together with +381 for the territory of Kosovo and Metohija as a code for a geographic area,” the Office told Tanjug. These comments came after Austria filed a request on behalf of Pristina asking the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to allocate a dial code for Kosovo.
Albanians block the street leading to the Orthodox Church in Djakovica (RTS, Novosti)
Tens of people have blocked the entrance of the Orthodox Church in Djakovica, while the police erected iron barricades to allow the entry of Serb pilgrims in the church to celebrate Christmas.
Albanians from Djakovica are opposing the return of Serbs who once participated in the Kosovo war. The protesters are being stopped by Kosovo police and special units are also seen observing the protesters. The bus carrying the pilgrims is expected to reach Djakovica very soon, while the Kosovo Police Special Units have surrounded the church. KosovaPress has reported that as a result of Kosovo police intervention and the objection by citizens, one protester was arrested. Following the intervention, police has managed to remove the protesters from the church entrance.
Displaced Serbs from Djakovic could not visit the monastery for the past two years and mark the Orthodox Christmas as some of the local Albanians oppose their return. Last year and the year before buses with the displaced Serb pilgrims were stoned. Djakovica was once a home to 12,000 Serbs, while today only four Serbian nuns still live here.

SNS, SPS discuss steps for Serbia’s future (Tanjug)
The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and the SPS-PUPS-JS coalition agreed Tuesday future steps to take together in taking reforms further, made a deal to run their candidates in the provincial and local elections independently of each other and said that that the stability of the country was the most important thing at the moment. The meeting, which lasted about an hour, was held at the headquarters of the Progressives and was attended by the parties’ leaders and senior officials. The SNS leader Aleksandar Vucic told at a press conference after the meeting that they talked about plans and coordination of ideas concerning Serbia’s future. “We felt that it would be good to ensure political stability on the party level once again, now that a year and a half has passed since the start of the work of this Government,” said the prime minister.

With NATO-members around it, can Serbia remain neutral? (B92, Danas)
This year, another Serbian border could become a border with a NATO member-state. If the Montenegrin Assembly accepts the invitation from the Alliance, out of Serbia’s neighbors only Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) will be outside it. This raises the question of how it could affect Serbia’s position. Chairwoman of the Committee on Security of the Serbian Assembly Marija Obradovic says there is no reason for Serbia to give up its policy of military neutrality in 2016, which has been verified by the Assembly. “I do not expect any changes, nor do I expect any tensions within Serbia after the accession to NATO of Montenegro. As we have so far functioned in relation to our other neighbors who are part of NATO, we will continue further with this cooperation. It is up to us to continue to strengthen cooperation with NATO within the IPAPs framework, as well as our cooperation with Russia,” said Obradovic. Editor-in-chief of Danas newspaper Zoran Panovic says that both the East and the West have begun to slowly adjust to the position of Serbia’s neutrality, but warns that it must be sincere in order to survive. “It would be good if the Serbian neutrality was less of a euphemism for a pro-Russian position, and more a real neutrality and if we look at and listen to statements by western officials, I think they are aware that it’s not easy to join NATO, and that the contracts provide sufficient room for maneuver that Serbia has with that Alliance,” said Panovic. Political analyst Djordje Vukadinovic is certain that the topic of NATO will be much more present in Serbia this year than before. “This effect and that picture, this impression of a white spot, I won’t say, ‘stain’, on the NATO carpet will be politically and psychologically more present. What has been under the carpet, where that topic had been pushed in the previous years, is coming back – that’s more than clear. Montenegro’s entry shows this symbolically too, and I expect more pressure to join on B&H, that is, on Republika Srpska, and then, indirectly, on Belgrade,” said Vukadinovic. He estimates that the tactic of the Alliance will be to gradually pull Serbia into its structure, while Russia’s tactic will be to raise alarm “among parts of the public opinion” against joining NATO.
REGIONAL PRESS

Vucic confirms he will attend RS Day ceremony (Bosna danas)
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has confirmed he will attend ceremony marking of Republika Srpska (RS) Day on 9 January in Banja Luka, despite the fact this holiday was declared unconstitutional by the Bosnian and Herzegovina (B&H) Constitutional Court. Vucic told reporters today that he spoke on phone with member of B&H Presidency Mladen Ivanic adding it was “regular communication.” He stressed that Serbia does not interfere in B&H’s internal relations. “We just want to preserve full stability of B&H, RS and the region. That is our primary interest,” Vucic said. He said that, as President of the Serbian government, he highly respects RS President Milorad Dodik, RS Prime Minister Zeljka Cvijanovic and that he considers them friends.
“I will not interfere in the internal political relations in RS and B&H, because (Dragan) Covic, (Vjekoslav) Bevanda. Bakir (Izetbegovic) and (Denis) Zvizdic are my friend as well,” Vucic said.

Ivanic-Vucic: To continue with the excellent relations between the RS and Serbia (Klix)
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and the member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) Presidency Mladen Ivanic agreed that relations between B&H and Serbia are improving and that the cooperation should be stimulated, especially in the economy sector, with special emphasis on military industry and tourism. Ivanic and Vucic agreed that the excellent relations between Serbia and Republika Srpska (RS) should be continued, and that they also represent an important contribution to the stabilization of the political situation in B&H. It was agreed that the two officials meet in Belgrade in the near future to discuss further forms of cooperation, aiming to improve the political situation in the region.

George Soros plans to topple Milorad Dodik this year (Bosna danas)
Overthrowing Republika Srpska (RS) President Milorad Dodik and his Government is high on the agenda of US billionaire George Soros for 2016, according to some media. Soros has a list of 10 targets around the world for this year, according to Infowars website. “Soros is backing a themed revolution for the RS and Republic of Serbia. The RS President, Milorad Dodik, is threatening to declare independence from the Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). Dodik has the backing of the Serbian Government as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin. Soros has decided to pull out all the stops to overthrow the Serbian government in Belgrade and the RS Government in Banja Luka and thus ensure compliant and anti-Russian governments take over power in both republics,” website writes. According to the website, this is second of ten Soros’ goals for this year. This article is immediately translated and published in many Serbian and RS media. The RS President Dodik repeatedly claimed that there is a plan by international community to topple him and his Government. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic also said recently he was informed by foreign diplomats about this plan.

State police raid Pavlovic Bank looking for evidence against Dodik (Bosna danas)
Director of Pavlovic Bank in Bijeljina Ruzica Jankovic said that the police inspectors of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) searched the headquarters of the Bank today seeking information in relation with the loan to the Republika Srpska (RS) President Milorad Dodik.
“The reason for their visit is the same as previous time, except that this time they were looking for additional information and the Bank provided it,” said Jankovic. She said Bank provided all documentation sought by Prosecution. SIPA already raided the Bank within the same investigation on November 18 last year. Dodik, who was then RS prime minister, bought villa in Belgrade neighborhood Dedinje in 2007 for 750,000 Euros, and paid the total amount immediately. He later claimed that he bought it with a loan of Pavlovic Bank. But it was recently discovered that the loan to Dodik in Pavlovic Bank was approved only a year later, on 27 June 2008. It is suspected that Dodik did not have evidence of the origin of the money with which he bought the house. The loan was approved in order to “cover” the origin of the money

Boniak woman given 3-year sentence in US for supporting terrorists (Bosna danas)
A Bosnian and Herzegovina (B&H) immigrant formerly from Illinois has been sentenced to three years in prison for giving money to terror groups in Iraq and Syria. Jasminka Ramic, pleaded guilty in September to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. She is among six B&H immigrants indicted in February for funneling money and military supplies to the Islamic State group and al-Qaida in Iraq. Ramic contributed $700. The other suspects have pleaded not guilty. Husband and wife Ramiz and Sedina Hodzic, and Armin Harcevic, live in St. Louis County. Also accused are Mediha Medy Salkicevic of Schiller Park, Illinois, and Nihad Rosic of Utica, New York. Ramic became a U.S. citizen in 2006. She lived in Rockford, Illinois, before moving to Germany, where she was arrested.
INTERNATIONAL PRESS

Croatia’s Serbs Nervously Await New Govt’s Plans (BIRN)
The incoming Croatian government has vowed to address the country’s troubled relations with neighbour Serbia, which deteriorated last year when Zagreb enthusiastically celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Operation Storm victory over rebel Serbs, to Belgrade’s disgust. Tomislav Karamarko, president of the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, the leading party in the Patriotic Coalition which is expected to form the new government, said on Monday that “Croatia must have good relations with Serbia”. The issue of the celebration of Operation Storm – which caused some 200,000 Serbs to flee Croatia – “must be resolved”, Karamarko insisted. Karamarko said that better relations between the two countries were likely because outgoing Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic was too confrontational. “The policy of confrontation with everyone, being in a quarrel with everyone… isn’t good within the EU and between neighbouring countries. What was done before was not good and cooperation will now be much better,” Karamarko insisted. Operation Storm, however, is not the only troubling issue between Croats and Serbs. The outgoing government’s initiative – based on Croatian minorities legislation – to install bilingual Cyrillic-Latin signs on official buildings in the wartime flashpoint town of Vukovar, which was razed by the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serbian paramilitaries in the war in 1991, sparked a series of protests within the country. Karamarko said that the Vukovar issue was “an open wound” which demands sensitivity.
His partner from the potential future government, the president of the MOST party, Bozo Petrov, also said on Monday that good relations with neighbouring countries are necessary and will result in the security and economic development of Croatia. But prime minister designate Tihomir Oreskovic, in an interview for Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji List, published last Thursday, said that “it’s still not time for Cyrillic in Vukovar”. He blamed the “fresh wounds” from 1991 but added that with time, the Serb Cyrillic script will come to Vukovar, just as the Italian language is used in Croatia’s Istrian peninsula despite the WWII conflict. Questions remains about how the incoming right-wing government will deal with minorities issues – specifically those of Croatia’s Serbs – once they are in power. Veljko Dzakula, president of the Serbian Democratic Forum, told BIRN that the new government “will have more sincere and clear” relations towards the Serb minority than the outgoing government led by Milanovic. “I think that the HDZ’s moves will be more responsible compared to when they were in opposition,” Dzakula said.
“There won’t be so much talking about national minority rights as work being done to improve them,” he added. He also suggested that relations between Zagreb and Belgrade will be better, since both governments come from the same side of the political spectrum and because “Milanovic didn’t want to have any relations with the Serbian government”. Dejan Jovic, a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Political Sciences, told BIRN that the issue of the Serbian minority was ignored during the election campaign last year. “Nevertheless, MOST did advocate a smaller number of MPs, which could affect national minorities’ representatives, while from the Patriotic Coalition, the HSLS [centre-right Croatian Social Liberal Party] in particular, there were comments that national minorities’ representatives should not make declarations about the majority in parliament,” he said.
The Serb minority in Croatia has three representatives in parliament; one of them supported the HDZ and MOST. Jovic said however that any change to election legislation to cut the number of minority MPs would cause a major political row, but this was highly unlikely since it would need the support of two-thirds of MPs. “We have prior experience that when the HDZ is in power, it doesn’t raise issues of this sort; it somehow pushes them into the background. When it is in the opposition, the HDZ insists on the issues of the Cyrillic script, Serbs’ rights, the position of Vukovar,” he said. Jovic said he expected that under a HDZ-led government, there would be no public protests like the anti-Cyrillic demonstrations led by the Headquarters for the Protection of Croatian Vukovar and that Serb minorities were expecting “a less aggressive HDZ when in government”. However, he warned, with conservative nationalist parties in power in both Croatia and Serbia, a “new war with words” could be expected in June, when the new government, if confirmed, could organise a military parade to mark the 25th anniversary of Croatia’s statehood.
Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic has also said that relations between Zagreb and Belgrade could now improve with the election of a new Croatian government. “Maybe the HDZ will be braver in making some moves than the [outgoing government led by Milanovic’s] SDP, because they thought someone could accuse them of not supporting national interests enough,” Dacic said.
Miodrag Linta, head of the Belgrade-based Association of Serbs from the Region, said that all the previous issues will remain despite the promises coming from the new Croatian government.
“Serbia-Croatia relations cannot be relations of mutual respect and trust until there are issues such as the question about the celebration of Operation Storm. For us it was a criminal act, while for the Croats it was an act of liberation,” Linta told BIRN. He also cited the issues of the remaining missing persons from the 1990s war and the prosecution of war crimes. “Bearing all this in mind, I don’t expect the substantial improvement of relations,” he said. Aleksandar Popov, director of the Novi Sad-based Centre for Regionalism think tank, told BIRN that it remains to be seen in the coming months how relations between Serbia and Croatia will develop now under the new administration in Zagreb. “If this was a bit more moderate version of the HDZ, I would say relations with Serbia could improve,” Popov said. However he raised concerns that HDZ party leader Karamarko could be a hostage of his own right-wing affiliations in terms of relations with Serbia and with Serbs within Croatia.
Serbia: Independent media increasingly targeted as spies (indexoncensorship.org)
In November 2015, a Belgrade tabloid began targeting independent media outlets by labelling them as “foreign spies”. Mapping Media Freedom correspondent Mitra Nazar interviews the editors in the firing line
It was a Wednesday morning in early November when investigative journalist Slobodan Georgijev opened Informer, one of Serbia’s notorious tabloids. He had just arrived at his office, the newsroom of Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), one of Serbia’s few independent media outlets. When he turned the page he was shocked by what he saw; a picture of his own face amongst two others, in an article calling three media outlets known for critical reporting of the Serbian government, including BIRN, “foreign spies”. “It was funny and unpleasant at the same time,” Georgijev recalled, speaking to Index on Censorship. “Funny because I knew that this is just a campaign by Informer to undermine the credibility of independent journalists.” More importantly, he had begun worry about his own safety. “It’s also unpleasant because you never know how people will interpret such defamations.” Several independent media houses — including BIRN, as well as Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK) and Center for Investigative Journalism Serbia (CINS) — have alleged that pro-government tabloids like Informer are running a smear campaign against them. The first major incident followed the publication of a story about the cancellation of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic’s vacation in August 2015. Informer published an article saying that Vucic was forced to cancel his two day vacation in Serbia due to reporters from BIRN and CINS allegedly booking a room next to his. The same newspaper also wrote that BIRN and CINS were meeting with European Union representatives on a weekly basis to plan to bring down the government. “We are basically accused of being financed by the EU to work against our government,” Branko Cecen, director of CINS, told Index on Censorship. Cecen, like Georgiev, was also pictured and called a foreign spy in Informer. “Expressions like ‘foreign mercenaries’ and ‘joint criminal activity against their own state’ have been used.” Informer newspaper is openly affiliated with the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and has frequently been accused of political bias in favour of the party and the prime minister. CINS, KRIK and BIRN have long reported on what they see as a slew of regular negative articles about themselves in tabloid newspapers with close ties to the government. There is no doubt that the three news outlets are targets because of their critical reporting on the government. One of BIRN’s stories revealed a contract the Serbian government had signed with the national carrier of United Arab Emirates, Etihad Airways, to take over its state-owned counterpart Air Serbia. The deal had been financially damaging for Serbia, which was kept from the public until BIRN obtained and published the contract. Another story investigated alleged corruption concerning a project for pumping out a flooded coal mine. BIRN found out that Serbia’s state-owned power company had awarded a contract to dewater the mine to a company whose director is a close friend of the prime minister.
The coal mine revelations led to an angry speech about BIRN by Vucic on national television saying: “Tell those liars that they have lied again(.” He also attacked the EU delegation in Serbia for being involved in discrediting the government by financing BIRN. “They got the money from Davenport and the EU to speak against the Serbian government,” the prime minister said, naming Michael Davenport, the head of the EU delegation in Belgrade. BIRN’s editor-in-chief Gordana Igric told Index on Censorship she sees a resemblance to Serbia’s difficult nineties. “This reminds me of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, a time when the prime minister also had a prominent role and critical journalists and NGOs were marked as foreign mercenaries,” she said. “What’s happening in Serbia today makes you feel sad and confused.” Independent journalists find the path that the prime minister is taking alarming. Some compare him with the Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or the Russia’s Vladimir Putin. According to Cecen, the level of freedom of expression is at the lowest level since the time of strongman Milosevic. “There is an aggressive campaign against anybody and anything criticizing the prime minister and his policies”, he said. “The prime minister has taken over most media in Serbia, especially national TV networks, but also local ones. His small army of social media commentators is terrorizing the internet. It is quite bleak and frustrating.” Regardless of Vucic’s verbal attacks towards the EU delegation, Serbia has opened the first two chapters in its EU membership negotiation in December 2015. This represents a big step towards eventual membership of the European Union. But the latest progress report on Serbia (November 2015) says the country needs to do much more in terms of fighting corruption, the independence of the judiciary and ensuring media freedom. “The concern over freedom of expression is always expressed in these reports,” Cecen said. “But we see no influence of such reports since situation with media and freedom of expression is deteriorating daily.” Cecen is disappointed in the European Union’s support for independent media in Serbia and finds that EU officials show too much support for the Serbian government and the prime minister. After he had seen his own face in the paper, Georgiev picked up the phone and called up Informer’s editor-in-chief Dragan Vucicevic to ask for a better picture in the next paper. Georgiev jokes about it and clearly doesn’t let accusations and threats hold him back. “People around me are making jokes”, he said. “They call me a foreign mercenary, an enemy of the state.” Georgiev pressed charges for defamation against Informer. “We are living in a state of constant emergency,” he continued, concerned about the state of press freedom in his country. “Serbia is not like Turkey. But it goes very fast in that direction.”