OSCE seeks probe after journalists' memorial falls 9th time
The plaque to Radio Pristina reporters Djuro Slavuj and Ranko Perenic was torn down on July 29, the ninth time since 2012. The OSCE wants an investigation; the union promises a tenth plaque.
The OSCE Mission in Kosovo has condemned the removal of a memorial plaque to Radio Pristina journalists Djuro Slavuj and Ranko Perenic, and asked the competent institutions for a swift and effective investigation, for accountability, and for measures that would stop the attacks from repeating. The plaque, set on the road between Velika Hoca and Zociste, was pulled down on July 29. That was the ninth time since it went up. The Union of Journalists of Serbia (UNS) says it will put the plaque back a tenth time.
The Mission’s statement carries one line that applies to every memorial of its kind in Kosovo and Metohija.
“Memorials that honour victims and missing persons must be respected and preserved.”
The plaque was installed in 2012, on the fourteenth anniversary of the abduction, by the Union of Journalists of Serbia together with the Association of Journalists of Kosovo and Metohija. In the fourteen years it has stood there, it has been destroyed nine times.
The road it sits on links Velika Hoca with Zociste, the village of the Sveti Vraci monastery. That is the same monastery Slavuj and Perenic set out for in August 1998 and never reached.
What the union said
Zivojin Rakocevic, president of the Union of Journalists of Serbia, said in a statement that the stone was not the real target.
“For the ninth time, a monument to truth and to media freedom has been torn down.”
In the same statement he asked who the people tearing down monuments are, and what kind of community erases every trace of men who worked on the truth. No institution in Kosovo and Metohija has answered that in fourteen years. The union is not backing off.
“We will keep rebuilding it as long as we exist and as long as this profession exists.”
Has anyone been held responsible?
Across nine attacks, police identified a suspect once. Saban Berisa received a suspended sentence of three months in prison and a fine of 200 euros. During proceedings he admitted that he had removed the plaque for ethnic reasons, yet that finding never made it into the verdict.
The omission matters. With the motive left out, the act stays on the books as ordinary damage to property, and the punishment is counted in euros and in months of a suspended term. The other eight attacks produced even less, because no suspect was ever found. That is the record the OSCE request now lands on: eight complaints that went nowhere.
An abduction still unsolved after 28 years
Slavuj and Perenic disappeared on August 21, 1998. They were driving to the Sveti Vraci monastery in Zociste to report on monks who had been kidnapped there. They took a wrong turn, ran into members of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and were never heard from again.
No proceeding, Serbian, Kosovar or international, has established what happened to them. Their remains have never been found and the site of their deaths is unknown. The only physical trace of the two men left on the ground is the plaque that keeps coming down.
The case sits on the list of people still missing from Kosovo and Metohija with almost nothing attached to it, a date and the direction their car was heading. August 21 will mark 28 years since that day. That leaves a little over three weeks, and the union has said it will restore the plaque together with its Kosovo branch. If the work is finished in time, the memorial will meet the anniversary in place for the tenth time since 2012.
