Pressrelease Radio B92 Amsterdam, April 2, 1999

Sound of B92 Banned

Government officials have shut down radio B92 - silencing the last independent voice in Serbia. In the early hours of Friday morning, April 2, police officers arrived to seal thestation's offices, and ordered all staff to cease work andleave the premises immediately.
A court official accompanied the police. He delivered a decision from the government-controlled Council of Youth to the station's manager of 6 years - Sasa Mirkovic - that he had been dismissed. The council of youth replaced Sasa Mirkovic with Aleksandar Nikacevic, a member of Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, thus bringing B92 under government control.

The ban on B92 is the latest in a series of crackdowns on free media in the past week. The wave of media repression has resulted in the closure of a large number of members of the B92-led independent broadcasting network - ANEM, and all independent press. The prominent independent Albanian-language newspaper and radio station Koha ditore was also closed down last week, as have been all other independent media in Kosovo, including Radio 21 since March24.

Since the launch of B92 news broadcasts on the web last Wednesday its site has had some 15 million visitors. Support sites such as http://helpb92.xs4all.nl report 16,000 visitors per day. Local radio stations across Europe have been re-broadcasting b92 audio signal from the Internet.

B92 is the leading independent broadcaster in Yugoslavia, and established the national re-broadcasting network of 35 radio and 18 television stations - ANEM - in 1996. The station was due to celebrate its 10th anniversary this May.