After 11 years of broadcasting Pescanik on Radio B92, this cooperation has been put to an end on June 10th 2011.

As editors and authors of this radio show, the two of us believed that, after the recent guest appearance of Kosta Cavoski and Ljiljana Bulatovic on TV B92, this media house had the duty to offer a public apology to the victims, their families and all the viewers who were offended by the guests’ denial of the genocide in Srebrenica and their glorification of war criminals. In Serbia, unfortunately, too many people are sympathetic towards war crimes committed during the wars in the nineties; however, there are not many who, like the two abovementioned guests of the show broadcasted on Monday, during primetime on TV B92, a station with national coverage – glorify war criminals in such a clear, brutal and heartless way.

Together with many citizens of Serbia, we expected the new management of this media house to find a way to apologize for this terrible editorial oversight. However, during the meeting we had yesterday with the director of RTV B92, Manja Grcic, we were twice explicitly told that there was nothing disputable in the guest appearances of Kosta Cavoski and Ljiljana Bulatovic, and that RTV B92 “was not a public service, but a commercial TV station”, and that is could invite whoever it wanted to.

Our attempt to explain that even “commercial media” cannot allow the justification and glorification of genocide and war crimes, was met with scorn.

After this, we believe that further broadcasting of Pescanik on RTV B92 would mean that the two of us, Svetlana Lukic and Svetlana Vukovic, as authors of Pescanik, are indirectly offending the victims of genocide and war crimes, and contributing to further relativization of atrocities committed in the name of the country and the nation that we belong to.

We ask all the people, who think it is a shame that radio show Pescanik no longer exists, for their understanding. This is the price that had to be paid. Otherwise, we would have become accomplices of an editorial policy which tolerates and supports everything that Pescanik has been fighting against all these years.

 
Peščanik.net, 12.06.2011.