(HRW/IFEX) – According to HRW, an ethnic Serbian journalist and his driver have been missing for five days, and are feared abducted by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the province of Kosovo. Djuro Slavuj and his driver, Ranko Perinic, both of Radio Prishtina, were last seen in the city of Orahovac on […]
(HRW/IFEX) – According to HRW, an ethnic Serbian journalist and his driver
have been missing for five days, and are feared abducted by members of the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the province of Kosovo. Djuro Slavuj and his
driver, Ranko Perinic, both of Radio Prishtina, were last seen in the city
of Orahovac on Friday, 21 August 1998. According to the Radio Prishtina
office, the two left Orahovac for the nearby town of Malisevo in a blue
Zastava car, but never arrived. The radio station and family members have
not heard from them since.
Slavuj and Perinic are the first ethnic Serbs working for the media to be
reported missing in the six-month Kosovo conflict. During that period,
Serbian police have detained and beaten a number of ethnic Albanian
journalists. On 19 August, Musa Kurhasku, correspondent for the
Albanian-language newspaper “Koha Ditore”, was taken into police custody in
Dakovica, beaten, and then released. He has since gone into hiding (see IFEX
alerts of 26, 21 and 20 August 1998).
HRW condemned such attacks on the media committed by both the Yugoslav
government and the ethnic Albanian armed insurgency. “Although we can not
confirm whether the KLA holds Mr. Slavuj and Mr. Perinic,” said Holly
Cartner, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia
Division, “we remind the
KLA of its obligations under international humanitarian law to protect
civilians and to refrain from taking hostages.”
[For additional information, see the Human Rights Watch website on Kosovo
at: http://www.hrw.org/hrw/campaigns/kosovo98/index.htm]
