Last Despatches: Serbian TV Workers Killed by NATO Strike

The RTS building after it was bombed by NATO on April 23. Photo: Srdjan Suki/EPA.

Minutes before a NATO missile hit the headquarters of Serbia’s national broadcaster Radio-Television Serbia on April 23, 1999, TV engineer Dragan Sukovic left his offices on the fourth floor of the building to go down into the studio on a mezzanine where the news was being broadcast.

“We felt something that few living people can say they have felt, which is to be at the epicentre of an explosion of a two-ton bomb,” Sukovic told BIRN.

He instantly went into shock: “I don’t know how I managed to snap out of it [and realise] that I was alive. I started running, pulled some people with me, another colleague dragged some others,” he said.

Sukovic recalled how the part of the building that was hit collapsed to the ground floor, creating a slope of debris which some of the staff climbed down to escape.

A total of 16 RTS employees were killed in the NATO air strike. The justification offered by the Western military alliance was that RTS was part of the Yugoslav regime’s communications network and that it was spreading propaganda for Slobodan Milosevic’s war effort in Kosovo.

It is widely believed that Serbia’s political leadership at the time gave an order to RTS director Dragoljub Milanovic to leave the workers in the building, exposing them to the attack.

Nobody from NATO has ever been held accountable for their deaths, and nobody except Milanovic was ever put on trial in Serbia.

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Last Despatches: about the series

BIRN’s Last Despatches series documents some of the 140 reporters and other media workers who were killed during and after the 1990s wars in the Balkans – some of them foreigners who came to the region to cover the conflicts, but most of them citizens of the warring republics.

Some were killed while reporting from the front lines, while others were gunned down in the streets of their hometowns, or murdered in their own offices. Amid the hysteria of nationalist unrest, journalists were seen by some as enemies who reported inconvenient truths.

So far, only one person has been convicted under a final verdict of responsibility for any of these killings – Serb paramilitary boss Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias ‘Captain Dragan’, who was found guilty of an attack in Croatia in which a German journalist died.

The lack of any other convictions shows that impunity for violence against reporters and other media workers has persisted for decades after the Balkan wars ended.

Last Despatches series tells the stories of some of these reporters, and highlights how attempts to secure justice for them have not yet succeeded – mainly because of official negligence or disinterest, or sometimes because their deaths still raise questions about people with connections to the highest levels of power in the Balkans today.

The Last Despatches series is part of BIRN’s Transitional Justice Initiative, co-funded by the Kingdom of The Netherlands and the European Commission.