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This morning in Belgrade …
The first editor-in-chief and one of the owners and founders of the Danas newspaper, Grujica Spasović, passed away at the age of 70, after a long and serious illness.
Photo: Stanislav MilojkovićSpasovic was the editor-in-chief of Danas from its first issue on June 9, 1997 until 2006.
He graduated from the Belgrade Faculty of Political Science. He started working as a journalist at the Belgrade Susret youth newspaper and continued his career at Večernji novosti.
Since 1980, he has been the editor-in-chief of Omladinske novine. Before joining Borba in 1989, he was editor-in-chief of Duga magazine for a time. After the Milosevic regime took over Borba, he moved to Nasa Borba with most of his companions, and a few years later participated in the founding of Danas, of which he has been editor-in-chief since the first issue.
He went through the list of all its most difficult phases, especially those before the democratic changes of 2000, adhering unswervingly to the path of open, professional and independent journalism.
During the night of October 13-14, 1998, we were simply banned. Then a “punitive expedition” entered the newsroom: some five or six uniformed policemen and a large number of short-haired civilians in leather jackets, led by Deputy Minister of Information Miljkan Karlicic. Who are these people in civilian clothes ?, we ask, and a man in a blue coat says they are members of the MUP … Basically, Karlicic made a decision with Vučić’s firm that we are temporarily banned from working. Ask Director Dušan Mitrović to sign it without reading. He also refused when he read it, “Spasovic explained in an interview.
During the three months of bombing, Grujica Spasovic ended up at the Information Ministry every working day, waiting, as he put it, for the “green light of censorship.”
– I was more often with Aleksandar Vučić and his deputy Radmila Višić. I want to be honest until the end, I had a lot more problems with that Višić than with Vučić. Everything bothered him, he was afraid of everything. That went so far that I once told him that the newspaper would not be published the next day and that I could no longer tolerate this torture and humiliation, Spasović said in one of the recent interviews with Danas.
After “editing” in Danas, he became Serbian ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina and returned to Danas, where he devoted himself to publishing in recent years.
He is the author of the book “Today, Despite Them” (published by Dan Graf), in which he writes about Danas’ first 1,000 days of work.
“I think that today the situation in the media scene is much worse than in the era of the Information Law. Why? Because there is much less plurality: with some exceptions, now almost all the media are under the direct control of Aleksandar Vučić. And not your government or party, but under your personal control. “Such manipulation with the media has not been noticed in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said in an interview with the weekly Vreme two years ago.
The condolence book will open tomorrow (October 27) in the Danas newspaper office, where everyone can register until Friday, October 30.
The place and time of the funeral will be announced later.
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