Here’s Why JBB Is Defending JRR From Me

Response from Antena M’s Editor, Darko Šuković, to the Statements Made by the President of the Capital City Assembly, Jelena Borovinić Bojović

Ever since their first attempt to discredit Antena M through Aleksandar Mijajlović’s messages backfired spectacularly, the masterminds behind this orchestrated smear campaign have regrouped and returned to the fray.

It took them precisely five days, the same amount of time my commentary on the Quint’s position regarding this shameful assault on media freedom has been public. So, let’s dismantle this latest attack on me and Antena M, briefly and clearly.

The motives of those pulling the strings, with their obedient journalists and politicians as instruments, could not be more transparent. They aim to pressure the U.S. Ambassador into using her considerable influence over the Prosecutor’s Office to conjure up some case against Antena M and me, something more serious than simple correspondence with Mijajlović.

Beyond that central goal, the President of the Podgorica Assembly has found in this a convenient opportunity to ingratiate herself further with the U.S. Ambassador, using me as her stepping stone. In essence, this is nothing more than a pitiful attempt by subservient media and politicians to earn favor with a Great Power by denouncing a small, independent, and incorruptible Antena M.

That’s the truth of the matter.

Still, Ms. Borovinić Bojović’s latest outburst offers me the chance to note something important. Ambassador Sattler issued a fair and principled statement yesterday regarding this case, one that has rightly outraged every free-minded person, as well as all experts who value human rights and media freedom.

The rest of the Quint remains silent, while the U.S. Ambassador allows the unrepresentative to act as her shield. Yet here lies the essential fact: in recent years, Antena M and I have done more to promote pro-American and pro-European values, in the truest spirit of defending Western ideals, than most of the Quint’s ambassadors who have served in Montenegro over the past decade.

And frankly, Ambassador Rising Reinke would gain far more credibility being commended by Darko Šuković, the man who risked both life and livelihood in the early 1990s, urging Montenegrins not to attack Dubrovnik, than by Jelena Borovinić, then without the Bojović, who at the time was penning letters of support to participants in that Montenegrin disgrace.

Not to mention her little “asterisk” beside the Republic of Kosovo, our neighbor with whom the U.S. shares a particularly close bond. But that, perhaps, is a topic for another day.