Pavle Cirovic

A force for good where goodness is hard to find

Pavle Cirovic

I am all too familiar with the adage that goes something like this: Be careful what you pray for; the gods  may grant your wish.

But I keep forgetting.

Monday night I was struggling to extract this newspaper’s messages from a plugged-up e-mail system when the following trickled through, marked "Urgent":

Dear Chris

I sent you mail last night, but it seems that the address was wrong, so I am sending the message again. I would like to inform you that my father, Mr. Pavle  Cirovic, died on July 28th, and his funeral was yesterday. You can phone me  home if you wish.

Mira from Kragujevac

The news did not come as a total shock. When I contacted Mr. Cirovic’s  newspaper, Svetlost, in June I was told he had cancer. But he had undergone extensive treatment in Belgrade, and was coming to work every day.

I had called Svetlost (the name means Light) to obtain Mr. Cirovic’s  permission to nominate him for a Knight International Press Fellowship Award.

I had no doubt that the award was richly deserved, but some concern that the public recognition that would come with the award would do Mr. Cirovic and his weekly more harm than good.

The awards are given by the International Center for Journalists, based in Washington. And Washington is not on good terms with Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

In late June, just before the deadline for nominations, Mira wrote to say that her father still had some concerns about his health and was unable to make up  his mind. But, she added, the family had decided that I should go ahead and submit his name.

I dug out the letter I wrote when I first suggested Pavle Cirovic for the Knight Award in 1998. Here is a bit of it:

Mr. Cirovic is manager of Svetlost, one of the major Serbian weeklies  published outside of Belgrade. He also heads Local Press, an association of about 23 regional non-daily newspapers and magazines.

My daughter Martha and I visited Svetlost for about four days in January, and I talked with Mr. Cirovic in March when I attended the annual meeting of Local  Press in Niksic, Montenegro. He is an extremely gracious host, a polite and  thoughtful listener, and a manager who clearly inspires the affection and confidence  of the people he works with.

On the streets of Kragujevac in early 1998, Pavle Cirovic, left, with Martha Braithwaite, Chris Braithwaite, and Pavle's daughter Mira.

His paper has a colorful history. It was founded in 1935 but was an opposition paper (in those days that meant you opposed the King) and was shut down by the police after 16 issues. It published through the Second World War as a Partisan paper. After that it published under four decades of Communist rule.

Mr. Cirovic joined the company in 1973 as an attorney. The workers elected  him manager in 1988. In 1989, Mr. Cirovic said, the paper came out from under  party control and set off in its own editorial direction. But he said it was  critical of the Milosevic government, and on September 2, 1996, the Socialist  Party took the paper over and fired Mr. Cirovic.

The paper's staff occupied Svetlost's office in protest until, after  40 days, the police threw them out, too.

In the meantime Mr. Cirovic had founded a new company and, with his original crew, started publishing a new Independent Svetlost in a crummy industrial  building on the outskirts of town. (Kragujevac might most kindly be described as the Detroit of Serbia. Its big Zastava plant which used to turn out a couple  of hundred thousand Yugo cars a year has pretty much closed down, so there are a lot of auto workers on the street. Some of them sell Svetlost on the  sidewalks every Wednesday night.)

The Milosevic forces continued to put out the party line in Svetlost.  But the upstart independent kept most of the readers and advertisers, despite harassment of its workers and its advertisers by the "financial police."

Mr. Cirovic challenged the party's action in court, arguing the case himself. He lost, and appealed to the Supreme Court in Belgrade. After 17 months he won a decision that the Socialist Party's actions were "denied."

In March 1997 Independent Svetlost and its original staff moved back into the downtown headquarters and resumed publishing Svetlost as they left off, an independent newspaper.

When NATO intervened to halt the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Kragujevac was a target of NATO's bombs because its Zastava plant is also said to produce weapons.

When NATO took out the bridges over the Danube River, Svetlost lost  access to the presses in the northern city of Novi Sad where it was printed. It switched to a smaller format and used the small, sheet-fed presses in its own basement print shop.

Among the victims of the NATO bombing is Serbia's struggling independent press. When bombs are falling, it's easy for a government to attack its critics as  enemy sympathizers, and Milosevic has moved harshly against the independent  media.

Of all the journalists I met across the countries of former Yugoslavia, Pavle  Cirovic was the one I most respected. Tall, handsome, he carried himself with a deliberation that suggested he would not be an easy man to steer.

There was a kind soul and a easy wit under all that personal weight, and I  was very much looking forward to seeing Pavle again soon, in his country or mine.

He was a force for good at a time and in a place where goodness is hard to  find. And it seems a particularly cruel irony that, in taking him with cancer, death should so smugly ally itself with the forces of political cynicism, financial  corruption, and ethnic hatred. — Chris Braithwaite