News-from-the-media

06. 04. 2023.

Author: Dragana Bjelica

UNS investigation on murdered journalists

Death notice for jusuf cehajic or when news of death is 38 days delayed

Nada Cehajic witnessed the death of her husband Jusuf (50). In Vukovar, under the shelling, she had no way to inform her son Sead, who was studying in Novi Sad, and her daughter Ksenija in Belgrade. After Jusuf’s death, there was no reason for her to return to the basement of the house where they found a shelter. She continued to work in the Vukovar hospital and to live there for the next month.

More than 30 years later, Sead Cehajic would tell UNS that his mother was his hero because until she moved to the hospital, she walked to work every day and risked her life. On that one-and-a-half-kilometer long road, she says, she often met the coroner picking human corpses from the streets and continued with him in the ambulance to work.

In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Vukovar was only one of the smaller places, but for the high circulation “Vecernje Novosti” with its branched correspondence, it was apparently important enough to employ Jusuf full-time since 1975.

UNS wrote in the first text that Jusuf Cehajic was killed by a shell that fell in a yard in the center of Vukovar in the morning on that Saturday, October 12, 1991, and that the force of the detonation threw him into the basement of the house from which he had come out.

And that news will be dead for 38 days.

When newspapers were read

A journalist at that time, when the press was read, and there was no internet, could write in the news that the event took place the day before yesterday.

Jusuf’s reports were neither long nor inflammatory, they relied on official sources, they often talked about the events of several days ago and it could be noticed that they were written by a journalist at the scene.

As the conflict turned into a war from sporadic incidents, the texts signed by J. Cehajic, i.e. his initials, disappeared.

The report from April 4 describes how citizens protested in front of the railway station in Vinkovci because of the passing of transporters of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA).

Cehajic writes that they yelled ill-intentioned words at the soldiers, as well as the questions “why don’t you arrest Šešelj”, “where were you when Mrs. Nemcic was wounded”. The report reads there was great inter-ethnic tension in Vukovar and Vinkovci.

On the very next day, he signed a report with the Zagreb correspondent of “Novosti” JuricA Kerbler that Deputy Minister of the Croatian Interior Ministry Slavko Degoricija, the previously attacked president and secretary of the Serbian Democratic Party for Vukovar Goran Hadzic and Borivoje Savic arrived in Vukovar from Zagreb “beaten from head to toe” and that the fact that they came together “did not help regain trust in the “new Croatian authorities'” among the Serbs.

Barricades were erected in front of Serbian residential settlements. “Uncertainty and fear are spreading, so a barricade was also erected near the Croatian village of Lipovaca, in the neighborhood of Brsadin and Trpanj”...

All three killed

It turned out that one text. dated April 14, was signed together by Jusuf Cehajic and war reporter Milan Zegarac, who was a correspondent for “Vecernje Novosti” from Sombor until the conflict.

It reads that the Osijek police chief Josip Reihl-Kir reached an agreement with the Serbs from Borovo Selo on the removal of barricades in Eastern Slavonia with guarantees that they would be safe until the referendum on the future of Yugoslavia.

This policeman, remembered for his willingness to negotiate and his statements that he did not want history to remember him badly, nor as a man who caused the civil war, said at the press conference that the police could not control all extremists, but they could remove those in their ranks. Then he announced that he had signed ten decisions on the dismissal of police officers of the Croatian MUP in Osijek.

Both journalists who signed the article and the hero of the report, the Osijek police chief, were  soon to be dead.Reihl-Kir was the first to be killed. He was killed on July 1 by an activist of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

Zegarac was killed in Vukovar on October 9, and Cehajic was killed by a shell three days later.

The last signature

Cyrillic-written “Novosti” did not change Croatian expressions in Cehajic’s reports. However, it was clear that, on the one hand, the issue of personal security, and then all the cruelty of the war in the besieged city, in which the telephone connections were cut off, would reduce his numerous reports from April and May 1991 to four in June, then two in July, and then there was the end.

Several pieces of information in August, apparently sent by Cehajic, were signed with the editorial initials V.N.

The last report in “Vecernje Novosti”, which this journalist signed with his name and surname after a quarter of a century of work, came out on July 27, it had four sentences and was published under the title “Vukovar leadership replaced”.

UNS tried to find out whether there were those who remembered him in Croatian Radio Vukovar, where in the beginning of his journalistic career Cehajic hosted the show “Fellow countrymen” about agriculture and “Vukovarske Novine” for which he wrote, and that was part of the same company.

We got the answer that most of the people working there were born in the 1990s. However, by making inquires, they found one person who confirmed that Cehajic worked there and was later a correspondent for “Novosti”, but we did not find out which person it was.

Honest man

The leading journalists and editors of “Vecernje Novosti” at the time, now in advanced retirement, will say that Cehajic was a good journalist, but we did not find those who worked with him professionally and knew him well.

The editor-in-chief at the time Rade Brajovic says that Cehajic was a model of a journalist who respects data and that “Novosti” employed his son and helped the family.

“Brave and honest” is the description given by Brajovic of the murdered correspondent from Vukovar.

Srecko Petric, at one time the desk chief of this daily newspaper, knew how Cehajic died.
“He was one of our best correspondents”, Petric says.

And Manojlo Vukotic, who at the time was in “Borba”, as he says on the opposite side of “Vecernje Novosti”, for which he previously reported from Rome, and whose editor-in-chief and director of two on occasion he was after the year 2000, commended Cehajic’s honesty.

“He was an excellent professional. A very honest man”, Vukotic answered the question if he remembered Cehajic.

The assistant to the head of the correspondence section of Kadire Bajec, who passed away, Andrej Dornik recalled that he met with Cehajic.

Correspondents usually came on October 16 for the anniversary of “Novosti”, he told us.

“Cehajic was a serious man. He wrote very well. Those were journalists who meant a lot to us. “Novosti'” had the strongest network of correspondents, and it built circulation based on that”, Dornik said.

There were editions of “Vecernje Novosti” for every Yugoslav republic, plus, Dornik says, for Vojvodina, and additional pages for the larger cities.

We found that the circulation of “Vecernje Novosti”, recorded with the imressum of the newspaper published on May 3, 1991, for the previous day, was 346,012 copies.

In that issue, on the front page, at the top of the page, there was a framed news published that 17 policemen were killed in Borovo Selo, signed by J. Cehajic.

“The result is known, it was the beginning of the war in the territory of the former Yugoslavia”, Branislav Gulan, the war correspondent of “Borbe”, wrote later in his book “On Both Sides of Hell”.

Journalism and divisions  

In the search for Cehajic’s texts six months before his death, we came across famous names who were published in “Novosti” at the time, cartoonists Dusan Petricic and Predrag Koraksic Koraks, journalists: Misa Brkic, Vladan Dinic, Stojan Drcelic, Tanja Jakobi, Gordana Logar , Zlatko Cobovic, personal views on how to save Yugoslavia were presented by Nebojsa Popov, Zaharije Trnavcevic, Slavoljub Djukic, Branka Mihajlovic, Milovan Vitezovic, Nenad Kecmanovic, Ivo Druzijanic, Milica Lucic Cavic, Toma Fila, Ratko Bozovic...

UNS has already written that while searching the databases of foreign organizations, it came across various, mostly wrong data, so in the former Washington museum dedicated to journalism and freedom of speech it was written that Cehajic disappeared under unexplained circumstances. There is no Cehajic’s name in the database managed by UNESCO, nor in the database of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, because their records do not include the year 1991. Reporters Without Borders recorded the murder of Cehajic.

On the other hand, although he was a member of the Croatian Journalists’ Association (HND), actually its predecessor, the Association of Journalists of the Federal Republic of Croatia, he is not in the publicly visible records of journalists killed during the war.

Neither the name of Cehajic, nor the name of Simo Kljajic, a journalist from “Licke novine”, killed in Gospic in 1991, about whom UNS has written in detail in its research, is found on the HND memorial plaque at the entrance to the House of Journalists in Zagreb.

On that memorial plaque, installed in 1994, it is written: Croatian journalists and technicians killed in the Homeland War: Stjepan Penic (1991), Gordan Lederer (1991), Zarko Kaic (1991), Djuro Podboj (1991), Nikola Stojanac (1991), Zdenko Purgar (1991), Pavo Urban (1991), Zivko Krsticevic (1991), Ivan Marsic (1992), Tihomir Tunukovic (1992), Tomica Belavic (1993), Zeljko Ruzicic (1993), Branimir Polovina (1991), Sinisa Glavasevic ( 1991).

Cehajic’s family carefully kept the typewritten confirmation of admission to membership from November 1974. When he became a member of the Journalists’ Association of the Federal Republic of Croatia, it automatically meant that he received a booklet of the Journalists’ Association of Yugoslavia, the umbrella house for republican journalists’ associations.

The Croatian Journalists’ Association has kindly provided UNS with several texts from its archive that Jusuf submitted for admission to membership.

But there was no will for further discussion about the murdered journalists.

Last ride with Zastava 500

In his diary entries from the war front, Branislav Gulan, a journalist of “Borba”, in the book “On Both Sides of Hell”, recorded that on May 28, 1991, representatives of the Croatian Ministry of Police met with the Federal Secretariat of the Interior at a conference in Vinkovci for the first time after the terrible events in Borovo Selo.

Gulan writes that from the conference, he returned to Vukovar by Zastava 500, and he and his colleague Branka Bertok, who wrote part-time for “Borba” from Vukovar, were driven by the “Vecernje Novosti” correspondent Jusuf Cehajic.

Gulan describes in the book that in the center of Borovo Selo, according to the stories of the locals, there were Serbian and Yugoslav flags and that several Croatian policemen who were celebrating May 1 drinking at home in Vukovar made a bet and agreed to take down the flags.

The two, who tried to remove the flag from the pole, were caught by the locals, the others who came by car were let go. One day later, the Croatian special police from Osijek and Vukovar raided Borovo Selo.

It was Cehajic who reported on the event. Without unnecessary words, even emotions, in an informative style. Altogether 17 policemen were killed, 16 people were seriously and lightly wounded, most of them policemen, and all of them were taken to the Vukovar hospital for treatment. It is feared, Cehajic writes, that there are also dead civilians.

In that issue of “Novosti” dated May 3, in addition to the news on the front page, this journalist signed three more articles.

From the village of Brsadin, he reported on the arrival of the investigating judge and three versions of a murder. Mihajlo Gelencer, by nationality Croat, shot his neighbor Stevan Inic, by nationality Serb.

Osijek court judge Mladen Filipovic says that an argument broke out when Inic, carrying a Serbian flag, passed by Gelencer who was mowing the grass. He told his neighbor that he had no right to wave the Serbian flag in Croatia, while the other replied that he had.

According to another version, Inic carried the flag to place it on his house, but Gelencer did not allow him to do so.

There was a scythe next to a tree at the scene of the murder, and a flag of Serbia with a five-pointed star next to it.

Wife Nada

Once again in his book, Gulan mentions Cehajic, and that is in the entry of November 25, 1991.

“I learned that on October 12, another journalist was killed in Vukovar, my acquaintance Jusuf Cehajic, a correspondent from Vukovar for many years”.

A little strange, but as fate and the belated announcement of a death in the news industry can happen, on November 20, 1991, in the section “News of the Day”, it was published that Jusuf Cehajic died 38 days ago.

Along with the photo at the top of the page, in a few sentences, it is written that the sad news was confirmed by his wife Nada.

After the entry of JNA into Vukovar on November 18, she came to Belgrade to see her daughter.“Novosti” journalists, a team that included Milena Markovic, came to the hospital to pick her up and drover her to her sister”, Sead Cehajic said.

A month and a half before my mother’s arrival, he continues, we received the news that they had both died, so we were sincerely happy that our mother was alive.

*UNS and the author would like to thank the National Library of Serbia and colleague Dragan Milosevic.