Peter Tkac
As in the United States, young people in Slovakia are playing a major role in organizing pro-democracy protests; here a young protester confronts authorities at the March 2 demonstration in Bratislava.
On February 25, investigative reporter Ján Kuciak was shot dead, along with his girlfriend, Martina Kušnírová, at their home in Veľká Mača, a small village in western Slovakia. Both were just twenty-seven years old; they had planned to get married in May.
The shooting bore all the hallmarks of a professional hit meant to silence Kuciak. Instead, the murder has reverberated around the world, sparking the largest street demonstrations in Slovakia since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which brought down Czechoslovakia’s communist government.
In mid-March, the fallout from Kucik’s murder prompted the resignation of Prime Minister Roberto Fico, who had led Slovakia since 2006 (with a break between 2010 and 2012). He has been dogged by scandal but always survived, until now.
Andrej Kllzan
Former Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico.
Fico found himself out of step with public opinion. He offered a million Euro reward for the capture of Kuciak’s killers, but his focus seemed more on battling opponents than finding the culprits. In stepping down, he accepted no responsibility, rather blaming the chaos on political rivals and “the reckless abuse of the murder of two young people for political purposes.”
The story Kuciak was working on when he was killed was an expose of corruption involving European Union subsidies, Slovak agriculture, and the ’Ndrangheta crime organisation from Calabria in southern Italy. It also exposed the connections between suspected ’Ndrangheta member Antonino Vadala and members of Fico’s inner circle, including state advisor Mária Trošková and Security Council secretary Viliam Jasaň.
Slovakia, a small country of 5.4 million inhabitants in the heart of Europe, takes pride in its peaceful nature. The downfall of communism without bloodshed was called the Velvet Revolution, soon followed by the Velvet Divorce, when the two countries of the former Czechoslovakia—Slovakia and the Czech Republic—agreed to part ways. So the brutal killing of an idealistic young journalist shocked the country to its core.
This is the second murder of a journalist in the European Union within the last six months, following the fatal car bomb attack on Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in October.
Harassment, violence, and murder are not new phenomena for investigative journalism. What’s changing is the countries in which journalism is under attack. The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, have traditionally focused their work on autocratic regimes in the Middle East, Russia, and the former Soviet Union, but have in recent years switched their attention to the European Union and countries seen as “beacons of democracy and human rights.”
Peter Tkac
Investigative journalist Ján Kuciak was shot dead, along with his girlfriend, Martina Kušnírová.
The increase in physical attacks on journalists occurs against a backdrop of verbal attacks on the profession. European leaders are taking their cue from U.S. President Donald Trump, who rails almost daily against “fake news.”
In Slovakia, Fico had called reporters “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes” and “slimy snakes.” The Czech President Miloš Zeman drew boos from the crowd at his recent inauguration, less than two weeks after Kuciak’s murder, for using the event to attack the media. He once appeared at a news conference holding a Kalashnikov replica inscribed with the word “Journalists,” and another time joked with President Putin that some journalists needed to be “liquidated.”
“We have seen this pattern before,” Nina Ognianova from the Committee to Protect Journalists, says in an interview for this article. “It always starts off with rhetoric, then trickles down to harassment, to cyber-attacks and in the most extreme cases to physical attacks, even to the most extreme form of censorship—murder.”
The murder of a journalist is unprecedented in Slovakia, a country that has come far since the fall of communism but still struggles with the shadow of corruption. For many, recent events echo the dark days of the 1990s, when barely regulated privatization made it hard to distinguish between state and organized crime.
The autocratic leader of the time, Vladimír Mečiar, was suspected of deals with local mafia groups and even the kidnapping of the president’s son. The U.S. Secretary of State at that time, Madeleine Albright, who was born in Czechoslovakia, referred to Slovakia as “the black hole in the heart of Europe.”
Frustration with government has sparked mass demonstrations, and, like the gun protests in the United States, young people are leading the way.
Slovakia’s continued struggles with corruption are not caused by lack of regulation, according to Gabriel Šípoš of Transparency International, but by an unwillingness to prosecute wrongdoing. There are more than 150 prosecutions for corruption each year, but over half of these are for sums of 100 euros or less. The largest-ever case concerned a bribe of just 30,000 euros. The bigger fish are allowed to swim freely. Šípoš tells me, “the feelings of frustration have been building for years, that the powerful from all parties get away with it.”
This frustration has sparked mass demonstrations, and, like the gun protests in the United States, young people are leading the way.
Karolína Farská, nineteen, combined coordinating the marches with cramming for her final school-leaving exams. A rally she helped organize in Bratislava on March 9 attracted about fifty thousand people, and the second a week later drew more than sixty-five thousand. Simultaneous demonstrations were put together in forty towns around Slovakia and twenty cities around the world.
For Farská, the shocking murder of a journalist crossed a line. “How did we get to this? If they can do this, then what next?,” she asks in an interview. “People don’t believe that politics without corruption can even exist. People don’t have faith in institutions and that’s a problem.”
In Martin, a small town in central Slovakia, it was two high school students, Michaela Knošková and Adriana Repáňová, who addressed a crowd of thousands. Like Farská, they don’t believe that standing on the sidelines is an option.
“Our parents’ generation was born in socialist times, and they sometimes think they can’t change anything,” Knošková tells me. “But we were born to democracy, we want to keep it. So we believe we have to take part and do the right thing.”
Peter Tkac
'#allforJan stickers have appeared all over the Slovakia. Nezabudneme' is Slovak for "Don't forget us!"
One condition of Fico’s resignation was that his party was allowed to choose his long-time ally, Peter Pellegrini, as his successor. But already there is pushback to Pellegrini’s attempts to lead.
Farská says the demonstrations will continue. The key demands are for fresh elections and a fully independent investigation into Kuciak’s murder with the support of international agencies like Europol.
“Democracy is not something that is here forever,” she reflects. “You have to fight for it.”
Brendan Oswald is a freelance writer and educator based in Slovakia.