“For the Minister of Culture to go on strike along with the Radio-Television Slovenia staff is something that no minister in the UK, Australia or the US would ever dare to do,” Nina Kojima, a former and current correspondent from London for the national media outlet RTV, who has returned to journalism after five years, told the media outlet Vikend.
It is not a subjective opinion that what is happening on the Slovenian political scene is worrying because of the unreasonable actions of our government representatives. Even if the government behaves as if everything is normal and tries to convince people that, for example, the fact that the Minister of Culture went on strike together with the employees of RTV Slovenia, is something acceptable – it is anything but that. Former and returning RTV correspondent from London, Nina Kojima, used Žižek’s expression “the light at the end of the tunnel, which is only the light of the next train.”
Kojima told Vikend that the situation in Slovenia is “stagnant” and that the political scene lacks “humanity.” She was very surprised by the recent developments we have reported on, pointing to two things that have happened in our country recently, that are unthinkable for real democracies. The first is the strike by the Minister of Culture, Asta Vrečko, together with the staff of our national television. “For the Minister of Culture to go on strike along with the Radio-Television Slovenia staff is something that no minister in the UK, Australia or the US would ever dare to do,” she said, adding that her journalist colleagues found it incomprehensible that a government minister should be attending a Communist Party celebration.
Namely, Minister of Culture Asta Vrečko was not concerned about her impartiality when she came to the aid of the far-left wing of RTV journalists in their “depoliticisation” of the national media outlet. As we reported, she said that she “doesn’t know what is going on there, but shares their frustration and is very angry,” and she called on the management of the national media outlet to resign. In what normal world does a government representative call on those in charge of an institution to resign after saying that he or she “doesn’t know what is going on there”? And let us not forget that this is a member of the far-left political party, the Left party (Levica), siding with those who attended the gathering of a few employees of RTV, who represented less than five per cent of the total staff, while the majority of people were working at the time of the protest. And what is even less normal in a democratic world is the fact that government representatives attend the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party – the party of a totalitarian system responsible for millions of deaths around the world. In doing so, the Minister celebrated the millions of deaths, and in public, she tries to portray herself as a democratic representative who is working ‘for the good of the people’. Has the world gone mad?
Uncompromising reporting on the Russophilia of Slovenian politics and RTV
Kojima’s cooperation with RTV as a correspondent from London ended in 2018, after she covered the Salisbury attack, in which a man and a woman were found unconscious on a park bench on the 4th of March 2018, and the two later turned out to be Russian double agents Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The latter was allegedly poisoned, and Russia was supposedly involved in the incident. The event severely damaged ties between Russia and the West. Kojima was supposed to report on it, but editors from RTV refused, and some apparently even thought it would be better to cover the event from Moscow, “because you never know what the British are up to.” This was the last straw for Kojima, who, doubting her own safety and that of her children in London, stopped her correspondence. What surprised her, however, was that “in the Slovenian Foreign Ministry, on RTV and elsewhere, they behaved as if they were the actual Russian secret agents.” “And you can write that down,” she told the media outlet Večer.
The Correspondence Commission of RTV Slovenia has identified the opening of a correspondence office in the UK as one of its priorities, given the content needs of our public television. Nina Kojima, who left RTV Slovenia in 2018 to focus on the film industry and is now covering the coronation of King Charles, will report from there. Kojima left public television in 2018 and has lived in London for more than 20 years. Her Brexit documentary “Brexit in the Non-Political Mirror” has won several awards at international festivals.
Ana Horvat
