Latest news with #Albanian-majority
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Disinformation surge targets Serbia's student protests
Massive student-led protests in Serbia have been met with a barrage of disinformation from pro-government media and social networks, in what analysts say is an attempt to undermine the anti-graft movement. The nationwide wave of demonstrations kicked off after a recently renovated train station roof collapsed in November in Serbia's second city Novi Sad, killing 16 people. With many blaming the deaths on state corruption and inadequate oversight, the protests have piled pressure on the nationalist government of President Aleksandar Vucic. Top officials and pro-government news outlets -- which dominate Serbia's media landscape -- for months have been portraying the students and their supporters as "foreign agents", violent troublemakers planning "a coup" or accused them of being funded by the opposition. The Kurir tabloid said students "terrorise Belgrade" while the Informer tabloid and TV station alleged they are paid by US aid agency USAID and billionaire George Soros -- a regular target of right-wing conspiracy theories. Another pro-government broadcaster, Pink TV, branded the protest movement an uprising supported by Albanian-majority Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia in 2008. - 'Enemies of the state' - Media expert and Belgrade University professor Snjezana Milivojevic told AFP such narratives aimed to frame the protests as an attempted "colour revolution", a reference to the pro-western revolts that shook post-Soviet states in recent decades. Media outlets and officials were also regularly spreading false news about the protesters "to discredit them", she said. In one recent example, students at the University of Arts in the central city of Kragujevac were filming a docudrama about the car ramming attacks that have struck several of the protests and left some people seriously injured. Media outlets such as Informer and TV Prva used footage of the students re-enacting the attacks to falsely claim the students were carrying out the attacks, painting them as perpetrators rather than victims. Bogdan Vucic, a student at the Belgrade Faculty of Political Science, told AFP that the pro-government reporting of the protests "contributes to the antagonisation of students, turning them into enemies of the state -- students who are the children and future of this country". Professor Ana Milojevic from the Faculty of Political Science's Journalism department at the University of Belgrade, said the misinformation sought to "delegitimise the protests". In another incident in March, a plain clothes police officer was injured during a student blockade of the headquarters of state broadcaster RTS in Belgrade. - Photos of old protests - Pro-government media accused the students of attacking the officer, a claim president Vucic repeated on his Instagram account along with an image of the injured officer. But video footage on social media showed the man being hit by a fellow police officer. Vucic later acknowledged that the officer "may have taken a few hits from his colleagues" but insisted that several blows also came from the students and others gathered near the RTS building. Serbia's pro-government media have been serving up "propaganda" for years, Milivojevic said, and their "tactics intensified once the protests started". "Their goal is to criminalise the protests, depict them as violent and show them as ineffective." The student protests are among the largest in recent Serbian history. The demonstrations have regularly attracted crowds of tens of thousands but pro-government outlets have used old photos or aired footage when crowds are dispersing to make turnout seem smaller. "According to media reports, more people gather in smaller squares for regime-backed events than in the largest squares during protests, and the number of students is constantly being downplayed," Milivojevic said. - Combating falsehoods - When high school students joined the blockades, Vucic claimed that minors had no legal right to protest. Pro-government media quickly echoed his words and published headlines, widely shared on social media, that claimed students had the right to protest but minors did not. However, according to the country's constitution and United Nations conventions, people in Serbia are allowed to protest regardless of age. The protesters themselves are not immune to falling for disinformation. One viral video purported to show the "arrest of RTS workers who want to expose the truth about protests". But it actually depicted the 2022 detainment of a small political movement's members who had stormed the RTS building. To combat false news and what they consider biased coverage, student protesters regularly turn to social media to expose perceived disinformation spread by pro-government media. They also have set up "Talk to a student" stands across Serbia to engage with citizens about misinformation, and created a group on messaging app Viber with more than 47,000 members to answer questions from the public. They also have rallied outside the RTS and Informer offices. mp/ks/mfp/fg/bc
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Kosovo goes to the polls as the shadow of Trump looms large
Kosovo goes to the polls on Sunday in an election that could mark a crossroads in the young country's history and even determine its future territorial integrity in an increasingly hostile world. With the election outcome very much in the balance, the prime minister, Albin Kurti, held a mass rally in Pristina on Friday evening, under the slogan 'From corner to corner'. It celebrated the fact that Kurti has succeeded where his predecessors had failed, in tightening the control of the Albanian-majority government over a rebellious Serb area on its northern border. That sense of hard-won territorial integrity appears increasingly vulnerable however. While Kurti did not mention Donald Trump by name, his presence hung over the rally on the freezing Pristina night. While every national capital has been watching the words and actions of an ever more mercurial US president since his return to the White House, Kosovo has more at stake than most. The last Trump administration backed a plan which at some point involved Kosovo's partition, and one of his officials has already begun assailing Kurti on social media. The nation of 1.6 million people declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after a US-led Nato force helped it prevail in a liberation war. But 17 years on, it is still not a UN or EU member state as a result of the refusal of Serbia, Russia, China and some European states to recognise its independence. About 6% of Kosovo's population is ethnically Serb and much of that minority remains loyal to Belgrade rather than Pristina. Its most significant stronghold is in the north side of the town of Mitrovica near the Serbian border, which was a no-go area for the government until the past two years in which Kurti succeeded in deploying Kosovo police, shutting down parallel institutions, and enforcing the use of the euro over the Serbian dinar. Kurti's critics inside and outside Kosovo say these gains in sovereignty have been imposed on the Serb minority, rather than being a result of winning it over, leaving the frozen conflict unresolved. In particular, the prime minister has been rebuked by the EU and successive administrations in Washington for his refusal to implement an autonomy package for majority Serb municipalities. Kurti's party, Vetëvendosje, won an absolute majority four years ago on a programme that combined social democracy, anti-corruption and fierce Albanian patriotism. The name means 'self-determination', and Friday night's rally was awash with bright red Albanian flags, dotted with a small handful of Kosovo's national flag. That emblem, which hangs outside Kurti's office in Pristina, is a compromise, portraying Kosovo's geographical outline and some white stars on a blue background, shorn of historical and ethnic overtones. The Albanian flag is, Kurti said, 'something of a long tradition that continues'. Speaking to the Guardian on Saturday, the prime minister said he has yet to have any contacts with the Trump administration, and had every reason to believe that Kosovo-US relations would remain as strong as ever. 'We have enhanced our cooperation with the US during our tenure. It used to be mainly diplomatic, and we have added defence and development,' Kurti said. However, Richard Grenell, who was special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo in the first Trump administration, tweeted on Friday that Kurti's optimism on where he stood with Washington was 'delusional'. 'Relations have never been lower,' said Grenell, who a few days earlier had said Kurti's government was 'not trustworthy'. In the first Trump administration, Grenell pushed a peace plan that would have involved Kosovo's ceding northern Mitrovica as part of a land swap deal. Grenell also served for a while as acting director of national intelligence four years ago, but his title this time round is 'presidential envoy for special missions'. It is not clear whether the Balkans will be one of those missions. Washington is not Kurti's only geopolitical headache however. His premiership has also been marked by friction with the EU, which imposed punitive measures on Kosovo for his alleged recalcitrance. The measures inhibiting new European funding have cost Kosovo some €150m according to one estimate by the Reuters news agency. They date back to 2023 when Kurti installed ethnic Albanian mayors in Mitrovica and other Serb municipalities, triggering Serb riots, in which nearly 100 Nato peacekeepers were wounded. Kurti and many analysts argue it was unfair to punish Kosovo and not Serbia, despite evidence that the riots were encouraged by the Serbian government of Aleksandar Vučić. Vučić also escaped US and EU censure for his refusal to sign a 2023 agreement on moves Kosovo and Serbia were to take towards normalising their relations, and failing to fulfil his undertaking not to oppose Kosovo's membership of international organisations. Kurti has said he will not consider a law on Serb municipal authority or rejoin talks with Belgrade until Serbia takes steps to remedy its obstructive actions. The main opposition parties standing on Sunday say they will be more flexible and will re-enter normalisation talks without preconditions. 'I would like to see Kosovo go back to the table with the EU and United States,' said Haki Abazi, who was once Kurti's deputy prime minister but has recently joined one of the smaller opposition parties, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. 'If Kurti remains in power, I think what we're going to see is the US basically acting swiftly against him by pulling out its troops from Camp Bondsteel [Nato peacekeeping headquarters in Kosovo] and also imposing sanctions to the point where Kurti is going to be blacklisted.' Unemployment has been radically reduced under the current government, which has raised the minimum wage and achieved economic growth above the regional average. But unease is growing over the the lack of progress towards normalisation of diplomatic relations, and so are fears about the country's vulnerability. Ramadan Ilazi, head of research at the Kosovar Centre for Security Studies, argues that Kosovo would be in a stronger position now if it had passed the Association of Serb-majority Municipalities (ASM) law. 'If we are concerned about potential plans for partitioning Kosovo, especially fears now amplified under a Trump administration, then establishing ASM would have been a way to prevent any kind of other solutions about the North,' Ilazi said. Kurti said he did not think Vučić would dare try to re-establish control over northern Kosovo by force, unless put under pressure from Moscow to act. 'Vučić is not a leader who would go to war with Nato,' the prime minister said on Saturday. 'However, one thing that we should be wary about is if he gets an order from Putin. Will he say no? I don't think so.' Opinion polls ahead of Sunday's election suggested that Kurti's Vetëvendosje would fall short of its resounding majority four years ago, though historically polling in Kosovo has not proved particularly reliable. If he does fall short, the prime minister said on Saturday he was not interested in a coalition with any of the major opposition parties. But those parties too have a history of bitter rivalry, and would also face significant obstacles to forming a stable coalition. Whatever the election outcome, said Alex Anderson, a British-born Kosovo citizen and political analyst, the coming months and years are going to be some of the most perilous for the country since independence. 'We could well see a lot of very dangerous things happen for Kosovo over the next few years, maybe even including the withdrawal of Americans from Camp Bondsteel,' Anderson said. 'That would leave Kosovo feeling very vulnerable.'
