Serbeze Haxhiaj, a journalist for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, was given the 2019 Rexhai Surroi journalism prize for the best written work of the year on Monday.
For the article, Haxhiaj spoke to mothers who became pregnant after being raped by Serbian fighters during the Kosovo war, addressing a topic that remains taboo in the country.
The jury said that this was an extraordinary story which had resonance beyond Kosovo’s borders.
Other award winners were Ardiana Thaci from KTV for a series of web articles and Bashkim Hoxha for the novel ‘Kronikat e Mjegullës’ (‘Chronicles of Clouds’), while veteran journalist Zenun Celaj was given a lifelong achievement award.
The awards are named after Rexhai Surroi, who was a pioneer of Kosovo journalism and an author. He died in a traffic accident in December 1988 while serving as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s ambassador in Spain.
Pristina-based media house Koha Group has been presenting the Rexhai Surroi awards since 2008.
The jury members were two journalists and professors of journalism, Imer Mushkolaj and Majlinda Bregasi, and novelist Xhevat Syla.
The 2019 monitoring report on the Kosovo Tax Administration, TAK, from BIRN Kosovo and Democracy Plus concludes that most of the recommendations from the previous year’s report were fulfilled but also identifies numerous other management and disciplinary problems within the institution.
Political employments, the involvement of TAK officials in political activities, weak disciplinary sanctions, and TAK officials’ links to accountants are among the key findings of this year’s monitoring report, which was discussed a few days ago at a roundtable with TAK officials, and released in full online on Monday.
Monitors also discovered that, in September, 30 officials within the institution were holding positions in political parties while also working for TAK.
As part of the monitoring process, researchers met with over 19 accountants and discovered numerous instances of improper links between TAK officials and accountants. The report also outlines unclarities in the process of TAK’s restructuring and administration reform.
Kosovo citizens assisted the monitoring, reporting irregularities through the KALLXO.com platform. According to the report, they submitted 68 reports related to tax evasion, the informal economy and political and nepotistic appointments between January and December 2019.
Over the same period, 53 legal letters were sent to TAK, passing on information about tax evasion, the informal economy, and illegal betting stores, as well as requesting access to documents related to employment, and information on political activities involving senior TAK officials.
As a result of these legal letters, inspections were carried out on 107 different businesses throughout the territory of the Republic of Kosovo, after which over 50,000 euros of fines were imposed.
BIRN Kosovo and Democracy Plus will continue to monitor TAK’s work throughout 2020.
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Albania on December 19 published its comprehensive database of the Urban Renaissance projects financed from 2014 until 2017 by the country’s centre-left government through the Fund for the Development of Regions.
Urban Renaissance was a pet project of Prime Minister Edi Rama to renew the image of local towns and squares across Albania after years of neglect. Its critics maintain the project was aimed at extensively funding municipalities controlled by Rama’s Socialist Party in order to guarantee its success at the polls.
The database contains the records of 573 projects with a total value of 359.8 million euros, as well as the documents and photos of the projects taken by a network of 12 reporters across the country.
Using the data collected in the database, BIRN Albania was able to publish over the past year dozens of pieces of news, features and investigative stories focusing on the Urban Renaissance project, offering a critical perspective and informing public opinion.
The database contains hundreds of contracts signed by contractors, subcontractors and overseeing companies for each project, as well as data on their completion status, obtained over a period of one year through freedom of information requests from 61 municipalities.
BIRN Kosovo held a round-table discussion on December 19 about public debt and capital investments in Kosovo.
The discussion was organised as part of an EU-funded project entitled ‘CSOs as equal partners in the monitoring of public finance’ in which BIRN Kosovo is among ten partners from across the Balkans.
Panellists at the discussion were Hekuran Murati, a member of parliament from Vetevendosje, Ahmet Ismaili, director of the Ministry of Finance Treasury, and Sokol Havolli, deputy governor of the Central Bank of Kosovo. It was moderated by kallxo.com’s managing editor, Visar Prebreza.
The panellists discussed the current level of public debt in Kosovo and institutions’ capacity to manage loans, as in many cases publicly-financed projects have been delayed due to financial mismanagement. They also discussed which projects most deserve public financing.
The discussion included officials from the Tax Administration of Kosovo, the National Audit Office, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economic Development and civil society organisations.
BIRN has published an updated and improved version of its War Crimes Verdicts Map, an interactive tool that offers an overview of hundreds of court rulings on the crimes committed during the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network published its updated and improved War Crimes Verdicts Map, enabling users to search rulings in cases from courts across the former Yugoslavia and from the UN tribunal in The Hague.
The map includes all the final war crimes verdicts that are available from 42 different domestic courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Serbia.
It also includes the verdicts handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and cases in which defendants died during their trials at the UN tribunal.
In the updated version of the map, users can now search by defendants’ names, the units to which they belonged, the countries in which the courts are located, the crime locations and the dates. It is based on over 1,400 court documents.
The number of verdicts included is now 468, with a total of 1,028 defendants. The verdicts were handed down between 1992, when the first cases in Croatia were opened, and 2019.
Courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina delivered the most verdicts – a total of 209 – while Croatia had the biggest number of defendants, 396 in total.
“This map is the result of our dedicated work in following both international and domestic war crime trials since 2004. While reporting from the courtroom, we as journalists often struggled to get all the documents. Through the years, we accumulated a significant archive and we wanted to share this with our colleagues but also the general public to make their work in following war crime trials easier and more factually-based,” said Marija Ristic, BIRN’s regional director.
“This war crimes verdicts map comes amid growing efforts of courts to anonymise court documents, preventing us from reporting fairly and correctly from trials,” Ristic added.
In the future, the map will also include verdicts handed down by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague.
In some of the countries however, BIRN is still waiting for courts to provide all their verdicts.
The wars in the former Yugoslavia left some 125,000 people dead, and around 12,000 are still listed as missing.
The War Crimes Verdicts Map is part of BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice initiative, funded by the European Commission.
The project aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice issues in former Yugoslav countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
Sandu won the award of 4,000 euros for her investigation into the trafficking of Roma children to Western Europe.
Kosovo journalist Shkumbin Ahmetxhekaj grabbed second prize, winning 3,000 euros for his investigation into the impact of medical brain drain in Europe’s youngest country.
Greek journalist Kostas Zafeiropoulos came third, collecting 1,000 euros for his work on cyber propaganda.
Jury members praised Sandu, a news anchor and editor at Romanian public radio and a reporter at large for quarterly magazine DoR, for her meticulous reporting on what Europol has described as one of Europe’s biggest trafficking rings.
Her investigation, Blind Justice for Romania’s Trafficked Roma Children, reveals the scale and complexity of an alleged criminal enterprise in the Romanian town of Tandarei, where investigators say local gangsters have trafficked scores of children into a life of forced criminality.
“At a time when we only get information in fragments and attention spans are limited to 140 characters, Ani produced a piece brimming with detail, suspense and thoughtful, elaborate research that grabs you to the end and you won’t easily forget,” said Elena Panagiotidis, editor of Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Erste Stiftung: Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence (13.12.2019) Foto: eSeL.at – Joanna Pianka
“Keeping people like slaves in Europe seems unthinkable, although we’re aware of Roma begging and being abused. Ani sheds light on this topic in a way that doesn’t sensationalise it. She contacted — or tried to contact — all the people involved. She found superb characters in Britain telling her how they discovered the network.
“She gives us a picture of life in Tandarei. She read countless court documents. It’s like she said: ‘a detective story without a happy ending.’”
“The exodus of medical personnel from the Balkans to Germany and other EU countries is well known by now,” said Florian Hassel, Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
“Shkumbin Ahmetxhekaj managed to break new ground nevertheless, reporting on the dark side of the medical exodus and the newly born exodus industry in his home country, Kosovo, and on Germany, where hospitals hire nurses and doctors from Kosovo by the hundreds but often find the reality different from their expectations.”
The jury singled out Zafeiropoulos, an investigative reporter for Greek daily Efimerida ton Sintakton, for his soon-to-be published “Alexander the Bot: The Twitter War for the Macedonian Soul”.
“It’s a good feature examining and exploring cyber nationalism using the latest methods of ‘computational propaganda’,” said Remzi Lani, executive director of the Albanian Media Institute.
Erste Stiftung: Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence (13.12.2019) Foto: eSeL.at – Joanna Pianka
Ten journalists from across the Balkans spent more than six months pursuing in-depth stories and investigations linked to this year’s theme: “freedom”. They came from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia.
The jury congratulated all of this year’s fellows on the originality and integrity of their work, which included stories on demographic change, public health, energy independence, human rights, refugees and historical revisionism.
In addition to Sandu, Ahmetxhekaj and Zafeiropoulos, this year’s fellows were Dina Djordjevic (Serbia), Stavros Malichudis (Greece), Milena Mitrovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Angel Petrov (Bulgaria), Jelena Prtoric (Croatia), Vedrana Simicevic (Croatia) and Katerina Topalova (North Macedonia). This year’s programme editors were Timothy Large and Neil Arun.
A collection of their stories will be published in the new year.
The jury members were Elena Panagiotidis, editor of Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung; Florian Hassel, Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung; Remzi Lani, executive director of the Albanian Media Institute; Kristof Bender, deputy chairman of the European Stability Initiative; Milorad Ivanovic, representative of the BFJE alumni network; and Adelheid Wolfl, correspondent for Austrian daily Der Standard.
With the conclusion of this year’s programme, the 10 fellows join the BFJE alumni network, which consists of more than 100 journalists from 10 Balkan countries who collaborate on stories and promote the highest professional standards.
The Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence was launched in 2007 to promote high-quality, cross-border reporting. The programme provides fellows with financial and editorial support, allowing them to travel, report and write their stories and develop their journalistic skills.
In 2020, the fellowship programme will expand to include journalists from the Visegrad Four countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network organised a study visit to institutions dealing with wartime crimes in The Hague to give ten journalists from the Balkans expert insights into transitional justice processes.
BIRN organised a study visit to The Hague from December 1 to 5, enabling ten journalists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia to visit institutions involved in transitional justice processes that address crimes committed during the Balkan wars.
They then had extensive training on how to use the Mechanism’s database, which provides online access to the public judicial records of all completed cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Mechanism.
The journalists also visited the Association of Defence Counsel practising before the International Courts and Tribunals.
On the last day of their visit, the journalists visited the International Commission on Missing Persons, where they were told more about the ICMP’s work in the Balkans and globally, and visited its laboratory.
All ten journalists who participated in the study visit received grants from BIRN to write in-depth stories on transitional justice issues in the Balkans.
Their stories will cover variety of topics, including criminal justice, reparations and missing persons. All the stories will be developed under the mentorship of BIRN editors and will be published in 2020.
Both the study visit and the granting scheme are part of BIRN’s Transitional Justice Programme, a regional initiative that aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The programme is supported by the European Commission.
Seventeen journalists from local media in Pristina took part in a training session on reporting on cases of violent extremism on December 10, organised by BIRN Kosovo and held at the Student Centre in Kosovo’s capital.
The training was divided into two sessions; one was held by Kosovo’s Counterterrorism National Coordinator, Fatos Makolli, while the second session was hosted by Kreshnik Gashi, anchor of BIRN Kosovo’s ‘Justice in Kosovo’ TV show.
Makolli outlined how radical Islamic ideology spread in Kosovo, the role of the Kosovo government and civil society in reintegrating returnees from the Middle Eastern conflict zone, and the importance of the media in responsibly reporting cases of violent extremism.
He suggested that the media must continue to work with institutions, not just to receive information and share it, but to be a partner. Makolli also briefly described the failure of international organisations in tackling the issue of radicalisation, blaming it on a preoccupation with inter-ethnic issues.
According to Makolli, the most successful project for countering violent extremism was Kosovo’s membership of UEFA and FIFA, as it offered a new perspective for the youth of Kosovo. For Makolli, preventing radicalisation means promoting values which include tolerance and diversity.
Gashi engaged in a more in-depth conversation with the participants and provided them with techniques for reporting cases of violent extremism correctly and precisely, while protecting the public and without causing unnecessary public fear and trauma.
He pointed out that reporting should not, in any situation, contain unreliable or false news which misinforms the public.
This training was organised as part of the ‘For a Resilient Community’ project, funded by the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, GCERF.
On Tuesday, December 10, in the Municipality of South Mitrovica, BIRN Kosovo held the fifth of its series of debates discussing the findings of its audit report monitoring project, which analyzes reports published by the National Audit Office on Kosovo’s municipalities.
The results of BIRN’s monitoring and analysis were published and discussed in an open debate with more than 25 participants from the municipality, the National Audit Office and representatives from civil society. The debate was also streamed live on BIRN’s anti-corruption platform KALLXO.com.
Visar Prebreza, BIRN Kosovo’s managing editor, gave a brief presentation on the project and its findings. According to Prebreza, the number of recommendations received by the municipality from the National Audit Office is high, though continuously decreasing: from 25 recommendations in 2015 to 16 recommendations in 2018. However, a number of recommendations have been repeated year after year, and there have been ongoing procurement problems.
Deputy Mayor of Mitrovica Faruk Mujka said that the debate had a very positive impact. “This report presents a true and fair view of all financial aspects,” he said. “The report shows that Mitrovica has made positive steps toward implementing recommendations but there is room for improvement. Most of the findings are due to a lack of coordination between the local and central level.”
During the debate, Shkelqim Xhema, a representative from the National Audit Office stated that full implementation of the recommendations will lead to a better performance from the Municipality and better services provided to citizens. In 2018, five out of 17 recommendations were addressed, three were partially addressed, one was considered closed, while eight were not addressed at all.
Alongside providing an avenue to discuss the municipality’s implementation of recommendations by the Audit Office, these debates also gave BIRN an opportunity to record promises made both by the General Auditor and the Municipality of South Mitrovica, to be followed-up through Kallxo.com’s fact-checking platform, “Krypometer.”
The debate was organized within the framework of the “Support civil society to increase public oversight and accountability of Kosovo public institutions” project, which is funded by the British Embassy in Prishtina. This specific activity is organized as part of the component looking into the compliance of targeted institutions with the recommendations from the Auditor General’s reports.
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, held a workshop with local journalists in Kosovo on reporting on energy efficiency and environmental issues on December 7.
It was held together with TV Mreza, a network of TV stations broadcasting in Serbian across all Serbian-majority areas of Kosovo, in an activity supported by the EU Office in Kosovo.
Those conducting the workshop included Jeta Xharra, BIRN Kosovo’s executive director, Visar Prebreza, managing editor of BIRN Kosovo and Petar Vidov, editor-in-chief of the Croatian media platform, Faktograf.
Eighteen local journalists attended, from Kossev, Kent FM, RTV Kim, RTV Puls, Medija Centar, Radio Gorazdevac, Insajderi, Indeksonline and from the civil society organisation Green Energy Kosova.
In the workshop, Xharra discussed the long journey of the Kosovo Civil Society Consortium for Sustainable Development, KOSID, in addressing pressing environmental issues, including campaigning against the financing of coal-power plants, especially the newly planned coal-power plant Kosova e Re, planned to be built in Obiliq, 10 kilometers from the capital, Prishtina.
Prebreza presented a lecture on the crimes committed to the local environment and on environmental reporting. He also outlined the investigations of BIRN’s TV show Justice in Kosovo, concerning the exploitation of gravel from rivers in Kosovo.
Vidov shared his experiences working on the investigative story “Captured by Gas,” an in-depth analysis of the quality of governance and state capture in the energy sector in Croatia.
