By Hamdi Firat Buyuk
In 2005, Gordana Igric, Nerma Jelacic, Ana Petruseva, Dragana Solomon and Jeta Xharra were sitting in Solomon’s kitchen in Belgrade, discussing what to call their new independent media project. They settled on the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network – BIRN for short – as the name for the organisation which this week celebrates its 20th anniversary.
“We chose to be watchdogs, not lapdogs,” Solomon says.
“Our countries needed us,” adds Igric, the founding regional director of BIRN.
Igric was a well-respected journalist at the time and was the Balkan project manager at IWPR, from 1999 until August 2005, during which time the organisations Balkan reporting won numerous press awards.
“Our purpose was to produce investigative reporting. The only way was to fund raise to produce that, to cover all these issues, like corruption, [war] crimes and all those problems that were bothering us in our countries. We did not want to be interfered with and controlled by governments,” Igric says.
Continuing the legacy of wartime reporting
When BIRN’s founders decided to establish their media NGO, many believed that the idea would fail because they assumed that the Balkans would enter a period of democratic stability after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarian nationalist regime in Serbia, which had been involved in much of the warmongering in the 1990s.
“At the time, many people internationally thought, ‘Oh, this is all over. Milosevic fell. There is going to be peace, unity, brotherhood and democracy and Balkan countries will join the EU in a short time.’ However, I knew, coming from here, it was far from [resolved] and we can see that now,” Igric says.
Nerma Jelacic, who came from Bosnia and ended up in the UK as a refugee fleeing the war, worked for The Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and IWPR before joining up with the other BIRN founders.
Jelacic was also told that setting up a new NGO, especially a regional one operating across borders in the Balkans, was impractical and unlikely to succeed.
“I remember speaking to both and international partners in Bosnia and across the Balkans. They asked us: ‘Are you crazy?’” Jelacic recalls.
The pessimists were proved wrong, however. Twenty years later, BIRN has become a major independent network with its headquarters in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as country organisations in Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia. The organisation has also won 155 local, regional and regional press freedom awards.
Jelacic describes this achievement as “beyond success”.
“The fact that the network has been established and still exists two decades later, is crucially important,” she says. “Beyond doubt, it also served as an inspiration for similar efforts to be set up, not only in the Balkans, but also in other conflict areas.”
Balkan Insight, BIRN’s flagship English-language publication, was first published in September 2005 as an emailed newsletter. Its first story focused on the perpetrators of a war crime in Kosovo. Since then it has continued to cover the consequences of the 1990s conflicts, even as many war crimes were ignored by other domestic media across the region and denied by nationalist politicians.
‘We needed non-nationalist media’
Jeta Xharra, from Kosovo, was the only Albanian speaker among BIRN’s fine founders. She has worked for the BBC during the war in her home country and then afterwards, as a young journalist and graduate student, for IWPR in London.
After finishing her master’s studies in the UK, Xharra intended to go back to Kosovo, where she believed she could make a difference to its war-ravaged society.
“The countries [in the Balkans] were so fragile, hurt and traumatised that balanced reporting was essential to make peace work in the Balkans. It was a time when we needed to make our countries functional, as the ethnic wars were still casting a shadow over the post-war period,” she says.
“Nationalism would have prevailed if we did not have balanced, non-nationalist media.”
Xharra said she joined BIRN for its non-nationalist and pluralist approach – a contrast to most of the media organisations in the Balkan region.
“I felt this was a team that treated me unlike any way Albanians had been treated in former Yugoslavia,” she says.
“Now, you have to understand, historically and traditionally, this matters a lot, because culturally, Albanians were treated like second-class citizens in former Yugoslavia. Yes, and this team treated me as an equal. It was quite important.”
Ana Petruseva, the director of BIRN’s North Macedonia office and the managing editor of Balkan Insight until 2016, also recalled the days they started BIRN and Balkan Insight.
Before joining BIRN, Petruseva was the Macedonia country director for IWPR. She previously worked as a journalist for a variety of media outlets in North Macedonia and internationally, including Reuters, Deutsche Welle, Telma TV and daily newspaper Dnevnik.
Petruseva was first in contact with Igric in 2001 while she was reporting on the Ohrid Framework Agreement that ended the brief conflict between the Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents.
However, as they were working for online media, which was newly emerging at the time, they only met in person in 2004. Petruseva’s online involvement led her to the helm of Balkan Insight, which she says she wanted to be seen as an “ethical and responsible” publication as well as “a very reputable source of information”.
“I’m really proud of what Balkan Insight has become,” she added.
From the original five, only Petruseva and Xharra are still with BIRN: Petruseva is head of BIRN Macedonia and Xharra is head of BIRN Kosovo.
Igric retired in 2018, while Solomon and Jelacic have enjoyed successful careers at an international since leaving BIRN.
Jelacic is now a leading global expert in justice in post-war countries, a topic that BIRN has covered extensively.
“And that was kind of also a natural progression because the Bosnian BIRN was focusing very much on transitional justice and accountability issues,” she says.
She is now director for management and external relations at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, CIJA, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to collecting evidence up to a criminal law standard in order to further criminal justice efforts to end impunity, domestically or internationally.
Before this, she was running communications and outreach programmes for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Like Jelacic, Solomon worked for international organisations after leaving BIRN. She was on the staff of the OSCE’s missions in Serbia, Kosovo and Ukraine, and now works for the British government.
‘Completely fresh and new’
According to Igric, BIRN’s main purpose was to bring international journalism standards to the Balkans at a point when domestic media outlets were poorly funded and were not doing in-depth investigative reporting, or even properly editing what they were publishing.
“Many media outlets just took whatever journalists would write and published it without checking, without structure, without proper sourcing of the stories,” she says. This situation was an inspiration for one of BIRN’s first training programmes, the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, which develops the skills needed for solid investigative reporting.
It was in this environment that the fledgling BIRN started to build a reputation for “fantastic, revealing investigative stories”, recalls Igric – an initiative that was “completely fresh and new for the Balkans”.
The second instalment of this series on July 1 looks at the development of BIRN from 2005 to the present day.
