Meet the People Behind BIRN: Sinisa-Jakov Marusic

Each month, BIRN introduces you to a different member of its team. For October, meet Sinisa-Jakov Marusic Editor and North Macedonia Correspondent at BIRN’s flagship English-language website Balkan Insight.

Sinisa, 42, is half Croat and half Macedonian. He studied literature and anthropology but finished journalism. He has worked as a journalist for 17 years and this year celebrates his 15 years’ anniversary in BIRN.

Sinisa told us about his work and Balkan Insight’s virtual newsroom where differences become familiar commonalities, his favorite BIRN’s “Happy Friday” mantra, his noisy keyboard and BIRN’s new endeavor “European Focus” – a weekly newsletter published by Balkan Insight and nine European Media such as Domani, Delfi, Tagesspiegel, Hvg.hu, El Confidential, Gazeta Wyborcza, Liberation, and N-ost.

Let’s meet him:

  1. What do you like most in your job, and what is the most challenging thing?

Coming from a small country, born before the internet was a thing, who experienced first-hand as a teenager the breakup of former Yugoslavia and the isolation of the country that followed during the 1990s, not only from Europe, but from the immediate neighbors as well, to this day I consider it as my biggest achievement that through my work I have expanded my horizons and managed to keep the door with the outside world open.

Nothing makes me happier than the notion that I get to share and communicate daily with a group of talented people from so many different countries who work at BIRN, and realizing how many commonalities we actually share, both personal and societal. And whenever we  meet in person, it’s a joy. It is a great asset to have in my career, sure, but it also makes me genuinely grateful.

As for the most challenging aspect, it is connected to the most joyous one. It is hat I work from home, or from a corner at my home that I’ve transformed into an office.

It is a blessing for some and a curse for others. For me it is a bit of both. Any journalist would tell you that it could be very challenging at times not sharing an actual physical space with your colleagues.

It helps a lot when you share your worries, laughs and “buying” or “selling” ideas with people in person. It eases up the day, nudges you in the right direction and motivates you to be better than yesterday. It is a base where you go to and you return to after each battle, to replenish your energy and motivation. If nothing else, it helps a person writing for a living, not getting stuck too much in his or her own head. Sadly, that natural human interaction that we all crave for is a little bit lost on the internet.

  1. Can you share a good memory of when you were on duty?

Being a duty editor in Balkan Insight sometimes resembles being a flight controller at the airport. You have to sort each article that flies your way, find its angle and place on the website and make it land well with the readers, while always multitasking and having the bigger picture in mind.

Having said that, I am happy to say that I have one good memory that reoccurrs each week. It is the “Happy Friday” exclamation each Friday at the morning editorial meeting that our Editor-in –Chief, Dusica Tomovic makes. I am fully aware that to an outsider this may sound totally lame. That’s OK. But for me it is a stress relief pill, acknowledgement that we are still here, we have almost made it through the stresses of the working week and a reminder to look forward to turning the “autopilot” at least for a while during the weekend.

  1. Besides your work, you are mostly known among people in BIRN as the editor with the noisy keyboard. Are you planning to change your keyboard?

I recently decided to look for a better keyboard. I figured out that for a person that spends so much time in front of the PC, a nicer keyboarded experience may be worth it. But to my horror, after paying an arm and a leg for a very expensive mechanical keyboard, I found out that the same soothing clicky sounds that my keyboard makes are the very sounds that annoy my colleagues when on a call.

I have to be honest. I have already spent my allowance for keyboards for the foreseeable future, and going back to the generic membrane keys of the old one is out of the question. So, sorry guys but no. I am not planning to change it.

I hope, though, that an ambient noise canceling software may help, and I pledge to look into it.

  1. Balkan Insight together with nine European media outlets publish together a weekly newsletter called “European Focus”. Tell us more about this cross-border initiative and its main scope

We started with the premise that Europe is not just Brussels, and surely not just the European Union nations, and that through cooperation with some of the best informative outlets across the continent, we can try to understand our common home a bit better.

We felt that while our nations share common challenges, national media alone are often not enough to offer European audiences the bigger European picture and often not able to connect the topics and discussions that are moving Europeans.

So we set up to try and offer this wider perspective that we feel our readers deserve. Thus, together with Tagesspiegel, El Confidencial, Liberation, Domani, Delfi, HVG.hu, Gazeta Wyborcza and N-OST we launched our joint weekly free of charge newsletter to cover topics that connect or affect us all and to exchange our different perspectives on them.

Our newsletter has five brief original pieces, which we also republish in the local languages of our different print and online publications to bring a variety of perspectives to our readers. And our hope is that this will enrich the essential debate in our joint European space.

  1. Each week journalists from nine different European newsrooms meet and decide European Focus’s context; how easy or difficult is this?

In professional terms, it is never easy to produce a good, well thought of, digestible yet informative and helpful newsletter. But we are not short of professional and enthusiastic colleagues from all corners of Europe, and not just from the aforementioned media outlets and organizations. So this enthusiasm and will to collaborate showed right from the start at our editorial meetings.

We are never short of ideas either. One colleague inspires another to try to look for similarities or differences in his or her own country, different angles, positive or negative examples. And just as we are thrilled, finding out new things and connecting the dots, we are sure that our readers will find the product of our work equally interesting and informative.

At the end of the entire process, of course, we have to decide on the topic of the week so we simply vote. It is plain and simple and as democratic as can be. Then we produce each newsletter jointly with a weekly rotating a team of five journalists and editors-in-chief.

  1. What kind of stories do you choose to present to the readers? How can you make multicultural readers be interested in these stories?

I must say, at the beginning of our cooperation, when we were still at the planning stage, we never imagined that the launch of our newsletter would coincide with the serious effects of the Russia aggression of Ukraine that has affected us all, from concerns about our security, to soaring fuel, electricity and food prices, all the way to how all these things fuel social and political movements in our countries.

And while at the beginning we felt, and still feel, compelled to tackle some of these issues that are undoubtedly shared among us all, causing great headaches but also inspiring great feats, we never feared that a European-focused newsletter could run out of topics, crisis or no crisis.

Be it the debate on EU enlargement, or the climate challenges or the worrying spread of wildfires this summer that showed that even countries like the UK are not unfazed by it, our Europe is simply too interesting to ignore, for good or for ill.

So we see the multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity and multi-confessionalism of our readers not as an obstacle but as our advantage. That is the whole point and our distinct European advantage, being able to compare, pinpoint the similarities, acknowledge the differences and simply try to learn from each other.

That was the thing that made us launch this newsletter and I believe that will be the thing that will keep our readers interested.

 

BIRN Holds Visual Storytelling Workshop for Youngsters Interested in Transitional Justice

Eleven youngsters from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia met in Sarajevo to learn about using war crimes archives in visual storytelling.

From 20-21 October, 11 youngsters from all over the Balkans met in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo for the “Visual Storytelling Using War Crime Archives” workshop organised by Balkan Insight’s Transitional Justice program.

With the help of Denis Dzidic, director of BIRN BiH and Lamija Grebo, journalist for BIRN BiH, and Nejra Mulaomerovic, programme associate for BIRN BTJ, they learned how to use war crimes archives and how to conduct interviews. Azem Kurtic, journalist for BIRN Hub, held a full-day workshop covering visual storytelling and video-making principles.

With the help of the trainers, the participants watched and analysed previous work that BIRN published on this topic, like “44 Months Under Siege” and “Lives Behind the Fields of Death”.

“These stories are a way to heal together beyond borders and nationalities. It’s nice to see people doing these kinds of projects, and putting in the effort, it’s inspiring. But it makes you wonder why nobody else is doing this,” reflected a participant. 

All these tools and knowledge will come in handy for the second part of the workshop, which starts when they travel back home. Each of them will produce two short video interviews with people who survived the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The best five applicants will be selected for a one-month exchange programme in 2023 in Sarajevo. This will enable the participants to foster closer networks, learn more about different facets of the war, gain skills and do more research into court archives.

In the previous edition of this project, held last year in Tuzla from July 25-29, 2021, ten young people from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia also produced interviews with war crime survivors. The whole playlist can be found here.

 

BIRN Grantee Trains Kosovo Journalists to Research War Crime Archives

A BIRN grant recipient trained journalists in Kosovo how to explore the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and domestic courts in ex-Yugoslav countries that deal with war crimes cases.

Amer Alija, one of 13 recipients of grants from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network to create small projects based on the archives of the UN war crimes tribunal, held a workshop for young journalists in Pristina on Thursday about how to research Kosovo war crimes in court archives.

“Documents administered by courts provide many details and insights into historical events that researchers and journalists can use to tell the truth, using official documents and sources,” Alija, a legal analyst at the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo, told the journalists.

His workshop was divided into two sections: lectures on the history of trials for crimes committed during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, and training on using the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY’s database and the databases of Kosovo and Serbian courts dealing with war crimes cases from the Kosovo war.

Alija talked through the events of the Kosovo war, the forces involved and the difference between war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He explained that crimes related to the Kosovo war have been tried in five different types of courts including the ICTY, Kosovo’s domestic courts, Serbian courts, Montenegrin courts and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a hybrid court that exists within Kosovo legal system but is located in The Hague and is trying former KLA members.

He said that there are 11 cases currently ongoing in Kosovo’s domestic courts and three at the Specialist Chambers.

He also said that contrary to common belief and reporting in Kosovo’s media that such cases are unpunished, five people have been convicted of bearing responsibility for sexual violence during the Kosovo war.

In the second part of the workshop, Alija showed the journalists how to do research in the ICTY’s database of court documents that include indictments, testimonies, official state documents, photographs and other documents admitted in court.

He also provided documents and step-by-step guides for using the ICTY database and domestic courts’ and non-governmental organisations’ databases in former Yugoslavi countries.

Alija showed the journalists how, by opening an account for the ICTY database, they can find more information about specific massacres during the war or particular war crimes by reading the indictments of individuals who have been tried already and the evidence from their trials.

Nejra Mulaomerovic, programme associate at BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice programme, said that archives play an important role in ensuring that the past is properly documented.

“The archives themselves are not a guarantee of the non-recurrence of conflicts, but if they are used by various actors from different research and academic backgrounds, they can contribute to raising awareness and can be used as tools to spark dialogue and inspire others to continue their efforts to seek justice and truth,” Mulaomerovic said.

BIRN’s other grantees have been exploring topics such as gender-based violence, Roma war victims, wartime sexual violence, the experience of women in conflict and the role of photography in prosecuting war crimes.

 

 

Freedom of Information in the Balkans: No Access and no Progress

Regional public institutions still need to improve their records on freedom of information and their transparency and accountability. Institutional silence remains a widespread problem, a BIRN panel discussion heard.

Even though almost all Western Balkan countries have excellent written Freedom of Information laws, they are mostly on paper. State institutions still need to improve regarding Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, speakers from the region told BIRN’s panel discussion, “Freedom of Information in the Balkans: No political will, no access, no progress”, held on Wednesday.

Political will is as important as laws, and public authorities need to make more progress with FOI requests, agreed speakers at the event, at which BIRN’s annual freedom of information report was officially launched.

 Saša Dragojlo, a BIRN journalist from Serbia, told the panel discussion that the laws are good only in theory. „The key word is political will. In our societies, it is much more important than laws”, Dragoljo said. Although the new law Serbia implemented last year is an improvement, if public institutions do not answer FOI requests, journalists will submit fewer of them. They will try to gather information unofficially, and that is a danger, he told the panel.

Helen Darbishire, executive director for Access Info Europe, said political will is often an individual decision, which leads to different reactions from even the same institutions. „In some countries, we have seen progress. Journalists tend to ask for more controversial pieces of information, therefore, have different impressions than the rest of the public. That’s not the way it should be,” Darbishire said.

Elona Hoxhaj, General Director of the Right to Information in Albania, told the panel that, „although much progress has been made towards transparency, civil servants are still unaware of their obligation towards the press and the public, so they question the requests”. The Information and Data Protection Commissioner’s Office is actively working with the Albanian school of public administration.

The Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information in Montenegro also helps public servants and journalists. But it is struggling to deal with more than 6,100 appeals, the Head of the Department for Free Access to Information said. „Some first-instance bodies don’t have enough money to have websites, so despite their goodwill, they are unable to publish public information”, Biljana Božić described the situation.

All Western Balkan countries have problems, the panel heard. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is a need for a strong, independent body monitoring the implementation of a new law submitted last year. In Kosovo, the local agency aims to raise awareness of public institutions that providing access to public information is obligatory.

In Serbia, one of the most significant problems is the so-called „silence of the administration”. „The common goal for all of us, both in the region and in Serbia, should be zero tolerance”, Serbia’s Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, Milan Marinović, wrote in a statement sent to the panel.

According to BIRN’s annual Freedom of Information report, this institutional silence is one of the most critical problems in the region. Monitored institutions from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia continue to struggle with implementing their own Freedom of Information laws. They are failing to become more transparent and accountable to their citizens.

BIRN’s annual FOI report is part of the „Paper Trail to Better Governance” project, funded by the Austrian Development Agency.

 

 

Spheres of Influence Uncovered

BIRN Hub

This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the roles that three key international players – the EU, Russia and China – have on the seven project countries’ economies. In the course of this, journalists from the seven countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – will map Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), coming from these three players and identify the main challenges and consequences for their countries. They will also produce investigative country-based and cross-border reports while their skills will be upgraded with a series of capacity-building activities.

Summary:

At the core of the project is the struggle for spheres of influence on the Eurasian continent, which has been going on between Russia, China and the EU for around a decade. Among other things, the project aims to identify Russian, Chinese and EU economic activities in these two broad regions, expose their consequences and downsides and inform the general public about its findings.

Political, economic and cultural ties with Russia, “inherited” from the Cold War, are still operative to varying degrees in these countries. However, the binding and integrating power of an economically weak, revisionist Russia, which relies above all on military strength, is clearly declining – and even driving away some former partners (Georgia).

The EU meanwhile is struggling to maintain its attractiveness because the demands that Brussels places on recipients of its financial support are high and often involve lengthy reform and adjustment processes that often cause frustration and disappointment among partners (Western Balkans, Georgia).

The main beneficiary of this frustration is China. By offering to finance large investments in long-awaited infrastructure projects, quickly and easily, it has found a willing audience in all the project countries. Although capital from China entails considerable risks and disadvantages for the recipient countries, the potential ecological, social and political consequences of cooperation with China in the recipient countries is barely publicly discussed.

Donor:

German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Main objectives:

 Objective 1: Strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in the project countries, as they are the main pillars of a critical public discourse on the effects of economic cooperation with China, Russia and the EU.

Objective 2: Increase skills and strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in the project countries to continuously inform a broad public with high-quality reporting about the background and consequences of international economic cooperation.

Objective 3: Increase the capacities of participating journalists to join cross-border projects and engage in data journalism.

Objective 4: Advance the reporting and publishing of complex investigative stories achieved through interesting and understandable preparation and a strategic public relations campaigns with a wide audience.

Objective 5: Increase the capacities of the participating journalists to become parts of international networks whose members support each other in researching and analysing global economic relationships.

Main Activities:

  • Hold several meetings and trainings throughout the project duration (in Tbilisi, Belgrade, Tashkent, Podgorica, and Sarajevo).
  • Organise and conduct online capacity-building workshops and sessions.
  • Work on a database and an interactive map to present the spread of FDIs in the project countries.
  • Produce country-based and cross-border long reads and investigative reports.
  • Develop curricula for self-study.

Target Groups:

  • The direct target group includes 25 journalists from the seven project countries who deal with questions of international economic cooperation either as freelancers or as permanent employees.
  • The indirect target group consists of two subgroups:
  • group of experts from diverse Non-Governmental Organizations (around 150 people involved in the project through trainings, researches and publications)
  • general audience in the participating countries.

Main implementer:

n-ost

Partners:

BIRN Hub

Anhor.uz, Uzbekistan

JAM News, Georgia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Society against Corruption in Montenegro

BIRN Hub

The aim of this project is to increase the accountability to citizens of Montenegro’s national and local governments, as well as public institutions, and empower the justice system and the rule of law.

Summary:

Corruption is the main obstacle towards establishing the rule of law in Montenegro and is significantly undermining its economy and appreciation of human rights. This has been outlined by many reports and policy papers, including the annual European Union reports that measure the country’s progress towards EU integration.

In 2020 the government was changed after three decades of one party in power, with the new majority making the fight against corruption a key priority.

But, more than a year since those elections, the results in the field of anti-corruption are either poor or missing, while political instability is affecting each segment of society. Citizens are more divided then ever, based on national, religious, political and other preferences. Trust in institutions is dropping.

Participation of civil society organizations (CSOs), especially community groups working at local level, in assessing the impact of gaps in reforms is lacking. Citizens are either poorly consulted by the government or excluded from designing and implementing anti-corruption activities. Public consultations are often organised in a way to discourage participation and recommendations made by CSOs are often rejected. Although on paper and in speeches the government supports civil society and its participation in policy development, in reality CSOs’ contribution is neglected. Media also have limited knowledge and skills to report on corruption and do not have developed relations with primary stakeholders – citizens and local CSOs.

This project will bring Montenegrin citizens closer to civil society and local media, and vice-versa. It will empower them to work together on identifying and reporting corruption, holding institutions accountable and demanding results, at the same time raising awareness of the damage of corruption, especially in the strategic areas of healthcare, education and the environment.

The project will also build the capacities of CSOs and local media to be active players in their communities, which will allow them to influence policies, laws and anti-corruption practices and so create a society with an empowered justice system and rule of law.

It aims to foster this collaboration through a multi-stacker approach but also through the active use of technology. The project will nurture a bottom-up approach – and empower those at local level on advocacy and, at an informative level – through CSOs and media – help citizens to demand change, influence politics, monitor and act as change-bringers in their communities.

Donor:

United States Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Main objectives:

  1. Empower local media, civil society and citizens to be able to identify corruption in their communities, report it to responsible authorities and hold institutions accountable.
  2. Strengthen civil society’s and media’s capacities to report and counter corruption at national and local level to influence changes, with a special emphasis on the environment, education and healthcare
  3. Improve policies and/or laws through constructive engagement between civil society, government(s) and/or the private sector

Main Activities:

1.1: Conduct needs assessments of local CSOs and media;

1.2: Implement tailor-made trainings and mentoring sessions;

1.3: Develop and implement a digital tool for citizens’ reporting corruption.

2.1: Provide sub-grants to six local CSOs and six local media (12 in total);

2.2: Develop and publish anti-corruption stories based on inputs from citizens;

2.3: Develop and publish anti-corruption policy papers based on the needs of local communities;

2.4: Promote anti-corruption campaigns via mainstream and social media.

3.1: Organize workshops between media and local CSOs every five months;

3.2: Organize anti-corruption forums and gather at least 50 representatives of CSOs, media, private sector once per year, followed by adoption of joint recommendations for improvements, and at least 50 follow-up meetings with the decision makers;

3.3: Implement 18 community events related to concrete anti-corruption project activities, each reaching at least 10,000 citizens, or 200,000 in total;

Target Groups:

  • Civil society organizations, media outlets, journalists, local and central institutions and citizens of Montenegro

Main implementer:

BIRN HUB

Partners:

Civic Alliance and Eos Tech Trust

 

 

 

 

Freedom of Information in the Balkans: No access and no progress

Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, will present its annual Freedom of Information Report in an online event on Wednesday, October 19.

The panel, including representatives from the Freedom of Information commissioner’s offices from several countries in the region, will discuss main findings of the report: that politics in the Balkans has a significant influence on access to information.

The report is part of BIRN’s ongoing project, A Paper Trail to Better Governance, whose main aim is monitoring access to information and exposing wrongdoing through country-based and cross-border investigations.

Speakers:

Krenare S. Dermaku, Commissioner of the Information and Privacy Agency, Kosovo

Besnik Dervishi, Commissioner for the Right to Information and Personal Data Protection, Albania

Irma Hadžiavdić, Deputy Ombudsperson, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Biljana Božić, Head of Department for Free Access of Information, Montenegro

Cvetan Stanoeski and Makfirete Morina Sulejmani, lawyers, Agency for Protection of the Right to Free Access to Public Information, North Macedonia

Helen Darbishire, Executive Director, Access Info Europe

Shengyl Osmani, author of BIRN’s Freedom of Information in the Western Balkans report in 2021: “No political will, no access, no progress”.

Moderator of the event: Ivan Angelovski, BIRN Investigations Editor

Date and time: Wednesday, October 19., 1400 CET

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82662905904?pwd=Z2dKZTJoeGo4RjB0Rytwck11VlUwdz09

The report will be available on https://bird.tools/publications/ after the official launch event.

 

 

BIRN Supports 28 Media Outlets in Engagement Journalism

Journalists and editors from 28 media outlets in six Balkan countries are being given financial and editorial support to engage their local communities in the reporting process.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, launched a new round of support for media outlets across the Balkans in October 2022, continuing the regional Media for All project.

BIRN will provide editorial and mentoring support to journalists and editors from total of 28 media outlets from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.

The group of 28 media outlets was previously supported in 2020 and 2021 within the same project through training, grants, technical support and mentorship to enable engagement with local communities and enable citizens to participate in the reporting process, by suggesting topics, providing testimonials, documents and evidence.

BIRN’s support will now equip local media to further develop their skills in engagement journalism and raise their editorial standards, with a particular focus on storytelling, data analysis, verification and fact-checking, contributing to the fight against misinformation and disinformation.

The media receiving the support will continue to use the Engaged Citizens Reporting tool, ECR, which was developed by BIRN during the previous phase of the Media for All project.

Media outlets will receive support until the end of February 2023. They will also be able to carry on using the ECR tool after the project is complete, to ensure sustainability of engagement journalism methodology in the region and enable media to better answer the information needs of local communities on a long-term basis.

The project aims to achieve a level of relationships and standards in which media outlets and journalists report together with citizens, and not only about them.

The project intends to build on the results from the previous phase but also to help prevent the spread of and the susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation. It will continue to work towards the creation of high-quality, accurate and relevant content created with the community by using the ECR tool and with support from BIRN’s editors and journalists.

Community-engaged reporting, in which ordinary people’s voices are heard and unresolved issues are tackled, proved to be a game-changer, as shown by numerous examples from the previous project phase.

Citizens’ engagement in the reporting process has put additional pressure on local authorities and decision-makers to act on issues of concern. It has helped media outlets to listen to voices from the community while bringing innovation to their investigative reporting and newsrooms.

Journalists and editors who have already used the ECR tool say that it has transformed the way the media outlets communicate with their audiences, who feel empowered by helping shape the content of their own media.

“It has direct impact on mobilising communities to solve a problem, because we provide data … that they can rely on, and continue to seek their rights,” Dorjana Daka, editor of Albanian news website Informim, told BIRN in August 2022.

Informim investigated stories about the Roma community, whose members often do not have access to the internet and lack trust in journalists, but managed to engage them through ECR and community events.

BIRN’s manager for the Media for All project, Marija Vasilevska, said that BIRN continues to support the media outlets in the creation of quality content “required by citizens and for citizens”.

“This way we are bringing back trust in the media, but also increasing the audience of local media outlets. Moreover, we are giving voice to the voiceless, such as minorities and vulnerable groups of citizens to share information that can be placed on media outlets’ front pages, lobbying and advocating for real needs in society,” Vasilevska said.

This extension of the projects is built on successes from the previous phase. During the first phase of the project, 51 media outlets were supported, directly engaging more than 39,000 citizens in six countries through more than 300 different callouts for engagement, which resulted in more than 700 journalistic products in various formats, including articles, video, podcasts and multimedia content.

The Media for All project is being implemented in six countries in the region: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The project is funded by the UK Government and implemented by a consortium led by the British Council together with BIRN, the Thomson Foundation and Intrac.

 

 

Enhancing accountability and memorialization processes in the Balkans by exploring war crimes archives and promoting fact-based narrative

BIRN Hub

The project aims to strengthen transitional justice mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo through enhanced usage of courts’ archives and professional reporting on war crimes. Specifically, the project is intended to reinforce the role of local artists, journalists, researchers, and historians in becoming drivers of change in reconciliation processes in the Balkan region; also, to improve intercultural dialogue and guarantees of non-recurrence through enhanced usage of court archives for the creation of multimedia fact-based content, combating the disinformation and denial that are encouraged by mainstream nationalistic narratives.

Summary:

Although more than 20 years have passed since military conflicts in the Balkans ended, former Yugoslav countries have been slow to implement transitional justice mechanisms regarding human rights violations. In the past, stakeholders in the field of transitional justice in the Balkans were mainly focused on criminal justice, which had its foothold in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ITCY, and its successor, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. On completion of the work of the tribunals, domestic courts were to take over the prosecution of war crimes suspects.

However, the number of such trials is declining, and new indictments remain focused on low-ranking perpetrators. Although the few existing trials are noteworthy, and BIRN is closely monitoring and reporting on them, it is important to focus on other segments of transitional justice and link it with criminal justice efforts. In this context, when regional cooperation among local judicial institutions remains key to advancing accountability and ending impunity, BIRN aims to increase the awareness of the key stakeholders and the public about these processes.

Aside from ongoing trials, court archives are a repository of testimonies and evidence presented at earlier trials, which should be used to create fact-based narratives about wartime past. Archives from the ICTY and local courts in all former Yugoslav republics make this conflict one of the best documented in history. Unfortunately, however, most of the archives are not easily accessible; a considerable amount of essential material does not see the light of day.

BIRN has already implemented two projects supported by the Matra Regional Rule of Law Program. The first, “Accountability and regional cooperation in prosecuting war crimes in former Yugoslavia”, focused on criminal justice efforts and regional cooperation among local prosecutors’ offices. The second, “Shaping and promoting war crime trial narratives in the Western Balkans”, aimed to promote and strengthen criminal justice and guarantees of non-recurrence through regular, in-depth, high standard reporting on war crime trials, but also to promote and disseminate the archives of the international and local courts.

This project is a follow-up to these previous actions, expanding the work on court archives and memorialisation processes but also providing interested individuals with the opportunity to research archives from different and often complementary perspectives. This way, overall reconciliation processes are being reinforced by broadening the scope of independent professionals interested in becoming active in securing guarantees of non-recurrence.

Donor:

Matra Regional Rule of Law, The Netherlands

Main objectives:

Overall objective – Strengthen transitional justice mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo through enhanced usage of courts’ archives and professional reporting on war crimes.

Specific objective 1 – Reinforce the role of local artists, journalists, researchers and historians in becoming drivers of change in the overall reconciliation processes in the Balkan region.

Specific objective 2 – Improve intercultural dialogue and guarantees of non-recurrence through enhanced usage of court archives for the creation of multimedia fact-based content combating disinformation and denial caused by mainstream nationalistic narratives.

 Main Activities:

  1. Produce and publish online 1,500 daily reports and analyses of war crime trials’ monitoring and transitional justice processes at all levels of the judiciary. The most important ones will be translated into BCMS and Albanian.
  2. More than 3,000 republications in local, regional and international media outlets.
  3. Publish at least five data-driven multimedia investigations into war crime cases.
  4. Artists, journalists and historians to produce at least 10 small projects using international and local court archives.
  5. Upload up to 20 multimedia pieces (essays, articles, photographs, video materials and archaeological research papers) to the Mass Graves Database.
  6. Update Mass Grave Database with small-size mass graves locations
  7. Hold one regional conference with up to 100 participants.
  8. Hold one archive workshop for youth, mentor 10 young people to produce 20 oral history videos and hold five exchange programmes.
  9. Develop tool for journalists, researchers, historians to more easily search court archives.

Target Groups:

Journalists, media, victims of war, researchers, historians, artists, academia

Main implementer:

BIRN Hub

Partners:

BIRN BiH

Project associates:

n/a

 

 

Spheres of Influence Uncovered

BIRN Hub

This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the roles that three key international players – the EU, Russia and China – have on the seven project countries’ economies. In the course of this, journalists from the seven countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – will map Foreign Direct Investment, FDI, coming from these three players and identify the main challenges and consequences for their countries. They will also produce investigative country-based and cross-border reports while their skills will be upgraded with a series of capacity-building activities.

Summary: 

At the core of the project is the struggle for spheres of influence on the Eurasian continent, which has been going on between Russia, China and the EU for around a decade. Among other things, the project aims to identify Russian, Chinese and EU economic activities in these two broad regions, expose their consequences and downsides and inform the general public about its findings.

Political, economic and cultural ties with Russia, “inherited” from the Cold War, are still operative to varying degrees in these countries. However, the binding and integrating power of an economically weak, revisionist Russia, which relies above all on military strength, is clearly declining – or even driving away some former partners (Georgia).

The EU is meanwhile struggling to maintain its attractiveness because the demands that Brussels places on recipients of its financial support are high, and often involve lengthy reform and adjustment processes that often cause frustration and disappointment among partners (Western Balkans, Georgia).

China is the main beneficiary of this frustration. By offering to finance large investments in long-awaited infrastructure projects quickly and easily, it has found a willing audience in all the project countries. Although capital from China entails considerable risks and disadvantages for the recipient countries, the potential ecological, social and political consequences of cooperation with China in the recipient countries is barely publicly discussed.

Donor:

German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Main objectives:

Objective 1: Strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in project countries, as they are the main pillars of a critical public discourse on the effects of economic cooperation with China, Russia and the EU.

Objective 2: Increase skills and strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in project countries to continuously inform a broad public with high-quality reporting about the background and consequences of international economic cooperation.

Objective 3: Increase the capacities of the participating journalists to join cross-border projects and engage in data journalism.

Objective 4: Advance the reporting and publication of complex and data-heavy stories achieved through interesting and understandable preparation and strategic public relations campaigns with a wide audience.

Objective 5: Increase the capacities of participating journalists to become parts of international networks whose members support each other in researching and analysing global economic relationships.

Main Activities:

  • Several offline meetings and trainings throughout the project’s duration (in Tbilisi, Belgrade, Tashkent, Podgorica, Sarajevo).
  • Capacity-building measures/workshops online.
  • Work on the database and an interactive map to present the spread of FDIs in the project countries.
  • Production of country-based and cross-border long reads and investigative reports.
  • Development of curricula for self-study.

 Target Groups:

  • The direct target group includes 25 journalists from the seven project countries who deal with questions of international economic cooperation either as freelancers or as permanent employees.
  • The indirect target group consists of two subgroups:
  • group of experts and multipliers from NGOs and science(around 150 people involved in the project through further training measures, research and publications)
  • general audience in the participating countries.

Main implementer:

n-ost

Partners:

BIRN Hub

Anhor.uz, Uzbekistan

JAM News, Georgia