Police, prosecutors, Kosovo’s Central Election Commission, none of them said yesterday what exactly happened in the building of the Ministry of Infrastructure in Pristina, in a room where votes from Serbia were counted, writes today portal KoSSev.
About 3,700 envelopes with votes in the recent Kosovo snap parliamentary elections arrived at Pristina from central Serbia last Friday. Their counting, along with about 15,500 diaspora votes, began yesterday morning. However, it was soon discontinued when those who counted votes during the counting, by their own admission, experienced health problems.
The media in Pristina had information on what happened there, before the competent authorities. Thus, the day ended with alarming news about intentional poisoning from Serbia and additional information on what kind of chemical poisons the “mighty” Serbia had.
At about 11 pm, the count was suspended due to an “odor” from the envelopes that allegedly caused reactions on the skin of the face and hands of CEC staff.
KoSSev writes that in Pristina’s leading media coverage, one scenario dominated – CEC officers were poisoned by envelopes or whatever was inside them, and the envelopes arrived from Serbia. Moreover, there were no enclosure in these reports – ‘allegedly’, that is there was in no way left the possibility that anything other than intentional poisoning could have been the cause of health problems. They did not even hesitate after the statement of the doctors, who were not even prepared themselves to state that it was just poisoning until the results of the analyses arrived.
The doctors estimated that nine patients they had received at that time had no symptoms of infection. This expert evaluation was accompanied by a statement from the director of the Institute of Public Health, who warned that they would have to wait between 24-48 hours before making a full assessment of the health status of those who counted votes from Serbia yesterday and who had experienced health problems.
The statements of the doctors, who did not mention poisoning anywhere, were reported by Gazeta Express in an article entitled: “QKUK Gives Details of Poisoned Women: Two Women Pregnant.”
The same statement, but also the title was conveyed by other Pristina media such as Zeri, Bota Sot, Insajderi, Gazette Blic…
As the day went by, the adjective “poisoned” became an axiom.
The opinions of official institutions have proved irrelevant compared to the views and opinions of Facebook experts.
Security experts and other political commentators, it has been shown, even without access to a secured spot where an investigation was underway, have enough expertise to judge what exactly happened.
Thus, at the moment of the election process crisis, the journalists of Indexonline, Gazeta Express, Insajderi… bypassed the opinions of the competent institutions and instead conveyed a Facebook status of a person described as a “security expert”.
“Serbia has the knowledge and material resources to produce chemical weapons and biological reagents,” the expert said, adding that this is another “subversive activity carried out by the Serbian state apparatus in Kosovo.”
KoSSev writes that without prejudice to the veracity of the assessment from the allegations itself, its underlying problematic potential is at least to spread panic at a time when it is still not possible to say with certainty what caused yesterday’s events.
The lack of reporting on official statements was also replaced by Facebook’s political analysts, notes portal KoSSev.
Bota Sot conveyed to its readers another Facebook status of an analyst who suggested steps that Kosovo should take after the “poison attack by Serbia”.
This analyst suggested the following steps – to fire the security chief and convene a UN session, organize protests in front of Serbian embassies around the world, and invite the Serbian ambassador to Tirana for an emergency meeting.
Political parties also compensated the slow reaction of the competent institutions, which did not announce the results of the official investigation by this morning.
The first political party to appear on this issue was the Serbian List.
Conspiracy – shouted from the Serbian List, an electoral engineering effort is underway to award one of the ten seats in the Kosovo parliament reserved for the Serb community to one of Kurti’s Serbs.
Another Brovina and a Roma woman stealing children
Portal KoSSev recalls that even though the Kosovo’s media infamous role is still in the memory, firstly the public service broadcaster (confirmed by the OSCE report in Vienna) in continued play in the escalating ethnic violence in March 2004, there are recent examples of similar media reports.
The most recent example is the case of two times beaten Roma woman in Urosevac, who has been labelled as a child thief on social media and in the media, despite the fact that the authorities have come forward and refute these incorrect claims.
Earlier that day, media in Pristina took part in the spreading of a false photo of alleged rapes of Albanian women by Serb soldiers, which was shown to the media in the Kosovo Assembly Hall by PDK MP Flora Brovina, claiming this to be an evidence. Although with dramatically disturbing content, they published the photo, even without warning what the content was, or dimming the photo.
A public outcry was needed due to disrespecting the dignity of the victim and in order to darken the intimate parts and face in the photograph. Following this, another media outlet reported another photo of the alleged murder of an Albanian child, who was alleged to have also been sexually abused.
At the end of the day, those same media, moreover, managed to portray themselves as responsible for the discovery that Brovina’s photo was actually from a pornographic film.
