The headphones are audible. repetitive: "I'm sorry, but I can't hear them, they didn't turn on the microphone."
That was the lady who was hired by the Municipality of North Mitrovica to translate into Serbian the session of the Municipal Assembly, because The Law on the Use of Languages obliged to provide it.
I look at the paper in front of me - the members of the Security Commission are written in Albanian. I don't understand anything. I'm trying to catch the notes from the session, again I can't. I hear every fifth word, and the information escapes me.
This is how my first trip to the North Mitrovica Municipal Assembly meeting, which has one Serbian councilor, looked like. The next ones were not better either. However, there are colleagues (Serbs) so we come together to convey to the public what happened.
Ana Marija Ivković, editor-in-chief of the Alternativna portal, told "Vreme" that the Law on the Use of Languages is most often not respected, and that journalists often receive answers from institutions only in Albanian.
"For example, I have excellent communication with the Privatization Agency of Kosovo and I have to praise the fact that they answer my questions very quickly, but those answers are in the Albanian language," says Ivković.
He adds that it also happened at the press conferences of some ministries that there was not a good enough translation.
"It seems to me that now it's easier for everyone if they simply don't have a translation into Serbian. If there is one, it will be extremely bad, so now we become happy if we get an answer at all. The question is no longer whether you will get an answer in Serbian, but whether you will get an answer at all," indicates the "Vremena" interviewee.
Special police as the new normal
A jazz festival, a basketball tournament, the construction of a bridge - these are all seemingly innocuous events from which we can report. However, if you are in the north of Kosovo, these events are not "harmless" either.
The presence of the special unit of the Kosovo Police is often after Banjska. Police officers sometimes legitimize and film journalists in the field. On the famous bridge are members of KFOR who also do this. And sometimes you are filmed by unknown people, whose language you generally don't understand.
Arrests of citizens are frequent, and the police know how to warn the journalist team in those moments, and again, most often in the Albanian language.
There are also local powerful people that you see around town and write to, and colleagues of other ethnicities with whom you do not cooperate well. And the responsibility for that is mutual.
In short: long pipes, bulletproof vests, recording, legitimization and misunderstanding follow Serbian journalists during their reporting from the north of Kosovo.
Ivković explains that from 2022, it has become the new normal in journalistic work that members of the special unit of the Kosovo Police periodically appear.
"Within a few minutes, it can happen that special forces are deployed on the field," describes Ivković.
"Are you Albanian?"
Ivković says that sometimes the special police ask in Albanian whether you are Albanian or Albanian, ask for documents and try to explain something in Albanian.
"It happened to me recently while filming the construction of a new bridge in Mitrovica. I'm lucky because I understand the language, but I wondered what would happen to my colleagues who don't understand a word. They didn't give me an ID, but they tried to explain to me that I couldn't be in front of the yellow tape because of the works, so there was a misunderstanding and I left," says our interlocutor.
Such situations, notes Ivković, are dangerous when there are tensions, such as after the explosion on the Ibar-Lepenac canal, when members of the KP were deployed in the entire North Mitrovica.
"As journalists, we then decided that during the deployment and recording of that evening, we would not move alone, but in a group of three of us, because we thought it was safer that way, given the tensions and the fact that some of the police officers simply do not know the language and can react in different ways when charged," she continues.
"So we decide on our own to have precautionary measures, to sometimes move together and very often not to wear press vests because we think it's safer not to have them than to have them in certain situations," emphasized Ivković.
Essential protections – none
According to the data of the Association of Serbian Journalists in Kosovo, 2024 cases of security threats were registered in 22, while the Association of Journalists of Kosovo recorded as many as 42 incidents.
Death threats, verbal attacks, disruption of work, but also police raids and cyber attacks are part of the daily life of local newsrooms, according to the report of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM).
When something happens to a journalist, the associations condemn it and that's it, emphasizes Ivković.
"There is no essential protection. Of course it is important to condemn the attack, but it will not prevent someone who attacked you from doing it again. I think one of the reasons that most colleagues do not report it to the police is that it would be a bigger problem for a local journalist to report it, after which we would meet the person we reported on the street. So I think that many attacks go under the radar," our interlocutor points out.
"The address of officials in Kosovo is no different than those in Belgrade. With a series of accusations against journalists who criticize them, I am also talking about political representatives of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. And it has not changed over time."
