Open letter with 700 signatories accuses the Croatian media of fomenting fear and prejudice through false and one-sides reports on migrants and refugees.
More than 700 organisations, individuals, journalists and public figures in Croatia have signed an open letter on Thursday, criticising the media’s “one-sided, simplified and ultimately dishonest and unfair reporting” about migrants and refugees.
Ivana Peric, editor of the H-alter website, one of the signatories, told BIRN that the media were overwhelmed by fake news about refugees.
He accused numerous media of violating professional standards with reports that were often one-sided.
“Our society is dominated by fear, resulting from insecurity, economic subjugation and a feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness, and this fear is being instrumentalized politically, with the help of the media, in a disastrous way; it is turning into weapons against refugees and migrants, who are already disempowered and marginalized people,” he said.
Peric said right-wing forces were thriving on the fear, and were using the recent migrant protests on the Velika Kladusa-Maljevac Bosnia-Croatia border crossing – and the dispute over the UN “Marrakesh Declaration” on migration collaboration.
The so-called Marrakesh Political Declaration on migration collaboration, signed by 31 European and 26 African countries on May 2 as part of the Rabat Process of Euro-African Dialogue on Migration, pronounces migration a positive thing, stressing the beneficial idea of migration of certain groups.
Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic abandoned attending the inter-governmental conference on the declaration, however – which drew claims that she was pandering to the right, which opposes it.
Bruna Esih, MP and president of the Independent for Croatia party, to which the well-known right-wing politician Zlatko Hasanbegovic also belongs, told N1 television that the UN document appeared designed to “encourage migration”.
“For the first time, migration is being put on the level of a human right”, Esih said, calling this a controversial and unwelcome development.
Ivan Pernar, from the populist Living Wall [Zivi zid] party, has meanwhile issued a video in which he accused migrants of being behind a crime wave in Germany.
“Before the arrival of migrants in Germany there were 300 stabbings per year; today, 3,000 people are stabbed yearly. So, a ten-times increase,” Pernar said.
In response to Pernar’s video, Croatia’s main fact-checking website, Faktograf, issued its own findings, which show that, according to official German statistics, last year saw the smallest such number of offences in the last 25 years.
Critics of the media say they have inflamed the atmosphere by their reports on the protests of hundreds of migrants and refugees at the Bosnia-Croatia border at the Maljevac border point, demanding entry into the neighbouring EU state.
From the start of the year until October 17, just over 18,000 migrants and refugees were registered as having entered Bosnia, travelling on a new so-called “Balkan route” towards Western Europe.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
