He begins simply. “This is me. At the moment I still have no idea how much trouble I am creating for my future self.” He tells us he works as a school organiser and videographer in Karabash, a town of 10,000 people, known internationally as one of the most polluted places on earth. Life revolves around the copper smelting plant. He loves his town. He loves his students. He loves arranging books by colour in his small …

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The article described something familiar to diplomats and analysts who have followed the region for a decade or more. Switzerland hosts informal dialogue formats in Solothurn two to three times a year2. These are not negotiations. They are not secret summits. They are confidence building spaces that include representatives from governing parties, opposition figures, and civil society. According to several sources, ministers have occasionally participated3. Two names were mentioned as participants in this format, Besnik Bislimi and Marko Djuric. Crucially, and explicitly, the article stated that the two had not met directly. Gafafer drew a careful line between what was observed, what was sourced anonymously, and what could not be attributed. Discreet did not become secret. Presence did not become encounter.

By midday, that restraint was gone.

VOX Kosova published its first article4 of the day under a headline that claimed Besnik Bislimi had secretly met Marko Djuric in Switzerland. The source cited was NZZ. I read it twice, then opened the original again. The claim was not there. It was not implied. It was not buried between lines. It simply did not exist. What had existed was participation in a multilateral dialogue format. What VOX presented was a bilateral secret meeting. The transformation was total.

At that moment, this could still have been incompetence. Kosovo’s media landscape is crowded, competitive, underfunded, and often rushed. Bad translations happen. Editors sometimes privilege sensation over fidelity. I have been in newsrooms long enough to know how easily that slide can occur. But journalism is not judged only by the first mistake. It is judged by what happens after the mistake is exposed.

As the day unfolded, exposure came quickly.

After questions were addressed to the Swiss foreign ministry, VOX published5 a second article. This one acknowledged that Switzerland organises such meetings two to three times a year and admitted that Swiss authorities had not confirmed any Bislimi-Djuric meeting. At that point, the correct professional response was obvious. The original framing had to be corrected. The headline had to be withdrawn or amended. The audience had to be told that the earlier claim went beyond the source.

That did not happen.

Instead, the narrative was preserved through semantic manoeuvring. The story now leaned on the distinction between discreet and secret, without abandoning the insinuation that something hidden and improper had occurred. The core claim remained standing, even though its factual foundation had already been publicly undermined.

Later that evening, VOX published a third article6, this time including a written response from Tobias Gafafer himself. He reiterated precisely what he had written in NZZ. Ministers had attended such meetings. Bislimi and Djuriç were among the participants. He had not written that they met each other. That clarification did not merely weaken the earlier VOX reporting. It directly contradicted it. And yet again, there was no full correction, no retraction, no editorial note explaining to readers that the central claim of the day had been false.

Parallel to this, the Government of Kosovo issued an official response through its media adviser7. The statement acknowledged Switzerland’s role, thanked Bern for its engagement, and clearly denied that Besnik Bislimi had held any secret meeting with Marko Djuric. It added an important factual clarification, that Bislimi had attended one of these events as a speaker at a gathering where Djuric was not present. VOX did not publish this denial. That omission was not incidental. In a story built around alleged secrecy, a clear official denial is not optional context. It is a decisive counter fact.

By the end of the day, the pattern was visible. A claim that did not exist in the original source had been introduced. That claim had been challenged by the source journalist himself and denied by the government concerned. Despite this, it remained uncorrected, repeated, and shielded by rhetorical adjustments.

This was the point at which I decided to write8.

The article we published later that day was not an opinion piece in the loose sense. It was a reconstruction. I placed the NZZ article next to the VOX articles and traced, step by step, where the divergence occurred. I quoted what NZZ had written and what it had not. I laid out the timeline of VOX’s publications and noted precisely when corrective information became available. I documented the absence of correction and the editorial choice to omit the government denial. The conclusion was not dramatic. It was procedural. By any standard of reporting, the VOX articles of 6 January did not qualify as journalism. They qualified as narrative construction.

Publishing that analysis did not end the matter. It sharpened it.

Shortly after, I contacted Lirim Mehmetaj directly. I did so formally, in Albanian, and in the name of . I made it clear that this was not personal polemic. It was a request for professional accountability related to his publications of that day. I asked five questions, all factual, all directly tied to his reporting. Where exactly did NZZ state that Bislimi and Djuric had met. Why was participation in a multilateral dialogue presented as a secret bilateral meeting. Why was the claim not corrected after the NZZ journalist publicly clarified his reporting. Why was the official denial by the Government of Kosovo not published. And if the reporting was accurate, why were none of the core claims confirmed by any source after twenty four hours.

These were not rhetorical traps. They were the basic questions any editor would ask a reporter whose story had begun to unravel in public.

The response I received did not address a single one of them.

Instead, Mehmetaj demanded that I provide certificates proving that Gunpowder Chronicles is a registered media outlet. He asked for proof that we operate legally. He asked for documentation verifying my identity, suggesting that I might not be the person I claim to be. He framed these demands as a prerequisite for answering my questions.

Documenting the Response to Scrutiny

This move matters. It matters not because journalists are never asked to verify themselves, but because of when and how the demand was deployed. The issue on the table was his reporting. The evidence was public. The questions were specific. Rather than engage with any of that substance, he attempted to shift the entire exchange onto my legitimacy.

I responded by stating what is publicly verifiable, that is a registered publication operating legally in the United Kingdom and that its public registration information is accessible. I also stated a principle that should be obvious to anyone who claims to practise journalism, that the legitimacy of factual questions does not depend on certificates, but on whether the questions are grounded in evidence. I reiterated the questions and invited him to answer them.

He doubled down.

In subsequent messages, he repeated his demands for documents and letters, insisting on proof of my existence and threatening that without such proof, I could be reported to authorities for impersonation or fraud. He described me, implicitly and then explicitly, as a potential criminal rather than as an editor questioning his work. Still, he did not answer the questions.

At that point, the exchange ceased to be about one article. It became illustrative.

The same pattern that had characterised the reporting on 6 January now appeared in the response to scrutiny. When confronted with a factual discrepancy, do not correct it. When pressed, do not clarify. Instead, change the subject. Attack the messenger’s legitimacy. Introduce procedural obstacles. Escalate into intimidation. Preserve the original narrative by refusing to engage with the facts that undermine it.

This is why I am writing this analysis, and why it cannot be reduced to a media spat or a personal disagreement. What unfolded on 6 January, and in the days after, is a textbook example of how journalism is used as a cover for something else. In the next part below, I will examine that something else more closely, not through insult or speculation, but through comparison with documented operational tactics of information warfare, as described by scholars who have studied these methods across Eastern Europe and beyond.

The Exchange That Explained Everything

By the time the WhatsApp exchange ended, I was no longer reading it as a personal interaction. I was reading it as a sequence.

This distinction matters. Journalists argue with journalists all the time. Egos clash. Tempers flare. That alone proves nothing. What interested me here was not the tone of the messages but their structure. The order in which responses were chosen. The subjects that were avoided. The substitutions that appeared precisely where factual engagement should have been.

Once you stop expecting answers and start observing behaviour, the exchange becomes legible.

I had asked about sources. He answered with certificates.
I had asked about discrepancies. He answered with demands.
I had asked about corrections. He answered with threats.

This was not improvisation. It was patterned.

The first move was dismissal. Not of my arguments, but of my standing. By questioning whether existed, whether I was who I said I was, whether I had the right to ask anything at all, he attempted to invalidate the inquiry before it could even be heard. This is an old reflex in compromised reporting environments. If the facts are uncomfortable, deny the forum. If the forum persists, deny the person.

Dismissal serves a psychological function. It tells the audience, even if that audience is only the speaker himself, that engagement is unnecessary because the challenger is illegitimate. Once that frame is accepted, silence becomes justified. Accountability becomes optional.

When dismissal alone did not work, the second move followed naturally. Distortion.

The subject of the exchange was never my identity. It was his reporting. But the conversation was gradually bent until the reporting itself disappeared from view. The questions I had posed were not answered, but they were also not explicitly refused. Instead, they were submerged under procedural noise. Requests for documents. Demands for formal notification. References to verification processes that exist nowhere in journalistic ethics but sound authoritative enough to confuse the issue.

Distortion is not lying outright. It is bending the frame until the original object is no longer recognisable. By the time he was finished, the exchange was no longer about whether he had misrepresented an NZZ article. It was about whether I had complied with an invented bureaucratic ritual.

The third move was distraction.

This is where the escalation matters. When I reiterated that my questions did not require certificates, and that his reporting could be defended or corrected regardless of who asked about it, the tone shifted. References to authorities appeared. Suggestions of fraud. The possibility of legal consequences. None of this had anything to do with Besnik Bislimi, Marko Djuric, or Switzerland. But it had everything to do with changing the emotional temperature of the exchange.

Distraction through intimidation is effective because it consumes time and attention. Instead of analysing facts, the recipient is forced to consider risk. Instead of pressing for answers, they must decide whether engagement itself has become costly. The reporting remains untouched while the challenger is pushed onto the defensive.

The final move is dismay.

This is the moment where the goal is no longer to win an argument, but to exhaust it. To make the cost of pursuing truth higher than the reward. To signal that persistence will be met not with dialogue but with escalation. The intention is not resolution. It is attrition.

What struck me most is how closely this mirrored the reporting sequence itself.

On 6 January, a claim was introduced that did not exist in the source. When challenged, it was not corrected. When clarified by the original journalist, it was not withdrawn. When denied by the government concerned, the denial was omitted. Each time, instead of engagement, there was substitution. Instead of correction, reframing. Instead of transparency, deflection.

The WhatsApp exchange followed the same logic, compressed into a private channel.

This is not how journalism behaves under scrutiny. Journalism, even bad journalism, has instincts for self preservation that usually include partial retreat. A correction buried at the bottom. A softened headline. An editor’s note. These are not acts of virtue. They are acts of survival within a profession that still recognises error.

What I encountered instead was something closer to operational behaviour. The refusal to concede even a minor factual error. The insistence on maintaining the original narrative regardless of contradiction. The targeting of the critic rather than the critique. The use of procedural language as a weapon rather than a safeguard.

This is why the question ceased to be whether Lirim Mehmetaj had made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. The question became whether the mistake mattered to him at all.

In environments affected by information warfare, truth is not contested head on. It is surrounded. It is diluted. It is made expensive to defend. The goal is not to convince everyone of a falsehood, but to ensure that no stable account survives unchallenged. Confusion becomes success. Fatigue becomes victory.

Seen through that lens, the insistence on secrecy, even after secrecy had been disproven, makes sense. A secret meeting is not just a claim. It is a narrative device. It activates suspicion. It invites speculation. It erodes trust. Once released, it does its work even if later denied. Retraction does not undo effect. Silence preserves it.

The same applies to intimidation. The threat does not have to be carried out. Its function is anticipatory. It teaches others watching, quietly, that asking questions has consequences. That scrutiny invites trouble. That it is safer to repeat than to challenge.

I am careful here because I am not claiming coordination, orders, or conscious alignment with any foreign service. That would require evidence I do not have. What I am describing is functional similarity. Behaviour that aligns with known tactics because it serves the same purpose, whether intentionally or by habit absorbed in a polluted media ecosystem.

The most revealing moment in the exchange was not what he said, but what he never said.

At no point did he state, “Here is where NZZ says they met.”
At no point did he say, “This was a translation error and I corrected it.”
At no point did he say, “We chose not to publish the denial because…”

Those absences are louder than any insult.

Journalism is a profession built on answering questions. When a journalist consistently refuses to answer the simplest ones about his own work, and instead attacks the legitimacy of the questioner, something fundamental has already broken.

In the next part, I will widen the frame. Not to personalise this further, but to contextualise it. This episode did not occur in a vacuum. The names, networks, and narratives involved have appeared before. Understanding that continuity is essential, because what is at stake here is not one headline, or one exchange, but the integrity of the information space in which Kosovo’s public life now unfolds.

What Happens When Falsehoods Face No Consequences

Nothing I described in the first two parts exists in isolation. That is the final, and most uncomfortable, point.

If this were only about a mistranslated article, or a stubborn refusal to correct a headline, it would not merit this level of attention. Media history is full of errors that mattered less than the ink used to print them. What gives this episode weight is continuity. The same names recur. The same narratives reappear. The same defensive reflexes activate when scrutiny is applied. Over time, these repetitions stop looking accidental.

In Kosovo’s media environment, patterns are rarely loud. They do not announce themselves as campaigns. They move quietly, through insinuation rather than declaration, through suggestion rather than proof. The story of a “secret meeting” fits neatly into that ecology. It requires no verification to function. It relies on implication. It trades on the public’s long trained suspicion that something important is always being decided behind closed doors, and that official denials are always cosmetic.

Once introduced, such a narrative does not need to be sustained by facts. It only needs to be left uncorrected.

This is why the refusal to publish the government denial matters more than the initial headline. Journalism is not neutral in what it omits. Choosing not to include a denial in a story whose entire premise is secrecy is an editorial act. It tilts the informational field. It leaves readers with asymmetry. Suspicion without counterweight.

When I look at the WhatsApp exchange in that light, it stops being surprising. The same instinct that avoids correction avoids accountability. The same logic that prefers implication to evidence prefers intimidation to explanation. Both protect narrative dominance.

There is also a broader structural issue that Kosovo, like many post conflict societies, has never fully resolved. Media outlets often operate without strong institutional memory or internal correction mechanisms. Editors are rarely held accountable. Retractions are seen as weakness rather than professionalism. In that environment, the loudest voice often wins by default, not because it is right, but because it is unchallenged.

What has changed in recent years is the external context in which this weakness operates. Kosovo does not exist in a sealed informational space. Its media ecosystem is porous. Narratives that destabilise trust, suggest betrayal, or frame dialogue as conspiracy do not remain domestic. They align easily with broader regional messaging that seeks to portray engagement with the West as duplicity and transparency as theatre.

This does not require coordination to be effective. It requires only repetition and tolerance.

That is why I am careful not to accuse but equally careful not to minimise. The danger here is not that one journalist wrote one misleading headline. The danger is that such headlines can be written, defended, and normalised without consequence. That the cost of distortion is lower than the cost of correction. That intimidation is easier than explanation.

When journalism reaches that point, it stops functioning as a public service and starts functioning as an amplifier. Not necessarily of a single ideology, but of cynicism itself.

Cynicism is powerful. It tells the public that nothing is as it seems, that everyone lies, that all sides are equally compromised. Once that belief takes hold, facts lose their organising power. Evidence becomes optional. Trust collapses inward. In that vacuum, the most aggressive narrative survives, not the most accurate one.

This is why I refused to let the WhatsApp exchange disappear into private irritation. Silence would have been easier. Many editors would have chosen it. But silence is also a form of consent. It allows patterns to harden into norms.

By publishing the chronology, the discrepancies, and the exchange itself, I am not claiming moral superiority. I am insisting on professional minimums. If a claim is made, it must be sourced. If it is wrong, it must be corrected. If it is challenged, it must be defended with facts, not threats.

These are not Western impositions. They are not abstract ideals. They are the basic mechanics of journalism anywhere that wants to be taken seriously.

The irony is that Switzerland’s role in hosting discreet dialogue formats is not scandalous. It is not secretive. It is not evidence of betrayal. It is a recognised diplomatic practice that Kosovo itself benefits from. Turning that into a story of clandestine encounters does not expose power. It distorts it.

And distortion, repeated often enough, becomes infrastructure.

I am aware that writing this will not change everyone’s behaviour. It will not produce sudden retractions or apologies. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is documentation. To place on record how a narrative was built, defended, and shielded from correction. To make visible what usually operates in the margins.

Information spaces decay quietly. They do not collapse in a single moment. They erode through tolerated shortcuts, rewarded distortions, and unanswered questions. The only counterweight is insistence. Insistence on evidence. Insistence on accountability. Insistence that journalism cannot demand trust while refusing scrutiny.

That is why I wrote this. Not because I enjoy confrontation, but because the alternative is accommodation. And accommodation, in this context, is how the line between journalism and manipulation disappears without anyone noticing the exact moment it was crossed.

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At the end of the evening, after a set of careful speeches, the room chose to reject the idea that defence should come first. A narrow result, two votes in it, and twenty people not voting at all. On one level, it was nothing more than an earnest Friday night debate. On another, it was a revealing snapshot of a country…

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On 11 October 2025, after unknown men shattered the windows of my family’s empty house in Kosovo and desecrated the memorial car we kept for my late father, I did what journalists are trained to do: I documented it, issued a statement1, and asked the institutions that claim to defend press freedom to stand where they say they stand. It was a textbook case. Nothing was stolen. The target was not property, it was reporting. The attack followed months of threats from the same circles I had been exposing for laundering Belgrade’s and the oligarchs’ interests through media. It followed a year of articles that made a lot of comfortable people uncomfortable. It was, in every meaningful way, the kind of incident European organisations love to condemn when it happens far enough away.

The National Union of Journalists spoke2. The International Federation of Journalists spoke3. CPJ welcomed swift police action4. The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the organisation that lectures governments from Lisbon to Tbilisi on their sacred duty to protect journalists, was informed on 13 October.

And then nothing.

I have seen a lot in the last two decades, enough to know that bureaucracies don’t always move at the speed of outrage. But when an institution that calls itself “the European Centre” for the very freedom now under attack in a NATO-protected, EU-courting, Russia-targeted corner of the Balkans decides that the safer option is to keep its head down, that moment exposes everything. It tells you what is performance and what is principle. It tells you who is allowed to be a victim and who is not. It tells you that the moral authority that looks so polished on their website5 does not always survive contact with a case that is politically inconvenient to their friends.

That is the centre of this dispatch.

I’ve come to realise that the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom speaks as if it runs the conscience of the continent, but behaves as if conscience is something it can’t afford when the scrutiny turns inward.

This is not an abstract critique. I am not writing about “NGO culture” in the abstract. I am writing about an organisation whose staff and partners have intervened, loudly and repeatedly, in Kosovo’s internal media debates, defending outlets that registered in Serbia while broadcasting in Kosovo, amplifying actors with overt political alignments, and publishing letters that presented Prishtina’s attempts to defend its information space as authoritarianism, and yet, when one of the journalists who challenged that narrative was targeted, they went quiet.

Silence, in this case, is not neutrality. It is a decision.

To understand the weight of that decision, you have to walk back through the last three years, through the reporting I published in January, July, August and again in October 2025, through the documents we sent to Leipzig, through the questions they chose not to answer.

In January 2025 I wrote a piece that many of them read, some of them admitted it quietly, called “The ECPMF’s Selective Outrage: Protecting Propaganda, Not Press Freedom.”6

It dissected their joint letter about Kosovo’s governing party boycotting certain media outlets. The letter was presented, as such letters always are, as a defence of pluralism. But Kosovo is not Sweden. You cannot defend pluralism while ignoring the very real use of media as an instrument of Serbian, Kremlin-aligned destabilisation. You cannot elevate Klan Kosova’s7 business registration games as if they were a noble press freedom cause and gloss over the fact that registering in “Peć, Serbia” was an act of constitutional contempt in a country still fighting for recognition. You cannot claim the right, as the UK and EU have done, to ban Kremlin propaganda and then deny Kosovo the same right. Yet the ECPMF’s intervention did just that. It treated Prishtina’s insistence on legal compliance as censorship, because it suited its local interlocutors.

At the heart of that strange, incurious stance stood one person, their media law officer, later introduced in the region as their “senior legal adviser”, Flutura Kusari. I said then, and repeat now, that her track record in Kosovo raised serious questions about partiality. She had positioned herself, consistently, as a critic of the current government precisely at moments when the government was pushing back against Serbia’s networks and their local helpers. She endorsed outlets that repeated Belgrade’s talking points. She mocked foreign policy lobbying meant to strengthen Kosovo’s recognition. She amplified smear campaigns against investigative work that exposed the U.S. diplomat Gabriel Escobar’s entanglements. All of this was known. All of this was documented. And yet, inside ECPMF, none of it triggered the defensive antibodies that are supposed to exist in organisations that preach accountability. Instead, she became the gatekeeper for what ECPMF thought Kosovo was.

Then, in July 2025, something happened that broke the spell for anyone still willing to pretend this was just about interpretation.

Kusari, a woman who built a European platform denouncing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, filed a criminal complaint in Prishtina against a citizen, Mentor Llugaliu, because he criticised her online and nicknamed her “Mickoja”.

The Basic Prosecution looked at it and said: there is no crime here. No threat. No contact. No stalking. One addressee, one public figure, multiple public posts, ugly perhaps, but not criminal. The case, on the merits, was dead.

What did Kusari do?

She did not accept the legal reality and walk away.

She orchestrated an international chorus8. IFEX, IPI, Index on Censorship, and yes, her own ECPMF, published statements of solidarity with her as if she had been a victim of gendered harassment, instead of what she was in that instance, a powerful insider trying to use the criminal code to punish criticism. Those statements were not spontaneous. They were engineered by her and submitted to the prosecution in parallel with her complaint. I saw the timing. I saw the posts. I saw the way an individual, acting in her own interest, weaponised the prestige of international organisations in order to bend a domestic legal process.

That should have been the moment ECPMF paused and asked itself: are we in the business of defending journalism, or of laundering the private battles of our staff?

Instead, when the case was rejected a second time on appeal, Kusari doubled down, and did something I find more dangerous than the first move. She named the prosecutors publicly, by name, and accused them of failure. Her allies in local NGOs followed, publishing near-identical statements demanding the Kosovo Prosecutorial Council review those prosecutors’ performance. This was not, as some of her defenders tried to spin it, a brave woman seeking justice. It was an international officer, backed by EU money and German honours, using her platform to intimidate a small country’s judiciary.

Again: ECPMF could have stepped in. It could have said, in the language it uses on others, that public shaming of prosecutors in a fragile democracy is incompatible with press freedom values. It could have reminded its staff that you cannot both fight SLAPPs and file one.

It could have said: we cannot endorse private legal campaigns by our own advisers and still expect to be taken seriously when we preach to governments.

It said nothing.

So, in August 2025, we at Gunpowder Chronicles did what they refused to do. We published the full correspondence9. We showed the screenshots of the coordinated endorsements. We sent detailed, factual questions to the ECPMF, to IPI, to Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, to the German Embassy in Prishtina, and to Kusari herself.

We asked very simple things:

• did you know both prosecutorial instances had rejected the complaint?

• Did you consider the public naming of prosecutors acceptable?

• Did you conduct due diligence on her silence in real SLAPP cases, including the Devolli-linked ones?

• How do you reconcile this with the European Charter on Freedom of the Press, the very document on which the ECPMF claims to rest?

They did not answer.

The German Embassy wrote back to say, politely, that its assessment “differs” from ours. It did not address the substance. It did not address the misuse of its endorsement in a domestic legal dispute. It did not address whether a German state honour could be weaponised against Kosovo’s own justice system.

When powerful organisations refuse to explain, they are not just being lazy. They are protecting an arrangement.

Here is the double standard, laid out as cleanly as I can manage.

When ECPMF and its partners criticise small states Kosovo, Georgia and Albania, they speak the language of obligation. They demand transparency. They list articles and covenants. They insist that independence of the judiciary is non-negotiable. They tell governments that media registered in hostile jurisdictions must still be tolerated because “pluralism.” They tell ruling parties not to boycott outlets that insult them. They invoke the Charter, the UN Plan, the EU acquis.

When accountability knocks on their own door, when someone asks them to explain why their senior adviser acted like a political operator, why they backed her without checking facts, why they stayed silent when a journalist who had scrutinised them was attacked, they delay, they reframe, or they redefine.

They never lie outright.

They just make truth wait until everyone has gone home.

This is not clumsiness. It is design.

ECPMF is, first and foremost, a project of European respectability. It was born in 2015 out of a beautiful idea, a European watchdog to protect the 2009 Charter on Freedom of the Press, and it has been bankrolled, largely, by the European Commission, backed by German municipal foundations, blessed by high officials in Brussels. Its funding depends on remaining a safe, attractive, non-controversial partner for European institutions. Its public authority depends on being perceived as neutral and principled. Its regional reach depends on local fixers and advisers who “know the scene”, which is how you end up trusting people whose politics you don’t really understand.

Inside such an organisation, two instincts grow very strong.

The first is brand protection. You do not want to admit, publicly, that someone carrying your colours has abused her platform. Because if you admit it in one case, people will start looking at others. And if they start looking at others, they might notice patterns, allegiances to oligarchic media in Kosovo, indifference to attacks on critics in Bosnia, blind spots where EU interests are involved.

The second is patronage protection. If your adviser is tied to one faction in a small country’s media war, if she sits in their studios, drinks in their cafeterias, takes photos with their owners, amplifies their talking points, then calling her out means picking a fight not only with her, but with that whole faction. That can make fieldwork harder. It can cost access. It can damage partnerships. It can, in the worst case, draw the annoyance of the embassy that likes her.

So the organisation does what so many of the actors it monitors do: it chooses institutional self-preservation over its stated principles. It is not evil. It is afraid. But fear, repeated often enough, becomes the mission.

The result is the same corrosive logic we see in captured press associations in the Balkans, just written in better English and set in Leipzig.

I have heard, especially from colleagues in Western Europe, a version of this defence: “Yes, but you and the ECPMF have had disagreements, maybe they didn’t want to be seen as taking sides.” That sounds sensible if you don’t know the chronology. In the last fifteen months I published investigations about the Association of Journalists of Kosovo protecting partisan outlets while ignoring actual threats. I analysed how donor money and award circuits produced a cartelised press that polices critics and flatters friends. I showed how the ECPMF’s own Kosovo-facing people sided, over and over, with media aligned with the Devolli business empire and with political clans nostalgic for the pre-VV years. I named names. I published screenshots. I did not do it in private. I did it in public.

When my house was vandalised, that history did not become irrelevant.

It became the test.

A genuine press freedom organisation would have said: we have been criticised by this journalist and we have defended people he has criticised, but intimidation is not a tool we accept, we condemn this attack, full stop.

That is what NUJ did. That is what IFJ did. That is what CPJ did. They separated critique from threat. They chose principle.

ECPMF did not, because to do so would have drawn a line that led straight back to their own double standard in Kosovo.

What makes this more bitter is that ECPMF is, in its own origin story, a monument to people telling Europe that press freedom must be a precondition for accession. In 2009, editors took the Charter to Brussels and Luxembourg to say: this must be the rule. In 2015, parliamentarians and German funders set up the Centre to enforce that rule. The rhetoric was, and still is, ruthless when addressed to candidate countries, adopt the Charter, protect journalists, investigate all attacks, show that you are Europe.

But when one of their own advisers is accused, with evidence, of using that European prestige to intimidate Kosovo’s prosecutors, they shrug. When the same organisation is asked to condemn the vandalism of a journalist who has been exposing Kremlin-aligned Serbian operations, at a time when Europe spends billions countering Russian disinformation, they go quiet.

You can lecture the Balkans.

You just cannot be lectured by the Balkans. Can you?

I am not the only one who noticed. A Kosovar source, repeatedly targeted by the same media clusters ECPMF has cosied up to, put it to me in one sentence that I have not been able to improve: “When they wanted to discipline us, they said rules were sacred. When we asked for the same rules, they said it wasn’t the right time.”

That is the sound hypocrisy makes when it finally hits the ground.

So what sits behind their choices?

Start with funding. If most of your money comes from the European Commission and German public sources, you live with a constant awareness of diplomatic weather. Berlin decorates your adviser with the Federal Order of Merit. Berlin’s embassy in Prishtina publicly praises her. She then weaponises that praise. Are you, as a Leipzig-based NGO, going to publicly contradict both the German state and your own staff? Not unless you have a board made of granite. They don’t.

Add structure. ECPMF sits inside networks, MFRR, IJ4EU, wider European advocacy coalitions, in which Kusari herself is a node. To call her out is to create friction across the network. Friction is bad for joint projects. Joint projects are how you show Brussels you are delivering. Delivery is how you get the next grant.

Add politics. Kosovo is not a space most Western NGOs study in depth. They take their cues from trusted intermediaries. When those intermediaries turn out to be politically invested, the NGO is slow to update. Admitting you were played is hard. Admitting you helped launder propaganda under the banner of press freedom is harder.

Add fear. Every organisation that spends its time criticising governments dreads the moment someone throws the mirror back. The easiest way to avoid that moment is not to engage.

In the end, it looks like this: the institution that exists to ensure crimes against journalists don’t go unanswered declined to answer when a journalist asked them to do, for once, at home what they claim to do abroad.

There is an irony here I cannot ignore. Today is the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, a day born out of real blood, real murders, real disappeared reporters. Every year, organisations like ECPMF issue statements calling on states to investigate, prosecute, and end the culture of silence. They tell governments that silence signals tolerance. That failure to condemn encourages repetition. That no attack is too small to address. That even vandalism is part of a chain that leads, in some countries, to assassination.

They are right.

They just didn’t apply it to a case that implicated their own ecosystem.

That is why this piece is not just an airing of grievance. It is a pointer to a crack in Europe’s press freedom architecture.

Because if an organisation can be swayed, muted, or compromised by the politics of a staff member in a country the EU still treats as an apprentice, what will it do when a bigger state leans harder? If it will not defend a journalist who has spent fifteen months documenting how Serbian-backed propaganda networks, Devolli-linked media, and warlord-era political clans work together to discredit and threaten reporters, what faith should we place in its declarations about Ukraine, Georgia, or even Denmark’s proposed media ombudsperson?

This is where I land.

Institutions do not have to be spotless to be useful. They can make mistakes, learn, correct. But they cannot keep telling the rest of us to submit to scrutiny while refusing it themselves. They cannot discipline governments for selective outrage while practising it. They cannot roll out the Charter on Freedom of the Press like a sacrament and then duck when someone asks: does this apply to you too?

You can fool people with your mission statement for a while. You can overawe those who rely on your grants. You can bank on the laziness of international media who will quote your press releases without ever asking who you didn’t defend this week.

But not forever.

Eventually, people notice who is lecturing and who is listening.

So here is the quiet verdict.

ECPMF is at its most convincing when it punches up at states. It is at its least convincing when it would have to punch sideways, at its own network. The gap between the two is where trust leaks out. If it wants to keep the claim to moral authority it made in 2009 and 2015, it has to close that gap.

The cure is not complicated.

Stop performing virtue.

Practise it.

Issue statements because they are right, not because they are convenient. Subject your own advisers to the same standards you apply to Balkan civil servants. Tell your funders, when necessary, that principle costs. Admit publicly when you have backed the wrong horse. And when a journalist is attacked, even a journalist who has spent months exposing your blind spots, do the one thing you were founded to do.

Stand up.

After that, we exchanged a few messages. I read through the avalanche of reactions online, most of them sharply against him. The hostility was so intense that some readers slipped into defamation, tossing out false claims as if outrage licensed invention. I had to step in, ask for evidence, remind them that indignation doesn’t suspend the duty to tell the truth. In the meantime, I started reading more of Cani’s work3. I found a body of reporting that, while competently produced, shared a pattern I couldn’t unsee. And then came his interview4 with President Vjosa Osmani. I watched it closely, and again, I couldn’t stay silent.

Here’s what I found.

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Zemaj later issued a public apology2, saying he reacted “in self-defence in affect” and that “violence, in any form, is not the right answer.”

The lawyer for the citizen countered that there was no physical provocation, only the words, “You are all the same, you only lie,” after which the MP allegedly used an insult and, some twenty seconds later, a punch. Civil society voices were swift and plain: “Unacceptable and shameful,” wrote Eugen Cakolli of the Kosova Democratic Institute; “violence cannot be justified,” added Ehat Miftaraj of the Kosova Institute for Justice. LDK, for its part, framed the episode as an attack on its MP3 and “a direct affront to the integrity of democratic institutions.”

The political context is neither incidental nor calm. Kosovo’s party system has been in a long season of polarisation, sharpened by repeated parliamentary gridlock and an atmosphere in which theatrical gestures often crowd out sober accountability. The same public square where Zemaj lost composure has, in recent years, hosted stylised protests and media performances. Influential media and legal personalities, among them Arianit Koci, have become fixtures of the spectacle, sometimes amplifying tensions, sometimes styling themselves as arbiters. In the immediate aftermath of the punch, Koci’s thumbs-up/heart emoji poll4, rather than a clear defence of norms, captured the ambient cynicism, politics as spectator sport. Meanwhile, adjacent media ecosystems, notably those orbiting Berat Buzhala’s platforms, have repeatedly rewarded provocation and ambiguity, elevating noise over verification. This is the backdrop, a political class tested by public frustration, a media sphere primed for virality, and institutions struggling to referee the rules of conduct.

For ordinary citizens, the episode lands on already sore ground. People live with rising economic pressure, high emigration intent, and pervasive distrust that politicians are listening. When a citizen calls an elected representative a liar and receives a fist in return, the implied message is corrosive, criticism may carry a physical cost. That chills speech in the town square and online alike, it narrows the safe space for dissent that any democracy needs to breathe. It also deepens the cynicism that “they are all the same,” the very frustration the citizen reportedly voiced. Livelihoods and security are not abstractions here. Kosovo’s social fabric remains vulnerable to intimidation from organised crime and pressure from hostile actors. When the line between words and violence blurs in public, people read it as permission for rougher methods elsewhere at workplaces, in municipal politics, even in homes. The result is an incremental, quiet loss of everyday freedom.

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“You’re lying.”

The citizen, unnamed, unarmed, unprotected did not attack. He merely spoke. Zemaj’s fist, caught unflinchingly by the camera of Gazeta Blic1(see video below), fell on more than one man’s face, it struck the foundations of speech itself.

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