Mic Check: Ethics Off in Kosovo

A journalist ambushed live on air, silenced mid-defence, and smeared with lies, this wasn’t journalism, it was a staged execution of truth.

On a seemingly ordinary Wednesday night in Kosovo, the studio of broadcaster Dukagjini became the stage for an unnervingly familiar act: the deliberate smearing of a journalist in pursuit of integrity, sacrificed on the altar of spectacle and manipulation. The guest at the centre of the evening’s storm was Milaim Zeka, a figure long familiar to Kosovo’s media scene, notorious for his dramatic flourishes and precarious relationship with facts. The programme’s ostensible theme, allegations of corruption within the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, quickly veered into a character assassination of another kind.

Zeka, invited to present supposed findings of corruption at the Special Court, launched instead into a premeditated diatribe, invoking my name unprompted and untruthfully.

The context: my investigative reporting into Zeka’s own alleged connections with international criminal elements¹, including media personalities and the Russian-linked operative Halit Sahitaj². These revelati…