Russia is using the Western Balkan countries for propaganda in a bigger game and is there to make things worse for its own benefit, says the head of the Western Balkans Task Force at the European External Action Service, Alen Musaefendic.
According to him, this is the strategy of Russia which they are trying to fight. He adds that Chinese influence is more subtle to analyze as China wants to convey the image of an economic partner that contributes to economic development, making its disinformation not overtly understood.
In the interview with The Geopost, Musaefendic shares the strategies they follow in the fight against disinformation in the Western Balkans and describes the challenges they face in the face of foreign influences such as those from Russia and China.
Full interview:
The Geopost: Thank you very much for this interview for The Geopost, which is the strategy of your office for disinformation?
Musaefendic: It rests on several legs. My team works with traditional strategic communications, which is to proactively communicate about the EU in the best possible way to explain our values and our policies before some other threat actor plants a distorted image of our policies and our values. And the second leg is to actively monitor and analyze disinformation patterns in the Western Balkans because it is a huge challenge, it’s an uphill battle and it changes, it goes through different phases and we need to keep track of what is happening, simply.
The Geopost: How do you see the situation because Russian influence in couple of media, especially in Serbia, spreading all this propaganda, attacking Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo. How do exit strategy for all of this?
Musaefendic: I think it’s very difficult to talk about an exit strategy. This will be a long-term problem. If there is any comfort in the fact that Russia does not actually have an ideology or a strategy it is just there to spoil, to disturb and to sabotage and we will do our utmost to show this to people and it will eventually hopefully become clear that Russia is here using the Western Balkan countries as a pawn in a bigger game and it has no interest in the Western Balkan countries that includes Serbia. It is only there to make things worse for its own benefit. That is the strategy of Russia and that is what we are fighting against.
The Geopost: How do you see Chinese influence in Balkans?
Musaefendic: Chinese influence is in certain ways much more subtle. China is, and this is universally seen across the world, they want to project an image of an economic partner who is there to contribute to economic development, it is not as harsh and as explicit as the Russian disinformation. Which is also hard for us to analyze because I really don’t want to speculate. It’s very hard to pinpoint exactly what Chinese disinformation is or the extent of it. So I think when it comes to China, we’re still at the early stages of trying to figure out what the end game is and how severe the problem is. But of course, China is an actor in this field as well.
The Geopost: What is the message for media, journalists and civil society who are fighting all this phenomenon. What is your message from Brussels?
Musaefendic: Well my message from Brussels is that as of last year it is actually formally a requirement for all candidate countries in the Western Balkans to close space for disinformation. So now it is in the association process where even governments are obliged to help society to combat disinformation and this partly should mean at least in long term to provide more resources to FIMI defenders in all fields to increase their efforts to improve media literacy in schools. So it’s a whole society approach and everybody needs to be involved and that includes promoting professional journalism which means ensuring that professional investigative serious journalists have the best conditions to do their job. And that usually means getting more resources.
/The Geopost