The chronology of a Twitter battle

Those of you who have been following this blogsite have read my previous post about the power of the web in inciting and supporting ethnic nationalism. Consider this the second part of that post.

A couple of weeks ago, as the EU-encouraged Serbia-Kosova talks went into the abyss, the Kosovar government took it upon itself to reciprocate Serbia’s trade boycott of Kosovar products by disallowing Serbian trucks destined for Macedonia and Kosova to get through the border. Similarly, it ordered a takeover of the border posts near Serbia, both of which had been under a state of anarchy, since Kosovar Serb police officers couldn’t control the flow of goods (possibly because they feared Serbian retaliation or because they sympathized with fellow Serbs). This triggered an increase in tensions, leading to a Serb hooligan chaos at both border posts, resulting in the burning of one. Following KFOR negotiations with the political leaders of Serbia and Kosova, it was agreed that NATO would make the area an emergency security zone, meaning it would be a sealed off border area, and anyone provoking a change the status quo could be shot. Serbs then placed roadblocks outside of borderposts, but near both sides of the border. They began removing some of those by August 10th. Macedonia immediately offered replacing the boycotted Serbian goods and services for ones made in Macedonia, and I think Gov’t of Kosova has taken them up on it. A most recent, EU-mediated agreement between Kosova and Serbia resolved the trade embargo, although the border dispute is still unresolved.

During this whole time, one looks for information on the latest updates, and since the Kosovar TV and web media kept playing the same story over and over again (sometimes sounds so repetitive I read their script in unison), I looked to Twitter for information. I followed two hashtags: #kosova and #kosovo (For anyone who doesn’t know why there are two spellings of the name for a single country, read this).

Most of the initial posts comprised of angry tweeple (Twitter users), largely Serbs, who supported the action of the organized bands that burnt the border posts, but also of people who wanted more up-to-date information on the emergency. Most of the conversation using the #kosovo hashtag was in Serbian. By the end of the day, someone suggested that English-speaking Twitter users may not understand what is being said, so it was better to write some tweets in English, so as to make others understand what the issues were.

Within 5 minutes, a new Twitter user emerged: KosmetNews and ObjectiveOnly (objective, as in being ironic) began to tweet links to articles by Serb and Russian authors in English about Albanian revenge killings against Serbs post-June 1999. For the next two days, these two users inundated the #kosovo hashtag with repeated link references to incidents that took place in 1999 and 2004. Presumably, this link-flooding was done to remind English-speaking users of Twitter that burning border posts and not recognizing Kosova as an independent state was justifiable under the circumstances of crimes against Kosovar Serbs. What I found fascinating was the fact that crimes committed by the Serbian military and paramilitary, as well as ethnic Serb volunteers of various supra-military groups pre-June 1999 against Albanian and other Kosovar citizens was not mentioned once. Similarly, faulty, unproven and outright false claims about the history of Kosova became the norm in this one-sided exchange: “astara231: @remzicej The “people of #Kosovo ” used to be predominantly Serb, Albanians began pushing them north many decades ago. WORK THINGS OUT.”

Once again, I was reminded that this was nothing but nationalist propaganda. The risks of such propaganda include a reinforcement of negative feelings or hatred against the other side, reinforcement of (flawed and biased) facts that one is right, and a reinforcement of a sense that one is a member of a large group of users who may share those former two emotions.

At one point, I asked expressly if a user would condemn the crimes that the Serbian military and volunteers committed against Kosovars in 1999. They responded: “zilez2003: @remzicej Who r you to claim what was done in my name? What u have done ever to stop bad things Albanians did on #kosovo Condemn? Brave” Upon a persistent request, the user replied (in a private tweet, without hashtags, so no other Serb users could see it): “@remzicej I condemn ALL crimes made by anybody. Including ones made by Serbs against Albanians, and Albanians against Serbs. Clear enough ?”

Three different Albanian users kept replying to tweets, and although they kept replying with facts early on, it turned into a bickering, an exchange of facts and bias, emotion and anger, hatred and cussing. This exchange turned into an intense throwing back and forth of words. A tweeter sent me a message, saying that the fact that I spoke Serbian attested to the fact that Kosova belonged to Serbia. When I replied that my parents taught me to speak the language of my neighbours, the tweeter replied, stating that he doubted I was telling the truth. Another one wrote saying that she had traveled to Brezovica, a skiing mountain in Kosova, and had not had to speak any Albanian, which she considered proof that Serbians were a majority in Kosova. When I replied that that was because all Albanians had been forced out of their jobs because they did not accept Milosevic’s rule, she wrote back saying “well, it was beautiful [to be there] anyway “. I saw it as a German citizen feeling ok with the fact that the streets had been emptied of Jews during the Olympic Games in Berlin; she saw it as a normal holiday. A disconnect happened somewhere, and I couldn’t quite figure out where. She then added me on Facebook as a friend, which she later described as a step she took to let me know that not all Serbs hate Albanians (if only any of these people knew that I’m not quite Albanian). I didn’t accept the request (because I don’t really know her), but I appreciated the effort. A few days later, she replied to a tweet I posted by saying that I was full of hatred because I had mocked the anti-independence protests in Belgrade, in which many local shops were looted. Serbian media mockingly called the protests “sneakers for Kosova”.

I concluded three different things from the nationalist Twitter battle:

1. As few as two people can take over the control of a hashtag, which means potentially millions of people relying on an update will receive propaganda updates from individuals who may have a specific goal in mind. By posting frequently, these tweeple give the impression of providing reliable information, posting older, biased, and nationalism-geared posts instead. As someone I had a Facebook exchange with wrote, the ten loudest people on Twitter don’t represent all of Serbia. It is easy to overestimate the extent to which public opinion is widespread through Twitter posts;
2. What is right is diluted in this social media platform. As a friend pointed out at an Amnesty International gathering recently, the unfortunate thing about the internet is that everyone finds what they are looking for – in other words, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong at the same time. This sort of encouragement only fuels further ethnic nationalism, convincing different sides not to find commonality and points of convergence, but of difference and divergence instead.
3. Emotions run high during a Twitter battle. In one exchange, I had 10 different messages back and forth. While it appeared that at one point, I had managed to convince one (!!!) user that I wasn’t out to get him or any other Serbs, but that I simply wanted to have a normal exchange with someone, he wrote back to say that he wasn’t sure he could trust me and that he couldn’t write anymore because it was too emotionally difficult for him.

My Facebook non-friend’s second last sentence was “We are all sick of hate”. I hope to live to see the day when that view is shared by everyone.

How do you make change happen?

I am flying back from a tremendously inspiring, moving trip in Ottawa, where I interviewed for a prestigious fellowship in national policy development.

I can’t quite figure out what made the trip so enjoyable. It could be one of the following things, or a combination of all three: the care and attention to the smallest detail the organizers and the selection committee placed on my needs and interests; the fact that I sat at the head of a table of 14, feeling relaxed and ready to answer any questions the selection committee members felt they needed to ask; the opportunity to meet some inspiring individuals who have changed the world over (and others who haven’t, but are on their way to doing so very soon).

I don’t know what the outcome of my interview will be, but just before my interview, I took a look back at my past, my childhood, where I was 10 years ago, and I sensed an enormous sense of debt to so many people who have helped me get where I am today. Eleven years ago, right around this week, I was dodging bullets in Kosova, as Serbian paramilitary forces indiscriminately fired around the neighbourhoods of Mitrovica, my town of birth. Five years ago this time, I was preparing to go on an exciting summer fellowship and course on German Literature at the University of Berlin. Last weekend, I spent two days with former and current federal and provincial government officials who are just as passionate about Canada as I am, international humanitarian lawyers who continue to defend human rights in Canada and abroad, heads of organizations striving for a more equitable society, and philanthropists who have spent their lives bringing change about in any way they can. I met young people whose life goal, either through personal experience or an event that inspired them, have become women’s rights, children’s rights, the connection between business and art,and support for non-profit organizations.

Receiving a compendium of the biographies of all the shortlisted candidates and of all the selection committee members and advisors probably inspired me the most – in a group of 34 future (and current) shakers and movers and 15 other individuals, each of whom could be a motivational speaker, based on their life work, how could one not feel inspired to make change happen?

The cliche has been said – just by being at the interview, we as shortlisted candidates were winners. However, nowhere was this more true than this last weekend in Ottawa. As for the question one of the candidates told me she had a hard time answering (“how do you make change happen?”), what else is there to say?

You know you have made change happen when you bring a group of Canadians from all walks of life, living in Canada and abroad, as far as Australia and Kazakhstan, and you give them a chance to get to know one another. That’s how you make change happen. The rest of us, having met each other, are already pairing our common interests to our ambitions, thinking about how we can keep in touch, and who knows, maybe even work together.

What a breath of fresh air this has been.

Nationalism in a new format

Random expressions of nationalist statements can be seen almost anywhere and everywhere these days. The web and especially social networking sites have become the newest tools for carrying out the promotion of nationalist ideals.

The examples are numerous: Last year, a Kosovar hackers group attacked a Serbian government website. What did they do, you wonder? They placed the Albanian national flag on the website – Big deal, right? It just meant the Serbian government had to fix their servers and make them more secure. Besides, I have no doubt the Serbian counterparts to Kosovar cyber-pirates hacked some Albanian or Kosovar site in revenge.

What happened to the Estonian internetage in 2007 was far worse: The whole government website system was under attack and more. Banks, cultural institutions, community centres – it didn’t matter whose website it was, if it was Estonian, it was targetted by Russian hackers for a simple reason – The Estonian government had removed a 1947-Soviet-Union imposed statue on the main square in Tallinn, the capital, in remembrance of the fallen Soviet soldiers in Estonia. For Estonia, the hack was disastrous. The country is, after all, the most wired country in Europe, with the highest percentage of internet users per capita.

Most recently, some months ago, a friend sent me an invite to a group calling for the closing of a Facebook page created by Serbian nationalists who claimed that one of the examples of genocidal mass murder in Srebrenica, Bosnia, was a hoax. The group was indeed shut after hundreds of thousands of concerned Facebookers joined within a matter of days.

Stickers stating Kosova is the heart of Serbia are nothing new. I used to see them when I was in Montreal, and I would routinely remove them. If Kosova was the heart of Serbia, Serbia would have had a heart attack and probably triple bypass by now – You don’t treat your heart the way Serbia treated Kosova and the great majority of its citizens.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned in a conversation that there is someone in Oxford who keeps placing the stickers all over town, and he apparently removes them every time he sees one. The name of the printing house is on the stickers. So is the name of the group posting the stickers [apparently they call themselves "Delije" - Serbian for "hero", Turkish for "fool"]. His comments during the chat reminded me of not only the new age of nationalism, but the continued facilitation of nationalist propaganda distribution in the age of technology.

It was expected, with the spread of the internet, that people around the world would find commonalities between them and people they consider “others.” Instead, it appears that the opposite has happened: People around the world are re-asserting themselves, their values, their beliefs, on the new platform for nationalist propaganda. The act of placing stickers all over a town is not necessarily physically endangering anyone’s safety, but the taking of the issues outside of their original geopolitical sources naturally carries some danger. Namely, it creates a new battlefield – convincing the persons of the new region that the nationalist cause is genuine and that the foreigner to the cause should not be an outsider, but an adopted nationalist.

..more to come.

Arabeske – Behari

This song was on my iPod playlist throughout my visit in Bosnia – The lyrics are haunting, the music astounding. Arabeske is a women’s band from Zagreb – more about them here:.

The last few months and the next few months

Dear reader,

I have not abandoned this blog – I’ve simply dedicated it no time in the last four months. It’s been a great summer of travels – I was in Boston, Istanbul, Prishtina, and finally, St. John’s.

In the next month, I will be traveling to Israel and Palestine, back to Newfoundland for the holidays, and then off to Prishtina for a few weeks of research and Sarajevo and Mostar for some thesis interviews.

Time in Oxford is flying by too quickly – I’m only eight months away from finishing my MPhil! eeck!

That said, it doesn’t mean I have not kept busy here. In the last year, I coordinated social action projects in my home college, St. Antony’s. I volunteered with Oxford Aid to the Balkans to Kosova, among other places. And, I made a meaningful contribution to decorating (don’t laugh) last year’s Rhodes Ball, which was a huge success!

I joined a yoga class for three lessons, only to discover that while I needed to relax, I thought about all of the valuable time I put to waste by relaxing – it’s unhealthy, I know, but it was better that I stopped.

I also started to take sporadic Arabic lessons, which began with a French-Arabic exchange – I taught a fellow Rhodie French while she taught me Arabic. It didn’t quite work out in the end, and she disappeared after the fall break, but I learned the basics of the Arabic alphabet!

My thesis is getting the best out of me these days, in addition to two course I’m taking this term – Global Institutional Design with Walter Mattli, and Post-Conflict State-Building with Richard Caplan. To say that I am enjoying taking these two courses is an understatement – not only have I learned a great deal in class, but I’ve been exposed to a whole literature on issues I feel most passionate about.

Informally, I’m a member of a number of discussion groups, including a group on Canadian issues, which discusses the current problems ailing Canadians in Canada and abroad.