Serbia seeks to combat 'lies' in foreign media

Despite being just 38 years of age, Arnaud Gouillon has experience of politics in two European countries: France and Serbia.

In his mid-twenties, French-born Gouillon wanted to stand for president of France for the far-right Bloc identitaire (now known as Les Identitaires), but did not gather enough signatures to run.

Gouillon was heavily influenced by the events of the Kosovo War in 1999. At the time, NATO intervened in the war, bombing targets in Yugoslavia — a federation made up of the Republics of Serbia and Montenegro — in an attempt to stop Serbia's systematic crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

While the intervention led to the end of hostilities on the ground, it remains controversial to this day because NATO had no UN mandate for its actions.

French-born lawmaker in the Serbian parliament

"An entire people was demonized at the time," Gouillon has said in an interview. Gouillon has lived in Belgrade for a long time and has, among other things, done humanitarian work for the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

He has an excellent command of Serbian, is married to a Serbian woman and holds a Serbian passport. He is also a member of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and is a lawmaker for that party.

Monitoring international coverage of Serbia

Now he has a new job as director of the recently established Office for Public and Cultural Diplomacy (KJKD).

The intention is that the staff of this agency will in future monitor international media for negative reports about Serbia and contact the editorial teams in question in a bid to improve the country's image abroad.

The aim is to have teams for English, French, German and Italian in place by the end of the year.

"Those who are accustomed to publishing lies and negative aspects of the events in the Balkans and in Serbia should know that they will get an answer from us every single time," Gouillon told the Belgrade-based newspaper Vecernje novosti, an unofficial mouthpiece of the Serbian government, shortly after his appointment.

Poor image unjustified, says Serbian government

In the eyes of President Aleksandar Vucic and his government, Serbia's image in the foreign media is about as bad as it could be.

Vucic is portrayed as the omnipotent head of state who has turned Serbia into an autocracy where free media, an independent judiciary and the opposition are stifled and where contracts for major projects and jobs are given only to those affiliated with the right party.

Vucic is often portrayed by Western media as a firebrand or troublemaker in the region. His idea of a "Serbian world," which would include zones of influence in Kosovo, Montenegro and the Bosnian-Serb entity Republika Srpska, is often described as extremely dangerous.

Serbian 'stereotypes' in the Western media?

According to political scientist Milan Krstic of the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade, "stereotypes from the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s" have also played a role in reports about Serbia.

"That is hard to change. At the time, many things were portrayed in black and white without any nuance: Serbs were the executioners; only others were victims," he told DW.

Krstic went on to say that Serbia does indeed need to improve its image, but not the way Gouillon intends to go about it.

"Emphasis should be put on positive stories, good news from the economy and tourism, instead of getting into arguments with Western media, which would only reinforce another stereotype, namely that of the quarrelsome people of the Balkans," he said.

'Like a North Korean propaganda department'

Independent Serbian journalists also have nothing good to say about the approach because inside Serbia, Vucic and his people control all the major broadcasters and tabloid newspapers.

Agitation against critics, members of the opposition and the "collective West" is par for the course in these media.

For Zeljko Bodrozic, president of the independent journalists' association NUNS, the fact that Serbia's current leaders want to fight what they call "fake news" borders on sarcasm.

"Their madness gets worse and worse," he told DW. "They are setting up something that is reminiscent of a North Korean propaganda and agitation department."

Fighting the truth?

President Vucic, who has ruled Serbia for 12 years and is known for his policy of oscillating between the EU, the US, Russia and China, cannot stop the negative headlines in the Western press, says Bodrozic. "Because most of the texts that Arnaud Gouillon now wants to refute and fight are telling the truth," he says.

So, what exactly does Gouillon intend to do? How does he intend to get in touch with foreign media? Will the KJKD team work on behalf of Serbia or primarily on behalf of Vucic's SNS? DW contacted both the Serbian government and Gouillon himself for comment, but no response had been received from either at the time of publication.

What is clear is that according to reports on the news portal Nova ekonomija, the new agency has allegedly already been given over €3 million for its work.

Adapted from the German by Aingeal Flanagan