Good morning! The hate festival scheduled for yesterday was a fiasco. The messages from that event, the threats that followed it, fully compromised and exposed all those who generated hysteria in the last days.
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Hate festival (car convoy religious processions) debacle
Many believed in the remake of the “magnificent religious processions”. Since Saturday, so much force was used to instantly raise tensions that many believed that they couldn’t fail and that Spajic, or at least some of the MPs, would withdraw facing the onslaught of violence, and let DF into power.
In addition, summer is still going on, people are on vacation, and they have time to take to the streets and express their political views, whatever they may be. In the end – dummy bullet. No response. The Viber group for organizing the protest generated so much hatred and slander that eventually everyone started to distance themselves from the protest.
Yesterday I joined the Viber group called Electoral Will Defense, so that you wouldn’t have to, and I had something to see there. From the mocking attitude towards names that are “not orthodox”, through fake news, threats, calling entire groups of people “enemies and waste”.
It is interesting how Vijesti, as the most popular media in Montenegro, treated that Viber group, in which unbearable threats, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, decasyllabics by extremist Perosevic poured out.
Namely, immediately after the formation of the group, Vijesti advertised it in the prime-time news programme a few days ago, and after that it also talked about it in the morning press review, referring to the dissatisfaction of the citizens as a motive for its formation. Believe it or not – citizens’ dissatisfaction “because the desired changes did not happen”. It’s as if they are protesting against Dritan, not Spajic, who is still not prime minister.
Yesterday at 12:48 pm, journalist Jelena Jovanovic wrote about this group, who has been in the public eye for the last year due to BIRN’s controversial mapping of extremism, as well as the publication of SKY correspondence. She wrote this text, which seems to be a PR piece of work for the Viber group, rather than a critical journalistic text. She also interviewed the administrator of the group, a certain Nedjo Pekovic, without mentioning interesting lines from his biography, which she should know well, as a connoisseur of the Montenegrin underground.
After his name was announced, yesterday at 2:28 p.m. CdM exclusively published details about who Nedjeljko Pekovic really is, when he was arrested and for what crimes.
After this, as well as numerous hate messages that continued, Mihailo Jovovic, as a journalist of integrity, probably saw that these were not things to joke about, and published an article with a similar title of the article on CdM – in which he presented even more details from the life of Pekovic, but he also gave good examples of hateful posts in the group. In this way, Vijesti, which initially promoted the group, distanced itself from it.
It is very likely that after that DF was also advised not to directly support these protests, so only a few officials came out to support the demonstrators. This was done by Nikola Jovanovic, Budva parliament speaker, and a couple of other high-ranking officials of municipalities on the coast. At least that was stated in the group itself last night. It would be interesting if competent authorities and investigative journalists checked possible connections between Jovanovic, the Municipality of Budva and the administrator of the Viber group, who, according to some reports, have businesses in Budva at locations along the promenade and in Buljarica. The legality of those business activities should also be checked.
All in all, with the debacle of this festival of hatred, an end should be put to it, and politicians should realize that the time when they can easily profit from it has passed. Also, the media and the civil sector should finally understand that flirting with extremism will be to their detriment and discredit them.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
