“Death, blood, war, insults, exclusive confidential findings and the announcement of the apocalypse are characteristic for the cover pages of the pro-regime tabloid Informer” – this is how the team of Raskrikavanje described the mentioned media. The analysis that they carried out, looking back to 2018, indicated that the Informer had 351 fake, i.e. not fact-based news on total 306 cover pages.
The Informer entered 2019 in the same fashion. Within the issue from January 10th both on the second and third page, as well as on the portal, news was published under the headline: “NATO TREATY IS CREATING THE GREAT ALBANIA: Hashim Thaci and Edi Rama hide no more dangerous intents!”
The reason for such headline and text was an announcement of the cabinet of the Kosovo President, Hashim Thaci, declaring 2019 the year of NATO in Kosovo.
“This year we are celebrating 20th anniversary of the NATO humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, the intervention that followed the massacre, ethnic cleansing and crimes of Serbian forces committed against civilian population in Kosovo, upon a failure of the world diplomatic efforts to come up with a peaceful solution for Kosovo”, it is stated in the announcement.
On 24th March 1999 NATO forces, as it was added, launched the campaign aimed at mining the goals of Serbia “by stopping the genocide and bringing freedom to Kosovo.”
“The people of Kosovo will be eternally grateful to the NATO member states for their support”, the announcement says.
The Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama welcomed, in his Twitter post, the idea of Kosovo President Hashim Thaci to declare 2019 the NATO year.
“I welcome the brilliant idea of Hashim Thaci to declare 2019 the NATO Treaty year, 20 years after the historic intervention of the Alliance in Kosovo. This coincides with the tenth anniversary of Albania’s NATO membership. May the decision on border opening in Morina, on the Schengen principle, be the highlight of the NATO year. “
Based on the announcement from the Kosovo Presiden’s office, and relying on the tweet of the Albanian Prime Minister, the author of the article came to conclusions that are not reality-based.
According to the author, not only that Thaci and Rama have actually declared that they have the support of the North Atlantic Alliance for the creation of Great Albania, but also that the abolition of the border is a way to repay to the NATO Alliance for its intervention in Kosovo. Neither in the accompanying announcement, nor in the tweet post is a NATO official mentioned, and there is no statement of any official that could support these claims, thus we are not familiar with the way the Informer came to such conclusions.
This text represents an obvious example of how fictitious conclusions are being distributed to the public, through publicly available information with no argumentation and fact-checking.