A very badly montaged image of a tweet attributed to Emir Suljagić was good enough for a number of media outlets, including the Tanjug news agency – but also for the Serbian Ministry of Defense – who published the made-up statement as a fact.
On October 29, an online media outlet Espreso published an article featuring the following title:
Horrible words
“JASENOVAC IS A CHETNIK FIGMENT, HANDSCHAR DIVISION MISSED ITS CHANCE: The new director of POTOČARI has FASCIST STATEMENTS”
The article claims that Emir Suljagić, the newly appointed director of the Memorial Center “Potočari”, denied the existence of Jasenovac concentration camp in World War II, calling it a “chetnik figment” on his Twitter profile:
Emir Suljagić, the new director of the Memorial Center “Potočari”, has scandalized the public again with his tweet claiming that “Jasenovac is a chetnik figment”.
Suljagić wrote:
– Jasenovac is a chetnik figment. Honourable Bosniaks from the Handschar division have missed their chance to deal with chetniks, so it is our duty to do it – Suljagić wrote.
As the source of this claim, the article published a post from an anonymous profile Bodljikava, featuring an image of Emir Suljagić’s alleged “tweet”. In the text, there is no link to the original article attributed to Suljagić, nor any information on how the editorial staff verified the authenticity of this post from an anonymous Twitter profile before turning it into the news.
The post of the profile Bodljikava, which allegedly displays an insulting statement by Suljagić about Jasenovac and the “Handschar division”, was published on October 28, 2019, at 7 pm. The date on Emir Suljagić’s alleged post is, however, significantly older (May 8, 2017).
Translation:
The person who runs the Memorial Center Potočari in Srebrenica. :/
Emir Suljagic:
Jasenovac is a chetnik figment. Honourable Bosniaks from the Handschar division have missed their chance to deal with chetniks, so it is our duty to do it.
Based on a mere glance at this post attributed to Suljagić, we can see that it is not authentic since it contains a word that is written in ekavian dialect (“reše” is written in ekavian, which is spoken mainly in Serbia, while “riješe” is on the ijekavian, which is mainly spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Even Suljagić pointed this out in a response to a question he was asked on Twitter a couple of hours after this post was published on Bodljikava’s profile and before it became the news, in which he corrected the statement that he had written such a tweet.
Translation:
Nebojsha Šatara: Did you really write this? For real? @suljagicemir1
Reply: I don’t use ekavian dialect, and the tweet is written in ekavian. The mere idea of writing something like this is disgusting to me. I assume this is just the beginning of a banal and semi-literate campaign to discredit me since I have taken over the Memorial Center in Srebrenica.
The image of this conversation was posted the same night in one of the comments written on the post of the profile Bodljikava and was visible and accessible on Espreso before the post was made into news, but the fact that the “author of the tweet” denied that he wrote it, is not mentioned in the text.
The actual source of this montage, however, is not the person behind the profile Bodljikava. According to our research, the first time this image appeared was in one of the comments of a tweet by Bodljikava created by an anonymous profile, Чеда Дискреција ‘иљаду двеста четр’ес четири (@Srbocetnik1389), which was deleted in the meantime.
On October 28, the account Bodljikava dedicated a few tweets to Emir Suljagić, the first was published around 4 pm. In the comment section, two images of alleged Suljagić’s tweets were posted by an account Čeda Diskrecija. The comments, however, disappeared along with the account, but both can be seen on the web archive snapshot (link, link):
Translation:
Bodljikava: 1. And now I’m asking for your attention, Emir Suljagić, as the new director of the Memorial Center Potočari in Srebrenica decided to spread the content.
Emir Suljagić:
- A serious change in nurturing and institutionalizing the culture of remembrance. For an institution such as the Memorial Center to even exist as a public institution is a wonder in itself; but, this status of a public institution is also “a millstone round the neck” for its further development, because when…
Чеда Дискреција ‘иљаду двеста четр’ес четири: they dig out serb graves and take them there.
Emir Suljagić: Why it is a problem that someone from Srebrenica is alive? It is normal to be wrong when the number is that high.
Bodljikava: I have to steal this. (slang for I will repost this from you).
…
Чеда Дискреција ‘иљаду двеста четр’ес четири: nurturing hate for future conflicts.
Emir Sugaljić: Jasenovac is a chetnik figment. Honourable Bosniaks from the Handschar division have missed their chance to deal with chetniks, so it is our duty to do it
МитологМТ: Does Čeda Prašak know about this quote? Did his family, from his mother’s side, all suffered in this chetnik figment?
The response of the Bodljikava’s account owner left at 6:17 PM, to one of these two comments, is still visible on Twitter. In the response, the account owner states that the posted image will be “stolen”, which happened. At 6:51 pm, Bodljikava’s first tweet was published featuring both “montaged” tweets. The second post, with the tweet about Jasenovac that the media later took over, was released 10 minutes later.
Among the people who commented on Emir Suljagić’s fake tweet were those who pointed out that Suljagić had previously tweeted about Jasenovac, but that he had diametrically opposed views to those attributed to him here. A search of his tweets indicates that he has, in fact, repeatedly criticized historical revisionism, that is, the distortion and the denial of crimes, or the scale of crimes committed in Jasenovac. On the other hand, a Twitter search for the statement attributed to Suljagić does not give any results, nor does a search for the alleged quote from June 2018 (in which, as in the previous case, the word “netko” (specific for Croatian language) was used, instead of “neko” (used in B&H region), indicating the inauthenticity of the text). The same result is obtained with Google search of keywords from a fictitious statement, which first appeared on October 29, 2019.
The “discovery” of a nonexistent tweet from 2017
Apart from the obvious linguistic illogicality, and inconsistency of the content of the claim with Suljagić’s previous statements about Jasenovac and/or the Handschar division, it is unbelievable – dare we say, impossible – to tweet such content, posted by a public figure on Twitter with 4,500 followers, and who is a frequent subject of media reports, to go unnoticed for more than two years.
An interesting fact is that Suljagić has been the subject of a special topic on a forum Herceg-Bosna whose users have written around fifty pages about him, filled with quotes and comments of Suljagić’s public appearances, including those from his Twitter account. This discussion was still active on May 8, 2017 (link), when the false tweet about Jasenovac was dated; however, the first comment about it appeared on November 7, 2019 (link), therefore, only after the fake news was published in the media.
After being published by Espreso, the same claim was published by a number of media outlets in Serbia. In the first case, it was that “Sugaljić scandalized the region” with his tweet, after which several media outlets, including the news agency Tanjug, shared the reactions of Kingdom of Serbia Renewal Movement (POKS) association, and the Alliance of Serbs from the region on this figment claim while repeating the “quote” of Emir Sugljagić and presenting it as an established fact.
Besides appearing on various online media outlets and in the reactions of different associations, the news also appeared on the official website of the Ministry of Defense of Serbia (MORS), in a statement published on November 6, 2019, which had also received media coverage:
Due to the statement of the Commissioner of the European Council for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović, the Ministry of Defense regrets that the respected commissioner failed to make a statement when Naser Orić, a proven Serb killer, was released, just as she did not see the need to condemn and demand the responsibility for the statement of Emir Suljagić, the director of the Memorial Center Potočari in Srebrenica, in which he says that “Jasenovac is a chetnik figment” and that “Honourable Bosniaks from the Handschar division have missed their chance to deal with chetniks, which is why it is our duty to do it”.
A day after MORS made this announcement, Suljagić posted on his Twitter account again and denied that he did not write the tweets. This statement was ignored by the media who published the original “news”. The editorial staff of Raskrinkavanje contacted Emir Sugaljić asking if any media gave him the opportunity to comment before posting this alleged tweet. He responded that none of the media whose articles were the subject of this analysis had done it.
The editorial staff also contacted all media outlets that have an Impressum published on their websites with contact information, who have shared this claim in any of the previously mentioned versions. Several online media outlets responded stating that they have not checked whether the statement was true since other media published it as well. Novi Standard is the only online media outlet that has, after communicating with Raskrinkavanje, published the correction.
Unlike this online media outlet, the director of Tanjug news agency, Branka Đukić, answered that her agency did verify the authenticity of Suljagić’s alleged tweet. However, instead of information that would confirm the authenticity of the alleged tweet, in our second inquiry, Đukić gave us a response, which we share here in full detail:
Response of Tanjug’s director
Respected,
I see that you are informed about a screenshot of a tweet written by Emir Suljagić on May 8, 2017, regarding his opinion on the Jasenovac camp, being posted on social networks. One such announcement, made on October 28, was sufficient enough for us to broadcast the two reactions which were sent to us afterwards.
Twitter posts of Mr. Suljagić from 2017 are not publicly available on his Twitter account.
You probably know, since you have stated that you are doing research, that Twitter messages can be deleted, but that they remain in the database, thus we recommend that you consult first and foremost social network and Internet experts for this research.
You claim that you have researched and that such tweet does not exist, and that there is no trace of such “tweet” from 2017 – here, we are offering you this trace, on which we relied on, not in order to broadcast it as news, but in order to have an insight into the reason for the reactions that have been sent to us.
We do not research cybercrime, and we draw your attention to the fact that an argument, such as the one where you state that Emir Suljagić denied the claim two times, denying that he is the author of the tweet and that his previous statements about Jasenovac, including those written on Twitter, are diametrically opposite to the stance on his Twitter profile on May 8, 2017 – is not a proof that such tweet never existed.
With no intention of suggesting anything, because we do not deal with the work and figure of Emir Suljagić, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that Emir Suljagić, a former Deputy Minister of Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the first person in Bosnia and Herzegovina who was convicted of libel for comments he made on Twitter.
The are dozens of apps and web pages, developed to create fake tweets just like the ones that are the subject of this analysis. For example, the image below shows how a Tweet Generator can be used to create tweets of the same contact, but displaying a different name behind the tweet. In this example, we can see that the tweet is displayed as being posted by Tanjug:
If we were to follow the logic of Tanjug’s director, then such a “tweet”, which would appear in the form of media news, would have to be considered as authentic as Suljagić’s alleged tweet.
It is also interesting to mention that one of the comments on Bodljikava’s post, along with notes about linguistics, content and other illogicalities of the alleged “screenshot”, explained how easy it is to make a fake tweet, displaying a portion of the fake quote as a post of that profile. This and similar comments were ignored by Espreso and other online media outlets that have shared this post as news.
From Espreso, Tanjug and other media, the fake news was also shared onto blogs and social networks. A number of Facebook pages, such as Страница Поносни народ/Гордые Люди (Proud People), Иницијатива за изградњу Меморијалног центра српским жртвама геноцида (Initiative for the development of Memorial Center for Serbian victims of genocide), Podrska za Alexandra Dorina /Untestûtzung fûr Alexander Dorin (Support for Alexander Dorin), and others, published the “screenshot” of the fake tweet, or some of the media publications of it, generating thousands of comments and shares, mostly full of insults and hate speech, including open calls for violence. The article of Espreso, which was the first one to present the fake tweet as authentic, we rate as fake news, while the others are rated as redistribution of fake news. The online media outlet Novi Standard, the only website that published a correction, in lines with the methodology of Raskrinkavanje, is rated as corrected.
We also rate articles as biased reporting, because none of the media outlets which shared the nonexistent statement and/or fake tweet has contacted the alleged authors.
