The Belgrade wants to fight “fake news” about Serbia in the Western media. A Frenchman with a past takes over the mission. Arnaud Guyon is only 38 years old, but he has done a lot in his life. At 25, he wanted to become president of France for the far-right Bloc Identitaire. In the end, however, he failed to be a candidate, since he failed to gather the necessary number of signatures.

The biggest impact on Guyon’s life was the Kosovo War. In 1999 NATO, wanting to stop systematic Serbian crimes against the Albanians of Kosovo, bombed Serbia. American intervention ended the war. However, it remains controversial to this day, since it was carried out without a prior UN mandate.

“An entire people was demonized then,” says Arnaud Guion in an interview. The 38-year-old Frenchman has been living in Belgrade for some time and deals, among other things, with the humanitarian support of the Serbian minority in Kosovo. He speaks fluent Serbian, has a wife from Serbia, holds a Serbian passport and is an MP of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

Hate speech against the opposition and the West

Now he is taking on a new mission: He is the head of the newly established Bureau of Public and Cultural Diplomacy (KJKD). In the future, its officials will “comb” the international media for negative reports about Serbia and then intervene, in order to improve the country’s reputation in international public opinion. “Those who are used to publishing lies and negative aspects about events in the Balkans and Serbia should know that from now on they will get a response from us every time,” warns Arnaud Guion.

Serbia’s reputation in the foreign media is extremely bad, and in the opinion of President Aleksandar Vucic and his government, unjustifiably bad. The Serbian president is usually portrayed in them as a powerful leader who has turned Serbia into an autocracy.

Independent Serbian journalists do not like the idea of ​​creating an office against “fake news” from abroad. And that’s because in Serbia President Vucic and his supporters now control all major radio and television stations and the “yellow” press. In this media, hate speech against critics, the opposition and the West as a whole is on the daily agenda.

3 million euro funding for the newly established office

For Zelko Bodrozic, president of the Association of Independent Journalists NUNS, the fact that the Serbian leadership intends to combat alleged “fake news” from abroad borders on sarcasm. President Vucic, who has ruled Serbia for over twelve years and is known for a policy that juggles between the EU, the US, Russia and China, is unable to stop negative reports in the Western media: “Because most of the reports, which Arnaud Guion is called upon to refute and combat, are absolutely true,” Zelko Bodrozic tells DW.

What exactly is Guyon planning now? How will he contact the foreign media? Are KJKD groups working on behalf of the country or Vucic’s ruling SNS party? Until now, DW’s questions to the Serbian government and Arnaud Guion himself remain unanswered.

But one is already known. As the news portal Nova Ekonomija reports, the new Bureau of Public and Cultural Diplomacy (KJKD), which notably does not even have a website, has reportedly already received funding of over three million euros.

Editor: Stefanos Georgakopoulos