“Is there anyone to put a metal to Deralla?”, reads the comment with a call for violence on the obviously fake profile with the name of “Miroslava Simonovska” on CIVIL’s Facebook page, under the text “Hungary enters North Macedonia with telecommunications through the 4iG Group”.

She probably made a typo and meant metak (bullet) instead of metal, having in consideration that the letters K – L are next to each other on the keyboard.

Either way, physical violence or murder is performed both with a bullet and metal.

The Facebook profile of Miroslava Simonovska does not have any information, that is, it can be concluded that it is a fake profile that has an intended role.

Fake profile or not, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, namely, the Sector for Cybercrime and Digital Forensics, has an obligation to monitor these situations and act according to the legal regulations. The same goes for the prosecutor’s office.

This is not the first threat to the President of CIVIL, Xhabir Deralla. “Bullet in the head”, “people’s court” and “shooting” have been a regular repertoire of expressions of hatred and calls for liquidation against “those from Civil” and personally against Deralla in the past period as well.

“In these conditions, one can only talk about a bullet in Deralla’s head”, writes “Maja Vrkljovic”.

“Those from Civil should be brought before a people’s partisan court as in 1945. They are Greek-ballist severdzani, only life imprisonment for traitors”, comments “Toni Monevski”.

Regardless of whether it’s about a text signed by Deralla or someone else, or it’s a news story downloaded from news tickers – the hate speech and the calls for liquidation, all the same, are all aimed against Civil and its most prominent representative, Xhabir Deralla.

The Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office only after nine months (on 17.09.2024, while the decision reached us on October 8, 2024) from the report submitted (on 24.01.2024), assessed that the threatening message “Be visible you nit, the bullet will catch you” from the profile titled “Aleksandar Antic”, that is Aleksandar Petrovski, directed against Xhabir Deralla, for the column “Snipers with blindfolded eyes”, was a “journalistic scuffle, without a specific intention and purpose, of sending a threat, or intimidating anyone, especially not the author of the text Deralla”.

CIVIL’s legal team has concluded that it’s unclear how – and based on what – the public prosecutor concluded that it was a “journalistic scuffle”, especially since it hasn’t been determined whether the person Aleksandar Antic is a journalist or not. Also, the public prosecutor could have and should have, ex officio, provided evidence about the exact IP address from where the comment was posted, and not that the “lack of evidence about the exact IP address from where the comment was posted” should be a reason for the public prosecutor not to act.

The AJM and other journalist associations are silent. So are human rights organizations that have been implementing projects for monitoring hate speech for years. On the other hand, CIVIL is always here to come to the defense of all those who are affected by this evil in the public discourse.  CDMT

Translated by: N. Cvetkovska