Mihajlović: The recognition means a lot to me because I share it with my friend Beqaj and it comes from my colleagues

„We learn to speak by the age of four, from the age of four we learn to be quiet, but we also learn something else – that you should speak when everyone is silent,“ journalist and analyst Milivoje Mihajlović said today from North Mitrovica.

In honor of a decade of work, the KoSSev portal presented its first award for professionalism and contribution to the public interest „ČasTnica“ today.

Two awards were presented this year – to journalist and analyst, a Pristina native – Milivoje Mihajlović, and posthumously to university professor and publicist Belul Beqaj, who passed away in September 2022. Beqaj’s daughter, Adea Beqaj, received the award in his name today.

For many years, until Beqaj’s death, the two of them kept up a correspondence on KoSSev under the name „Prištinska veza“.

Mihajlović reminisced on how it all began.

„In 2018, the Oxford Dictionary chose the word ‘toxic’ as the word of the year. First of all, because they assessed that such is the situation in the media all over the world, on social networks. That toxicity of the public space, in a way, launched our dialogue ‘Prištinska veza’. My friend Belul Beqaj used to say, ‘Let’s detoxify that public space a bit,'“ he recalled.

He described this long-term „correspondence“ as sincere, friendly, and fair.

Much to his regret, it had to come to an end:

„Then he got seriously ill and left us too soon. I hope he went to some better place.“

What they did, Milivojević says, should be the role of every journalist.

„We learn to speak up to the age of four, from the age of four we learn to be quiet, but we also learn something else – that we should speak when everyone is silent. That is the role of us journalists, whose profession itself is, in a way, sinful. Our job is to tell someone what someone else did, to recount what someone said. It’s quite sinful in a way.“

In his words, the award he received today signifies the consequence of the sentence he heard during his last conversation with Beqaj.

„I asked him how he was doing, and he told me: ‘Invoices from the past are arriving.’ This is exactly one of the invoices that arrived,“ he said.

„We live in a time where you are brave if you say what everyone knows, and you say it out loud. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of this job, and it’s not a great feat of courage. It was neither courage nor in the time of that infamous ‘communism’ when we had a little more freedom in the public space than we have now.“

He thanked the KoSSev portal for the award.

„It means something to me because I share it with him, and also because it comes from my colleagues,“ he concluded.

Read more:

Vučenić at the “Častnica” award ceremony: Beqaj and Mihajlović sent a message of hope from the bottomless well for years

The first “Častnica” awards presented to mark the decade of work of the KoSSev portal