Hereby we would like to inform everyone who follows our portal Vicinity Chronicles (the platform of the European Fund for the Balkans and the European Movement in Serbia) that our website has been under constant hacker attacks in the last month.
We assumed that the website of the Vicinity Chronicles was not chosen deliberately – however, despite all the measures taken and regular maintenance of the site, these attacks are repeated continuously, thus everything speaks in favor of the well-founded suspicion that our portal is someone’s target.
Vicinity Chronicles is a unique and the only portal of its kind, where texts by authors from all countries of the Western Balkans are published every week, where different views on the same topics are expressed without censorship. From the very beginning, all authors present their views in a civilized manner, without insulting others. We believe that the Vicinity Chronicles is a rare example of a desirable way of dialogue and a promoter of a culture of dialogue that, unfortunately, is almost non-existent in these areas, but also a space for free expression of views, regardless of whether they are in agreement with the ruling groups in any of these countries.
It is sad that freedom of speech and opinion bothers someone to such an extent, that a project whose mission is rapprochement and understanding can cause such resistance. The authors of these attacks clearly do not understand the processes we are a part of and we can only regret it.
We remind you that a year and a half ago, the Twitter account of the rapprochement was permanently terminated, with no chance of its return. That and this event are obviously not accidental, but as we said then, it will neither scare us nor make us stop. We will continue to promote all the values we believe in, so that such “outbursts” remain in the minority and so that the citizens of the region do not remain hostage to daily political calculations that drag us not only away from EU membership, but also from the values without which it is impossible to imagine a democratic society.