Dispatch #27
Read about the national identity of Bosnian Muslims, a sideways investigation into Maltese gambling, and the dire situation of independent journalism in Burkina Faso
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
First up, a compelling read about Maltese criminals attempt to break into the world of pan-Mediterranean gambling.
From Bosnia and Herzegovina, an essay about the national identity of Bosnian Muslims three decades after the horror of the Srebrenica massacre.
And lastly, a chilling dispatch from Burkina Faso about the dire situation of independent journalism and freedom of speech following the abduction of two leading figures of the local press earlier this year.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
Agius’s Bet
A fascinating investigation into how a Maltese criminal recently convicted of murder tried to make his way in the pan-Mediterranean betting world
Some way into this deeply researched article from the Italian investigative media outlet IrpiMedia, there is a complicated diagram, an influence map: one could describe it as a spider’s web.
What it shows is the network of connections between Adrian Agius – long considered one of Malta’s criminal “intoccabili” (“untouchables”) – and businesses and individuals with commercial and other links as far apart as Italy, the United Kingdom and Dubai.
It comes at a significant time. Last month, Adrian Agius was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murder of Maltese lawyer Carmel Chircop in 2015. At the same time, his brother Robert was convicted in connection with the separate 2017 murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. (Simone Olivelli’s article for IrpiMedia comes as part of a series dedicated to continuing her work under the hashtag #DaphneProject).
Based largely on encrypted communications, many of which came to light in the context of the investigations that finally led to these convictions, Olivelli’s article takes a wider look – across the Mediterranean, and beyond – into a web of personalities and players linking criminal networks (not just in Malta: the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta comes up, as does the mafia) to the legal betting industry and its various offshoots and side industries.
Why might such links exist? The article notes that Europol investigators had long considered the Agius brothers to be involved in drug trafficking and smuggling of fuel and cigarettes. They suggested the Maltese authorities follow the money in their investigations – in other words: how did they try and turn illicit gains into apparently licit ones? Was that what Agius was trying to do, or was he simply trying to cash in on the betting boom?
The article speaks to an era in Malta’s recent history when then Prime Minister Joseph Muscat dreamed, the article notes, of making the island into “the Singapore of the Mediterranean”. (Muscat himself has been on trial for financial crimes since 2023; the article mentions another figure who was holidaying with Muscat when he was arrested, in southern Italy, on a German warrant for tax evasion). The question of whether Malta’s role in the global betting industry is a triumph of entrepreneurialism or a magnet for shady dealings hangs over the article.
Starting from Agius, Olivelli finds himself writing about an ever-widening web of individuals and projects, some quite tenuously linked, many which never came off: the possibility of a casino being set up in Ghana, a business venture in Suriname, a 35-year-old Sicilian who was the promoter of a crypto project with links to betting (and currently under investigation for fraud), Slovakian assault rifles shipped from Sicily…
It’s a hard to follow world of companies changing hands, changing names; legitimate businesses mixed in with more compromised ones or acting as cover for them in one way or another; intermixed business relationships, where the apparent, ostensible commercial link between two individuals may not be the whole reality of the relationship or even anything close to it.
Besides Adrian Agius himself, one figure who comes up a lot is “Fabio” (not his real name), who IrpiMedia tracked down and interviewed. Fabio appears to have been a veteran of the online betting scene in which Agius was becoming involved as a sort of spotter, finding wealthy people to bet on particular platforms. “I never knew he was a criminal,” the article quotes Fabio as saying of Agius, calling their dealings purely “professional”. Presenting himself as a “friend of Fabio”, Agius then got in touch with another veteran of Italian online betting and, through him, with another man with a long history in Spain. When he was living in Malta, Fabio was also involved in the tourism industry. It was in this context that Fabio met the recipient of those Slovak assault rifles.
It is head-spinning stuff. What it adds up to isn’t clear. How many of Agius’s forays into the betting world came to fruition? “Fabio” describes him as a “mythomaniac”. What is certain is that Adrian Agius and his brother are now in prison, Carmel Chircop and Daphne Caruana Galizia are long dead, and the punters (generally) lose.
Original article (“La scommessa di Agius: I progetti d’investimento del criminale maltese con I bookmaker italiani”) by Simone Olivelli first published in Italian in IrpiMedia on 20 June 2025.
The article was produced in partnership with Amphora Media, OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) and the Times of Malta.
It’s available here.
IrpiMedia is a Milan-based Italian nonprofit investigative journalism outlet founded in 2012. Part of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), its reports deal with a range of inter-related topics including organised crime, corruption, financial misconduct and environmental abuse, often using open-course intelligence and data journalism methods, and working in collaboration with cross-border networks such as the OCCRP.
Summary by ZN
Being Bosnian
A Bosnian intellectual confronts a thorny topic: the national identity of Bosnian Muslims
In his polemical article “Only a Crazy Muslim…”, published in Prometej, Bosnian intellectual Tarik Haverić confronts a thorny and emotionally charged topic: the national identity of Bosnian Muslims. Written three decades after the horror of the Srebrenica massacre, the piece strikes a raw nerve in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In the deeply fractured Balkan country where memory and trauma shape politics, Haverić poses a fundamental question: what forges national identity – culture, religion, language or DNA? Rejecting rigid views that tie national identity solely to religion, Haverić presents a more flexible model: the Bosnian Muslim subject should be free to “shift” (vrdati) their self-identification according to their situation.
Haverić traces the contested history of the term “Bosniaks” (Bošnjaci), now commonly used for Bosnian Muslims. It was only at the First Bosniak Assembly in September 1993, amid the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, that the name was reintroduced to denote Bosnian Muslims – “as if they hadn’t vigorously rejected it themselves!” he retorts.
The article challenges influential views on Bosnian Muslim identity. One belongs to Sunni theologian Mehmed Handžić, whose History of the Bosniaks enjoys cult status among contemporary Bosniak readers – “mostly because it lacks footnotes,” Haverić remarks cheekily, “which tend to exhaust the Bosnian Muslim subject.”
Handžić’s 1940 treatise, The Islamisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Origin of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims, aimed to prove that Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina are indigenous, not newcomers. Yet, even in a follow-up text from 1941, Patriotism, Nationality and Nationalism from the Islamic Perspective, Handžić avoided clearly delineating their nationality.
Haverić attributes Handžić’s reluctance to define Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim nationality to the subordination of all identities to the universal community of believers (umma) in traditional Islam. The umma was a primary identification that, through centuries of Ottoman rule, filled Bosnian Muslims with pride.
Until Yugoslav times, children memorised the following lines from the religious education textbook Sual i dževab (Question and Answer): “The teacher, the hodža, asks the question, the pupil answers, for example: – What are you? – I am a Turk, a mumin, a Muslim, alhamdulillah.”
Haverić picks apart the essentialist and anti-secularist bias of Handžić’s position. The French, he contends, are neither Catholic nor Huguenot; they have abandoned religion as a marker of their national identity. Today, there are “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Orthodox, Muslim, Evangelical, Mormon, Hindu, and even atheist (naletosun!) French.” (A loanword from Turkish, “naletosun” is an exclamation that roughly translates to “damn it!” or “to hell with it!”)
Accordingly, in the Balkans there have long been Muslim Croats and Serbs, such as the late 18th-century Ottoman Bosnian military leader Smail-aga Šarić, who once exclaimed: “I am a Serb, alhamdulillah! Long live King Peter!”
Amid this confusing medley of identities, the theologian Handžić bluntly stated in 1941: “Only a mad Muslim could embrace a nationalism that included even the slightest element from a faith other than exalted Islam.” Strikingly, just six months later, Handžić enthusiastically embraced the creation of a fascist puppet regime in his homeland: “By the boundless will of God… He has bestowed upon us, as a blessing, the Independent State of Croatia!”
However, if “only a mad Muslim” accepts a non-Muslim nationality, Haverić rightly asks, how did Muslims come to embrace Croatness, defined by Catholicism? Either they all went mad overnight or they came to a sobering realisation: in the face of war, the wisdom of 7th-century ḥadīths held little weight. The community had to make radical decisions grounded not in theology but harsh political reality.
For Handžić, only Muslims see Bosnia as their homeland – everyone else betrays it when convenient. Haverić accuses Handžić of resorting to “patriotic chest-thumping” when asserting: “When it comes to the interests of this homeland of ours, almost no one participates in the effort except the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims.”
An alternative theory of Bosnian Muslim identity came from politician Suljaga Salihagić, who outlined his position in the 1940 pamphlet We, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims within the Yugoslav Community. He advocated for a “wavering” stance in political affairs: those at each other’s throats yesterday might be embracing and kissing today.
Similarly, one could not blame Muslims seeking help from non-Muslims: “We want to survive, and we have the right to that – that is our struggle for survival.” Despite adopting such a strategy of “shifting” (vrdanje), Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims suffered devastating losses in WWII and the Yugoslav breakup in the 1990s, exposing a trend of fatal decisions by their leaders which, for Haverić, persists.
So, when and how did Bosnian Muslims adopt the name “Bosniaks”? According to Mustafa Imamović, Bosniaks are defined by “Islam, together with the medieval Bosnian heresy that preceded it.” But are the Bošnjaci a distinct national community or merely a part of the larger umma?
Haverić insists on preserving the historical ambivalence that clashes with “today’s official version of Bosniak autofiction, which claims that they had always been aware of their national distinctiveness, but others denied them the right to a name and existence.”
There was strong controversy before Bošnjaci was accepted as an ethnonym. In the 1991 booklet Muslims and Bosniakhood, Mustafa Imamović claimed that the name of the “Islamised Slavs in the Yugoslav historical space” is Muslims, who consciously chose to abandon Bosniak identification. (There was, however, a strong pro-Bosniak sentiment among the diaspora.)
Haverić sees dissent on questions of religious and national identity as stifled today. Paradoxically, the old dogma that one couldn’t be both Muslim and nationally conscious has flipped: now, to be Bosniak, one must be Muslim. However, there’s hope: “whenever faced with a moral crossroads, the Bosnian Muslim subject boldly and decisively marches forward.”
Original article (“Samo lud musliman…”) by Tarik Haverić first published on 27 March.
It’s available here.
Based in Sarajevo, Prometej is a socio-cultural website advocating for a unified yet decentralised Bosnia and Herzegovina, embracing its religious diversity and grounded in the principles of secularism.
Summary by IJ
Journalism in Burkina Faso: “submit or disappear”
This spring, authorities in Burkina Faso kidnapped two leading figures of the country’s independent press in a chilling escalation of media repression
“Like a seed that is sown, which germinates and grows, hatred and contempt for independent media and professional journalists in Burkina Faso have reached maturity.”
So begins a lyrical, outraged report for the Francophone site Afriquexxi on the kidnapping in March of Guézouma Sanogo and Boukari Ouoba, two leading figures of the country’s independent press. The article is written by ‘Serge Chams’, a pseudonym for a Burkinabe journalist – the author’s anonymity another nod to the dire situation for journalists in the West African nation.
On 24 March, men claiming to belong to Burkina Faso’s intelligence services entered the Norbert Zongo Press Centre in the capital Ouagadougou, where they seized Sanogo and Ouoba – respectively president and vice-president of the Association of Journalists of Burkina (AJB).
The men were taken away, resurfacing only in a video that showed them dressed in military uniforms around a fortnight later. (In July, after the publication of the article in Afriquexxi, Ouoba was released; the whereabouts of Sanogo remain unknown.)
As Chams points out, the persecution of journalists under Ibrahim Traoré’s military rule, which began in 2022 following a coup, is far from unusual. Amid worsening insecurity and jihadist violence, the junta has suspended dozens of media outlets, expelled foreign correspondents, and threatened independent journalists with prison or forced conscription, pushing many into exile while others have simply disappeared.
Where the kidnapping of Sanogo and Ouoba crossed a “new red line” is that it happened in the Norbert Zongo Press Centre – previously considered a safe haven for media professionals.
Named after the country’s most celebrated investigative reporter – who was assassinated in 1998 by soldiers from the Presidential Security Regiment – the centre functions as the “the ultimate refuge for all defenders of freedom, democracy and human rights.” By forcibly entering the space, Chams says, authorities “pulled the trigger of a weapon that will permanently destroy hard-won press freedom”.
Despite threats, both Sanogo and Ouoba – who also held senior roles at the Press Centre – chose to remain in Burkina Faso.
Just days before their disappearance, Sanogo spoke publicly about the need for journalists to maintain ethical standards and resist becoming “web activists”, insisting that professionalism was their only remaining protection in an environment where “submit or disappear” has become the regime’s message to critical voices.
Traoré’s regime, Chams writes, has “chosen to attack the thermometer… rather than find remedies to cure the illness that is eating away at the country.”
Original article (“Journalisme au Burkina Faso: se soumettre ou disparaître”) by Serge Chams was first published in French on 7 April 2025.
It’s available here.
Afriquexii is an independent site run by journalists, academics and activists, devoted to reporting and writing on Africa.
Summary TM
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team