Long story short: The Serbian protests against the lithium mining project proposed by Rio Tinto were not motivated by environmentalism but instead were aimed against the Serbian ruling kleptocratic coalition with an outpouring of anti-Western hysteria.

What the protesters and their sympathizers tried to achieve last year was to hurt the ratings of our Supreme Commander by using a page out of his playbook.

In the minds of the Serbian parochial, narrow-sighted populace, our country is considered an Arcadia, a pastoralist green oasis with fantastic potential for (organic)c agriculture and rural tourism that will take the world by storm, a potential that, in their minds, was never realized because of decades of communist rule and Western and other foreign interference.

In reality, Serbia is Europe’s most polluted country. Its thermoelectric power plants are the most polluting in Europe, and air quality is among the worst in the world. The smog in Serbian cities and towns is so thick that it looks like a live-action scene from Silent Hill.

Pollution spreading from 138 garbage dumps and 3,500 illegal landfills is insidiously poisoning Serbian citizens, whether by rainfall taking the pollutants into the ground, or the fires that keep consuming them, taking the pollutants into the air.

Existing mines and affiliated enterprises are notorious for their pollution and unsafe working conditions, which sometimes lead to fatal accidents, like the one in the “Soko” mine located near Sokobanja, where 8 miners were killed, while 20 were injured on April 1st, 2022. The public prosecutor’s office closed the case by ruling that the accident was caused by force majeure.

But no one protests against these issues en masse for months. Why? Because these are all environmental problems caused by the domestic government, and most of the polluters are either state-owned or don’t have stakeholders from any Western country. That’s right – you can’t have a massive public gathering against pollution unless it’s somehow Western pollution. Business investments coming from Europe and the US are widely considered as “theft”, “exploitative”, and “neo-colonial”. No such criticism is aimed at Chinese, Russian, Serbian, or Indian-owned companies.

Protesting against a non-existent, “neo-colonial” mining project is fashionable and safe over here. But it’s an exercise in futility to try to damage President Vucic’s standing by using his own rhetoric and methods.

It fits a local dominant sacrosanct narrative that paints Serbia as a victim of greedy capitalists and occupiers from the Collective West coming to bleed it dry of resources.

But it doesn’t fit reality, and gaslighting people into a frenzy with nationalist lies has always been the ruling party’s forte.