Ever since 2023 or so, whenever I get a worried call from abroad, “What is going on over there in Serbia, are you all right?!” I tend to respond, “Perfectly normal Friday night, enhance your calm”. Yes, there were violent protests here at the time. There’s been riots here all my life, not to mention all that other stuff.
There’s no other way to respond to genuinely worried people who don’t understand the intricacies of the social and political landscapes of countries like these, other than to tell them that there really isn’t anything out of the ordinary going on and that we’ve been through worse.
Don’t believe me? You think I’m downplaying this? Here’s the horrific footage of events that took place in Serbia on the evening of August 12th, which shook us to the core.
Portal Una informed us how “the concert venue was well organized with lots of clean toilets and washing sinks“, which is quite a feat considering Serbia’s notorious lack of public toilets. Indeed, for a country in a paralyzing crisis, Serbia certainly has a lively nightlife and a wealth of concerts.
When there is an escalation of protests, like the ones in Bačka Palanka and Vrbas, which set off the latest string of riots, the stage was set a long time ago by “pumping it up” on both sides.
So did you notice any difference between the pro-government agitprop from the Informer TV tabloid and the student movement supporter from X Mario ZNA? Yup, like we say here, “same crap, different packaging”.
Or take, for example, the flurry of angry, ridiculous reactions to he news about the possibility of 100.000 people from Ghana getting Serbian work permits.
Serbian netizens threw a fit over this imaginary migrant crisis by claiming how the government is “importing HIV and hepatitis from Ghana to replace white people in Serbia because Soros” and spun endless yarns about The Great Replacement plotted against white Christian Serbs by the Judeo-Americans. When as many as 370000 Russians migrated to Serbia by 2023 (source: Serbian Ministry of Interior), Serbian people seemed fine with the fact that a bunch of folks came from Russia, which is among the top five of the world’s highest HIV rate, and among the top 10 with hepatitis.
And off we go then. After a brief intermezzo that we spent being poisoned by two sides slinging mud all over the infosphere, we were ready for another bout of over a week of two sets of like-minded people protesting against each other. Get ready for scenes that rival the hellscape of war in Ukraine. Oh, wait, they don’t.
According to news reports, the altercations continued in hospitals, where the injured participants continued to rough each other up, but with no police present, much to the displeasure of the medical staff.
Social content creation, oops, I mean protests, continued today in multiple cities.
Look, there were genuinely injured and harassed people, and I am not trying to downplay the seriousness of what goes on around here, but the common practice of Serbian propaganda is to present oneself as a victim. The enemy needs to be this vicious, inhuman creature that is after your children. That’s why the student protesters are “our kids”, while the government-affiliated media keeps the public bombarded with alleged threats against President Vucic’s children.
When the opposition members of the Serbian parliament activated smoke bombs during a session last March, the pro-government agitprop produced animated videos of supposedly deadly injured pregnant female MPs.
The alleged sonic cannon use during the March 15th protests in Belgrade had the student supporters start rumors about the imaginary debilitating effects of LRAD that they suffered, and even went so far as to claim that some of the protesters died as a result. Guess what? No one died.
This kind of PR nonsense is a continuation of unhinged methods utilized during the Yugoslav wars by the Milosevic government that produced a laundry list of vicious lies about non-existent crimes committed against the “suffering Serbian people”:
- The depleted uranium munitions causing unspeakable diseases
- The “yellow house” in which the kidnapped Serbs from Kosovo were robbed of their organs to be sold on the black market
- The destruction of the Serbian Army’s tanks and armoured vehicles at the Smederevo ironworks after the fall of Milosevic
In Koha’s op-ed, “Serbia’s last war, the Albanian-Croatian one“, Veton Surroi, a Kosovar Albanian publicist, politician, and journalist, explains the rationale behind the Serbian opposing political camps using racial slurs like “shiptar” and “ustashe” as a dehumanization tactic against each other and the history of such discourse during the Yugoslav wars.
The actors of the confrontation on the streets of Serbia today are children born or raised during this century. While the world’s attention has been directed to other crises in the world, that same world has assumed that somehow, with the passage of time, the wounds of the past will heal, that the new generations that will grow up in Serbia will automatically be democrats and liberals like most of their European peers. Serbia has not known or wanted to face the past. Today, its problem is becoming the ignorance of facing the present.
Andrej, the brother of the president of Serbia, Vučić, came out to protest against the student protesters (as they are known, even though they have long been no longer students, but a broader popular movement). His appearance was a sign that even the government knows how to protest in the streets, moreover, it can do so because it enjoys broad support from citizens, support that has been ritually verified in elections since 2012, which his brother wins at the head of a populist political movement.
Approaching the points where the anti-government protesters were, the cameras recorded the cry of Andrej Vučić’s group towards the opponents: “Ustaše, Ustashë…!”
During the same night, anti-government protesters formulated their chants directed at the Serbian president, whom his supporters call “Aco Srbine” as a popular endorsement of his nationalist or nationalist credentials. The chant against Vučić was “Aco Šiptare!”
The protesters then made it clear what they thought about the ethnic affiliation of the government by formally challenging the special police units with the question and cry “why don’t you go to Kosovo?”; if they went to Kosovo, the special police units of Serbia would have to traditionally beat and kill Albanians, a kind of implicit role that differs from the one they were implementing and that was being done, the routine beating of Serbs.
And so, when protesters call President Vučić a “Shqiptar,” they do so with two goals. One, to show that he is not “Aca Srbin,” and being a “Shqiptar” is the opposite of a defender of Serbian national interests. And two, by using this term, he is also on a lower social and civilizational level than any Serbian citizen. The use of the term “Ustasha” has a similar purpose. The term, which is the name of the Croatian quisling formations during World War II, began to be used in Serbia during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in an attempt to show that the war of armed Serbs (“of the unarmed people”) for the occupation and division of Croatia was a war of “anti-fascists” against “Ustasha”. Since then, anyone who opposes Serbian nationalist politics in Croatia is an “Ustasha”, and this excludes few in that country. And, as a discursive extension, the “Ustasha” is now the student movement directed against President Vučić.
In a strange way, Serbia is preparing for a new war.
Yours truly also wrote about it after the Vidovdan protests.
24/7 news cycles and irresponsible social media users who comment on the events are a driving force of the outrage and fear factories that we suffer each day. While the agitprop from the 1990s radicalized the parochial, vindictive Serbian populace against its neighbours and the Collective West, the one that is being applied now is radicalizing that same parochial, spiteful, and vindictive populace against each other. For example, it is now conventional wisdom among the vox populi of Europe’s most polluted country that the police force should be dismantled and prosecuted after the change of government, because in their frustrated minds those police officers are worse than criminals…somehow. They thirst to avenge the innocent victims of unspeakable crimes committed by animals, ANIMALS I TELL YOU! Crimes that only exist in their minds, but crimes nonetheless. Trying to talk some sense into increasingly angrier participants of the local house of the dying lies only gets you branded as a shill or a traitor to the Serbian cause.
So what is the response of Mr. and Mrs. Average to calls to action? Here we have yet another Serbian content creator, making a YouTube video while strolling through Skadarlija, a bohemian quarter in the Old Town district of Belgrade, telling us how “Serbia is miserable, while some people are in a war on the streets of Belgrade, others are enjoying themselves, they are a disgrace”. The videographer tries to equate the passersby and restaurant and club-goers with Ćaciland, a camp of Vučić supporters squatting in Pioneers Park, between the National Assembly and the Presidency. In the minds of both opposed camps, if you’re not with us, you’re against us.
See? Nothing out of the ordinary is happening, other than the de-crazification of the Serbian political discourse that will throw away both versions of the same, yet differently packaged crap. The state of imaginary emergency, where Everything Is Broken and We Need To Fix It, Dammit, so dear to authoritarian minds, is now an impossibility in Serbia.
Most desire normalcy and going back to having normal problems. Like booing the ex-president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, when he tried to attend the Serbia-Slovenia basketball game on August 21st and heckle him, “Boo, you bear!”
Serbianism 