On Saturday night, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators held a voiceless vigil on the streets of Belgrade, something unexpected broke the silence. Witnesses say they heard a low roaring sound, as though a jet engine was hurtling towards them. What it was remains unclear – videos circulating on social media show the crowd suddenly parting, stumbling, falling over one another as though driven from the streets by some unseen force.
The shock soon gave way to accusations that the police had turned a military-grade “sound cannon” on the silent crowds. Opposition politicians held press conferences showing photos of a police car parked near the National Assembly equipped with what appeared to be a long-range acoustic device (LRAD), a military device designed to project sound at ear-splitting volumes as a means of public communication or, more controversially, crowd control.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has flatly denied that the police used such a device, and the country’s interior minister insisted the government didn’t even own one. He later walked back his statement to say that Serbia’s police force did in fact have a number of US-manufactured LRADs in its possession, but maintained they were only used for broadcasting emergency messages to large crowds.
It’s not the first time that protesters have accused the government of trying to suppress the protests by force. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević announced his resignation at the end of January after a group of demonstrators putting up stickers outside the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) headquarters were set upon by men armed with baseball bats. Vučić later confirmed that the four alleged assailants, who were arrested, belonged to the ruling party.
Student protestors unfazed by PM Vucevic resignation, demanding Serbia ‘become a different society’
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Government supporters have repeatedly driven their cars into demonstrations, and students have been hospitalised in street clashes with masked men that opposition groups accuse the government of mobilising against the largely peaceful protesters.
For a government that has committed to reforms based around democracy and the rule of a law as part of its years-long bid to join the European Union, these are heavy accusations. But despite calls from Serbian civil society groups for the EU’s leading bodies to condemn violence against peaceful protesters, and a demand by largely left-wing European deputies for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to cancel a planned meeting with Vučić next week, Brussel has kept largely quiet.
The Council of Europe, a Strasbourg-based rights group, on Thursday urged Serbia to investigate claims that police had used a “sound cannon” against the demonstrators. A joint statement from the council’s parliamentary arm, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, said that “dozens of people” had needed medical attention as a result.
London-based political scientist Branislav Radeljic said that the EU’s silence had not gone unnoticed in Serbia.
“It is clear – and to many, very disappointing – that the EU has remained silent regarding the deeply corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Vučić regime,” he said. “Back in October, Ursula von der Leyen praised ‘dear Aleksandar’ for ‘delivering on reforms, in particular on the fundamentals, as you just said, of rule of law and democracy. And you have shown that deeds follow your words’. This speaks volumes, not only about the EU’s treatment of Serbia but also about the moral degradation within the Brussels administration.”
Studied indifference
The student-led mass protests erupted in November after 15 people were killed in the collapse of a train station’s concrete canopy in Serbia’s second city of Novi Sad. The station had recently been renovated as part of a project led by a Chinese consortium – working with local subcontractors – to upgrade the country’s deteriorating rail infrastructure.
Protesters are blaming what they call rampant corruption and cronyism within the country’s government and construction industry. Keeping their distance from the country’s opposition parties, their demands have been concrete and uncompromising: the release of all unredacted documents related to the botched reconstruction project, the arrest and unmasking of people who’ve attacked protesters and an end to prosecutions against demonstrators who have been arrested.
Serbia: Opposition MPs throw smoke grenades, tear gas in parliament
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Vučić, who began his political career in the far-right Serbian Radical Party and served as nationalist dictator Slobodan Milošević’s information minister before riding pro-European public sentiment back into office as part of the SNS in 2012, has remained publicly committed to EU accession.
Despite this, periodic reports show little progress on reform around democracy, rule of law and the continued opening of Serbia’s economy to foreign capital. This has not prevented Von der Leyen from praising Vučić’s dedication to EU membership as recently as October last year following months of widespread protests against a controversial lithium mine.
Nebojša Vladisavljević, a professor in Serbian politics at the University of Belgrade, said that the EU’s approach to the western Balkans had long been one of shoring up the status quo.
“The EU had – it was not actually a support for dictators, as some would claim, but it was complete indifference towards this issue of whether these states are democratic or not,” he said. “The EU has some priorities, which is stability as they see it – which is short-term stability. But we who live here in the region know that authoritarianism may provide short-term stability, but it actually triggers instability in the medium to long term.”
Although Serbia’s path to EU membership has been a long one, Belgrade has already forged close economic ties with the 27-member bloc.
The EU is Serbia’s largest provider of financial assistance, and far and away its largest trading partner. In 2020 it launched an investment plan in the western Balkans that has already funnelled more than €5 billion to Belgrade. Another €1.5 billion is being spent on gradually integrating Serbia into the European Single Market.
Buying support
This deepening economic relationship has not always been popular. In July last year, the EU signed a memorandum of understanding with Belgrade announcing a “strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials”, giving it access to Serbia’s largely untapped reserves of lithium. Just days earlier, the government had issued a decree reinstating Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto‘s project of creating Europe’s largest lithium mine – a project that had been halted two years earlier following mass public protests.
Although the overwhelming public opposition has focused around the potentially severe environmental impacts on some of Serbia’s richest farmland, it’s easy to see why the EU has forged ahead. Once completed, the Jadar project could fulfil 90 percent of Europe’s current lithium needs – an essential step in securing its own supply chains in an electric vehicle industry increasingly dominated by China.
Read moreResidents in rural Serbia rally against lithium mining project
“As has often been the case worldwide, the EU has chosen to prioritise business interests, which are not necessarily conditioned by political liberalisation, over freedom and democracy in Serbia,” Radeljic said.
“Both the EU and the Vučić regime have pushed the Rio Tinto project, even though 80 percent of the local population opposes the opening of the mine,” he said. “The EU should be mindful that opposition to Rio Tinto was a major blow to Vučić back in 2021, and the massive movement that emerged from this has since felt that they have the EU on the opposite side regarding this project. This means they are not only fighting the regime but also the EU as Vučić’s enabler.”
Vladisavljević said that the high-profile project fit with Vučić’s long-held habit of courting the support of Europe’s economic powerhouses.
“For Vučić, it is very important for two reasons – one because it is a large project, and there are great opportunities for corruption, and we’ve seen how it works in other large projects,” he said. “And the second is to court favour with the EU, and more specifically with Germany and the European car industry.”
He pointed to Serbia’s 2024 purchase of 12 Rafale fighter jets from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation, allowing French President Emmanuel Macron to return from a state visit to Belgrade with a €2.7-billion contract for French heavy industry.
“We are buying the most expensive fighter planes from France, Rafales, which Serbia does not need – but Vučić needs support from Macron,” he said. “That’s why we are buying this stuff, which is about two to three billion dollars. For a small country such as Serbia this is huge. This is enormous. So Vučić has been very successful in actually buying out support from the key members of the EU, especially Germany and France, and that is probably one of the issues and reasons why the EU has been indifferent towards democracy in this region.”
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This indifference is increasingly going both ways. A 2024 regional poll by the International Republican Institute across Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Albania found majority support for EU membership in every western Balkan country – except Serbia, where it remained at 40 percent.
Although European support for Kosovo’s independence and an uneasy historic relationship with the West likely contributes to this ambivalence, Radeljic said that more and more young Serbians have been disenchanted by the EU’s realpolitik approach to the country.
“The EU has been widely perceived as a transactional actor,” he said. “Even the pro-European, liberal segment of the population no longer views the EU as a values-based organisation. By supporting Vučić, the EU has alienated those segments of Serbian society who have long been the staunchest advocates for EU integration.”
“In the eyes of students, the EU is seen as highly hypocritical and unsupportive of the rule of law and liberal-democratic standards,” he said. “As a result, the EU’s soft power among the new generation is almost non-existent.”
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