SERBIA: Election Conditions & more – 16th Apr 2024

Dobar dan from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Serbia Update from the 16th of April twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Serbia.

On Thursday the 11th, MPs from the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, and some of the MPs from the Serbia Against Violence opposition coalition had a meeting about the conditions to rerun Belgrade’s elections and hold local elections. Ana Brnabic, the National Assembly speaker, said that the meeting ended poorly, as the sides failed to reach an agreement. She also said that the government’s main goal is to meet the recommendations of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or ODIHR, which aim to improve the electoral process by addressing its key issues. These included voter intimidation and pressure, vote buying, bussing of foreigners to vote, among other illegal activities.

However, she said that the opposition MPs were very uncooperative, disregarding ODIHR’s suggestions. Marinika Tepic, the vice-president of the opposition Party of Freedom and Justice, said that the opposition is willing to work on the ODIHR recommendations, but that the government should have implemented them before announcing the elections because ODIHR said in their report that Serbia must initiate legislative amendments well in advance of the next elections.

Speaking of elections, the vote on the dismissal of four mayors in the north municipalities of Kosovo will take place on the 21st of April. However, last week, the representatives from the Serbian List , the largest Serbian party in Kosovo, submitted their resignations to the Central Election Commission, or CEC. The party said that they are boycotting the vote on the mayors’ dismissal because they believe PM Kurti will make sure that the old mayors stay despite the vote.

Recall that in twenty twenty-three, heavily boycotted local elections in Kosovo resulted in the appointment of four Albanian mayors to the four Serbian-majority municipalities in the north. The low turnouts of only around four percent resulted in the Serbian population staging a series of protests, which extended to January’s petition to dismiss mayors elected by a handful of votes.

Another event that the Serbian List is boycotting is Kosovo’s census, which began last week. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, for Kosovo, said that the online resources for the census process are limited, adding that the questionnaire, originally in Albanian, has been poorly translated into the languages of the minorities. This questionnaire includes the place of work, marital status, level of education, salaries, among others. The lack of questionnaires in the language of minorities is currently driving them away from participating in the census, and the OSCE warned that such low participation could have budgetary consequences on the municipal level.

Moving on, on Thursday the 11th, the Freedom House published a report called Nations in Transition twenty twenty-four on the state of democracy in countries of Central Europe and Central Asia. The report ranked twenty-nine countries on a scale from one to seven, where one meant that a country has a consolidated authoritarian regime, and seven meant that it has a consolidated democracy. Serbia scored 3.6 points, labeling the country as an autocratizing hybrid. They explained this categorization by saying that key institutions, such as the courts and media companies, have become too politicized, exceeding the expected level for hybrid regimes. They added that the ruling SNS party has practically captured these institutions, using them for personal gain. The country with the best score was Estonia, with six points, and the worst-rated country was Turkmenistan, with one point.

In other news, the UN recently announced that they drafted a resolution that declares the 11th of July the International Day of Reflection and Remembrance of the nineteen ninety-five Srebrenica Genocide, and announced that all the UN member states will vote on it on the 2nd of May. With this, the UN aims to encourage efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice and to condemn any denial of the genocide.

However, Serbian authorities, as well as those in the Republic of Srpska, one of the two Bosnia’s entities, heavily opposed this resolution because Serbia and the Republic of Srpska do not recognize the crimes committed in Srebrenica as genocide, but rather as a series of crimes. The massacre, which occurred in July of nineteen ninety-five in the eastern town of Srebrenica in Bosnia, claimed the lives of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys. In two thousand seven, the International Court of Justice determined that the massacre was not a genocide as there was individual responsibility for it.

On that note about genocide, following the two major arms sales from Serbia to Israel since the twenty twenty-three Hamas attack, the customs data of Checkpoint, a portal that collects the Serbian state’s trade information, reported that the country continued exporting weapons this year. In March and April, First Partisan, the state-owned ammunition production factory, exported arms worth nearly 800,000 dollars to Israel. The UN’s Human Rights Council called on Serbia to stop the sales of arms and other military equipment to Israel, adding that by delivering arms, Serbia is actively supporting a war that is violating international humanitarian law.

Aside from selling military equipment, Serbia is also engaging in its purchasing. On Tuesday the 9th, president Vucic announced an agreement with France to buy Rafale fighter jets. The plan to get these jets goes back to twenty twenty-two, when the media reported that Serbia was looking to upgrade its combat aviation with a switch to Western technology. The estimated price of the purchase is around three billion dollars. However, the government has not disclosed the number of jets that the country wants to buy or how much each of them cost .

Now for some economic news, on Thursday the 11th, the National Bank of Serbia, or NBS, announced that its benchmark interest rate will stay the same as last year’s, which is 6.5 percent. They added that their rates on deposit will stay at five percent and the rates for lending facilities will also remain the same, at eight percent. The NBS said that the declining global inflationary pressure, current medium-term inflation projections, and uncertainty over energy and primary commodity prices influenced their decision.

Since we mentioned energy, the directors of the transmission systems of Serbia, Hungary and Slovenia and the European Power Exchange signed an agreement on the integration of the three electricity exchanges. The pact aims to create an organized regional electricity exchange that will ensure the security of energy supply to the connected countries. Dubravka Djedovic, Serbia’s minister of Mining and Energy, said that the integration would enable simpler and more efficient energy trading in the region.

On Friday the 12th, The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, published its national report on the fifteen-year-old students' performance in reading, math, and science literacy for twenty twenty-two. The program surveyed eighty-one countries, and it ranked them in comparison to the PISA average, which is roughly 480 points. The report shows that, when it comes to Serbia, the results vary depending on the type of high school. More than eighty percent of students in vocational schools are functionally illiterate in reading and math, while in General high schools and grammar schools, it is only ten percent. Serbia placed 38th with an average of around 440 points. The country with the highest score was Singapore, and the one with the lowest was Cambodia, with an average of around 350 points.

And to close this edition, the Yugoslav Film Archive in Belgrade has organized a mini retrospective titled 100 Years of Surrealism on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of actor Marlon Brando, deemed ase one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time. The mini retrospective of his films started on Sunday the 14th and will last until the 22nd of April. Some of the featured films are The Godfather, On the Docks of New York, and Last Tango in Paris.

And that’s it for this week! Thanks for joining us!

Do you know that besides the Serbia Update, we also do others? Our latest ones are the Arctic Update, about the area north of the Arctic Circle, and the Ocean Update, about the 70% of the world covered in salt water. The other ones are all country updates, we have a selection of countries from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. Check roroshok.com/updates to see the full list. Find the link in the show notes as well.

Do daljnjeg, zbogom!