SERBIA: No Meeting & more – 2nd July 2024

Dobar dan from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Serbia Update from the 2nd of July twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Serbia.

On Wednesday the 26th, Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative, announced the cancellation of the trilateral meeting between him, president Vucic and Kosovo’s PM Kurti. Wednesday’s meeting was supposed to be another round of the EU-facilitated Pristina-Belgrade dialogue. However, Kurti refused to join, saying that Vucic did not agree with the preconditions he had put forward. These mostly focused on the signing of the agreements Kosovo and Serbia have previously made, which are focused on the normalization of relations between the two. Vucic refused to meet these conditions, since he said they all boiled down to Serbia recognizing Kosovo, which is against its constitution.

Borrell said that both parties made some progress in the normalization dialogue, with Serbia recognizing Kosovo’s license plates and Kosovo agreeing to form the Community of Serbian Municipalities. However, he said that the normalization process has slowed, urging both parties to focus on achieving peace.

Speaking of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, on Friday the 28th, its Basic Court found four men guilty of involvement in the twenty eighteen murder of Oliver Ivanovic, a Kosovo-Serbian politician. Ivanovic was an opponent of Serbian List, a Belgrade-backed party in Kosovo, and advocated for the coexistence of Serbians and Albanians in Kosovo. The perpetrators received sentences for various criminal acts, including illegal weapon possession, abuse of official duty and being involved in a criminal joint enterprise organization — which orchestrated the murder. Three of the perpetrators were sentenced to four years in prison, and one of them to ten years. Additionally, they will have to pay fines of a couple thousand dollars each.

On the same day, the media outlet Balkan Insight Investigative Network, or BIRN, published a report on the presence of surveillance systems in the urban areas of cities. They highlighted that the authorities adopted surveillance practices with facial recognition technology aimed to monitor opponents, activists, and journalists. BIRN stated that Serbia has more than 8,000 cameras across the country, which the authorities say are intended to combat crime and ensure security and public order.

However, the report showed that in the past, the authorities had breached human rights by invading the privacies of many. BIRN noted that the Serbian Intelligence Service BIA surveilled an individual without a court order, with equipment capable of controlling users’ devices. They also revealed that state-sponsored hackers tried to breach the phones of certain pro-European civil society organizations.

Serbia is under pressure from the EU to adhere to European standards on data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity due to its aspirations to become an EU member.

On that note about Serbia and the EU, the two signed a new deal on Tuesday the 25th, focusing on the control of Serbia’s borders with non-EU countries. According to the agreement, Serbia will be able to deploy Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, on the country’s borders with Bosnia and North Macedonia. Ylva Johansson, the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migrations, said that the EU had donated over fifty special vehicles to the Serbian police. They have surveillance equipment to improve border control.

Currently, Frontex personnel are present on the country’s borders with Bulgaria and Hungary, as part of an operation which aims to combat crime at the borders, such as people smuggling, and document fraud.

Going back to reports for a second, BIRN published their analysis on gender-based violence and Kosovo’s institutional responses. The report comes a month after the arrest of several men who have shared derogatory videos of women containing personal information to a Telegram group called Albkings, with over 100,000 members. BIRN said that even though the group is an extreme manifestation of misogyny on social media, the ideology they promote stems from the patriarchal system of the Albanian society in Kosovo. They also noted that Kosovo lacks mechanisms to track these kinds of incidents, ultimately failing to protect their citizens from online abuse. According to the report, Kosovo’s legal framework does not adequately address online abuse of women.

However, Kosovo is working on tackling online security risks. On Friday the 28th, their government banned the use of TikTok in state institutions, citing the growing concern over the institutions’ vulnerability to cyber threats as their main reason. Kosovo’s Deputy Minister for Internal Affairs said that their ministry conducted a test, where they anonymously emailed more than 7,000 public officials with inaccurate information. The results showed that many of the recipients thought the information was true, which proved how easily they could fall prey to cyber fraud. Kosovo feared that, in the case of a cyber-attack, their public officials could hand over important confidential information. Their government followed many other countries that banned TikTok in their state institutions, including the US and the UK.

Now, onto the economy. The latest annual report titled Finance TOP by the media outlet Business and Finance, analyzed the profits of banks and insurance companies in Serbia, and said that they were record high. The net profits of banks in twenty twenty-three amounted to more than a billion dollars, which is a significant increase compared to twenty twenty-two, when the net profits were around 650 million dollars. As for the insurance companies, in twenty twenty-three, they achieved a total premium of 1.5 billion dollars, which is an increase of around fifteen percent compared to twenty twenty-two. Dunav Insurance topped the market with a premium of more than 350 million dollars in twenty twenty-three, which is an increase of around thirty million dollars compared to twenty twenty-two.

Last week, President Vucic said that June's inflation slowed down to around four percent. He said this trend would continue into the second half of twenty twenty-four. The National Bank of Serbia said that May's inflation reached its target range of 4.5 percent, announcing that the inflation should drop to three percent by the end of the year.

In some environmental news, on Sunday the 1st, the representatives of the We Won’t Give Jadar Up Citizens’ Association submitted a request demanding the government introduce a legal ban on lithium and boron mining in Serbia. The call comes in the midst of the ongoing talks between the mining giant Rio Tinto and the Serbian government about the continuation of the Jadar project, which focuses on geological exploration and exploitation of lithium and boron. The We Won’t Give Jadar Up representative said that their association has collected nearly 40,000 signatures supporting the call for the ban, giving the executive forty days to fulfill the request.

Recall that the government had canceled the Jadar mining project in the western Jadar region of the country due to the irreversible damage it was causing to the surrounding environment. However, they have recently been talking about re-opening the mining project, sparking condemnation from environmental experts.

However, Serbia has been working on environmental protection in other ways. For instance, there’s The Clean Serbia project, which focuses on the construction of wastewater treatment plants and sewage systems across the country. The government plans to borrow nearly 200 million dollars from the Bank of China to fund this project.

Serbia currently has a small number of plants for wastewater collection and disposal, which do not offer an adequate degree of treatment. So, the treated wastewater that ends up in the rivers could pose an environmental risk.

And to wrap up this edition, from Tuesday the 2nd and until the 30th of July, the Theater Museum in Zajecar will hold an event titled Italian Movie Days, where it will screen various Italian movies. The screenings will take place every Tuesday at nine PM on the museum’s summer stage. Some of the featured movies include Nobody Can Judge Me, Do You See Me?, and Leopardi. The event is free of charge! For more information, check out the link in the show notes!

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Do daljnjeg, zbogom!