SERBIA: SNS vs Djilas & more – 24th Dec 2024

Dobar dan from BA! This is the Rorshok Serbia Update from the 24th of December twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Serbia.

On Sunday the 22nd, students who had been blocking their faculties’ buildings staged protests across the country, demanding accountability for the railway station canopy collapse in the northern city of Novi Sad, which resulted in fifteen deaths. Around 140,000 students gathered near the Slavija square in Belgrade, joined by farmers, actors, and educators, giving fifteen minutes of silence for all victims.

In the southern city of Nis, thousands of citizens got together near the Delta Planet mall in a student-led protest and walked across the city holding banners, calling for the government to fulfill the students’ demands.

Students demand that the government publish all documents related to the railway station renovation, prosecute those responsible for the railway station’s unsafety, and release all students who have been jailed and beaten by the police during peaceful protests.

Next up, on Friday the 20th, a fight ensued between activists of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, and Dragan Djilas, the leader of the opposition Party of Freedom and Justice, or SSP. SNS activists said in a press conference that they were putting up anti-Djilas posters all over Belgrade, saying he was a thief, and Djilas confronted them.

Soon a fight broke out, with all parties throwing punches and pushing each other. The SNS amd the SSP started blaming each other for the fight. However, the general consensus is that SNS activists initiated the attack.

Many international political figures, such as the European Parliament rapporteur and the US ambassador to Serbia, condemned the attack on Djilas, and called on the authorities to investigate the incident and prosecute the perpetrators.

Since we mentioned Europe, on Wednesday the 18th, the EU held an EU-Western Balkans Summit in Brussels, Belgium, aimed at encouraging the region’s progress in its path toward EU membership. Even though EU officials reaffirmed their support for the Balkan countries to join the Union, they underlined that these countries need to introduce reforms to meet the membership criteria.

When it comes to Serbia, they noted that the country needs to improve the rule of law, media freedom, and human rights situation to advance its EU accession process. Additionally, they urged Serbia to resolve bilateral disputes it has with Kosovo by implementing agreements that work on the normalization of relations between the two.

Despite the EU calls aimed at normalizing their relations, Kosovo decided to ban the Serbian List - the biggest Serbian party in Kosovo - from running in its upcoming national elections. On Monday the 23rd, Kosovo’s election authorities said that they will not be certifying the Serbian List party to run in the elections scheduled for February since the ethnic-Serbian party has never acknowledged Kosovo’s independence.

Serbia condemned the decision, with President Vucic accusing Kosovo’s Prime Minister Kurti of attempting to eliminate the only opponent in the elections. The Serbian List also called the decision unlawful. The US and the EU joined in on the criticism. The spokesperson for the US embassy in Kosovo said that Kosovo’s decision undermined the basic democratic principles for free and fair elections. The EU officials in Kosovos’s capital Pristina criticized Kosovo for basing the certification process on the ruling party’s considerations, and not on legal standards.

However, as a step towards improving the relations between Serbia and Kosovo, Besnik Bislimi and Petar Petkovic, the chief negotiators of the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, agreed to implement the Declaration on Missing Persons. At a meeting on Tuesday the 17th, both negotiators agreed on implementing the declaration, which aims to bring closure to families of individuals who went missing during the nineteen ninety-eight - nineteen ninety-nine war between Kosovo and Serbia. They agreed that the cooperation between the two on locating burial sites and detecting mass graves is crucial to finding as many missing people as possible.

Earlier on we mentioned media freedom in Serbia — or the lack of it. Well, a Belgrade-based NGO noted that aside from pro-government bias, news outlets and the media have increased the use of aggression and hate speech in their articles and programs. The Center for Media Professionalization and Media Literacy, or CEPROM, reported that the thirty most popular media outlets in Serbia publish more than twenty articles per day that contain elements of aggressive communication, hate speech, and sensationalism.

Compared to twenty nineteen, the use of violent language in the media has risen by around nine percent. CEPROM expressed concerns over this increase, noting that the public in Serbia is exposed to aggression in the media every day.

On Tuesday the 18th, the mayor of Belgrade announced that as of twenty twenty-five, public transport in the city will be completely free. Despite the seemingly good news of cost-effective transit options in the capital, many economists voiced their concerns about this decision. Economist Milan Kovacevic told the New Economy news outlet that the announced free public transport would mean higher taxes for citizens, since the public transport sector needs money to afford the new scheme somehow.

Nikola Jovanovic, the director of the Center for Local Self-Government, noted that currently only vulnerable groups of people, such as the elderly, primary and secondary school students and people with disabilities, have access to free public transportation. He added that with free public transport, these groups would lose their benefit.

Speaking of transport, Serbia’s Morava Corridor motorway has opened an additional thirty kilometers, or around eighteen miles, connecting the central cities of Krusevac and Vrnjacka Banja. With this milestone, half of the 110-kilometer or seventy-mile-long motorway is now operational.

The Morava Corridor aims to improve transport infrastructure by cutting travel times for both people and goods. It will connect Serbia’s east and west, from Pojate to Preljina, and link the North-South motorway between Serbia's border with Hungary and North Macedonia. Additionally, it is Serbia’s first digital highway, since it is equipped with fiber optic cables for better traffic management.

Infostud, the leading employment platform in Serbia, published the results of the research they conducted during the Regional Employment Fair held in October. The study revolved around factors that are influencing job selection in employees, as well as employment expectations and workplace trends in the country.

The results showed that salary was the most important factor when picking jobs, with nearly seventy percent of respondents citing it as their decisive criterion. A little over a third of respondents said that the ideal salary would be between 80,000 dinars, which is around 800 dollars, and 100,000 dinars, or around 1,000 dollars. More than 6,000 people participated in Infostud’s research, and half of them were Serbians.

In other news, last week, archeologists in Novi Sad discovered a cemetery dating back to the first half of the 11th century in the city’s neighborhood of Klisa. Ljubisa Vasiljevic, the head of the archaeological research team, stated that the discovery of the cemetery is one of the most significant archeological discoveries in Serbia, providing new insights into how inhabitants of the northern region of Vojvodina lived.

Vasiljevic said that his team found objects within graves, such as coins pointing to remnants of pagan religious practices, jewelry, and an arrowhead, in the cemetery. He said that they would send the artifacts to the Museum of Novi Sad, where an exhibition will be held.

Let’s close this edition with a cultural update. On the 30th of December, Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art will host the Belgrade Winter Festival featuring musical performances by various famous artists. Names such as Nicim Izazvan, Prljavo Kazaliste, Kerber and Yu Grupa, will perform at the Museum’s front plaza. The entrance to all gigs will be free.

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!