When it comes to the biggest environmental movement in Europe, the movement against lithium mining in Serbia, President Aleksandar Vucic has claimed we are funded by “the west.” Now, in your article, we have come to discover that “the west” suspects that we are fueled by Russia. 

It must be difficult for leaders in bed with extractivist corporations to be confronted with a genuine decentralized peoples’ movement of this magnitude of hundreds of thousands in the streets and protests in over 50 towns. We are a movement that has unified people of varying ideologies, political preferences, education levels, ages and life experiences.

While our autocratic leader, Rio Tinto, the US embassy and Germany’s Chancellor (who wants to avoid a recession by re-powering Germany’s ailing car manufacturing fleet with electric vehicles) promote this mine, it is not surprising that “the west” would use Vucic style propaganda to suggest that if a movement they can not control is successful it must be funded by a political rival. It’s a politically fashionable rhetoric used to delegitimize and destabilize genuine, non partisan, people-led descent.

People have been opposing this mine for years but it’s only now, when lithium unleashes a white gold-rush that Serbia is getting coverage. Here, the issue of land is crucial; especially to the farmers threatened with expropriation. It is our collective respect for land, farming and nature, not Russia, that fuels our solidarity and hope. It is insulting to the intelligence and hard work of those who have built this movement, and to the hundreds of thousands who have joined us on streets, to claim it is fueled by anything other than hard work, unity and determination.

Bojana Novakovic

coordinator of the Marš sa Drine collective against lithium mining in Serbia 

Please note that the movement against lithium mining in Serbia is decentralized and coordinated by various civil society groups who comprise the organizational platform of this collective campaign. Mars sa Drine is one of those groups.