{"id":1687,"date":"2024-09-22T08:56:40","date_gmt":"2024-09-22T08:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/?p=1687"},"modified":"2024-10-26T09:06:57","modified_gmt":"2024-10-26T09:06:57","slug":"the-new-republic-death-threats-and-detained-pop-stars-inside-serbias-lithium-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/the-new-republic-death-threats-and-detained-pop-stars-inside-serbias-lithium-battle\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Republic: Death Threats and Detained Pop Stars: Inside Serbia\u2019s Lithium Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On her way to sing at a birthday party last month, Croatian pop star Severina Vu\u010dkovi\u0107 was\u00a0stopped<\/a>\u00a0and questioned about her political views by Serbian authorities. Around the same time, Aleksandar Matkovi\u0107 started receiving\u00a0death threats<\/a>\u00a0on Telegram. The first was in Serbian: \u201cWe will follow you until you disappear, scum.\u201d A subsequent text was written in what Matkovi\u0107\u2014a Serbian academic at the Institute for Economics in Belgrade who studies Marxism and economic history\u2014described to me as \u201cgarbled German.\u201d Another showed that the sender was just over a quarter-mile from the home of a friend he was visiting on the Adriatic Coast. Also around the same time, teams of police, armed with search warrants, showed up at the homes of five members of the environmental group Eko Stra\u017ea (Eco Guard) and confiscated their cell phones and laptops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do the pop star, the academic and the environmentalists have in common? Like the\u00a0tens of thousands of people<\/a>\u00a0who\u2019ve rallied across Serbia in recent weeks, they\u2019ve all\u00a0spoken out<\/a>\u00a0against the Anglo Australian mining firm Rio Tinto\u2019s $2.4 billion plan to mine and process lithium in that country\u2019s verdant Jadar Valley, near the town of Loznica. The company has said that the site could eventually produce 58,000 tons of lithium per day\u2014enough to meet 90 percent of European lithium demand and power some one million electric vehicles. The Serbian government has eagerly backed the project. It\u2019s also garnered the enthusiastic support of the European Union and the United States, which on Wednesday signed an\u00a0agreement<\/a>\u00a0with Serbia for strategic cooperation in energy. The EU, especially, hopes it can help diversify a supply chain now\u00a0heavily concentrated<\/a>\u00a0in China and secure the bloc easier access to a mineral that\u2019s central to its electric vehicle\u2013centric green industrial policy goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Serbians, though\u2014including those who\u2019d live closest to the project\u2014worry it will devastate the region\u2019s agricultural production and poison the drinking water for millions. Critics argue it promises few upsides for either local residents or the majority of Serbians. Demonstrators want the project canceled. It wouldn\u2019t be the first time that\u2019s happened: After mass protests in 2022 shut down cities and railways, Serbia\u2019s government revoked its approval of Rio Tinto\u2019s plan for the Jadar Valley site in advance of federal elections that April, blocking further development. On July 11, 2024, Serbia\u2019s Constitutional Court ruled that the decision was unconstitutional, laying the groundwork for the government to let Rio Tinto move forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside a new wave of protests has come a new, more intensive wave of repression. Once news broke that Severina had been stopped at the border\u2014she was eventually allowed to pass\u2014Serbian Interior Secretary Ivica Da\u010di\u0107 said<\/a> that she and other regional celebrities would be removed from \u201clists\u201d of people whose public stances the government considers problematic. People who\u2019ve participated in protests further report<\/a> being questioned by police over Instagram posts, and might face criminal charges that could mean they spend years in prison. Rio Tinto is now attempting<\/a> to have peer-reviewed research on the environmental impact of the Jadar project substantially changed or redacted, insisting\u2014alongside high-ranking members of Serbia\u2019s ruling party<\/a>\u2014that its authors are spreading \u201cdisinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bojan Simi\u015bi\u0107 is the founder of Eko Stra\u017ea, although his home wasn\u2019t among those searched by police in August. Members of that group are now waiting to see whether the government will build a case against them for calling for a \u201cviolent change in the constitutional order<\/a>,\u201d a felony charge. Such serious charges are a new development since the last round of protests,\u00a0Simi\u015bi\u0107\u00a0says. \u201cIn 2021 there were police at my door. They came just to warn me\u201d not to organize or participate in protests, he said. More often, demonstrators were issued tickets fining them around 50 euros for minor infractions. \u201cNow they\u2019re getting more aggressive,\u201d\u00a0Simi\u015bi\u0107\u00a0added. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about the mine. We have to fight for basic liberties to protest.\u201d In response,\u00a0Simi\u015bi\u0107\u00a0helped organize a\u00a0protest<\/a>\u00a0that drew tens of thousands of people to the grounds of state-run media outlet RTS on September 1, opposing the mine, the government\u2019s treatment of protesters, and the silence around both from Serbia\u2019s\u00a0tightly controlled media environment<\/a>. Serbian officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of last month, a website run by an \u201cindependent citizens\u2019\u201d group calling itself \u201cKopacemo\u201d (We Will Dig) appeared, claiming to fight \u201cmisinformation.\u201d The page features a registry<\/a> of so-called \u201cecological terrorists,\u201d including Matkovi\u0107 and Simi\u015bi\u0107. Profiles of several dozen alleged ecoterrorists feature stylized black and white pictures set against cyberpunk-ish green and black backgrounds. Descriptions list whether they\u2019ve been arrested and take personal pot shots. Matkovi\u0107\u2019s listing starts off by saying he \u201chas a speech impediment and tics\u201d and \u201ccan\u2019t pronounce his R<\/em>s and L<\/em>s properly.\u201d A profile for another anti-mining activist states that he \u201cwears a bandanna over his head in a militant style,\u201d which is \u201cactually to cover the loss of his hair.\u201d Vladimir \u0160timac, a former basketball player featured on the site, has now filed<\/a> a criminal complaint against its anonymous creators. Though it\u2019s still unclear who exactly is behind the site, the group did indicate<\/a> on X that it would give power of attorney to fight \u0160timac\u2019s charge to Vladimir \u0110ukanovi\u0107, a lawyer and member of the Serbian National Assembly with Serbian President Aleksandar Vu\u010di\u0107\u2019s<\/a>\u2019s ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The powerful governments backing the Jadar Valley project have been relatively quiet about the protests against lithium development in Serbia; the government\u2019s crackdown on dissent; and ominous, anonymous threats to mining critics. That may be because of just how anxious they are to unlock sources lithium, a critical component in the batteries that power electric vehicles, cell phones, and other technologies. The Eurozone\u2019s largest economy, Germany, is facing\u00a0persistently high levels of unemploymen<\/a>t. Its industrial sector has\u00a0struggled<\/a>\u00a0amid low demand and high interest rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the whole article go to The New Republic.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On her way to sing at a birthday party last month, Croatian pop star Severina Vu\u010dkovi\u0107 was\u00a0stopped\u00a0and questioned about her political views by Serbian authorities. Around the same time, Aleksandar Matkovi\u0107 started receiving\u00a0death threats\u00a0on Telegram. The first was in Serbian: \u201cWe will follow you until you disappear, scum.\u201d A subsequent text was written in what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1688,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,55],"tags":[41,95,94,88,92,96,85,49,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-1687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-info-and-news-en","8":"category-foreign-media","9":"tag-aleksandar-vucic","10":"tag-critical-minerals","11":"tag-critical-raw-materials-act","12":"tag-crma","13":"tag-electric-vehicles","14":"tag-ev","15":"tag-jadar","16":"tag-lithium","17":"tag-rio-tinto-2","18":"tag-serbia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1690,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions\/1690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marssadrine.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}