Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The political and social crisis convulsing Serbia has deepened since we last referred to this topic (and here). Civil unrest driven by university and high school students is gaining momentum and is now an everyday reality in cities and towns throughout Serbia. On Friday 24 January the students called for a general strike bringing large segments of the country to a standstill whilst demonstrating an impressive level of support for their cause.

Initially, the demands of the protesters focused on accountability for the loss of life that occurred on 1 November 2024 at the railway station in Novi Sad when a newly “reconstructed” but inadequately secured 23-tonne concrete canopy collapsed on top of seventeen persons, killing fifteen instantly. Ominously for the regime, the list of grievances has been expanding since then to also include other acts of notorious malfeasance.

The central demand of the students and multitudes of citizens who have joined them remains that the Serbian government disclose all technical and financial data pertaining to the railway station tragedy to document the details of suspected shabby workmanship and corrupt cash flows and so that the culprits could be prosecuted. This key demand, striking in both its reasonableness and simplicity, has been adamantly rejected by the regime whilst it constantly puts out shifting narratives characterising the tragedy as an unforeseeable accident and denying wrongdoing on the part of any of its corrupt partners and contractors.

A steadily growing portion of the Serbian public however are not buying it, resulting in clashes with the police forces sent out to disperse their protests.

A just released expert study of the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the University of Belgrade [in Serbian] makes mince-meat of the official rationale, listing key documents that remain inaccessible or that have been redacted to be made public in incomplete form. It reiterates the accusation that the authorities are withholding crucial technical data, leaving investigators in the dark. According to these independent civil engineers, based on information about the canopy collapse grudgingly furnished by official sources neither the sequence of events that led to the tragedy nor a proper attribution of legal and professional responsibility for the loss of innocent human lives is possible.

A steadily growing number of outraged Serbs suspect that the real reason the Serbian authorities are refusing to comply with the students’ demands is because any admission of liability would be politically suicidal, exposing the appalling pervasiveness and deadly consequences of corruption in Serbia. It would also confirm the embarrassing fact that official corruption is systemic and extends to the highest levels, emanating from the very top of the government administration and involving the individual that we have figuratively referred to as “Batista” in our previous reflections on this subject.

The question that is now foremost on everybody’s mind is whether the civil unrest in Serbia constitutes a “colour revolution” in progress, as the regime virtuously claims, or an autochthonous phenomenon, driven by domestic grievances, and independent of external influence.

There is evidence that could support either side of this argument.

The grievances that motivate the protests unquestionably are genuine and legitimate, but that is the case with practically every colour revolution. The instigators always search for genuine grounds for dissatisfaction that can be blown out of proportion and used to manipulate the discontented masses to embark on a regime change agenda which is discretely directed by trained professionals. The ultimate outcome is usually quite unlike what the street protesters, mobilised under false slogans, imagined would result from their efforts. The old crew is simply replaced by a new set of puppets prepared to follow the instructions of the hidden authors of the putsch more faithfully than their predecessors. That is precisely what happened in the Maidan operation which was patterned after the standard blueprint for all such upheavals, and invariably engineered under false pretences.

That incidentally is roughly the process by which the current regime in Serbia also came to be established. Its inception goes back to Hotel Ritz in Paris in 2008 where Serbia’s current leader (or Batista, as we have affectionately nicknamed him) presented himself for a meeting with Arnaud Danjean, veteran agent and Balkans specialist of the French secret service DGSE, acting on behalf of a consortium of Western intelligence agencies. The meeting was called to discuss Batista’s anointment as the next vassal ruler of Serbia and for the tasks the Collective West intended to assign to him in return for that favour to be explained to him.

That is why the regime’s claim that the protesters have been hired by foreign intelligence services and NGOs rings exceedingly hollow. The famous saying that people living in glass houses should refrain from hurling stones has never rung truer.

The false pretence agreed upon at the Hotel Ritz was that the Collective West-aligned Serbian vassal regime would be camouflaged as nationalist and Russia-friendly in order to mislead both Moscow and the Serbian electorate whilst following the agendas set by Washington, London, and Brussels. For years that stratagem worked. But not so anymore, it seems.

The regime correctly asserts that it is under assault by forces affiliated with its curators.

But what pressing motive could the Collective West possibly have to rock the boat in Serbia and to undermine its cooperative Serbian partners at this particular time?

The answer to that puzzling question can only be speculative. But at least two hypotheses can be put forward.

One is that the assessment has been made in centres where such decisions are taken that the Serbian regime is a spent force and that the preservation of the neo-colonial system which promotes Collective West interests in the geopolitical heart of the Balkans would be better served if it were replaced with a new and comparatively unblemished team of equally zealous quislings. Such human material can easily be found and there is evidence that some candidates are already being groomed for the job. If a large-scale conflict with Russia is being contemplated, installing a more internally stable variant of the current regime would make eminent sense.

The alternative (but also to some extent analogous) explanation is rooted in the deliberate propagation of chaos to undermine the global position of BRICS and BRICS-sympathetic countries, a process that in a recent interview Pepe Escobar elaborates with great perspicacity. Slovakia and Hungary have already been actively targeted in that context. It is possible that the targeting of Serbia follows a similar logic, albeit more because of the strong sympathies of the population than because of objections to specific policy vectors pursued by the regime. The wholly unexpected disruption of Drang nach Osten plans that resulted from the anti-Axis coup in Belgrade in April of 1941 is still vividly remembered. Its lesson, when it comes to the unpredictable Serbs, is that when, as was the case then and still is now, there is a radical disjunction between the actions of the servile political elite and the patriotic sentiments of the population, all bets are off. Induced chaos is to be followed by the imposition of order. Perhaps some new methods for disciplining the Serbs have been devised and are waiting to be unveiled once the successor regime is put in place.

What role in that context does the student movement play? A secondary role, regrettably. No compelling evidence has emerged that the students are being manipulated externally, though the eye of the experienced observer does detect attempts by the usual suspects to penetrate it and influence the direction of their activities. For the moment however it may safely be said that the movement is a genuine and autonomous expression of the moral aspirations of decent and patriotic Serbian youth. Some of their tactics may recall Gene Sharp’s precepts from the colour revolution playbook. But the clever and creative tactical innovations introduced by these smart young people who are driving the Serbian regime crazy are not just a vast improvement on what Sharp had preached but are in many respects a qualitative breakthrough in relation to anything previously seen. The significance of superficial similarities should not therefore be overemphasised. After all, even Freud had to admit that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not a representation of another elongated object.

The difficulty lies elsewhere. Smart as they are, Serbian students are as politically unsophisticated and inexperienced as the Serbian population in general. They are no match for career manipulators with demonstrated accomplishments in the practice of mass deception. Assuming that regime change is the plan, and there is plenty of evidence for that, and assuming also that the student movement was not artificially launched but arose spontaneously in reaction to injustice and corruption, it is conceivable that the energy generated by the students is tolerated for the moment to act as a bulldozer, just to bring down the status quo, but that it will have no impact or voice in the shaping of what comes next.

That stark reality has implications, mostly unfavourable, for both Serbia and Russia, in the short term at least. Once the euphoria subsides, the Serbian people most likely will again fall under the sway of a pre-selected clique of neo-colonial administrators, of slightly different composition but with similar tasks, installed not to look after their interests but those of their foreign oppressors. The new rulers might be less or perhaps even more harsh than the current set of satraps, that is something that remains to be seen. But their task will not be to act for the benefit of the subject population, any more than it was the task of their predecessors.

The Serbian people will once again have to pay the price for their foolish naiveté. The unfortunate fact is that there simply isn’t any organised political force amongst them capable of effectively opposing and defeating the machinations of their enemies.

For Russian policy in the Balkans, the denouement of the current commotion also will signify a setback, hopefully not of long duration. But in geopolitical terms, a price will have to be paid for ill-considered political choices. More than anything else, for futilely consorting with duplicitous and useless local actors whilst failing, in Serbia of all places, to cultivate, support, and organise the vast reserves of good will at the grass roots level that Russia could have harnessed, and done so effortlessly.