A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI #197 - Balkan Butchery (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

After decades of the European Union keeping the Balkan states that were 
asking for membership on stand-by, the situation now seems to be 
unblocked and indeed everything is being done to orient the countries 
that until now were doubtful and perplexed about the opportunity to join 
by implementing initiatives creating and supporting movements of opinion 
to achieve this goal. This renewed interest is explained by the need for 
fresh meat to slaughter and by the fear that these countries left to 
themselves will choose Russia as a pole of attraction. In this sense, 
the case of the Serbian crisis is emblematic, which the EU wants to ride 
to orient it to its own ends.

Corruption and the rule of law

In Serbia, the occasion for the outbreak of protests was given by the 
collapse of a shelter on the high-speed railway under construction 
Belgrade-Budapest, which occurred in Novi Sad, in which 15 people lost 
their lives, including a six-year-old child, and three young people were 
seriously injured. Among the identified victims are eight Serbian 
citizens and one Macedonian. The government declared a day of national 
mourning, while in Novi Sad there were three days of mourning. In the 
following days, controversy erupted over the causes of the accident and 
the government and the bodies responsible for the renovation works, as 
well as the Chinese consortium that carried out the work, were accused 
of violating the rules relating to the protection of safety in the 
workplace, and of corruption in the awarding of contracts. To ascertain 
responsibility, the judiciary opened two investigations, one regarding 
the contract for the work in general and the other relating to the 
specific accident that occurred. The frequency with which corruption 
cases go unpunished, as happened with the train accident two years ago 
south of the Tempi Valley, in Greece, in the region of Thessaly, where 
two trains collided causing the death of 57 people and the injury of 180 
other passengers, has remained in the collective memory of the Balkan 
peoples and so also in this case the protest exploded. The participants 
were mainly students who denounce the corruption of the public apparatus 
as the cause of what happened and the accident was used as a pretext to 
ask for the resignation of the government. The protest was organized by 
young people, especially university students. To understand what is 
happening, two factors must be taken into account: the first is the fact 
that the accident has drawn attention to corruption, creating a climate 
similar to that produced in Italy following the Mani Pulite 
investigation; the deep economic crisis that afflicts the country and 
that has led many young people to seek the solution to their problems in 
emigration, abandoning the country, judging the situation irreparable. 
All the energies of society were absorbed in the struggle for Serbian 
nationalism and the construction of a greater Serbia; the war left the 
country's infrastructure in a state of progressive degradation, put 
industrial activities and especially agriculture in crisis, allowing 
poverty and social hardship to grow.
In the face of a persistent crisis of political parties and social 
organizations, including trade unions, the protest took on spontaneous 
characteristics, allowing some NGOs operating in Serbia today to 
intervene in the attempt to direct the protest that took on mass 
characteristics. Today the activity of these organizations replaces that 
of the youth groups of the parties, of the political aggregations of 
young people, confusing itself with the role played by the youth 
associations of a recreational nature, so much so that the 
demonstrations and protest initiatives have taken on the characteristics 
of mass, joyful and festive happenings, in other words the 
characteristics of an opinion movement that pursues its objectives with 
initiatives, flash mobs, produces gadgets, creates consensus, not 
forgetting to denounce the disinterest of the media towards the slogans 
of the movement, the repression of the demonstrations by the police 
forces, the restrictions of the freedom of the press and of opinion, 
identifying as the instigator the government that wants in this way to 
keep the elite in power and denouncing the fact that no one has been 
punished for what happened. Although the investigations are not 
concluded, the impunity of those responsible has led the movement to 
request the democratization of the institutions and the end of 
corruption, appealing to the protection offered by the EU in the name of 
the protection of the rule of law and the liberalization of society.
In an attempt to contain the protests, the center-right President of the 
Republic Vucic used the velvet glove and proceeded with a government 
reshuffle to accommodate the protest movement, also trying to reach an 
agreement with the Rector of the University of Belgrade, in vain: as 
time passed in movement he became politicized, focusing his demands on 
the country's accession to the EU, a request that culminated in the 
organization of a bike ride of 80 students to Brussels to ask for the 
support of the European institutions against corruption.

The instrumentalization of the EU

Ursula von der Stupid promptly sided with the protesters' demands, 
suddenly discovering the urgency of Serbia's accession, which has always 
been postponed by the EU together with that of other Balkan states. Two 
hypotheses can be made about such suspicious and sudden availability: 
the position of Serbia and other Balkan states not entirely contrary to 
Russia's reasons for its intervention in Ukraine which advises Brussels 
to try to remove these countries from Russian influence as soon as 
possible, the initiatives of Russia and China to use Belgrade as a pied 
à terre for penetration into the Eastern Balkans and Europe. It is no 
coincidence that the high-speed railway under construction is built and 
financed by the Chinese and colleagues Belgrade in Budapest. This is a 
strategic investment in infrastructure by the Chinese government that 
allows the Silk Road to reach Budapest as a terminal, where Beijing 
intends to build factories for the assembly of electric cars on EU 
territory. In this new scenario, the accession of Serbia, Montenegro, 
Bosnia, Macedonia to the EU, would bind these countries to the policies 
of the Union and would provide with their young population, and not so 
young who have experienced war, at least a part of the human resources 
potentially available to act as cannon fodder in view of the 
warmongering prospects that animate the governments of Europe. We are 
faced with a new attempt to realize in another form the Hitlerian hope 
contained in Mein Kampf, to use the Balkan peoples considered to be of 
an inferior race compared to the Germanic one to act as servants for the 
much more noble Central European populations.

An Orange Revolution in Belgrade?

For these reasons there is a danger that when it is happening in Serbia 
it could take on the characteristics of one of the so-called Orange 
Revolutions, or those movements of opinion artfully developed using the 
action of NGOs with opaque funding, created ad hoc, using a corruption 
scandal or a particularly traumatic episode in the life of a country as 
a pretext, to trigger protest actions against the legitimate government, 
in order to destabilize it and cause its fall, implementing a 
reorientation of the foreign policy and the international positioning of 
the country, together with the change of the political class in power. 
This strategy was adopted for example in Ukraine by provoking the events 
in Maidan Square and starting from the riots and provocations that arose 
alongside that event, to trigger a process of crisis in the political 
system that resulted in the subversion of the general political 
orientations of the country.

The movement of young Serbians fighting against corruption seems to have 
reached a crossroads: it must choose whether to grow its libertarian 
content, taking the path of social demands and the defense of the class 
interests of the population or take the path of those phenomena that 
characterized the birth of youth protest movements in Georgia and that 
saw the growth of NGOs, also in Moldova, in support of its accession to 
the EU, while a similar attempt to create similar organizations in 
Russia was crushed by the adoption of a law on the registration of NGOs 
that obliges them to disclose their sources of funding and to consider 
them foreign organizations when they receive funding from abroad of 
unclear origin that is higher than a percentage established by law.

For further information: Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, The 
Manufacturing of Consent, Politics and the Mass Media, il Saggiatore 
2023; Sara Teginella, The Wars They Sell You, Manipulation and 
Propaganda in Ukraine and Elsewhere, Dedalo 2025; ID., The Front of the
Invisibles. The War in Ukraine from a Different Perspective, Milan, 
Exòrma, 2924; ID, Donbass, The Ghost War in the Heart of Europe, Exòrma, 
2021. | Sara Reginella, War Literacy, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzdEpqTTiLQ; Chiara
Nalli, The Balkans Risk Exploding, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CPa8VgN_bU.

G.L.

https://www.ucadi.org/2025/05/25/macelleria-balcanica/
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