Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic arrived in Sarejevo to donate 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the two constituent entities that make up the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vucic was welcomed at the Bosnian capital’s airport on March 2 by members of the Bosnian presidency, Milorad Dodik and Sefik Dzaferovic.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The president of the Football Association of Serbia has been questioned by police in Belgrade in connection with recent arrests of several members of soccer fan groups who are accused of murder, kidnapping, and drug trafficking.
Slavisa Kokeza, who heads the Belgrade-based governing body for soccer in Serbia, was questioned about his links to leaders of Partizan Belgrade supporter groups who were arrested earlier in February in what officials say is a major crackdown against soccer’s links with organized crime.
Details from the police investigation leaked to the media include alleged killings by group members of their rivals, including decapitations and torture in a special “bunker” at the Partizan stadium in the Serbian capital.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who has often boasted about his youth as a radical supporter of Partizan’s rival Red Star Belgrade, said on February 27 that some of the “shocking” details of the investigation would be made public during the coming week.
He said children will be warned not to watch the reports.
Serbia has a history of tolerating hooliganism that often resulted in violence and outbursts of nationalism at stadiums. During the Balkan wars in the 1990s, many of them joined notorious paramilitary groups linked to war crimes against other national groups in the former Yugoslavia.
More than a dozen prominent figures from Serbian soccer supporters’ groups have been killed in recent years. Most have perished in gangland-style killings.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
WASHINGTON — The United States needs to step up its engagement with the Western Balkans if it wants to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the region, the former president of Croatia said.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who served as president of the Balkan nation from 2015-20, also criticized Europe for dragging its feet on regional integration.
“If you want to really prevent others from political interference in a certain area, then you have to be involved yourself,” Grabar-Kitarovic said, referring to the United States, during a discussion hosted on February 17 by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“I must say that I’ve been disappointed by the sort of [lack of interest] that I’ve seen in the past years” in the Balkan region from the administrations of both President Donald Trump and predecessor Barack Obama, she said.
Washington and Brussels have been seeking to integrate the nations of the Western Balkans into the European Union and NATO to bring stability to a region rocked by ethnic fighting in the 1990s.
However, Grabar-Kitarovic said the process has been “too slow” and that “it’s creating a vacuum that is being filled by third forces that are not necessarily benevolent at all times,” a possible reference to China and Russia.
The United States and EU have expressed concerns over investments by Beijing in the Western Balkans as well as Kremlin disinformation and political influence activities in the region.
As an example, Grabar-Kitarovic called the decision to invite Bosnia-Herzegovina into NATO’s Partnership for Peace program rather than directly into the military alliance “an unnecessary delay” that opens the door for adversaries to claim that the region isn’t “good enough” for Western organizations.
The former president highlighted the importance of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s stability to Croatia’s own security. Bosnia-Herzegovina, which borders Croatia, is threatened with secessionist movements.
Grabar-Kitarovic said the Chinese are taking a “very smart” approach in their relations with the Western Balkans.
“They show that they value you, that they will talk to you,” she said, pointing out that a Croatian leader hasn’t had a White House meeting since 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
“The feeling that we are all getting…is if you are not a big country, or if you are not a problem country, or if you are not bringing big money to the table, you don’t have an entrance to the White House,” she said.
She said Washington has been “dragging its feet” on a double-taxation treaty with the country that would improve trade, and that she could not remember the last time a company from the United States made a big investment in Croatia.
“What I would like to see is more U.S. engagement, and a lot more active role” in the region, she said.
The United States has promised to invest up to $1 billion into the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund, which seeks to back projects that help the 12 EU nations located between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas improve their transport, energy, and digital infrastructure connections.
Grabar-Kitarovic, along with Polish President Andrzej Duda, launched the Three Seas Initiative in 2015.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
WASHINGTON — The United States needs to step up its engagement with the Western Balkans if it wants to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the region, the former president of Croatia said.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who served as president of the Balkan nation from 2015-20, also criticized Europe for dragging its feet on regional integration.
“If you want to really prevent others from political interference in a certain area, then you have to be involved yourself,” Grabar-Kitarovic said, referring to the United States, during a discussion hosted on February 17 by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“I must say that I’ve been disappointed by the sort of [lack of interest] that I’ve seen in the past years” in the Balkan region from the administrations of both President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama, she said.
Washington and Brussels have been seeking to integrate the nations of the Western Balkans into the European Union and NATO to bring stability to a region rocked by ethnic fighting in the 1990s.
However, Grabar-Kitarovic said the process has been “too slow” and that “it’s creating a vacuum that is being filled by third forces that are not necessarily benevolent at all times,” a possible reference to China and Russia.
The United States and EU have expressed concerns over investments by Beijing in the Western Balkans as well as Kremlin disinformation and political influence activities in the region.
As an example, Grabar-Kitarovic called the decision to invite Bosnia-Herzegovina into NATO’s Partnership for Peace program rather than directly into the military alliance “an unnecessary delay” that opens the door for adversaries to claim that the region isn’t “good enough” for Western organizations.
The former president highlighted the importance of Bosnia’s stability to Croatia’s own security. Bosnia, which borders Croatia, is threatened with secessionist movements.
Grabar-Kitarovic said the Chinese are taking a “very smart” approach in their relations with the Western Balkans.
“They show that they value you, that they will talk to you,” she said, pointing out that a Croatian leader hasn’t had a White House meeting since 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
“The feeling that we are all getting…is if you are not a big country, or if you are not a problem country, or if you are not bringing big money to the table, you don’t have an entrance to the White House,” she said.
She said Washington has been “dragging its feet” on a double-taxation treaty with the country that would improve trade, and that she could not remember the last time a company from the United States made a big investment in Croatia.
“What I would like to see is more U.S. engagement, and a lot more active role” in the region, she said.
The United States has promised to invest up to $1 billion into the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund, which seeks to back projects that help the 12 EU nations located between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas improve their transport, energy, and digital infrastructure connections.
Grabar-Kitarovic, along with Polish President Andrzej Duda, launched the Three Seas Initiative in 2015.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
U.S. President Joe Biden has said that Kosovo holds a “special place” for his family because of the time his late son Beau spent in the Balkan country, where he helped to strengthen the rule of law.
Biden made the remark in a letter sent to acting President Vjosa Osmani on the occasion of Kosovo’s independence day. Osmani made the contents of the letter public on February 16.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, a decade after a 1998-99 war between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian forces. The war ended after a 78-day NATO air campaign drove Serbian troops out and an international peacekeeping force moved in.
“Kosovo continues to hold a special place for the Biden family in honor of the time our late son Beau Biden spent working to ensure peace, justice, and the rule of law for all the people of Kosovo,” Biden wrote.
Beau Biden worked in Kosovo after the 1998-99 war with the military forces and also with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe strengthening the rule of law there.
Biden visited Kosovo in 2016 on his last trip to the region as vice president to attend with his family a ceremony naming a road near a U.S. military base after his son, who died a year earlier of brain cancer at age 46.
In the letter, Biden said the United States was ready to work with the new government of Kosovo on the path of European integration.
“There is still a lot of work to be done, including reaching a comprehensive agreement with Serbia focused on mutual recognition, which strengthens the rule of law, tackling the pandemic, and fostering economic growth that enables a prosperous future for all citizens,” he said.
Biden urged the same in a letter to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic earlier this month.
Most Western states have recognized Kosovo, but Serbia and its allies Russia and China do not. Tensions over Kosovo remain a source of volatility in the Balkans.
The United States was among the first countries to recognize Kosovo’s independence. Since 1999, the U.S. government has invested about $2 billion in Kosovo.
In September, Kosovo and Serbia signed at the White House two documents for the normalization of economic relations, in the presence of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Following the U.S. presidential election, Pristina and Belgrade have pledged to continue implementing the agreements, despite the change in U.S. administration.
“The United States of America remains a committed partner and friend of Kosovo in these efforts,” Biden wrote in his letter.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that reaching a comprehensive agreement between Kosovo and Serbia, focused on mutual recognition, will require flexibility and a willingness on all sides to compromise.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
As countries in Europe struggle with shortages of COVID-19 vaccines, China has stepped up its efforts in the Western Balkans, supplying injections and collecting diplomatic wins in the region.
Serbia has emerged as the tip of the spear for China’s “vaccine diplomacy” in Europe, where Beijing is aiming to build global influence by sending its injections to poorer countries — filling a vacuum left by Western countries who have bought all of the available doses and are facing production delays for their homegrown vaccines.
While Serbia is a Russian ally and has aspirations to join the European Union, the country’s ties with China have expanded in recent years and deepened further under President Aleksandar Vucic.
During the pandemic, he has not held back in trumpeting his country’s strong ties with Beijing — holding several high-profile press events to praise China’s assistance and famously kissing the Chinese flag in March after medical aid from China arrived in Belgrade.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (without mask) welcomes Chinese health experts and a planeload of Chinese medical supplies to Belgrade on March 21, 2020.
Vucic’s strategy appears to have worked, as Belgrade has leveraged its relations amid the pandemic to diversify its vaccine sources and inject a greater percentage of its population than any other country in continental Europe. As of February 16, Serbia had given at least the first vaccination to about 11.2 percent of its nearly 7 million people, outpacing the EU, which is led by Denmark, with 6.9 percent of its population having received its first shot.
The bulk of those doses — some 1.5 million — have come from China’s state-backed Sinopharm, though Serbia is also using Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and the U.S.-German Pfizer-BioNTech injection.
The latest Sinopharm vaccine shipment arrived on February 11 at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport and was welcomed by Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and Chinese Ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo.
For China, providing vaccines to Serbia serves as an important geopolitical win as it faces stronger headwinds from an increasingly skeptical and disapproving West. Belgrade also becomes an important launching pad for China to gain a foothold in Europe as Beijing seeks greater influence in the region and beyond.
“Serbia has long been a testing ground for China,” Vuk Vuksanovic, a researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy and a former Serbian diplomat, told RFE/RL. “We’ve seen it with defense, construction, technology, and now with vaccines. It’s where Beijing has tried policies that it hopes to test elsewhere in Europe.”
From Masks To Vaccines
For China, the supply of vaccines follows a similar logic to Beijing’s so-called “mask diplomacy.”
That strategy saw it provide much needed masks and medical equipment to countries along China’s Belt and Road Initiative — from Africa to Southeast Asia and the Middle East — in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic to deflect anger and criticism over Beijing’s handling of the outbreak and to enhance its soft power.
In Serbia, the Chinese vaccines have helped the country become an inoculation leader. Good access to injections has also provided Vucic with a useful foil to criticize the EU and the inequalities in global access to vaccines.
In late January, Vucic compared the global scramble for vaccines with the Titanic disaster. “The world has hit an iceberg, like the Titanic: the rich and the richest only save themselves and their loved ones,” Vucic said. “[The EU countries] have prepared expensive lifeboats for them and those of us who aren’t rich, who are small, like the countries of the Western Balkans — we’re drowning together in the Titanic.”
“For China, it’s a golden opportunity to embarrass the EU and the West more broadly,” Dimitar Bechev, a fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna, told RFE/RL. “This is a chance for Beijing to burnish its global reputation and further its campaign to replace the West as the backbone of international cooperation.”
The EU pledged to give the six prospective EU members in the Western Balkans — including Serbia — $85 million to buy vaccines, but deliveries have been delayed.
The powerful bloc, which buys vaccines on behalf of its 27 member states, has not yet approved the Russian and Chinese injections, even though the manufacturers of the three vaccines being produced in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom are struggling to deliver their promised doses to countries.
Instead of waiting for EU help, Belgrade moved to get doses from China, Russia, and the United States directly — a strategy that other countries may be looking to follow.
Beijing was quick to offer support to Serbia after it declared a state of emergency in March after finding itself cut off from access to medical equipment due to EU export restrictions. In what was the first rendition of his recent criticism of the vaccines, Vucic called European solidarity “a fairy tale” and emphasized that only China was willing to offer Serbia a helping hand.
As with the early days of the pandemic when countries were dealing with a shortage of medical equipment, smaller countries on the EU’s periphery are looking elsewhere for help in acquiring vaccines.
North Macedonia is currently seeking to buy 200,000 Sinopharm doses in the hope of inoculating its population quickly.
Bosnia-Herzegovina has received 2,000 doses of Russia’s Sputnik V, with plans for 200,000 more to arrive in the next month. Montenegro is also expecting 100,000 doses of the Russian vaccines — a significant number for its tiny 625,000 population.
“Those countries outside the EU are left in the cold and have no other choice,” Bechev said.
Workers unload containers holding 500,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine from a special Air Serbia flight at Belgrade’s airport on February 10.
At least one EU country, Hungary, is following Serbia’s example by procuring Chinese and Russian vaccines. Budapest unilaterally approved the Sinopharm injection for emergency use on January 29 and has ordered 5 million doses, the first of which arrived on February 16.
Others may also take the same approach.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has expressed an openness to follow the embrace by Hungary and Serbia of Chinese, Russian, and Western vaccines — visiting Budapest and Belgrade on February 5 and February 10, respectively, to meet with leaders and discuss their strategies.
Pandemic Politics
Serbia’s growing success in its vaccine strategy is a product of a foreign policy that has looked east and west, which was on full display in the vaccine preferences made by members of the Serbian government.
Prime Minister Brnabic received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine while Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin and parliament speaker Ivica Dacic took Sputnik V. Not to leave anyone out, Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar posed for his shot of China’s Sinopharm. Vucic has also indicated that he would likely roll up his sleeve for the Chinese injection.
But despite the clear overtones, the Serbian government has insisted its vaccine strategy is not driven by world politics but rather is focused on rolling back a public health emergency.
“For us, vaccination is not a geopolitical matter. It is a health-care issue,” Brnabic told the BBC in a February 10 interview.
According to Vuksanovic from the Belgrade Center for Security Policy, Serbia’s embrace of China’s vaccine diplomacy should be seen in the context of the country’s wider foreign policy balancing act. “It is also a way to provoke and leverage the EU to do more,” he said. “The China factor is an important way to extract as much as you can from Beijing, but also to potentially motivate the Europeans to do more.”
Following Vucic’s criticism of European solidarity and praise for China in March for its “mask diplomacy,” the EU eventually stepped up and delivered medical equipment to Serbia as part of a $112 million aid package.
But Beijing’s strategy appears to be making gains: Surveys show that China is viewed overwhelmingly positively in the country, showing that its diplomatic efforts during the pandemic have been fruitful.
The larger question for China is whether it can build upon its foothold in Serbia and make gains elsewhere in Europe.
Beijing hosted a virtual summit for a bloc of Central and Eastern European countries on February 9 amid growing pushback toward China and its entities in the region.
Despite being chaired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the meeting received the lowest level of representation since it was founded in 2012 — with six European states not sending either a prime minister or a president.
Despite that mild show of disinterest in a major Beijing event, many countries in the region are looking to keep their ties with Beijing intact amid the uncertainty and gridlock in the EU over the vaccines.
“Even those countries in Eastern Europe who are becoming disillusioned with China still might keep their China card around to play depending on how things shake out,” Vuksanovic said.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
BELGRADE — Hundreds of people have gathered in central Belgrade to pay their respects to Serbia’s doctors and nurses killed by COVID-19 and to demand more to be done to protect health-care workers who are at the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Colleagues and families of the deceased medics placed flowers and lit candles at the entrance to the government building on February 15, and read the names of 105 doctors and a number of other health professionals who have died from the coronavirus.
Participants also made several demands of the Serbian government, asking for national pensions for the families of deceased health workers and better working conditions for those fighting COVID-19.
The event was organized by the Union of Doctors and Pharmacists.
More than 4,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been confirmed in Serbia since the beginning of the pandemic.
Doctor Dejan Zujovic, a pulmonologist who has worked in COVID-19 red zones in Belgrade, said poor protective equipment and long working hours were the main reasons for the high death toll among doctors in Serbia.
“People do not go on holidays, they are exhausted and their immunity suffers,” he said.
Media have reported that only one doctor died from COVID-19 in neighboring Croatia, 24 in Albania, and 23 in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Serbian government officials have said they would investigate the deaths of medical workers in the country, but critics say little has been done so far.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
BELGRADE — Serbian authorities say they have arrested 17 people in a crackdown on a crime syndicate linked to hooligans who support a Belgrade soccer club.
The arrests took place overnight and were the result of a joint operation of Serbian police and the intelligence agency, Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin said in a statement on February 4.
Vulin said the suspects were accused of murder, extortion, and drug trafficking.
Police official Ninoslav Cmolic said that “the dismantled criminal group was hiding behind” a group of supporters of the Partizan Belgrade soccer club.
Serbia’s hard-core soccer fans are notorious for their rowdiness in stadiums, while some have also been accused of using sport as a front for engaging in organized crime.
In recent years, the Balkan country has seen a string of gangland-style killings of members of soccer supporters’ groups.
Partizan fan leader Veljko Belivuk, nicknamed Velja Nevolja (Velja the Trouble) and a close associate, Marko Miljkovic, were among those arrested in the overnight raids.
Belivuk has been linked to criminal activity in the past but reportedly managed to avoid prosecution because of his political connections.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Born and raised in New York City, Valentina Duhanaj is a newcomer to Kosovo’s elections.
But she’s no stranger to the country, its culture, or its politics.
Both of Duhanaj’s parents and three of her siblings were born there, and she visits her extended family in their landlocked Balkan homeland. She’s also spent much of the past decade focused on Kosovar and Balkan politics in college and graduate school as she studies for a master’s degree in global affairs.
Duhanaj, a 30-year-old with just U.S. citizenship, expects to vote in the Kosovar elections for the first time on February 14 thanks to the inclusiveness enshrined in that mostly ethnic Albanian country’s election law and its constitution.
“I started seeing chatter on Albanian Twitter with many friends and Kosovar politicians mentioning that children of Kosovar citizens could vote if they could prove at least one of their parents were born in Kosova, so I decided I wanted to,” Duhanaj told RFE/RL.
Kosovo’s law on citizenship — part of the path to voting — extends citizenship to former Yugoslav citizens and residents in January 1998 and their “direct descendants,” regardless of where they live.
But an unusual strategy of screening would-be voters by telephone threatened to upset Duhanaj’s and the efforts of tens of thousands of other Kosovars in the diaspora to collect on that democratic promise.
No Shortage Of Problems
There are other, arguably more conspicuous, challenges piling up ahead of these snap elections in Europe’s newest independent state.
They include conducting mostly in-person voting in a pandemic that has already frayed governments throughout Europe and the region.
Add to that the long shadow of alleged wartime atrocities that has been cast on former influential leaders, at least one candidate, and the national conscience.
And, more unexpectedly, the problems include ensuring a fair and competitive vote after the Central Election Commission last week signaled the likely disqualification of three party lists over prior criminal convictions against several dozen candidates — including the front-running Self-Determination (Vetevendosje) party’s choice for prime minister, Albin Kurti.
Whatever the outcome of opposition appeals that are still pending, critics are sure to attack the resulting vote as rigged and will possibly boycott.
But to some of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the former province during and since a battle for independence from the Yugoslav constituent republic of Serbia in the late 1990s and their descendants, it won’t matter who’s on the ballot if they can’t even register to vote.
After acting President Vjosa Osmani scheduled next month’s snap national elections to replace a government declared illegitimate by the courts, the Central Election Commission on January 11 gave Kosovars outside the country just 10 days to register to vote.
A day later, the commission added a key verification step to the process: voter registrars must telephone such applicants abroad to confirm their identities and other details before registering them.
Keep Those Phones Handy
Duhanaj was “skeptical of the commission’s motives,” she said, in part because she heard lots of criticism of that decision among Kosovars on social media. Plus, she said, it simply seemed “anti-democratic that a diaspora member’s application can be tossed out if they simply miss a call.”
“It’s not that this process takes so much time, so much as missing this call seems to be a disqualifying factor for the application process,” Duhanaj said.
Central Election Commission (CEC) Chairwoman Valdete Daka suggested that officials would call just three times. “The CEC will verify the application process for registration by contacting all applicants by telephone,” the commission said in its decision. “If the applicant is not notified by phone, then his application is rejected.”
Osmani quickly urged the commission to reconsider the phone-call requirement as risking a “flagrant violation” of the right to vote.
Liza Gashi, a former deputy foreign minister of Kosovo who also founded an umbrella NGO for the Kosovar diaspora, called it an attempt “to suppress the vote from abroad.”
Her former NGO, Germin, filed a complaint with the Election Panel for Complaints and Appeals (ECAP) alleging that the commission’s decision contravenes four articles of the Kosovar Constitution, the national election law, and the Election Commission’s own guidelines.
After the ECAP rejected its petition, Germin on January 15 appealed to Kosovo’s Supreme Court to strike down the requirement.
Lots Of Work To Be Done
Kosovo’s population is about 1.9 million.
And in a small, partly recognized country with around one-third of its population abroad, even tens of thousands of potential expat voters can easily swing an election.
Support among the diaspora was thought to have helped swing the 2019 election for Kurti’s Albanian nationalist Self-Determination party, upsetting more than a decade of political dominance by former guerrillas of Kosovo’s war of independence in the late 1990s.
Kurti’s hold on government lasted just two months before his junior coalition partner, the Democratic League, jumped ship to trigger nine months of caretaker administrations and political uncertainty.
Now, polls suggest Self-Determination is the front-runner heading into the February vote and the diaspora could once again prove decisive.
Any eventual government will immediately face the ongoing challenges of an unprecedented public-health crisis caused by COVID-19, a looming presidential vote in parliament, and economic malaise that predated the pandemic but has been exacerbated by it.
It must also confront brain drain and other demographic challenges stemming from decades of emigration, and potentially divisive fallout from expected war crimes trials in The Hague of prominent Kosovar leaders, including ex-President Hashim Thaci.
Washington and Brussels will meanwhile expect Pristina to provide new momentum to internationally mediated talks on normalizing relations with powerful neighbor Serbia, which still refuses to recognize the 2008 declaration of sovereignty by its former province.
And as Osmani — who could be poised to compete for the presidency — has already signaled, Pristina will be eager to seed relations with one of Kosovo’s staunchest allies, the United States, as President Joe Biden’s new administration gets out of the blocks.
Silencing The Diaspora?
Its authorities estimate that around 800,000 Kosovars live abroad, many of them unregistered.
The NGO Germin has complained for years that officials need to do more to “overcome obstacles and to widen the possibilities for out-of-country voting.”
Some critics would argue that the conditions for Kosovars to vote abroad were already tight enough.
Prizren-born Kosovar Hilmi Gashi has lived in Switzerland for 32 years and has always tried to vote.
Twice, however, he was prevented from voting.
After his complaints to ECAP went unanswered, he traveled to his homeland to ensure he could cast a ballot in the 2019 elections.
Since then, in December, the Constitutional Court overturned a decision by the country’s Supreme Court that would have ensured that ballots sent by mail from abroad would be counted even if they arrived after the deadline.
In this vote’s case, that’s February 12. Strict adherence to such a preelection-day deadline could especially be a problem for voters in neighboring Serbia, whose postal service doesn’t formally cooperate with Kosovo’s due to Belgrade’s ongoing refusal to recognize Kosovar sovereignty.
Gashi says he’s critical of the process this time, too. “It’s incomprehensible that they make deadlines so short and expect people to apply on time,” he told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service. “[Or] people apply on time but the documentation gets to them too late.”
He echoed expat groups’ particular scorn for the three-phone-calls-and-you’re-out verification requirement.
In Switzerland, he said, many employers prohibit people from using their personal mobile phones at work. “My sister, who works at a company, hands over the phone in the morning at 6 a.m. in the changing room,” Gashi said. “She has no access to the phone all day.”
An organizer of Kosovars in Germany, teacher Muhamet Idrizi, said he was similarly unable to use his phone if the commission called during work hours. “It’s not clear here whether I can then contact the CEC and tell them, ‘You called me, but I couldn’t [pick up the phone], but can you verify my right [to vote]?”
Busy Signals
Back in New York, Duhanaj got her phone call around midday five days after applying, although she’d been prepared for the worst because of the time difference. “I was also worried they would call in the middle of the night so I kept my phone on loud, as I am six hours behind [Kosovo’s time] on [my] Eastern Standard Time [zone in New York City],” she said.
In the end, she added that the process “was only a slight inconvenience” and was perhaps aided by the fact that she was working from home due to the pandemic. Once a registrar employee reached her, it took only about a minute and a few perfunctory questions to satisfy the verification process.
When she last was in contact with RFE/RL, the day after the voter-abroad deadline and less than four weeks ahead of the elections, she said her other family members were still waiting for their e-mails and phone calls so they could take part in the elections.
And she was still “slightly skeptical” of the process.
“It worries me that thousands of phone calls will need to be made,” she e-mailed RFE/RL, adding: “I am [also] waiting to see what the actual ballot process is like. I have not yet received a ballot and could not find it online, not sure when it will be available.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
BELGRADE – Two French companies along with a Chinese firm have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Serbian government to build a metro in the capital, Belgrade.
“Today is a great day for all of us because we are one step closer to realizing a decades-long dream,” Serbian Finance Minister Sinisa Mali said during the signing ceremony on January 22 with representatives of Alstom and Egis of France and China’s Power Construction Corporation.
The project is expected to cost 4.4 billion euros ($5.35 billion) and consists of two metro lines covering a total of nearly 42 kilometers.
Construction is due to start at the end of this year, pending signature of the contracts with the relevant Serbian authorities, with completion expected by 2028.
France’s Egis would develop feasibility studies, preliminary design, and environmental impact assessments, while Alstom would be responsible for the metro equipment and infrastructure, including trains, digital train control systems, platform screen doors, and the power supply solutions.
Construction work would be performed by the Chinese company.
The project is to be partly funded by the French and Chinese governments, while the Serbian government is to finance the remainder from its budget.
In 2020 the French and Serbian government signed an agreement according to which Paris agreed to allocate 454 million euros ($552 million) to Belgrade’s first metro line.
The content of a 2019 agreement between Belgrade and Beijing regarding the project has not been made public.
Alstom said in a statement that the new metro system “will provide the foundations for truly sustainable mobility in the densely populated capital city of Serbia, rapidly contributing to the reduction of road congestion.”
However, Serbian opposition, analysts, and environmental groups have warned that the deal lacked transparency and that construction would affect an area that supplies Belgrade with drinking water.
The main French and Chinese contractors for the Belgrade metro have been selected without a public tender, but Mali ensured that tenders will be organized to select the subcontractors.
“We wonder why we have the Law on Public Procurement and the Law on Public-Private Partnership at all, if they are not applied to the most expensive projects,” Nemanja Nenadic of the nongovernmental organization Transparency Serbia told RFE/RL.
Serbia is a candidate for membership in the European Union – its main trade partner. Belgrade also maintains strong economic ties with China, which has invested in infrastructure and energy in the Balkan country.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Serbia became the first European country to begin a mass inoculation campaign using China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, with health officials and hundreds of uniformed soldiers lining up to get their jabs in the capital, Belgrade.
“It is the only way to return to normal life,” Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar said on January 19 as he became the first person to receive the vaccine in an event broadcast live on state television.
“These are all very safe vaccines,” Loncar said from Belgrade’s virology institute.
Meanwhile, at an exhibition hall in the capital, hundreds of soldiers in camouflage uniforms bared their arms to receive their shots from dozens of nurses.
Defense Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said that he and more than 700 members of the military had been vaccinated with the Chinese-made vaccine.
The Sinopharm vaccine has become a source of controversy in many Western countries.
China approved the shot developed by Sinopharm’s BIBP late last year. No detailed efficacy data has been released, but BIBP has said the vaccine is 79 percent effective based on interim data.
That number is below the efficacy rates of around 95 percent reported by Western-made vaccines, such as those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna.
Serbia, which last week received 1 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, has close ties with Beijing, and Chinese companies have invested billions of euros in the Western Balkan country of 7 million people.
“I have been inoculated with the Chinese vaccine, which we completely trust…I’ve said I will get the same vaccine as our troops,” Defense chief Stefanovic told reporters.
Serbia, which also has close ties to Russia, began using the Sputnik-V vaccine on January 6, with top officials getting the first jabs to boost public trust in the shot.
Russians are also being inoculated with the Sputnik-V vaccine after it was approved by Moscow in August despite a lack of large-scale clinical trials and perceived shortcomings in data to support its safety and efficacy.
Serbia and Belarus are the only European countries using the Russian vaccine, which does not have the approval of the European Medicines Agency or the World Health Organization.
Serbia launched its coronavirus vaccination program using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in December when Prime Minister Ana Brnabic received the shot, which alongside the Moderna vaccine has been approved for use in the EU and North America.
But with supplies of the Pfizer-BioNTech limited for now, Serbia is seeking to diversify its sourcing of vaccines.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic over the weekend said the country expects to get another 250,000 doses of the Sputnik-V vaccine and 20,000 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the coming days.
Vucic on January 19 said vaccinations will be administered at some 300 locations in Serbia’s biggest cities. He added that he will receive his jab this weekend.
Serbia is vaccinating essential workers such as police officers, teachers, and soldiers after it last month began to treat the elderly in care homes and medical workers.
Serbia has recorded 3,771 deaths from COVID-19 and 347,111 overall cases.
In the Western Balkan region, vaccinations have begun in Serbia and Albania, but Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and North Macedonia have not yet received vaccine supplies.
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, Reuters, and AFP.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Hundreds of freelancers and online workers marched through central Belgrade on January 16 to protest a recent law that requires them to pay income taxes for the last five years. The Serbian Tax Administration sent out thousands of tax bills in October 2020. Organized by an informal group known as the Association Of Internet Workers In Serbia, demonstrators called the practice “tax prosecution,” claiming the measure has been adopted without prior discussion. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said that protests are not a solution as “taxes must be paid.” The association is calling for talks with the government.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
BELGRADE — Donald Trump and his American supporters have complained loudly about bans on the outgoing U.S. president by the biggest names in social media since the violence at the Capitol that sparked Trump’s impeachment this week.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon Web Services are among nearly a dozen tech giants to cut off Trump or his allies over their unfounded accusations of vote fraud or perceived incitement of political violence ahead of the U.S. inauguration.
There has been a huge ripple effect in the United States, including a robust debate about free speech and a social-media shakeout that could further insulate like-minded users from being challenged by those outside their “epistemic bubbles.”
Some of the political Twitterati in Serbia have meanwhile sought to affect their own minor social-media shake-up in the Balkans in response to the Trump bans.
“We’re hanging out here until something better happens,” Vladimir Djukanovic, a lawmaker from President Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), shared on the Gab social network on January 11, under a cover photo that zoomed in on the left-wing Antifa movement’s logo.
It was the Serbian politician’s first post on the 3-year-old microblogging platform, which employs a sort of mash-up of the Facebook and Twitter formats and has thrived as a digital congregating ground for the alt-right.
The @RealDonaldTrump account on Gab has some 1.2 million followers, including Djukanovic and at least a handful of his SNS party colleagues, a fraction of the 88 million who followed the U.S. president’s now-deleted Twitter account.
Vladimir Djukanovic’s profile on the Gab social network
Gab’s algorithms are proprietary, but an initial browse on January 15 featured a long list of dubious pro-Trump and conspiracy-minded accusations without evidence, including blaming leftists and the media for the January 6 storming of the Capitol, praise for exposing “deep state” conspiracies, and memes targeting Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner this week reportedly discouraged the outgoing president from migrating to “fringe social-media platforms such as Gab and Parler,” Bloomberg reported, citing three unnamed sources “familiar with the matter.” They said a social-media aide had also questioned the management and capacity of the sites.
Djukanovic is a part-time talk-show host and former Radical Party member who is regarded as being well to the right within President Vucic’s SNS.
He has publicly celebrated convicted Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic’s birthday and backed anti-Western positions on issues like Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and China’s claims to disputed South China Sea territories.
Djukanovic was a frequent Parler user, too, until Amazon Web Services effectively shut it down by denying services the same day he turned up on Gab.
Free-Speech Debate
The free-speech debate around the actions of the commercial tech giants has continued.
A survey of Americans suggested more than 60 percent of them backed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to ban Trump over the risk he might incite violence.
Abroad, public regrets about the ban on Trump have been expressed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s leadership, as well as by Chinese leaders and Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
Meanwhile, Djukanovic and a few other prominent politicians in Serbia have deleted their Twitter accounts and taken public stands as they migrated to Gab and other sites generally seen as more welcoming of nationalist and right-wing posts.
“If they change their crazy censorship decisions, maybe I’ll return,” Djukanovic said, via Parler, about Twitter’s policy.
A number of Djukanovic’s ruling-party colleagues were also active on Parler before Amazon’s cutoff made Parler untenable.
The leader of Serbia’s euroskeptic, anti-vaccine, nonparliamentary Enough Is Enough party, Sasa Radulovic, announced he had abandoned Twitter for that platform on January 8.
He has since also joined Gab, where in his first post he suggested most Serbian citizens believe a pharmaceutical “mafia” is involved in spreading the coronavirus and one-third of them believe the Chinese government created it.
“And that’s a ‘conspiracy theory’? People ask obvious questions,” Radulovic said, going on to accuse the media of “insulting and making fools” of them.
Gab’s founder once said that while he hadn’t “set out to build a ‘conservative social network’ by any means,” he had “felt it was time for a conservative leader to step up and to provide a forum where anybody can come and speak freely without fear of censorship.”
The Pennsylvania-based platform said on January 9 that it was getting “10,000+ new Gab users every hour” to add to a base of monthly users that was said to be 3.7 million in April.
Sasa Radulovic, the leader of Serbia’s Enough Is Enough party, said that he had abandoned Twitter and now has a profile on Gab.
But as the social-media migration continued this week, other platforms also appeared to see a ripple effect from the bans on Trump and propagators of unfounded alt-right theories.
CNN’s Brian Fung said instant-messaging platform Telegram told him that 97 percent of the “explosion of growth” that took it over 500 million active users came from outside the United States.
Last year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center human rights organization described Telegram as an “online weapon of choice for [the] violent far-right.”
Djukanovic remains active on Telegram, where he urged others to leave Twitter.
Although launched with an eye to serving pro-democracy activists, critics suggest that Telegram’s relaxed content rules have been abused to spread disinformation, hate, and bigotry.
“Telegram has transformed into a nerve center for far-right sympathizers, many of whom come from the former Soviet Union,” an investigative article asserted last week in Rest Of World.
Trump’s banned private Twitter account had about 88 million followers.
Trump still appeared to have some access to the @POTUS Twitter account for the president of the United States, where a denunciation of Twitter and suggestion that Trump might create his own “platform” appeared before it was quickly deleted, according to AP.
That account currently has around 33 million followers, but will be transformed into Biden’s recent @PresElectBiden account on inauguration day, January 20.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling on President-elect Joe Biden to reinforce the commitment of the United States to human rights after four years of shirking it during Donald Trump’s presidency, and to join broad coalitions that have emerged to stand up to “powerful actors” such as Russia and China that have been undermining the global human rights system.
Trump was “a disaster for human rights” both at home and abroad, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth wrote in an introduction to the New York-based watchdog’s annual report on human rights published on January 13.
[Trump] cozied up to one friendly autocrat after another at the expense of their abused populations…”
According to Roth, the outgoing president “flouted legal obligations that allow people fearing for their lives to seek refuge, ripped migrant children from their parents, empowered white supremacists, acted to undermine the democratic process, and fomented hatred against racial and religious minorities,” among other things.
Trump also “cozied up to one friendly autocrat after another at the expense of their abused populations, promoted the sale of weapons to governments implicated in war crimes, and attacked or withdrew from key international initiatives to defend human rights, promote international justice, advance public health, and forestall climate change.”
This “destructive” combination eroded the credibility of the U.S. government when it spoke out against abuses in other countries, Roth said, adding: “Condemnations of Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran rang hollow when parallel praise was bestowed on Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Israel.”
But as the Trump administration “largely abandoned” the protection of human rights abroad and “powerful actors such as China, Russia, and Egypt sought to undermine the global human rights system,” other governments stepped forward to its defense, he said.
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After Biden’s inauguration on January 20, the U.S. government should “seek to join, not supplant” these collective efforts by a range of Western countries, Latin American democracies, and a growing number of Muslim-majority states.
Biden should also “seek to reframe the U.S. public’s appreciation of human rights so the U.S. commitment becomes entrenched in a way that is not so easily reversed by his successors.”
China
According to HRW’s annual World Report 2021, which summarizes last year’s human rights situation in nearly 100 countries and territories worldwide, the Chinese government’s authoritarianism “was on full display” in 2020.
Repression deepened across the country, with the government imposing a “draconian” national-security law in Hong Kong and arbitrarily detaining Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region on the basis of their identity, while others are subjected to “forced labor, mass surveillance, and political indoctrination.”
Russia
In Russia, HRW said the authorities used the coronavirus pandemic as a “pretext…to restrict human rights in many areas, and to introduce new restrictions, especially over privacy rights.”
Following a “controversial” referendum on constitutional changes, a crackdown was launched on dissenting voices, with “new, politically motivated prosecutions and raids on the homes and offices of political and civic activists and organizations.”
Belarus
The situation wasn’t much better in neighboring Belarus, where HRW said thousands were arbitrarily detained and hundreds were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment as strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka faced an unprecedented wave of protests following a contested presidential election in August.
“In many cases they detained, beat, fined, or deported journalists who covered the protests and stripped them of their accreditation,” HRW said. “They temporarily blocked dozens of websites and, during several days, severely restricted access to the Internet.”
Ukraine
According to the watchdog, the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine “continued to take a high toll on civilians, from threatening their physical safety to limiting access to food, medicines, adequate housing, and schools.”
Travel restrictions imposed by Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian authorities in response to the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated hardship for civilians and drove them “deeper into poverty.”
Balkans
In the Balkan region, HRW said serious human rights concerns remained in Bosnia-Herzegovina over “ethnic divisions, discrimination, and the rights of minorities and asylum seekers,” while “pressure” on media professionals continued.
There was “limited” improvement in protections of human rights in Serbia, where journalists “faced threats, violence, and intimidation, and those responsible are rarely held to account.”
On Kosovo, HRW cited continued tensions between ethnic Albanians and Serbs and “threats and intimidation” against journalists, while prosecutions of crimes against journalists have been “slow.”
Hungary
Elsewhere in Europe, the government in EU member Hungary continued “its attacks on rule of law and democratic institutions” and “interfered with independent media and academia, launched an assault on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, and undermined women’s rights.”
Iran
HRW said Iranian authorities continued to crack down on dissent, including “through excessive and lethal force against protesters and reported abuse and torture in detention,” while U.S. sanctions “impacted Iranians’ access to essential medicines and harmed their right to health.”
Pakistan
In neighboring Pakistan, the government “harassed and at times prosecuted human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists for criticizing government officials and policies,” while also cracking down on members and supporters of opposition political parties.
Meanwhile, attacks by Islamist militants targeting law enforcement officials and religious minorities killed dozens of people.
Afghanistan
HRW noted that fighting between Afghan government forces, the Taliban, and other armed groups caused nearly 6,000 civilian casualties in the first nine months of the year.
The Afghan government “failed to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture, and killing civilians,” while “threats to journalists by both the Taliban and government officials continued.”
South Caucasus
In the South Caucasus, six weeks of fighting over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region dominated events in both Azerbaijan and Armenia.
HRW said all parties to the conflict committed violations of international humanitarian law, including by using banned cluster munitions.
Central Asia
In Central Asia, critics of the Kazakh government faced “harassment and prosecution, and free speech was suppressed.”
Kyrgyz authorities “misused” lockdown measures imposed in response to the coronavirus epidemic to “obstruct the work of journalists and lawyers,” and parliament “advanced several problematic draft laws including an overly broad law penalizing manipulation of information.”
Tajik authorities “continued to jail government critics, including opposition activists and journalists, for lengthy prison terms on politically motivated grounds.”
The government also “severely” restricted freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion, including through heavy censorship of the Internet.
Uzbekistan’s political system remained “largely authoritarian” with thousands of people — mainly peaceful religious believers — being kept behind bars on false charges.
Citing reports of torture and ill-treatment in prisons, HRW said journalists and activists were persecuted, independent rights groups were denied registration, and forced labor was not eliminated.
Turkmenistan experienced “cascading social and economic crises as the government recklessly denied and mismanaged” the COVID-19 epidemic in the country, leading to “severe shortages” of affordable food.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Montenegrin President Milo Dukanovic has refused to approve amendments to a controversial law on religion that has been sharply criticized by ethnic Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Dukanovic sent the amendments back to parliament along with six other laws passed by the ruling coalition, his office said on January 2.
A total of 41 deputies of the ruling coalition, which is composed of pro-Serb parties and is closely aligned with the Serbian Orthodox Church, in the 81-seat legislature backed amendments to the Law on Freedom of Religion in a vote on December 29 that was boycotted by the opposition.
The president’s office claimed it was unclear if the required number of lawmakers had been present in parliament during the vote.
Dukanovic heads the long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), which is now in opposition.
If lawmakers vote for the amendments again, the president is obliged to sign them.
Under Montenegro’s religion law adopted a year ago, religious communities must prove property ownership from before 1918.
That is the year when predominantly Orthodox Christian Montenegro joined the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes — and the Montenegrin Orthodox Church was subsumed by the Serbian Orthodox Church, losing all of its property in the process.
The Serbian Orthodox Church, its supporters, and pro-Serbian parties claimed the law could enable the Montenegrin government to impound church property, though officials deny that they intend to do this.
The new government — which came to power after elections in August — said it would rewrite the law to ensure the properties stay in the hands of church, which is based in neighboring Serbia.
Serbia and Montenegro were part of a federation until 2006, when Montenegro declared its independence.
Montenegro is a member of NATO and aspires to join the European Union.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
MITROVICA, Kosovo — Sretko Radenkovic was one of the first of Kosovo’s 1.7 million people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 last weekend.
From the village of Srbovac, outside the divided northern city of Mitrovica near the border with Serbia, the 77-year-old says he kind of lucked out.
Radenkovic, an ethnic Serb, said he had heard from a neighbor late on December 25 about a chance to get inoculated against the pathogen that has so far infected 82 million people worldwide, killing nearly 1.8 million of them.
The next day, after hearing that three people had given up their spots, he was in line alongside dozens of others at the Zvecan Health Center, part of a shadow health system in the area run by Serbia for ethnic Serbs.
There were said to be 50 or 60 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine earmarked for elderly patients.
“I got the vaccine without hesitation,” Radenkovic told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service. “It simply happened.”
Under other circumstances, in a region plagued by anti-vaccination sentiment and disinformation, anyone’s eagerness for a vaccine to protect them from the coronavirus might be welcomed.
But Radenkovic’s discretion about how exactly he got his shot could be warranted.
Kosovo is not expected to get its first shipment of vaccines under the COVAX international distribution system for at least two months.
Even then, it is expected to receive only enough doses for around one-fifth of the country’s residents.
So Kosovo’s judicial authorities, faced with possibly hundreds of vaccinations in a handful of communities in the northern region bordering Serbia, want to know exactly who is vaccinating whom, with what, and on whose authority.
Simple Deduction
Regional prosecutors in Kosovo say they are collecting information for what could become criminal investigations that lead to prosecutions over the vaccine reports.
“If we have evidence that [vaccines] are indeed smuggled — because use of these vaccines requires authorization — and if they are illegal, criminal proceedings will be instituted against those who did these things,” Shyqri Syla, the prosecutor in Mitrovica, told RFE/RL.
They might not need to look very far.
Unofficial reports suggest Zvecan was one of four northern Kosovar municipalities to have received about 50 doses of the Pfizer vaccine despite no authorization so far from Kosovar health and safety regulators.
The others were North Mitrovica, Zubin Potok, and Leposavic.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced on December 25 that the vaccination of elderly residents in Lepasovic had begun and were imminent in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica.
“Let’s protect them first and then the others,” Vucic said of elderly Serbs at a press conference at a military airport outside the Serbian capital, Belgrade, where he was welcoming a shipment of medical equipment from the United Arab Emirates.
He has since said Serbia will continue to look after “its people in Kosovo.”
Serbian authorities have not said whether they are continuing to vaccinate in Kosovo, a former province whose sovereignty Belgrade still rejects despite recognition from more than 115 countries.
But an official in Gracanica, a Serbian-majority community near the Kosovar capital, Pristina, suggested that the Serbian Health Ministry was preparing to send vaccinations to that area.
Mirjana Dimitrijevic, the director of a health facility in Gracanica, told RFE/RL that residents over the age of 65 were being surveyed to gauge interest in the Serbian vaccine.
“We expect that after submitting this data to the competent institutions, we will receive the invitation for supply and will start distributing vaccines,” Dimitrejevic said.
Pristina Appeals For Consequences
In a Facebook post under the heading “Sanction Serbia’s Violations,” Kosovar Foreign Minister Meliza Haradinaj-Stublla called it a “clandestine intervention” in her country’s affairs and a “flagrant violation” of a 2015 agreement on rules governing the mutual recognition of pharmaceuticals.
“Serbia and its top officials, with [its] recent actions as well as with ongoing violations, has endangered Kosovo’s state security and has therefore undermined the entire process and achievements of the normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia in Washington, just as in Brussels,” she said in reference to international efforts to mediate a path to normalcy between Pristina and Belgrade.
Meliza Haradinaj-Stublla (file photo)
Kosovar’s caretaker prime minister, Avdullah Hoti, noted on December 26 the reported distribution of vaccines to “citizens in the north of the country” and suggested any such medicines had “entered through illegal channels.” He vowed that “Kosovo institutions will take the necessary legal measures against persons involved in this illegal activity such as drug smuggling.”
Two days later — just as the European Commission adopted a 70 million-euro ($86 million) package for early Western Balkan access to EU coronavirus vaccines — Hoti suggested that EU Neighborhood and Enlargement Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi shared his “concerns” about the matter.
World Health Organization (WHO) officials in Pristina have said a vaccine under COVAX, the UN public-health agency’s global distribution mechanism, is unlikely to arrive in Kosovo until the spring — early April at the latest.
WHO experts say Kosovo currently lacks the technical infrastructure and trained medical staff needed to administer the vaccine.
Hoti also said Varhelyi had “assured” him that a vaccine “will arrive in Kosovo at the same time as in other Western Balkan countries.”
When asked by RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, Kosovar Health Minister Armend Zemaj last week declined to say whether Pristina was negotiating for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
Acting Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on December 29 called vaccines already imported from Serbia a violation of agreements within the international normalization efforts but also suggested they bespoke “a lack of preparation on the part of our institutions.”
Kosovars, including those in the north, should be “notified [as to] when they should expect vaccines from health institutions of Kosovo.”
Vjosa Osmani (file photo)
“I think we have delays that should not be justified,” Osmani told reporters. “Other countries in the region are ahead of us, so we must and will demand responsibility from the government for why we are not prepared and it is expected that, in all likelihood, vaccines will arrive sometime after April.”
She also said that in addition to any COVAX vaccines, Kosovo’s government should be trying to obtain vaccines from other EU countries.
Political Preening?
Although the numbers are slippery, at least 100,000 or so of Kosovo’s residents are ethnic Serbs, mostly in the north but also in scattered communities in the south.
Belgrade maintains a shadow health-care system in many of those regions.
Serbia, a regional economic power, led the area in kicking off its vaccination effort thanks to the arrival of nearly 5,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech serum on December 22.
Two days later, it became the third country in Europe to start inoculating with the Pfizer vaccine, after the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
Its use everywhere but Switzerland has so far relied on emergency-use authorizations following extensive testing.
Serbia is currently testing the Russian-made Sputnik-V vaccine and has reportedly been negotiating for Sinopharm’s Chinese vaccine.
While it is unclear if or when regulatory approval might come from Serbian laboratories, concerns about a lack of testing and transparency have dogged the Russian vaccine in particular.
Is Serbia’s Vucic playing politics with vaccines?
Vucic, who burnished his ultranationalist credentials opposing Kosovo’s bid for independence in the 1990s, cultivates strong formal and informal ties between Serbia’s government and ethnic Serbian communities in Kosovo and other neighboring countries.
Arton Demhasaj, director of the Kosovo-based NGO Cohu!, a think tank that promotes democracy and anti-corruption efforts, said he believed Vucic’s apparent vaccination politics in northern Kosovo were aimed at provoking Pristina.
“He now expects institutional reactions from Kosovo and then this will be used in the international arena as ‘Lo and behold, even for a humanitarian intervention for Serb citizens in Kosovo, these are the reactions,’” Demhasaj told RFE/RL.
He suggested that even securing the vaccine so quickly — even ahead of many EU countries — was part of a deliberate political show on Vucic’s part.
“First bring it to Kosovo and wait for the reaction of our institutions, and then use that politically,” Demhasaj said. “I think this shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.”
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This post was originally published on Radio Free.
WASHINGTON — Kosovo will lose its biggest supporter in the U.S. Congress when Representative Eliot Engel leaves Capitol Hill in January after more than three decades in office.
Engel, a Democrat, has represented parts of the Bronx — a New York City borough with a large and politically active ethnic Albanian population — since 1989 and was a leader in Congress gathering support for recognition of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia in 2008.
His unwavering support for Kosovo through the decades has made him a celebrity in the predominantly ethnic Albanian republic, which has been recognized by some 115 countries.
Kosovo has named a street and a highway in honor of Engel and even issued a stamp with his image. Conversely, all of this has made him a controversial figure in Serbia, which still refuses to accept the loss of its former province and lobbies against its recognition by the international community.
But Engel’s departure from the House of Representatives — where he most recently chaired the lower chamber’s Foreign Affairs Committee, using his formidable position to chastise Belgrade and defend Kosovo — might not be an occasion for Serbia to rejoice.
Kosovo’s then-speaker of parliament, Kadri Veseli, meets in Washington with Eliot Engel in 2019.
Engel, 73, has said he has no plans to retire following his surprise defeat to a school principal in the Democratic primaries earlier this year. He said he has been asked if he wants to be an ambassador or undersecretary in the administration of President-elect Joe Biden and is considering his options, raising the question of whether he might continue to influence U.S. Balkan policy.
“[There are] lots of different things I could do…. I’m not going to make any decisions right now, but, you know, I’m thinking about it,” he told the Washington Examiner in early December. “Maybe do something with the administration…. Some people have suggested perhaps I could be an ambassador.”
Though Engel is keeping his cards close to his chest regarding his future plans, he recently demonstrated where his policy interests lie during one of his last House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings.
“Little did I know the passion I would develop for a small corner of Europe called the Balkans,” Engel said on December 8 as he kicked off a hearing he called to give policy recommendations to the incoming Biden administration on the region.
“I’ve traveled to every country in the Western Balkans several times, met with so many leaders from so many parties, and come to love the rich variety of cultures, ethnicities, and religions,” he said.
“But no place has touched my heart more than Kosovo,” he said in an introduction that often touched upon his leading role in U.S. Balkan policy over the decades.
Engel’s decision to hold a hearing in his waning days in Congress on a part of Europe that rarely makes headlines in the United States — amid more immediate national security concerns such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — was noteworthy, observers said.
Eliot Engel holds a joint press conference with then-Kosovar Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj in Pristina in November 2017.
“The hearing was meant to cement Engel’s legacy in the Balkans, especially with respect to Kosovo,” said Dan Vajdich, who covered Europe and Eurasia for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now advises the Serbian Chamber of Commerce on attracting American investment to Serbia and the Western Balkans.
Engel entered Congress just as Yugoslavia was breaking up violently along ethnic lines, and he immersed himself in the many regional disputes through his seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, eventually earning a reputation as a Balkan expert.
He was among the first U.S. lawmakers to call on the administration of President Bill Clinton to intervene in 1998 to stop Yugoslav and Serbian forces in Kosovo and was arguably the most outspoken advocate in Congress for U.S. recognition of the country’s independence a decade later.
Engel continues to fight for justice for the Bytyqi brothers, three Albanian-Americans who fought on the side of the Kosovar rebels and were summarily executed by Serb police in 1999. Their killers have not been prosecuted.
“As all of you know, Elliott has been Kosovo’s greatest champion in the United States Congress,” Representative Kevin McCarthy (Republican-California), the ranking minority member on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told the December 8 House of Representatives hearing.
With Engel possibly looking at ambassadorships, some have speculated whether a Balkan role could be in the cards for the outgoing lawmaker.
Balkan postings will likely open up by early 2022 as U.S. ambassadors in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina reach the typical three-year term limit for service in a country.
The Biden administration may also appoint special envoys to the region, including for Serbia-Kosovo talks.
Engel would not be good news for negotiations between Pristina and Belgrade. He has become too biased, too one-sided, and he is totally out of touch with what is happening on the ground in Serbia.”
Washington is still focused on solving the unresolved dispute between Serbia and Kosovo over the latter’s recognition, which would open the door for both countries to move closer to EU membership and potentially even NATO.
Washington is also pushing for constitutional reform in Bosnia with the aim of maintaining its territorial integrity amid threats by Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s ethnic Serb entity, to secede.
Tim Mulvey, communications director for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declined to comment on whether Engel is interested in ambassadorial postings or being appointed as a special envoy in the Balkans.
Ronald Neumann, the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy and a former U.S. ambassador, told RFE/RL that someone of Engel’s stature would more likely be tapped to head a large embassy in a Western European capital like London or Berlin rather than a small posting in the Balkans.
Jelena Milic, director of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies in Belgrade, said Serbia would view it as a setback if Engel became involved in Serbia-Kosovo peace talks, due to his close ties to Pristina. For the same reason, she also doubted he would make a positive impact on regional issues if we were appointed as ambassador to Kosovo or Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Engel would not be good news for negotiations between Pristina and Belgrade,” she said. “He has become too biased, too one-sided, and he is totally out of touch with what is happening on the ground in Serbia. He still views Serbia through [the prism of] the 1990s,” she said.
Milic said the December 8 House hearing was a case in point.
Engel highlighted some of Serbia’s shortcomings, including its failure to prosecute war criminals, a rollback of democracy under President Aleksandr Vucic, and the country’s close military ties to Russia. The lawmaker also criticized current U.S policy on Kosovo as too beholden to Serbia.
“Too often we deal with Kosovo as [an offshoot] of the dialogue with Serbia. We subsume our bilateral ties to such an extent that we, the United States, are limiting Kosovo’s choices to avoid offending Belgrade,” Engel said.
Eliot was a singular champion on Kosovo. He didn’t really have any peers. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t others that will emerge [in Congress].”
Many Balkan analysts in the United States say Engel was right to highlight those issues.
But Milic said Engel distorted the perception of Serbia and failed to acknowledge some “positive changes” that have occurred over the years, listing respect for Bosnia’s territorial integrity and what she termed “cooperation” with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), despite Belgrade’s failure to extradite criminal suspects to The Hague. She also said Engel had downplayed the deaths of 2,000 Serbians during the 1999 Kosovo War.
Vajdich said Engel’s comments make it “politically difficult” for politicians in Belgrade to advocate for stronger ties with the United States and are used by Russia for propaganda purposes to build a divide between Serbia and the West.
“The Russian messaging is that America will never accept you and all it cares about is Kosovo. And it resonates with the average Serb,” he said.
Neumann said Serbian opposition to Engel would be “germane” in debating who to tap as an envoy to peace talks.
“If one of the parties is very negative, that would not help the work of a special envoy,” he said.
Janusz Bugajski, a Balkan expert at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, said Engel could still do work in the Biden administration on the Balkans that is not tied to Serbia-Kosovo peace talks, such as working with the Europeans on combating Russian and Chinese influence in the region. Engel, he pointed out, has extensive experience with transatlantic relations.
Engel speaks to the Kosovar parliament in July 2015.
“There are many possibilities” for Engel in a Biden administration, some of which would be “more sensitive vis-a-vis Belgrade,” he said.
Tanya Domi, a Balkan expert at Columbia University who previously worked on Balkan policy for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said she doesn’t expect Engel’s departure to weaken U.S. support for Kosovo.
Engel, she said, may have become so outspoken on Kosovo and other Balkan issues in part because White House attention to the region had declined over the years.
That changed at the end of Donald Trump’s administration with the 2019 appointment of Richard Grenell as special envoy for the Serbia and Kosovo talks and the signing of a deal in September to normalize economic relations.
That trend is likely to continue under Biden, who knows the region firsthand from his days on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Domi predicted that Biden is likely to take up the cause of the region more aggressively than previous presidents.
“Eliot was a singular champion on Kosovo. He didn’t really have any peers,” Domi said. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t others that will emerge [in Congress]. And this loss will be offset by a Biden State Department that is going to be very forward-leaning on the Balkans,” she said.
Engels will be replaced as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee by Gregory Meeks (Democrat-New York), who will take the reins on January 6 when the Congress that was elected on November 3 meets for the first time.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Serbia will begin vaccinating its population against COVID-19 on December 24 using the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
Prime Minister Ana Brnabic will be among the first to receive the jab in order to foster public confidence in the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, the government said.
Serbia received a first batch of nearly 5,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 22.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said the first shots will go to the elderly in retirement homes.
“It is important to protect these people…. More than 80 percent of the people who have died from this terrible virus are the elderly and they are most at risk,” he said.
Mirsad Djerlek, state secretary in the Health Ministry, told RFE/RL that as more vaccines arrive in the coming weeks health-care workers will also get the vaccine.
He said about 80,000 doses should be delivered each month, or enough for about 40,000 people because it’s a two-dose regimen.
While Serbia hasn’t approved their use yet, it plans to add the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine and a jab produced by China’s Sinopharm to ensure a greater quantity of vaccine for its 7 million people.
“We expect that these two vaccines will arrive in Serbia very soon,” Djerlek said.
The Pfizer-BioNTech shot is already in use in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Israel.
Meanwhile, rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech will begin across the EU on December 27.
Serbia has suffered 2,800 deaths to the coronavirus while more than 300,000 have been infected.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Despite travel restrictions, huge traffic jams have been reported on the borders between Slovenia and Croatia as well as Hungary and Serbia.
Reports on December 19 spoke of thousands of people waiting for hours to cross.
Many people from countries like Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia work and live in Western Europe. They traditionally travel home by car for holidays, both in the winter and in the summer.
Some European Union nations with big migrant worker communities have imposed obligatory coronavirus tests and isolation upon their return, hoping to dissuade people from holiday travel to countries with high infection rates.
Countries throughout the Balkans have reported thousands of new virus infections daily and hospitals across the region are full.
Aside from the regular holiday traffic, the current border rush could be linked to Serbia’s decision to demand mandatory negative coronavirus tests for foreigners coming in starting on December 21. Serbian citizens without negative tests will have to isolate for 10 days upon arrival.
Croatia, a member of the EU, is also demanding mandatory negative virus tests for its citizens coming in from abroad, which has slowed down the usual border checks.
The Croatian state television station, HRT, reported on December 19 that lines of cars had formed on Croatia’s borders with Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.
Serbia’s RTS television said travelers waited for at least four hours to enter Hungary overnight. It said some 16,000 people had entered Serbia in the previous 24 hours.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The deputy leader of an association of Kosovar war veterans declined to enter a plea before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on December 18.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
WASHINGTON — Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a congressional committee on December 8 that corruption is “crippling” the Western Balkans and urged Washington to devote more attention to the strategically important region to counter Russian and Chinese influence.
Albright, who served under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, also said the United States needs to work closer with Europe on resolving the region’s lingering political and economic problems.
“We must attack the rampant corruption that is crippling political institutions and undermining the rule of law across the region,” Albright told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during a hearing dedicated to Balkan policy recommendations for the incoming Biden administration.
“In every country, leaders seem to regard political office as a source of patronage to stay in power. Addressing the so-called state capture and rooting out these influences must be a top priority,” she said.
The United States has been seeking to integrate the Balkans into Western organizations such as the European Union and NATO in order to bring peace and prosperity to a region that has suffered from ethnic wars. Serbia’s reluctance to recognize its former province of Kosovo as an independent country and Republika Srpska’s threats to secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina are the two key issues hindering that goal.
Albright said the United States has pulled back from the region following its deep involvement in stopping the ethnic wars of the 1990s. The United States led two NATO military campaigns in the Balkans that decade, including the 1999 bombing of military targets in present-day Serbia to halt the cleansing of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Albright was one of three experts to speak at the hearing, which also addressed the growing influence of Russia and China in the region, the autocratic tendencies of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, and the need for U.S. leadership to solve outstanding problems.
“This may sound too simplistic, [but] we have to pay attention,” Albright said when asked about how to counter Russian and Chinese influence. “We have not paid the kind of attention that is necessary to this area, feeling kind of ‘oh well, we did everything that we could.’”
Daniel Serwer, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a former State Department special envoy to Bosnia, also called for more U.S. involvement in the region in cooperation with Europe to solve the most critical issues.
Serwer said that Europe has been unable to solve Balkan regional problems by itself in part because some EU states refuse to recognize Kosovo. Europe has been leading the effort to solve the political impasse between Serbia and Kosovo for a decade.
“The essential precondition for solving the remaining Balkan problems is American recommitment to the region in tandem with European allies,” Serwer said. The EU “demonstrated it cannot do the job on its own,” he said.
The experts said Biden should push Vucic to recognize Kosovo, end military cooperation with Russia, and improve the state of democracy inside the country if Serbia wants to join Western institutions. Vucic, who vowed to lead Serbia toward European Union membership, has been accused of curbing media freedoms and intimidating critics.
“The Biden administration will need to toughen up on Belgrade together with Europe,” Serwer said.
The experts warned Congress against pulling NATO forces from Kosovo, saying it would be a sign of a lack of commitment to the region at a time when rival powers are getting more involved.
NATO has a force of 3,500 in Kosovo, including slightly less than 700 U.S. military personnel.
“If it were ended at the moment, it would be something that would continue to make the people in the region think well, the rest of the world doesn’t care,” Albright said of the troop deployment.
Janusz Bugajski, a Balkan expert and senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank, told the committee that the United States needs to “pay more attention” to building up a security force in Kosovo.
“In that way, Kosovo will be in NATO rather than NATO being in Kosovo,” he said.
Lawmakers in Kosovo in December 2018 passed legislation to build a full-fledged army, a move that has inflamed tensions with Serbia but that would take years to accomplish.
Turning to Bosnia, the experts warned that the 1995 Dayton agreement, which created a political settlement based on ethnic power sharing following years of war, is no longer viable and only serves to perpetuate corruption.
“The United States and the European Union must focus their efforts in Bosnia on the abuse of government and state-owned enterprises, taking away the levers of power that keep the current system in place,” Albright said.
Serwer said the United States should pressure the EU to sanction those pushing for the breakup of Bosnia and to move EU peacekeeping forces to the country’s northeast to block secession by Respublika Srpska, the country’s ethnic Serb region.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The acting head of the Serbian Orthodox Church was hospitalized on December 4 after testing positive for coronavirus, the church’s information service said.
Bishop Hrizostom was admitted to a hospital in the nation’s capital Belgrade, it said. The church did not release information about the condition of the 68-year-old’s health.
Hrizostom became interim leader of the church after Patriarch Irinej died of COVID-19 last month. Hrizostom presided over the funeral services of Irinej, who was 90 years old.
Metropolitan Amfilohije, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, died of COVID-19 in October. Irinej lead the funeral services for Amfilohije.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Its ostensible target was Belgrade, and it was almost certainly an intended broadside against Podgorica’s new government.
But the diplomatic expulsion amid a back-and-forth in the Balkans has instead laid bare fault lines that are likely to keep rattling the political landscape in one of Europe’s youngest states for some time.
It is just one of the outward signs that tremors loom for the tiny Adriatic coastal state of Montenegro as a fledgling ruling coalition is set to take on three decades of entrenched power; a dominant church led from abroad is maneuvering to replace a bishop credited with helping flip the country’s recent elections; and obstacles continue to block membership in a European Union that is grappling with its own internal questions about commitments to the rule of law.
All of it as Montenegro’s 620,000 citizens experience government without President Milo Djukanovic’s Democrat Party of Socialists (DPS) for the first time in their 14 years of independence.
The ousted Social Democrats had led every Montenegrin government dating back to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s — longer if you count the 45 years of rule by the League of Communists that it succeeded.
Their run ended when a vote of confidence in the National Assembly on December 4 propelled three awkwardly matched political groupings — a pro-Serbian, a center-right, and a green bloc — into government three months after elections on August 30.
They hold a one-vote majority after campaigning to shed the political and economic stagnation, corruption, and state ties to organized crime that many Montenegrins blame on Djukanovic and his DPS.
Balkan Games?
Just a week before the vote in parliament, the Montenegrin Foreign Ministry declared the ambassador from neighboring Serbia persona non grata, sparking friction in Podgorica and Belgrade.
It cited Ambassador Vladimir Bozovic’s “long and continuous interference” in Montenegrin affairs and “behavior and statements incompatible with the usual, acceptable standards of diplomatic office.”
It elicited an initial announcement of a response in kind by Belgrade before Serbian officials reconsidered and avoided rising to the bait.
“What’s happened now with the expulsion of the Serbian ambassador in Podgorica was not at all directed against Belgrade or [Serbian President Aleksandar] Vucic,” says Dusan Reljic, a Southeastern Europe analyst for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “It was Djukanovic’s move to hurt and perhaps motivate the opposition that’s now taking over as a majority government into some rash action.”
Other analysts called it “a parting gesture” timed to hinder the new government and a tactic by the still-powerful Djukanovic to maintain support with the kind of “tough stance toward Serbia” that he has exploited well for years.
Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic will not give up power easily.
Belgrade and Montenegro’s coalition-in-waiting called it an effort by outgoing elements to destabilize bilateral relations.
Playing The Nationalist Card
The relationship between the two former Yugoslav republics is not without its irritants, some of which are exacerbated by shared culture and Podgorica’s decision to leave their joint federation in 2006.
Djukanovic has spent much of his three decades atop Montenegrin politics moving the country on from Yugoslavia, ushering in independence from Serbia, and battling to promote a national identity distinct from Serbia’s with a homegrown orthodoxy outside the Serbian Orthodox Church.
There was also an alleged coup attempt during Montenegro’s elections four years ago that led to the conviction of eight Serbian nationals among the 13 people found guilty of participating in a plot to kill Djukanovic, who was prime minister at the time, and bring pro-Russian politicians to power.
Just last week, Montenegro’s special prosecutor reportedly accused Serbian authorities of conspiring to overturn some of those verdicts for political reasons.
Serbian President Vucic, who has publicly eschewed radical ultranationalism since 2008 but encourages ties between Belgrade and Serbian communities abroad, has routinely dismissed Djukanovic’s accusations of meddling and occasionally swiped back.
Their very public exchanges have led many to suggest that they are props in both men’s nationalist plays to their respective constituencies.
Last week, Djukanovic was able to “reassert his tough stance towards Serbia and try to preserve his support among citizens on an issue he [has] exploited very well in the last two decades,” says Dejan Bursac, a research associate at Belgrade’s Institute for Political Studies.
After Serbia’s government “posed as strong and determined” to its public by first ordering a reciprocal expulsion, Bursac says, “Vucic reversed the decision…the next day and promoted himself as a regional peacemaker.”
He is not alone in suggesting that each has served as a foil for the other in politically expedient spats during the past decade.
“I don’t believe that there are genuine tensions between Belgrade and Podgorica,” Reljic says. “Whatever was happening in the last couple of years, there was never…a confrontation between…Djukanovic and Vucic. As a matter of fact, there was always the impression that they avoided attacking each other and that they were really, to a great extent, coordinating, synchronizing their political actions.”
Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic (left) and Montenegro’s Djukanovic: Playing the same cards?
The expelled Serbian ambassador’s offense, however, touched a particularly raw nerve among some Montenegrins by describing a hastily arranged gathering organized by Serbs that effectively folded Montenegro into the future Yugoslavia in 1918 as a “liberation.”
“The Serbian ambassador’s assertion that it represented a ‘liberation’ and was the ‘free expression’ of the Montenegrins can, of course, be contested by historians or, indeed, politicians who are inclined to take the view that Montenegro’s independence was revoked unfairly as a consequence of the Assembly of Podgorica,” says Kenneth Morrison, a professor of modern Southeastern European history at Britain’s De Montfort University. “And one would assume that Ambassador Bozovic knew how incendiary his words might be interpreted to be before making the statement.”
Holy ‘Spillover’
The Podgorica Assembly is a watershed event in Montenegrin history and a litmus test of sorts on questions of history, ethno-nationalism, and independence.
It was used as a cutoff for a controversial new law on religion that Djukanovic pushed through a year ago over the loud objections of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its Montenegrin branch, both of which accused him of crafting the law to dispossess the church of its property.
The man who headed that Montenegrin arm of the church even before Djukanovic’s national emergence, Metropolitan Amfilohije, died of COVID-19 in October.
Djukanovic’s relationship with Amfilohije was always complicated. But particularly as the new law on religion was being crafted, he accused Amfilohije and the Serbian church of meddling to undermine Montenegrin politics and national identity.
“There is always a large degree of spillover from religious to political life — in particular, when it comes to the issue of Kosovo [and its independence from Serbia] — but these spillovers have not, in general, affected the relationship between the Serbian and Montenegrin governments in the past few years,” says Emil Bjorn Hilton Saggau, a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen who has focused on religion in Montenegro.
But Amfilohije’s leadership in the 10 months before his death of a protest campaign that mobilized tens of thousands of Montenegrins in response to the new law on religion was widely credited with helping to tip the August election against Djukanovic.
Across the border in Serbia, Vucic’s popular base also “has been overwhelmingly in support of the church protest,” Saggau says, forcing the reluctant Serbian president to “take a stand on the Montenegrin issue” in a manner he has generally avoided since independence.
“The church protest in Montenegro has forced [Djukanovic and Vucic] to confront each other this past year in what is perhaps the most dangerous question in Montenegrin politics — that of national identity,” Saggau says.
Now, the combination of Amfilohije’s death and the death days later of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s patriarch, Irinej, also of COVID-19, means the church must pick successors to fill both of those hugely influential positions.
Saggau thinks state officials in both countries will try to involve themselves heavily in the succession debates “and try to turn it to their advantage.”
“These deaths and the hospitalization of many Serbian top clergy is really a game-changer,” Saggau says. “It makes the political game much more open and might create further tension or ease it.”
Around two-thirds of Montenegro’s churchgoing public is thought to attend Serbian Orthodox services, despite Djukanovic’s years-long effort to prop up a mostly unrecognized Montenegrin Orthodox Church.
Around one-third of Montenegro’s citizens regard themselves as ethnic Serbs, and about half the population calls its mother tongue Serbian as opposed to Montenegrin.
Djukanovic’s power base is built in part on appealing to Montenegrins who prefer to distance themselves ethno-nationally from Serbs, along with other ethnic minorities whose representatives have chosen to join the Social Democrats in opposition, Reljic says. “The new government will try to keep those minorities but strengthen the participation of those Montenegrins who feel themselves to be Serb.”
“So their natural partner in the region is Serbia, but that doesn’t mean that it’s Mr. Vucic, because they remember the foul games that Vucic played with Djukanovic,” he adds. “They can’t oppose him overtly, but they definitely won’t go to Belgrade to ask for anyone’s opinion.”
Prime Minister-designate Krivokapic pays his respect to the late Archbishop Amfilohije in Podgorica on November 1.
One of the blocs in the incoming Montenegrin government reportedly has already proposed amending “all discriminatory laws,” explicitly including the law on religion that so angered the Serbian Orthodox Church and its faithful throughout the region.
The actions of the new Montenegrin government and its ability — or failure — to withstand pressure from Djukanovic and his Social Democrats on the religion issue could go far in altering the tone between Belgrade and Podgorica, according to Saggau.
“The current tension is mostly fueled by Djukanovic and his allies,” he says, “and if they are more firmly removed from power and the new government dismantles the law on religion, tension will defuse.”
Djukanovic Fighting For Survival
With the confidence vote, the new governing coalition has already accomplished much by ousting the DPS and putting Djukanovic on the defensive.
But Djukanovic shows no signs of wilting in the two years before his current presidential term ends.
And the DPS won the most votes in the August 30 elections, even though its 35 percent of the vote left the opposition trio with a one-seat majority paving the path to power in the 81-member parliament.
Three months of tense coalition talks highlighted a lack of familiarity and potential clashes of policy and personality among the pro-Serbian and pro-Russian For the Future of Montenegro led by Zdravko Krivokapic, the pro-Serbian church but pro-EU Peace is Our Nation, and the liberal and civic-oriented Black on White.
The diplomatic row with much larger neighbor Serbia landed just as Prime Minister-designate Krivokapic was putting the final touches on his proposed cabinet.
“I think [it] is probably a parting gesture by the outgoing government, timed to leave a problem in the hands of the Montenegrin government-in-waiting. So the timing was no coincidence,” Morrison says.
The new “expert government” will try to ride a wave of optimism that things like corruption and the economy might finally improve under different leadership, even as Montenegrins and the rest of the world try to climb out of a devastating pandemic.
It is unclear, however, how long their momentum and public enthusiasm will last.
The respective blocs in the new government have pledged to maintain a “pro-European and pro-Western” orientation, but analysts say there is not much else that unites them.
“What binds…[the opposition] together at this moment is only one wish — to dismember the Djukanovic system which has been in power for 30 years,” Reljic says. “And this is what all of this is going to be about in the next weeks and months: whether they will get rid of Djukanovic or whether Djukanovic will bust the new government.”
Few analysts are are willing to write off Djukanovic’s party yet, and many predict that Djukanovic will continue to fight tooth and nail to bring down the new government, elements of which have signaled a desire to investigate him for possible wrongdoing.
“Djukanovic has to work hard to sow division in the new government to avoid being ousted and [possibly] eventually jailed,” Reljic says. “So already this moment — kicking out the Serbian ambassador — was part of this scheme. He will certainly come up with new plans and strategies.”
EU Fatigue
The European commissioner for enlargement, Hungarian Oliver Varhelyi, tried delicately to step into the breech amid the diplomatic dust-up between Serbia and Montenegro.
He welcomed Belgrade’s de-escalation and urged Podgorica to do the same. “Respect for good neighbourly relations®ional cooperation are cornerstones of #EUenlargement & Association and Stabilisation Process,” Varhelyi tweeted.
It was a relatively standard diplomatic response seemingly intended to tamp down tensions, although it drew some criticism from offended Montenegrins, including a spokesman for Djukanovic’s DPS party.
“I don’t believe his [Varelyi’s] intention was to support either the government-in-waiting or the departing DPS or, indeed, Serbs and Montenegrins,” Morrison says. “He was attempting to mitigate against any further deterioration of bilateral relations between Serbia and Montenegro.”
It was only the latest on a growing list of headaches for the bloc to emerge from a region chock-a-block with EU aspirants, some of whom are inching in the wrong direction politically, economically, or both, from the Brussels perspective.
One of EU officials’ most stubborn problems in the Balkans has been Serbia and the protracted dispute of its former province, Kosovo, over recognition and diplomatic normalization.
The European Union is not blameless. It has urged on the so-called Western Balkan Six — five former Yugoslav entities and Albania — only to heap impediments in their paths as it wrestles with its own problems.
A current impasse involves sudden demands from EU member Bulgaria for historical and linguistic concessions from North Macedonia, less than two years after Skopje’s government renamed the country to appease Greece in another cultural dispute.
Reljic, who is based in Brussels, cites a view among many EU officials and in some European capitals that enlargement has “been a success geopolitically, but it has also weakened the European Union.”
He says that in the eyes of those skeptics, adding more Southeast Europeans to the bloc just “adds to the complexity of the union and further dilutes the basic European values, such as democracy and the rule of law.”
Montenegro, in line since 2012 and the “lead candidate” in the region ever since, got a green light to open its final chapter of accession negotiations in June.
But under Djukanovic and his DPS party’s leadership, it has closed just three of the 35 negotiating chapters of the acquis that makes up the body of EU law and deals with issues like free movement of goods and people, justice, corruption, and media.
A current EU budget dispute stemming from rule-of-law mechanisms pits national populist governments in postcommunist Poland and Hungary — both of which acceded in 2004 — against the rest of the bloc.
It has added fuel to longtime internal demands that the bloc reform its notorious veto power and other procedures before taking in any more members.
Meanwhile, there are perceptions in the Balkans that governments there swung open their markets to Western goods and services despite competitive disadvantages that have created huge trade disparities.
“It’s a bad situation in Brussels and it’s a bad situation in the region,” Reljic says.
He says the Balkans are “bleeding an awful lot of money that is going to the European Union” as a result of that opening up without the benefit of EU structural and cohesion funds that countries like Czech Republic and Hungary receive.
“As long as the political economy doesn’t work, the region is going to diverge, rule of law is going to deteriorate, and such political strongmen and caricatures like Djukanovic and Vucic will stay in power,” Reljic says.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Montenegrin Prime Minister-designate Zdravko Krivokapic has criticized the outgoing government’s decision to expel the Serbian ambassador just days before the planned inauguration of a new, pro-Serb cabinet.
Krivokapic said on November 29 on Twitter that he regretted the expulsion, announced on November 28, of Serbian Ambassador to Montenegro Vladimir Bozovic.
“Such acts are not in the spirit of the European path and good regional cooperation of friendly countries,” Zdravko Krivokapic tweeted. He lamented that the outgoing regime, even in its last days, did not “shy away from the polarization of society and the deepening of divisions.”
The Montenegrin Foreign Ministry cited “long and continuous meddling in the internal affairs of Montenegro” as the reason for declaring Bozovic persona non grata and expelling him.
Hours later, in a tit-for-tat move, Serbia declared Montenegro’s ambassador persona non grata and expelling him from the country.
Montenegro remains deeply divided among people seeking closer ties with traditional allies Serbia and Russia, and those who view Montenegro as an independent state allied with the West.
Montenegro and Serbia were part of a joint country before an independence referendum in 2006 led to Montenegro splitting off.
The country is now set to be led by a pro-Serb coalition that is to be voted into office during a parliament session next week following the defeat of the long-ruling pro-Western Democratic Party of Socialists in August.
The coalition’s most powerful party is the Democratic Front (DF), which seeks closer ties with Serbia and Russia and is backed by the Serbian Orthodox Church. Its partners, however, insist that Montenegro remain on its pro-Western course.
Krivokapic said the new government would work to improve Montenegro’s relations with Serbia.
“We will promote a truly good neighborly policy with Belgrade, as well as with everyone in the region, on the principle of sovereignty, independence and noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries,” Krivokapic tweeted.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Montenegro’s outgoing government has declared the ambassador of neighboring Serbia persona non grata and asked him to leave the country, the Foreign Ministry said on November 28.
The Balkan nation’s Foreign Ministry cited “long and continuous meddling in the internal affairs of Montenegro” as the reason.
The Foreign Ministry’s statement said Serbian Ambassador Vladimir Bozovic “directly disrespected” Montenegro by describing a 1918 decision to join a Serbia-dominated kingdom as an act “liberation” and “free will” by the Montenegrin people.
Montenegro’s parliament declared the century-old decision void in 2018, saying it had stripped Montenegro of its sovereignty.
The statement said Bozovic’s comments on November 27 were “incompatible with the usual acceptable standards of diplomatic office.”
There was no immediate reaction from Serbia.
Montenegro remains deeply divided among those seeking closer ties with traditional allies Serbia and Russia, and those who view Montenegro as an independent state allied with the West.
Montenegro and Serbia were part of a joint country before an independence referendum in 2006 led to Montenegro splitting off.
The pro-Western Democratic Party of Socialists was defeated in August after three decade in power by a pro-Serb coalition. The new government is set to be voted into office during a parliament session next week.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Serbia has seen a recent influx of digital nomads — people who use the Internet and remote working to move around the world. The capital, Belgrade, was recently listed as the seventh best city in Europe for life and work by nomadlist.com. Local experts say more needs to be done to entice newcomers and ensure natives don’t move abroad.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.