In Serbia, la Résistance continues

by Saker’s Johnny-on-the-spot in Belgrade for The Saker Blog

Last Monday, August 3 – to paraphrase President Roosevelt – was a day that will live in Serbia’s parliamentary infamy. The fraudulently elected “parliament” was formally seated, but its inauguration was most inauspicious. On the plateau in front of the Parliament building indignant citizens greeted the arrival of the tyrant’s rubber stamp “parliamentarians” with angry shouts, eggs (hopefully as rotten as their targets), and tomatoes. Take a watch:

A journalist inside the building tried to strike up impromptu conversations with the new “legislators,” but few seemed self-confident enough to chat or even bold enough to identify themselves by name. One of them (Vučić’s former minister of culture Tasovac, at 00.36 seconds, with his signature bizarre hairstyle) tried to run away. If you speak Serbian, take another watch, but if you do not speak the language, no big deal. Just kick back and enjoy the obvious discomfort of these fraudsters, whose body language is a clear admission that they are where they do not belong:

Would anyone watching this disgraceful spectacle ever guess that the renewal of Serbia’s independent statehood in early 19^th century was accompanied at every turn by vibrant parliamentary life? Tyranny and one-man rule are inherently incompatible with the Serbian ethos. Even during the first Serbian insurrection against Ottoman occupation in 1804 there was an advisory soviet (Правителствующій совѣт сербскій) to make sure that Karageorge, the leader of the rebellion, would not be making arbitrary decisions. Throughout the rest of the 19^th century, Parliament or Скупштина, played a major role in political life, balancing the power of the prince and later the king. The golden age of Serbian parliamentarianism was the first decade of the 20^th century when the Skupština, in terms of the quality of its proceedings and elite composition, which included the country’s most accomplished citizens and finest minds, was more than a match for its Western European models. Their successors today are colorless, insecure non-entities looking only for a sinecure and always ready to raise their hands approvingly at the command of their ruling party superiors.

And they will be expected to do just that soon, when the constitutional amendament to delete the preamble which asserts that Kosovo is an inalienable part of Serbia is put before them. They will be expected also to approve mass compulsory Covid-19 vaccionations with hastily improvised, untested and unsafe experimental preparations which the regime intends to use on a good part of the Serbian population as guinea pigs, in return for hefty bribes from crooked pharmaceutical manufacturers. And they will at some point undoubtedly raise their hands also when asked to publicly approve the currently secret arrangements whereby hordes of migrants deemed superflous by Germany, Austria, and other EU countries will be dumped on Serbia, to be permanently settled here.

Serbs are expressing their utter disgust at the regime’s rampaging madness with various degrees of public intensity, depending on where they happen to be. On August 8, free Serbs in the diaspora conducted protests against the Vučić regime in about a dozen world capitals and major cities. These are their plans and demands:

The symbol of the diaspora protests are Rattling Keys, signifying the incarcerated condition of the Serbian people in their homeland under tyrannical rule. Here are some scenes from the protests far from the reach of Vučić’s lawless tontons macoutes:

https://twitter.com/democracy4srb/status/1292132507723485185?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1292132507723485185%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsrbin.info%2Fpolitika%2Fprotesti-srba-sirom-sveta-vucicu-izdao-si-srbiju-nas-neces-prevariti%2F

“Phony elections, a phony parliament, soon a phony government, phony figures of Corona virus victims. We can no longer keep silent as democracy and freedom are being obliterated,” according to Lazar Karapandža, spokesman for the „Democracy 4 Serbia“ protests.

Their compatriots in Serbia, however, are less fortunate when it comes to freely expressing their views. The regime is installing face recognition cameras all over Belgrade, and probably in the interior as well. There is a price to be paid for non-conformist thinking and behaviour in today’s Serbia. A woman who attended the nightly protest in front of the Parliament building in Belgrade a few days ago was followed by two uniformed policemen when she boarded a bus to go home. They asked her for her ID, Ihre Papiere bitte, presumably in Serbian, and demanded she get off at the next stop so that they could issue her a 5000 dinar (about $50) fine, a small fortune in Vučić’s prosperous Serbia. When the lady, who has no criminal record, asked the police why they were doing that, they replied “because we saw you at the protest”. Take a watch at how police intimidation unfolded (00 to 3:14 minutes), in front of the Parliament of aspiring EU applicant Serbia:

But all told the lady got off relatively lightly. On Thursday, a 31-year-old man, whom the authorities identified only as P. G., was arrested in the provincial city of Užice over twenty days after committing the heinous offense for which charges against him are now being pressed. The corpus delicti was that together with other miscreants P. G. took part in an anti-regime demonstration, pictured below

in front of the building housing the headquarters of the ruling party. During the disturbance – and get this gentle readers – the crowd pelted “with eggs, tomatoes, and paint” a huge poster of – need I explicitly disclose who? – and the banner of his Serbian Progressive Party.

The hapless P. G. was jailed for 48 hours, pending a court decision on whether detention should be extended for the next thirty days. Three young men who were also charged with defacing the tyrant’s image with paint and assorted vegetables were threatened by prosecutors with four-month prison terms for “unruly conduct.”

With such outstanding first hand reports, the unflattering assessment by the respected French weekly political magazine “Le Point,” that “the dream of the rule of law in the heart of the Balkans is increasingly fading,” is as unsurprising as it is easily verifiable.

Mincing no words in its blazing headline, “Aleksandar Vucic, le satrape des Balkans”, so transparently damning that it does not even require a translation, having made plain that Serbia is ruled by a lawless regime, “Le Point” points out the seeming paradox that “beyond Serbia’s borders no European country dares to criticize Vučić’s abuses. There is an explanation for such diplomatic leniency. The West believes that as a leader Vučić is capable of bringing lasting peace to the heart of Europe. But how?”

“By recognizing Kosovo,” the French weekly calmly answers its own rhetorical question.

The conclusion rings true, but it is hardly a compliment from the standpoint of most Serbs.

So Vučić’s game is largely up. His measure has been taken, and he has been found wanting. His pretenses are not believed, they are merely being tolerated, and for the sake of a larger objective set by globalist power centers whose marionette he is. Once he facilitates that objective, his tolerated abuses will be turned into a lengthy indictment, the usual grim fate of satraps. (For those interested in linguistic precision, “satrap” is defined as “a provincial governor in the ancient Persian empire” or alternatively “any subordinate or local ruler.” The French are known for carefully picking their words.) Vučić will then be toast, as dispensable as used toilet paper. But if he fails to facilitate it, he will also be toast, as he very well understands. Either way, he goes down in flames with his toadies.

If you are upset, bots and trolls, spare me the invective. Earn your daily sandwich for a change by haranguing “Le Point’s” editors instead. This is their email: abo@lepoint.fr .

Tell them how they’ve got it all wrong, won’t you? And do it in impeccable French.