Saizaku

Hello, first time posting here and it's probably gonna be a long one. So anyways I was scrolling lemmy today and came across a megathread on the hexbear news community regarding Nepal. There I saw plenty of comments about Brian Berletic and eventually a link to his video about the recent regime change in Nepal. Now I know next to nothing about the situation in Nepal and haven't had the time to do proper research so I'll refrain from commenting on that. However while watching the video there was something he said that caught my attention, specifically regarding the symbol of a clenched fist that "The US has used everywhere since Serbia in 2000". Now as a Serbian who knows what happened in my own country, as well as currently heavily involved in student protests this rang some alarm bells for me. So I went to the channel to see if he had any videos about Serbia trying to get a clearer picture of his takes. And I quickly found a very recent video in which he discusses Serbia, along with Indonesia and Venezuela. Now there is a lot of misinformation, at times outright lies, which prompted me to make this post.

So let's start with one of his first arguments, and the most idiotic of which: "Young people can't organize, cause they're naive". With the proof of that being his own story about how he joined the Navy/US Army when he was young cause he was so naive and impressionable and therefore it's impossible for young people to organize properly and do something meaningful. Needless to say this is a bunch of drivel with no meaning, but it's a bit more insidious as well, cause it implies that everything that happened in Serbia in both the 90s and the year 2000, as well as what's happening now, has somehow happened overnight. That is obviously not the case. Firstly Serbia has a rich history of Student led political activism and protests. Even when we were a Monarchy a political revolutionary movement existed from 1919 to 1929 in the University of Belgrade. Than later when we were Yugoslavia we had student protests in 1968. But that's just history, now let's focus on the period of how the Milosevic regime was toppled. Namely the first protests against Milosevic happened all the way back in 1991, again led by students, which were mostly anti-war, specifically against the wars Milosevic was waging against countries trying to secede from the federation of Yugoslavia. The protests ended with the fall of the government at the time and new elections. The next bout of student protests against the Milosevic regime would come in 1996-1997, where notably Milosevic's ruling party lost the elections in Nis, the 2nd largest city at the time. At the time Milosevic refused to acknowledge the results of the elections, but was eventually forced to due to pressure from the protestors, making Nis the first "free city" at the time. Something else of note also happened back in 96-97, which wasn't public at the time, the idea for DOS (Democratic Opposition of Serbia) was born, which would later ratify as a coalition of 19 parties/organizations that defeated Milosevic's regime in the 2000 elections. During this entire time, from 1991 to 2000 opposition forces, as well as students that graduated/grew up didn't just forget about everything after the protests were formally over. No, they kept organizing and building power in preparation to eventually win elections and overthrow the the Milosevic regime. There was nothing sudden about Milosevic's fall in 2000, it was a decade long fight.

Now moving on from that, the entire basis of his argument that the fall of Milosevic was a color revolution, is a single NYT article about how Otpor (one of the organizations in DOS) was funded by NED. Now there is little I can do to verify or refute the arguments of that specific article, however Brian tries to portray Otpor as much more influential than it was. Otpor was founded in 1998, some if it were students who once protested and some of it were young people who wanted to join the fight. Regardless Otpor was one of the many movements that sprung up after the various student protests, but it wasn't the entire movement, nor was it the majority, nor was it the driving force behind the fall of Milosevic. In the 2000 elections, when DOS won, Otpor had 1 seat in the parliament ( out of 250), and in the subsequent elections held in 2003 where they went independent, they had 0 seats and dissolved shortly after in 2004.

There were however a couple more things of note that happened before Milosevic fell. In 1998, a new Law of Public Information was proposed by Aleksandar Vucic, the current president of Serbia and Minister of Information at the time, and passed in the parliament. The law dictated enormous fines (in the hundreds of thousands of euro) for publishing information that endangered stability ( completely open to interpretation). Not only that, it required the fine to be paid withing 24 hours otherwise the news outlet would be shut down and the property of the outlet as well as the personal property of the owners of said outlets repossessed. Also a couple of months after the law was passed, a notable opposition journalist Slavko Curuvija was assassinated by the state. Of course the impact of the NATO bombing in 1999 also can't be understated. Without diving too deep into what lead into it (cause this post would become even longer), the prelude to the bombing was that Milosevic sent the army and tanks to Kosovo with the idea to expel ethnic Albanians from the territory, which thus led to the NATO bombing, forming of KFOR, mass emigration of ethnic Serbs from the region and in general loss of influence that the Serbian state had in the region. Another notable law was also passed in 1998, which abolished the Autonomy of Universities, granted by our constitution, without a referendum, which is legally necessary in order to change the constitution. Along that the state put their own people in charge of universities and all the faculties in order to deal with the students. The Autonomy of Universities is a big deal here and is the main reason why the protests against authoritarian regimes here have been student led. Cause Universities provide a safe haven from police retribution. All of the students protestors basically lived in University buildings during the protests cause the police couldn't just barge in unless someone's life was actively in danger or they were called by the Dean.

Worth mentioning is that the living conditions during Milosevic were absolutely miserable, inflation was rampant, to the point that you could still find 5 billion RSD (~5 million USD with current exchange rates) bills from the time, which could buy you a loaf of bread and some milk. People would receive their monthly pay in the morning only for it to become worthless by the end of the day, with various basic products such as coffee being completely unavailable. On top of all of that the state closely worked with various criminal clans. In fact the new Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic elected in 2000., was assassinated in 2003 in a joint operation of the criminal Zemun Clan and parts of the JSO (Jedinica za Speciajalne Operacije/Special Operations Unit) shortly after he established a Special Persecution office for organized crime. Now Brian's narrative would lead you to believe that they were freedom fighters trying to take out the US puppet regime.

Now I could go way more into depth about this period of my country but I feel like I've sufficiently covered it for now. I feel like it's also important to get familiar with Aleksandar Vucic himself. At the time of Milosevic he was a member of the Serbian Radical Party, an ultra nationalist, far right party. The person who during the 2000s, before getting back to power, was calling Ratko Mladic, the general responsible for the Bosnian Genocide, a Serbian Hero. The person who in the parliament once said "For every Serb killed we'll kill hundreds of Muslims. So let's see if they like it." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGqv9CJbd3U). The President of said party was, and to this day is Vojislav Seselj, the author of the aforementioned law abolishing the Autonomy of Universities and an equally disgusting human being. Now in his video Brian says how people have tried to convince him that "Vucic is bad or w/e, blah blah", which shows to me that he is either completely uninformed or has malicious intentions.

Let's fast forward to 2012., Tomislav Nikolic and Aleksandar Vucic leave the Serbian Radical Party ( while Seselj was still in the Hauge on trial) to form the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS - Srpska Napredna Stranka). Obviously the party wasn't progressive, it was still very right wing, but they move more towards neoliberalism with less emphasis on outright ultra-nationalism. People also rightfully characterize him as a western puppet which Brian simply dismisses "as necessary concessions in order to balance the foreign policy of Serbia between the West and Russia". But let's look a bit into how he even came back into power in 2012. The Democratic Party, the ruling party at the time, as well as the coalition government it formed with other parties came to a roadblock during the negotiations with the EU, namely the Brussels Agreement. The agreement stipulated the abolishment of all judicial and police institutions of the Serbian government on the territory of Kosovo and recognizing the Kosovo government authorities there. They refused to sign the agreement and the Serbian progress towards joining the EU was halted. Suddenly a new campaign made its way onto the mainstream media - the "white ballots" (aka empty/invalid ballots). It was an organized effort, by the intellectual/political elite in the country with ties to foreign funding, to promote the idea that there wasn't any good option to vote for and the conscious and moral voters should therefore submit empty ballots. The number of invalid ballots reached record high during that election (4.6%), 4 times higher than in recent years and impacted the results of the elections. SNS (with Vucic as the vice president at the time) won the election and congratulations form UK officials on the win came hours before the voting was even closed (which is even more funny when you realize they only won by 2% and only managed to form a coalition government due to a previous coalition partner of the Democratic Party jumping ship as well). Before even forming the new government, Tomislav Nikolic and Aleksandar Vucic went to the UK, for the Queens birthday reception of all things, and met with various high officials. Not even full 9 months after forming the new government Serbia signs the Brussels Agreement in April of 2013. Now I could go on and on about the various affairs that have marked the rule of Vucic and SNS over the past 13 years, but this post is already too long. Let's look at some more recent reasons as to why people view him as a Western puppet. Namely the project "Jadar" aka the Lithium extraction project by Rio Tinto, backed by the EU. Scientists and experts in Serbia have warned that the extraction of Lithium in the region would contaminate the water sources which supply one fourth of the country with drinking water. Vucic was however determined to push this project along with backing from the EU, this sparked big protests in 2021. as well as self-organized activist groups that sabotaged the project itself.

Eventually the government was forced to temporarily suspend the project, but have since continued it with an even stronger backing from the EU (https://apnews.com/article/germany-serbia-lithium-scholz-vucic-114befbdab762c829b98616e94b99a0d). Recently Vucic has gifted the old building of the Ministry of Defense, which has been bombed by NATO in 1991 and has never been reconstructed and has been left as is as a monument and a reminder, to Trump's son in law who plans to demolish it and build a Trump Tower (luxury hotel) there. There have also been other contentious agreements regarding Kosovo signed as well but I won't go into the details now, the result is that there are no Serbian institutions on Kosovo and that it is defacto independent now. Another huge project that is also looming over our heads is EXPO 2027, a project in which the country is investing 17.8 billion EUR, while more than 70% of Serbians work for less than the average pay which is 900 EUR. During Vucic's tenure, every single project has been a front for money laundering and embezzlement. During that time the ruling party has employed various techniques to steal elections. The first of which was grabbing a firm hold of the media. In Serbia most people don't have cable, especially the older ones, they rather rely on receivers and watch TV stations that have a national frequency. The government decides which stations get a national frequency and funds those TV stations as well. No opposing voices can be heard on TV stations with a national frequency, while they constantly pump out pro Vucic propaganda. In 2024, Aleksandar Vucic has appeared live on TV 350 times, that is almost every day of the year. The level of propaganda they spew is unprecedented. They also frequently target the most vulnerable parts of our population, such as people on disability or welfare who are threatened to vote form them (and take a picture of the ballot) or they would be cut off from social support. They have routinely bought votes and it has been documented numerous times. People working in the public sector for the national minimum wage are similarly threatened. Of course various protest movements have sprung up as well as died down during his 13 years of rule. Now I've personally been protesting since I was in high school, so the movements I've personally been a part of:

1 od 5 miliona (1 of 5 million) 2018: was a protest movement sparked by the authoritarian way of the regime, a brutal beating of one of the opposition politicians as well as an unresolved assassination of an opposition politician in Kosovo.

Protests against the governments handling of COVID19 (2020): a protest movement that was sparked from a decade long deterioration of the health sector:

• with the main emphasis on a law change that allowed doctors to work both in public healthcare institutions as well as private ones, which resulted in huge waiting lists and doctors actively telling patients they won't see them in public hospitals but they can go to their private clinic later in the day

• Party control of public healthcare institutions, effectively meaning that if you don't support the ruling party or aren't a member you can't get a job in public healthcare

• Rampant nepotism both at the public healthcare institutions, as well as in various Faculties of Medicine across the country

• Misuse of public funds meant for the maintenance and the betterment of the various healthcare instiutions

• Miserable wages - nurses in the public sector make 725 EUR per month, a whopping 100 EUR below the national average

All of this culminated during COVID where the government at first minimized it completely, bringing out quack doctors that are members of their party to make statements such as, and I quote, "This is a nation that survived Ottoman rule and NATO bombing, don't worry, you'll be fine, go to Milan (Italy) for shopping. Which exacerbated the problems with our already collapsing healthcare system, which didn't have the resources to deal with the pandemic. The government was hiding the number of people that died while healthcare workers were blowing the whistle on it and were either fired or threatened in various ways. In certain months we had about 4 thousand people dying per day according to official numbers, the true number is still unknown.

Srbija Protiv Nasilja - Serbia Against Violence (2023) was a movement that was sparked by a school shooting (a first here) in Belgrade. The criminal regime has normalized violence and violent rhetoric over the 10 years that they've been in power at the time. The protest also focused on inadequate resources for people struggling with mental health. In the entirety of Serbia, in the public health sector there are only 123 employed psychologists. This protest culminated in another stolen parliamentary elections in December of 2023.

I've also been involved in various smaller protests and leftist organizing but I'll leave that aside for now.

Then we get to the current student led protests. Sparked by a deadly canopy collapse at a railway station in Novi Sad in November of last year, which killed 16 people. The railway station (including the canopy) was reconstructed only a month prior to its collapse. Now I say sparked because the issues just keep mounting on and on, this is just straw that broke the camel's back. This is far from the first instance of corruption leading to a deadly outcome under Vucic, we've had big construction companies close to Vucic operating with impunity and with no regard for labor safety laws which resulted in deaths of workers. We've had railway workers dying due to ignoring safety laws. The list goes on. This incident would have likely fizzled out as well, however when the students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (might be a wrong translation ngl) were out on the street observing 14 (the number of victims at the time) minutes of silence, the government sent their criminal thugs, along with high ranking people from the Municipality of New Belgrade, including it's president, to attack them and beat them up, cause they wanted the incident out of the public eye as soon as possible. That was their biggest mistakes this led to students all over the country organizing blockades of their Faculties and Universities, organizing into plenary session and begging massive protests. Within one month all of the public Universities (as wells most of the private ones) were in blockades.

Now I'd like to address some of the other stuff he says in the video. Such as "Yeah this youths just suddenly organized and go into the streets to burn their own country down, this is obviously a colored revolution". Firstly this is an outright lie, there has been no violence at our protests, no burning, no smashing anything, up until a month ago. I'd also like to point out that we've been actively protesting for 10 and a half months. There has been recent escalation however there has still been no burning of anything, the only thing that was smashed were empty SNS premises in some towns. And that escalation only happened after months of police brutality, along with the policy using sonic weapons on us during the 16 minutes of silence on the biggest protest yet on 15th of march 2025. And even after that, the protests remained peaceful. Along with brutal beatings of students by their criminal goons (broken jaws, heads split open, running students over with cars during intersection blockades observing 16 minutes of silence). The recent escalation came cause of an incident in Vrbas, where SNS activists started shooting fireworks and various other pyrotechnics at the protesters while being protected by the police and noone was arrested. Not to mention frequent arrests, bogus charges and threatening calls from the police and BIA(Bezbedonosno Informaciona Agancija - Security Intelligence Agency). And after the brutal repression the most of the escalation was some smashed up empty SNS premises and some smoke bombs thrown at the police in self-defense.

Pictures from the protest on the 15th of March 2025. (note the smoke and fire you see are flares, not anything burning):

So Brian is actively lying when he is saying students protestors in Serbia are burning down the country to the ground.

Now as for how we were able to organize, there are numerous factors. Namely a lot of young people in Serbia have experience with protests, at least attending them, and a decent chunk with organizing them. We organized in a decentralized anarchist manner, according to a text released by the Center for Anarchist Studies in Zagreb - The Blockade Cookbook published in 2009. It contained the various experiences of both the good and bad practices and what worked written from the experience of student protests in Zagreb in 2009. Each faculty is organized in a plenary session which make decisions as a majority vote and all of the various plenary session make up a confederation with equal voting rights each to make decisions for the movement as a whole. Since the start we have denounced all NGOs as well as political parties numerous times, much to the dismay of all of them who have even threatened us with legal action. We've done it so many times that at this point it would be beating a dead horse if we did it again. And we obviously receive no funding from the US or EU. In fact some of the faculties have even denounced EU as a whole. We've received no funding from any NGO, we are funded purely through donations and all of them are logged, both when they were made, what amount, by whom and all spending is logged as well backed by receipts.

Finally I would like to examine his actual evidence, which is one guardian article that was somewhat positive about the protests. To him this means it's a color revolution. This is complete nonsense. He also shows that NED funded some projects in Serbia in 2024, the NED is constantly funding projects in every single country on the planet that doesn't mean that any actual resistance to the regimes in those countries is automatically a US backed coup. He later shows some press organizations in Serbia and shows how they received funding from the US and the EU as some sort of proof, while conveniently ignoring that they are also receiving funding from the Serbian Government and other organizations that have nothing to do with the US. Ultimately he fails to make any connection between the protests in Serbia and the US, but characterizes them as a colored revolution because of one Guardian article.