Srdjan Cvijić, President of the International Advisory Committee of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, Serbia, on the Panel “Countering Authoritarianism”, at the Conference “Defending Democracy and Human Rights”, December 12, 2024 Skopje.
In my country, concretely, for almost 10 years, we do not have media freedom. Practically all television stations with a national frequency are controlled by the government and by the president himself. Only less than 10 percent of the share is held by independent television stations that are basically on cable only. And in Serbia, still, the majority of the people get their information through the public service, through the TVs with national frequency, and this is what shapes their minds about what we were talking about.
The second thing is – we refer to these regimes as competitive authoritarianism. This is one of the terms used. But they are not competitive. Serbia is not competitive since December last year. In December last year, the ruling party bussed tens of thousands of people from Bosnia and Herzegovina to vote in the Belgrade elections and in other elections. And I took this publication because I think you had this in 2014 in this country. So, it’s just, I think, yes, been there, done that. I think that maybe you would beg to differ, but I think in my country, it was done on steroids in comparison to 2014 here, but I might be wrong on that one.
And lastly, since August this year, if not before, we do not have, or at least the freedom of assembly is threatened in a serious manner. And I think these things then come together because how we look at these particular type of regimes that we sometimes call competitive authoritarianism, hybrid regimes, they’re not separate types of regimes. They’re just in a process that is going towards complete authoritarianism and you can’t stop it with a snap.
Now, on media literacy, the ambassador mentioned something about Serbia. I think that’s an interesting case. Actually, it is not Russia to be blamed for the way in which Serbian people think about the world, their own country, relations with other countries in the region. Their minds are shaped by the media machine of the ruling party in Serbia.
And why am I underlying this? You may call the ruling party in Serbia useful idiots. We talked about it before, but I think it’s deeper than that. This distinction needs to be made because our president was just received by the German chancellor as a legitimate partner in Germany because, yes, we do have lithium that everybody wants and then our competitive authoritarianism is considered, well, kind of more acceptable. So, I think this is a big problem that we have right now.
And I want to mention a research that is really interesting, that explains what I am saying, that it is the Serbian media machine that actually shapes hearts and minds of the people when they think about the war in Ukraine because this is what we discussed.
Basically in 2022, Open Society Foundations and the UK-based organization Data Praxis, they did a big global public opinion survey in numerous countries of the world. I think that there were more than 20 countries and Serbia was amongst them. They didn’t publish the data on the war in Ukraine and Serbia in particular in their own publication, but my think tank was given access to the raw data of this research. So, we published in cooperation with them a separate type of research, a separate publication called Beyond Sputnik and RT. And it explains that Serbia is a global outlier in pro-Russian narratives. And so, for example, responding to the question, “Who do citizens think is responsible for the beginning of the war in Ukraine?” And the options offered were Ukraine, Russia, the West, and I don’t know. Well, 63% of Serbs think it’s the West.
Well, here as well same and I think probably because you are enormous consumers of TV Happy, TV Pink from Serbia and probably there are other reasons, but I think this is a very important reason why this is so in Macedonia as well.
But now, interestingly, an answer to another question: How does the war, I’m paraphrasing, but how does the war in Ukraine end? And there were several answers offered as option. One of them was Ukraine should give part of its territory that Russia currently controls, so to have a ceasefire and peace talks and so on. The other one was that Russia should withdraw from all territories that it occupied. And interestingly, on average, when you look at the global south, that on the first question was weaker than Serbia, but you know kind of there, 57% of the global south do not agree with the statement that Russia should leave all the territories of Ukraine. In Serbia not, only 12% agree.
So, why is this? You cannot say that there is more Russian propaganda in Serbia than in Moldova for example, because Moldova in this research was not agreeing with this statement by far. And interestingly we also, well, at least a majority of the Serbs think that parts of our territory were taken in the past as well.
So, how this paradoxical result here that they think that you know it’s okay to take Ukrainian territory but not theirs and this is something that we have been talking about. It’s not about the truth. It’s about emotions. And why Serbs are pro-Russian? It’s not because they know anything about Russia or that they really like Russia. They like Russia not because of what it is, but because of what it is not. And it is not the West. And I think this is the point of departure and this explains why the lady was you know that you mentioned was talking like that.
And the question is how do we get to the heart? How do we get to change that? You know this is a big puzzle, but I don’t know to what extent are you following the situation in Serbia. We have a huge mobilization of students currently and I think you know they’re managing, I think they’re managing quite well to do that actually right now, to address power in a way that politicians and maybe traditional civil society that we are we haven’t been able to until now.
D. T.
Camera: Atanas Petrovski/ Igor Chadinovski
Editing: Arian Mehmeti
Photo: Robert Atanasovski/CIVIL
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