A Failed Coup in Serbia?

On December 17th 2023, Serbs voted in a snap general election. The result was President Aleksandar Vucic’s ruling SNS coalition regained its parliamentary majority. Immediately, pro-Western, liberal opposition party Serbia Against Violence (SPN) declared widespread fraud in the government’s favour, and committed to convening protests around government buildings in Belgrade until authorities agreed to hold a new election.

Thousands took to the streets of the capital, night after night. This culminated on December 24th with protesters, led by SPN chiefs, attempting to forcibly gain access to Belgrade city hall, in scenes evocative of January 6th in Washington DC. Quite what they hoped to achieve by breaching the building is unclear, but in a hugely symbolic twist, they were unable to do so, and fought back by riot police. Around three dozen attendees were arrested for vandalism and violence. 

The city subsequently remained peaceful and calm. Yet, these rather trivial events were widely exploited by a variety of domestic and international actors to support conflicting narratives, thereafter. For example, Russian state media has framed the disturbance as a Maidan 2.0 in the making, which Russian President Vladimir Putin personally averted, by warning Vucic Western-sponsored actors were plotting sedition. 

Vucic touted this alleged intervention as decisive, playing into his persona as close Kremlin confidante, and defender of Serbs from foreign incursions. In reality, the protests were widely publicised in advance, overseas sponsorship of groups and individuals involved was openly advertised, and there was zero prospect of demonstrators achieving their goals, let alone unseating the President. As such, there was seemingly nothing to warn of.

One wouldn’t have known that from Western media reporting on the non-events though, or the hysterical chorus of foreign “think tank” pundits, who claimed a revolution was dawning in Serbia. They grossly exaggerated protest crowd sizes, while openly fantasising about the downfall of Vucic - who they branded a Kremlin confidante, and Putin clone. In doing so, they perpetuated the false myth of eternal Serbian-Russian brotherhood, as Belgrade is on the verge of incorporation into the EU and NATO, despite widespread public opposition.

The truth of what happened is at once more anodyne, and more sinister, than any of these narratives suggest. In reality, Serbia’s Western-backed opposition tried to take on Belgrade’s Western-backed government, but failed, because their foreign sponsors did not want them to succeed. The only victor was the US Empire. And the ultimate victims are the Serb public.

Revolution by Marketing

While Serbia may be small, it is of enormous geopolitical significance. Throughout its history, multiple major powers have without success attempted to subjugate the nation. During the 1990s, relentless media demonisation, Western-supported proxy wars in the former Yugoslavia, crippling international sanctions, an illegal 78-day-long NATO bombing campaign, and US-orchestrated coup immediately following that awful decade, were all ultimately concerned with achieving that end, for the Empire’s benefit.

After NATO criminally bombed Belgrade for 78 consecutive days from late March 1999 onwards, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was ripe for removal. Accordingly, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US regime change agency that avowedly does overtly what the CIA once did covertly, USAID, and other US government entities - including the CIA - pumped tens of millions of dollars into ensuring his defeat in Yugoslavia’s September 2000 election.

As a Washington Post investigation documented in extraordinary detail in December that year, US advertising supremos who typically marketed chewing gum and soda pop were employed with brainstorming catchy slogans, PR stunts, and other innovative communications strategies to undermine Milosevic. Extensive opinion polling and countless focus groups were secretly conducted to road test and perfect campaign strategies in real-time.

Concurrently, scores of parliamentary candidates and activists were covertly coached in the art of staying “on message”, to field questions from journalists, and rebut the arguments of Milosevic supporters. Extensive training and support were likewise provided to student activist collective Otpor (Serbian for “Resistance”). They learned how to organise strikes and protests, communicate via symbols, “overcome fear,” and undermine state authority via disruptive, non-violent means.

USAID provided 5,000 cans of spray paint for student activists to daub anti-Milosevic graffiti across Yugoslavia. Otpor meanwhile employed “a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising” on Washington’s dime. All the group’s messaging was informed by US-financed polling, which meant “at every moment, we knew what to say to the people,” one of the group’s activists boasted. As an Otpor leader explained in 2005:

“Our idea was to use corporate branding in politics. The movement has to have a marketing department. We took Coca-Cola as our model.”

When the election’s official results were announced, pointing to Milosevic’s victory, mass strikes spread throughout the country, while riots engulfed Belgrade. Otpor was at the forefront, claiming industrial scale electoral fraud. Such was the groundswell, the President resigned in October. Six months later, he was transferred to The Hague to stand trial for alleged war crimes. Washington threatened to withhold financial aid from Yugoslavia if he remained at liberty. Milosevic died in custody in March 2006, before his trial concluded. The aid never materialised.

Milosevic’s downfall is dubbed the “Bulldozer Revolution”, due to iconic scenes during the much-publicised unrest of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings, and shield activists from police bullets. In a perversely ironic twist though, its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”. Subsequent Western-imposed privatisation decimated Yugoslavia’s economy, causing his successful independent business to fail and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meagre state welfare payments.

Stage-Managed Maidan

The legacy of the 1990s, and NED’s brazen actions, loom large today in Serbia. These events produced enduring national trauma, and widespread distrust of foreign meddling in Belgrade’s affairs, among the overwhelming majority of the population. Serbs also witnessed the same techniques of regime change used against them in 2000 be redeployed in a series of “color revolutions” across the former Soviet sphere, which even Western foreign policy apparatchiks admit resulted in disaster for target countries.

As such, when on December 22nd 2023 a 24-page-long report on alleged fraud in the election was published by the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, a Belgrade-based NGO, many Serbs worried Western powers were cooking up a fresh “Bulldozer”. A cursory glance at the organisation’s donors indicates why. They are a veritable rogue’s gallery of foreign foundations, intelligence agency fronts, and overseas embassies, notorious for sponsoring color revolutions. Among them, NED and USAID.

CRTA’s funders

Those fears were only reinforced by some anti-Vucic protesters openly waving banners bearing Otpor’s original logo, and in some cases the group’s name. These displays queasily nestled alongside signs written in English pleading for the West to come to the rescue, and EU flags. Such scenes were absolute anathema to many Serbs, greatly diminishing already limited sympathy for the opposition and demonstrators, while eliciting widespread calls to prevent “another Maidan” in Belgrade.

It is now abundantly clear the protests lacked anything like the popular support necessary to pressure Vucic into an election rerun, much less force him from office. Most crucially though, the opposition’s efforts were not endorsed by the US embassy in Belgrade. On December 25th, Ambassador Christopher Hill issued a firm warning to rioters to respect the election’s official results, while harshly condemning the previous night’s violence and vandalism. Serbia’s true ruler had spoken. It was time for demonstrators to go home.

However, the memo wasn’t universally received. Several Western news outlets, including the BBC, and Politico, continued to report on the unrest thereafter as if it were not only ongoing, but intensifying, and city-spanning. Articles and video packages prominently featured images and footage of protesters attacking Belgrade city hall, with little to no clarity the scenes took place on December 24th. One can only speculate whether this was deliberate.

Meanwhile, foreign social media users shared pictures of vast crowds gathered outside Serbia’s parliament, captured during protests in May, falsely claiming they were contemporaneous, and urging the EU and US to support the “revolution”. These posts in some cases generated enormous traction. Apparently those sharing them didn’t conduct reverse image searches, consult livestreams of Belgrade CCTV cameras online, or notice leaves on trees in the photos were luscious green, unambiguously indicating the scenes weren’t captured in December.

While protests did continue after Hill’s intervention, they typically attracted only a few hundred people, while a handful of students set up tents in central Belgrade in an attempt to block traffic. Parallels with the tent occupation of Ukraine’s Freedom - now Maidan - Square during Kiev’s NED-sponsored “revolution of dignity” were not lost on Serbs. These efforts were exclusively intended for Western media consumption.

Nonetheless, the extrapolative impact of these images on foreign audiences cannot be underestimated. After Maidan demonstrations erupted in Kiev in November 2013, NED financed the creation of Hromadske TV, which livestreamed the protests. Its output was recycled by many mainstream news outlets in reporting on the rebellion. Foreign audiences were led to believe, based on Hromadske’s slanted coverage, the opposition was wholly energized by concerns over human rights and democracy, and overwhelmingly - if not universally - popular.

Yet, contemporary polls showed less than 20 percent of Maidan protesters were motivated by “violations of democracy or the threat of dictatorship,” Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and there was never overwhelming public support for the uprising. In fact, “quite large majorities” opposed it, due to “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism,” rife among demonstrators, “not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.”

One student protester arrested on December 24th, branded a “political prisoner” by Serbia’s opposition and Western journalists, has since been consigned to “house arrest” in his university dormitory. In hagiographic interviews with foreign media, the flag of the Serbian Volunteer Corps, a fascist paramilitary that collaborated with Nazis during the genocidal Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, was displayed prominently on his bedroom wall.

‘Serbia’s Jerusalem’

A startling success story of Serbia’s elections, not acknowledged by the Western media, was the triumph of WE - Voice From The People, a completely new political party established just weeks before. Formed by outsiders, committed to opposing foreign influence in Belgrade, and seeking to attract voters from both the right and left, it secured seats in parliament purely off the back of social media campaigning, and town hall meetings across the country.

The President has already invited WE to join his government, which the party refused. The upstart movement has disrupted mainstream Serbian politics in other ways. On December 26th, its chief issued a statement accusing the administration and opposition of conspiring to stage the protests, in order to distract Serbs from Vucic’s quiet recognition of Kosovo government-issued vehicle licence plates one day prior.

This development may seem trifling to outside observers, but it was hugely significant. Kosovo, which remains under heavy NATO occupation, unilaterally declared independence in 2008, which successive Serbian governments have formally refused to accept. Belgrade’s constitution still categorises the province - widely regarded as “the cradle of Serb civilisation” and “Serbia’s Jerusalem” - the country’s sovereign territory. Recognition of official licence plates could de facto legitimise Pristina’s claims to be an independent state, divorced from Belgrade. It is therefore an extremely sensitive subject nationally.

Disputes over the matter in Kosovo produced a volatile situation in August 2022, with aggravated clashes between police and Serbs. Yet, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, Vucic has been consistently willing to cede ground on Kosovo to the West. It is precisely due to his malleability on the issue - and EU and NATO membership, which the overwhelming majority of Serbs oppose - that Western powers permitted his rise to President in the first place, and continue to bolster his rule.

Should a Serbian leader fail to acquiesce to the West’s demands, the consequences may be literally fatal. In 2003, Prime Minister Zoran Djindic was assassinated in broad daylight while exiting his vehicle outside government headquarters in Belgrade. Despite 11,000 arrests, several suspects convicted in absentia remain at large, and many - including Djindic’s former bodyguard, himself severely injured in the incident - believe the official narrative to be fraudulent.

Djindic entered office as Washington’s guy. He had a lengthy history of calling for total Kosovan autonomy, and it was widely expected he would obediently enquire “how high?” whenever ordered to jump by the EU and US. However, in the last months of his life, he made an abrupt volte face, openly condemning Western powers for conspiring to wrest Pristina from Belgrade’s grasp, while proposing a federal union with Serb-majority areas of neighbouring Bosnia and Montenegro.

US Empire house journal Foreign Policy doing nothing to discourage ‘conspiracy theories’ about Djindic’s assassination

In addition to providing a helpful smokescreen to rally Serbs around their government while it inches closer to recognition of Kosovo’s independence, the NED-sponsored commotion may have been a warning shot. To remind Vucic he is only in power because the West permits it, only then if he acts according to their will, and he can be replaced with a hand-picked puppet at any time if he fails in that mission.

This is precisely what happened in Georgia in March 2023. After the government announced plans to compel NGOs to disclose their sources of income, an army of NED-financed protesters threatened to overrun parliament, in direct step with pronouncements of US officials. Message received, Tbilisi dropped the legislation. But, the threat didn’t disappear. In September, authorities summoned members of Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) for questioning, after they allegedly helped coordinate a Maidan-style regime change effort, with opposition actors.

Belgrade-headquartered CANVAS evolved out of Otpor, and many of the activist group’s most prominent faces lead it today. Its website boasts of cultivating over 16,000 activists in 52 countries since its 2003 founding, and inspiring 126 “successful” political “campaigns” the world over subsequently. Leaked emails show CANVAS receives secret US funding, and its work is explicitly concerned with overthrowing governments “the US does not like.” 

We must never forget imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s appraisal of Serbia, as “where the future happens first.” Nor the maxim of Slovenian author Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut: “Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted.”

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