Serbia Needs a Revolutionary Cadre, Give it any name you like.
Serbia is turning against the government after a series of alleged election frauds, holding elections despite an outbreak of coronavirus, and the announcement of a new lock down.
By Joshua Tartakovsky, 8 July 2020
Pictures by Joshua Tartakovsky
Serbia is once again at a critical moment. Last night, Tuesday July 7, masses attended a protest facing the Serbian parliament in the capital, Belgrade. However, they were not content with just protesting. They climbed up the stairs leading into the parliament. Some of them even pushed their way inside.
Then the reaction came. The police started to push back. Protesters went back to the plaza. A lot of tear gas. Constant street battles. The battles lasted for hours with the protesters refusing to relent.
Popular calls: Vukcic [the country’s president] is a traitor, Vukcic resign. Vukcic is an Albanian.
The reason for the protests are quite clear. Or are they? The President announced there will be a new lock down to be imposed on Friday for the entire weekend. This was due to the high number of coronavirus cases and the genuine concern that hospitals will be overwhelmed. The current cases stand at 16, 719 according to Johns Hopkins University in a country of 6. 9 million people.
People see contradictions in the system. Why did the president allow for the parliamentary elections to take place on June 21, 2020, while nearly all health experts warned against it, saying elections should be postponed, as allowing them to unfold will cause greater infections? The President went ahead with the elections anyway, ignoring the warning. His party scored over 60% of the vote. But coronavirus has been spreading since. People are wondering: Why did the president allow for a major football game between Partizan and Red Star to take place on June 11, 10 days prior to the elections, (the result was 1-0 in favor of Partizan) when health officials warned that such a wide attendance of 25, 000 people may cause the spread of coronavirus? Is it possible that the president, in an act of supreme arrogance and short sightedness, wanted to show off to the country and buy them out before the elections? And now he decided on a lock down once again? Just recently Vukcic was booed by medical workers in Novi Pazar.
This latest mishap is the last one in a chain of incidents. Some criticise the President for declaring an emergency situation with Covid-19 only after enough signatures were collected for carrying out parliamentary elections. They say that the government covered up Covid-19 cases initially, resulting in a larger problem later on.
Added to the health concern were additional factors. The number of the ballots counted in the parliamentary elections – physical ballots – did not match the official reports at all. Did widespread fraud take place? It would appear so.
On the other hand, despite the victory for the incumbent’s party, Kosovo president Thaci was unexpectedly accused of war crimes. The accusation came from the International Criminal Court itself, a body that was historically unfriendly to the Serbian people. It may have been pushed by Germany as a counter offer to US President Trump’s pressure via his emissary Grenell, to solve the Kosovo issue once and for all by having Serbia recognizer the breakaway region. German, some argue, would like to see Kosovo join the EU but it would not like to see it join the EU. But this latest move by the ICC frustrated the Americans’ plans. It meant that the anticipated meeting in the White House between Vukcic, Thaci and Trump, scheduled for June 27 had to be postponed. Now, all are awaiting the upcoming visit of Grenell to Serbia.
Back to the protests. The protesters, of all walks of life, and of all political streams, battled the police for hours. Police cars were made to burn. But, there was no unified group that had all the protesters under one umbrella, with a clear agenda. Even if the protesters would have managed to take control over the Parliament, what next? Who will lead? What would be the platform? In such a scenario, only the most disciplined, organized, rational, common sensical and collaborative cadre could take over and assume power.
The protest has strong representation, apparently, from both the far-right and the far-left. But Serbia definitely needs a revolutionary movement. Whether from the left or the right, the young people need to move beyond operating as individual atoms and join forces together for the common goal. In a future balance of forces, the slightly stronger side will win. Julius Evola famously said that ”the blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.” But, without a philosophy, without philosophers, without thinkers, what will protesters do once and if they assume power?
Meanwhile, the Serbian government may be hoping the protesters continue to protest but never unite, until they tire out. A disunited group cannot possibly achieve anything, at the end of the day. Vladimir Lenin famously wrote in What is to be Done that a revolutionary party is needed to spread political ideas among the workers. But, once people are already protesting, is a political party, composed of educated or street-smart leaders, not needed to assume power? If there is no organized people who can assume power, and who know what they want, what we will be left with is true anarchy, the goal of some.
That protests were were held also in Novi Sad shows that the disgust with the existing president is wide spread. Indeed, he was recently booed out of one of the hotspots.
For now, the lesson of Serbia teaches us that populism can also mean removing a lock down and letting people to get infected in a short sighted act of populism of allowing a football match to run its course.
