Welcome to the ONE CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. ONE CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of Foreign Relations.
To contact the show, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.dubbacivilaffairsassoci.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Please welcome back Sam Cooper of the Bureau as he interviews Adam Zebo, who is an independent journalist covering the protests in Serbia. Today we're joined by independent journalist Adam Zevo, who's done brilliant reporting for the Bureau and many other Canadian news outlets about Canada's safer supply
opioid programs. He led the way for the past couple of years, exposing how these safer supply programs intended to save lives were hijacked by organized crime, making the fentanyl crisis even worse. And these programs are now being rolled back. So tremendous credit to Adam for his brave research there. And he's continuing his international journalism work. He's on the ground in Serbia, where historic student LED protests are shaking the foundations of what some have
been calling a mafia. State. Something like 300,000 people at the peak have been on the streets in Serbia challenging corruption, challenging how the state is coming apart at the seams and hurting students. So Adam, you're there. Without diving into the history, just tell us what you're seeing on the ground right now. What I'm seeing on the ground right now is a sense of optimism that Serbia has not seen in years.
And I do want to clarify that I'm ethnically Serbian and I've traveled here quite often since 2018. Serbia is a country that has struggled with deep seated corruption since the 1990s if not longer and essentially most of the institutions have been Co opted by the mafia. People do refer to Serbia as a mafia state. As a result of this corruption living standards had stagnated and Serbia is being left behind and a large number of people
have emigrated. I think about 25% of former Yugoslavia has moved away since the 90s. And this all came to a head back in November when a train station in Novisad, which is the second largest city in Serbia, partially collapsed. So there was a concrete canopy and it fell and it killed about 16 people. And that raised a lot of concerns because the train station actually just been renovated as part of a Chinese
belt and Rd. initiative. So China wants to build high speed rail between Budapest and Athens and Novisa den Belgrade. That was the initial test run. And that was something that people used every single day. It was an incredible piece of infrastructure. It was the regime's main victory when it came to renewing Serbia. Everyone loved it. And a few months after the station reopened, all of a
sudden you have 16 people dying. Now, as with any kind of corrupt regime, the president, Alexander Vucic, was very slow in responding, providing any real accountability. And so they did some kind of like, fake arrest for one of the ministers who signed off on this. And he was released shortly afterwards. And because of the fact that he didn't seem to face any real consequences and no one else seemed to face any real consequences, and the procurement contracts for this
station remained private. All of a sudden, these protesters came and had vigils and, you know, blockades in the El Visad. And had the government just left these people alone, it's likely that the movement would have fizzled out after a few weeks or a few months. But that's not how things work in Serbia. This is a very corrupt country. So in mid November, a whole bunch of masked thugs came and started beating these protesters. I think some of them had
baseball bats. And then on top of that, you had some cars that would actually ram into the protesters. And so that didn't actually suppress the protests. In fact, it just inflamed the situation further. And as a result, all of these Serbians realized that they had enough of corruption, They had enough of this regime, which is quite authoritarian, that is undermining democratic institutions for over a decade now.
And they began to support the students to the point that in December, 100,000 people marched in the streets of Belgrade, which was the largest protest in the country's history up until that point. And so things continue to intensify because these attacks against the protesters continued. While I was here, 1 protester got stabbed in southern Serbia by another one of these strange
mysterious mass goons. So you know that I look at the Belton Rd. I look at Hong Kong and mask thugs stepping into democracy protests. And so let's step back. One second Mafia state. My understanding we're talking about some states in Europe. I believe at the end of the day we'll have to say China, North Korea, people would say Russia, Latin America. We have a senior ministers, if not the very top that have a support from organized crime and may even be directing organized
crime. Is that your definition of what we're talking about here? Oh, absolutely. And this is where I think Serbia actually fits very neatly into the work that you've been doing about how authoritarian regimes outsource a lot of their dirty work to organize gang. So the Vucic regime is coming into power in 2012, 2014 ish.
They really maintain close relationships with top criminal leaders in Serbia. And the way that this all works in Serbia is that many of these organized criminals are often part of soccer groups, and they often do soccer games and then they organize amongst each other at the games. So there's an intersection between the soccer hooligans, the organized criminals, and the top level ministers of this
government. And so it's common knowledge here that organized crime works hand in hand with the governments. And that's something which really became a scandal about five years ago when one major Serbian mafia boss was hauled into a trial. And his his story was sensational.
He managed a House of horrors about one hour to the east of Belgrade. And there he would take was victims and they would torture them, dismember them and then put them through an industrial scale meat grinder and then take the remains, put that into bags, need to throw that in the Danube River or burn all of the victims possession. So it was really gory. And even though Serbia is a pretty intense country where horrible things happened quite often, this was something that stood out.
And then this guy basically testified that his crime group had been put together at the direction of Alexander Vucic, the president, and did his bidding. Now Vucic of course denied that, but no one believes him. OK, let me ask the Belton Rd. So I've written a lot about this. We have Peru, Panama, British Columbia, the global S These are jurisdictions and of course British Columbia shouldn't be one of them, but is. But they welcome on paper cheap Chinese loans to finance
infrastructure. China gets port access. China is on the surface making a country standard of living rise. But a metaphor is that a train station, the roof will collapse five years, 10 years later if we really see the end game here, China owns your critical infrastructure, essentially, and they're corrupting your officials. Is this how you see it and what's going on there?
Absolutely, but I do want to stress that the situation in Serbia is rather unique because Serbia is at a crossroads between the East and West and Vucic has been really good at doing the strategy which in Serbia is referred to as sitting on 2 chairs. So in the early 2000 tens he really emphasized his desire to integrate Serbia into the EU, which many Serbians found suspect because which each is a very well known figure in Serbian politics.
He was the minister of information in the last years of the Milosevic regime in the 90s and during that period journalists and yet murdered. He was a far right hyper nationalist radical who rebranded as a Europhile and for some reason the EU bureaucrats bought it and they said OK, Serbia will make low reforms and then eventually we will review this membership and potentially integrate Serbia into the EU at
some point in the future. But what which each would do is he would say, OK, well if you disrespect me, I'm also going to maintain relationships with Russia and China and I can go to them if I want to. So he was in the sides against each other, but by the early twenty 20s he really abandoned any pretense of wanting to integrate Serbia into the EU.
And so EU politicians have kind of just accepted it because from their perspective, as long as which each can keep Serbia stable, then that's OK. We'll accept democratic backsliding, we'll accept as authoritarianism, we'll accept the corruption, just so long as the Balkans doesn't blow up again. Now, looping back, Russia obviously has a strong influence in Serbia, partially because of a close sense of cultural affinity.
Many Serbians are more socially conservative, more religious, and they're Eastern Orthodox. And so they feel a kinship with Russia, particularly under Vladimir Putin, ever since Putin began to emphasize religiosity and social conservatism in his politics. Then on top of that, they view Russia as being one of the few countries that stood up for Serbia in the 90s. So that's a really complicated story that we're not going to get into.
But Russia doesn't have the economic resources to invest into Serbia in the same way that China does. So China has recently emerged as a very powerful figure in Serbia. Between 2017 and 2022, the amount of direct foreign investment coming into Serbia from China increased tenfold. They began to build all sorts of large infrastructure, like this train station and this railway. They purchased one of the largest steel factories in Serbia, in a small town called Smetherville.
And they often brought in Chinese labor to make this infrastructure. So you wouldn't see economic benefits for the average Serbian because they're not getting jobs out of it. So there is an increasing anxiety among some Serbians, especially in civil society, that China is luring Serbia into a form of debt trap diplomacy, as we've seen in these other countries, and that the benefits will be concentrated within the local corrupt elites and that everyday Serbians won't actually benefit.
And then they'll find in 1020 years that they've effectively signed away parts of their sovereignty. What's it like just as a journalist on the ground there? I mean, you're talking about masked thugs likely are sponsored by the government and would be mafia elements used just as in Hong Kong when sort of the white shirt thugs go into the democracy protesters. So is there a danger element for you on the ground as a journalist there?
Yes, to a certain degree. I mean, I'm very fortunate in that I haven't seen any violence in any of the protests that I've attended. So I arrived around March 21st and that big protest with 300,000 people happened on March 15th. And then that protest was really messed up because the protesters anticipated that there would be some major provocation by the government.
And of course, there was a giant group of masked thugs who went to try to attack the students, but they were protected by a combination of Serbian bikers and Serbian veterans. So the biker community actually provides a lot of security to these student protests. But the biker community in Serbia is not the same as it is in North America. I mean, a small segment of them are associated with crime and
drugs. But for the most part, these are just biker enthusiasts who like the sense of family that comes with this. They'll have 20,000 bikers meet once a year or a few times a year. So these are the guys who are in their 30s, forties, 50s, masculine Bros who just like going throughout the mountains,
throughout the countryside. And The thing is that many of their kids are in these protests, and they've been moved by the purity of these protests because the protesters have been unaffiliated with any of the opposition parties, because the opposition parties are corrupt. Protesters have been really a polite, really orderly. So the biker said, you know what, we believe that this protest is different from the previous ones, so we're going to protect that.
So looping back, when those hooligans attack, there are people there to intercept them. And that's really important. However, the reason why the Serbian protests were widely reported on last month is that the government used a prohibited sound cannon against a crowd of protesters. And these protesters weren't doing anything violent. They were literally just in the middle of a moment of silence to commemorate the victims of the Novi Sod disaster.
So a sound cannon uses incredibly loud noise to induce pain, nausea, headaches, and that caused a wide panic. And so that infuriated people and actually further galvanized the protest movement. And I think because of that, the butchered government has been a bit more careful with what kind of provocations they want to engage with because it's pretty clear that the more they attack these protesters, the more public support protesters receive.
And so me coming after March 15th, I've been a beneficiary of that trend. That being said, I know that the government is organizing a mass pro government protest. And the people who are going to be there are probably going to be public sector workers who are told that they're fired if they don't attend, or old Serbians who don't have access to anything aside from regime propaganda, because the media here is highly censored and I am concerned about potential violence there. Right.
So where to from here politically? Which its government is destabilized or do they have a very strong response? And what's on the horizon? Yeah, when you have 300,000 people on the streets of Belgrade, I really want to stress that this is the country of 6.5 million peoples. I think right now there is a lot of anxiety about where the student movement might go.
And there's a very real chance, but it might be some kind of revolution in Serbia or a regime change, which would be great because everyone here hates Fuchi. But I'm going to give you a bit of background. So the students, when they started their moving back in November, they said, OK, we're not going to be political. We're just going to be against corruption as a general concept.
And we're going to ask that our institutions work because we're going to argue that if our institutions work, it doesn't matter which government is in place. And by not associating with the opposition and trying to take a, a political approach, they were able to build a large coalition of support. The supporters of the protest movement include for whatever part of Serbian society you're from, you'll support the protests because they're against
corruption. To give you another example, you know, you have these bikers and you even have drag Queens who support the protests like everyone. And then they released 4 demands. And the four demands were essentially OK. You need to release the procurement documents for the train station. You need to drop charges for any of the students who've been arrested so far. You need to investigate and charge the people who assaulted the student protesters at the beginning of this movement.
And you need a + 20% increase in the overall higher education budget. And that seems kind of tacked on. So all of that is great. But at this point, we're not sure where everything is going.
So the opposition has said, OK, well, we propose the creation of the interim government of technical experts, apolitical technocrats who can implement reforms over the course of a few months and eventually allow for free and fair elections, which he just said that he has sworn on his life that that will not happen, but he sworn his life on a whole bunch of other things. Was hard to say if that's true, but he's very hostile to that.
So this creates A dilemma. The students don't want to get political, so they don't want to work with any of the opposition parties. They don't want to create their own party right now. I've heard some rumors that they're planning on it, but as of now they haven't done that. So they don't have any Ave. into the political arena. So if an election does happen, how are they going to make their voices heard? What does that look like?
Then on top of that, the Serbian election is supposed to happen in 2027. So their movement might fizzle out by that point. But if they press for an interim government or for early elections, and which each doesn't want to do that, well, what can they do to force them to do these things? So you have an authoritarian who doesn't want to step aside, who might not want to have an early election, who might not want to see power to an interim
government. Well, then you create the conditions for some kind of revolutionary behavior, whatever that looks like. And this is where people debates about what the future could be. Some people believe that the students don't have a concrete plan and that this will fizzle out in the future. Some people believe that there's sufficient public pressure for Vucic to accept some kind of early election. And some people think, well, what if this just descends into violence in the future?
We don't know. Now I did mention who earlier and I want to say here that as with any kind of authoritarian from the very outs, that's Vucic and his allies have tried to frame this as a color revolution. So since about December, they've said that the students are Western puppets who are controlled by them. They never specify who these external actors are.
And so that narrative has been really emphasized in the regime controlled media and has also been repeated by China and Russia. And so that also complicates things too. So if you're an older Serbian or if you're a poor Serbian and you're not in a place where you can get independent media, all you're seeing is this regime propaganda that is portraying the students as CIA puppets who are drug users and they're all rich kids. So that's those are some of the main narratives being used.
And it's really concerning to see this kind of information warfare and to see how apparatus of censorship has been established in a country that technically forbids censorship and its constitution. For these older generations that would only have access to that state media, are they completely on board with that or are they having in person coffee house conversations where the kids are all right? Or is it completely like a young generation versus older?
Older is kind of not buying this organic protest narrative. So for many of these older Serbians, I don't think they fully understand the extent to which their information diet has been controlled by the States. However, the students did something really intelligent back in February that really ensured that rural areas understood that they are not
some evil villains. So starting around late January, the students started actually marching between different cities, started with them going from Belgrade to Novi Sad, and then they would go to other main cities. And so they would walk day after day after day for hundreds of kilometers, stopping by little Serbian villages and Serbians. They have a really big hospitality culture.
So you have all these videos of the students passing through small villages and then out would come these old grandmothers and grandfathers who live very difficult lives. Serbia is a poor country in general, and a rural Serbia is a very difficult place to live in. So they have very little. And what little they had, they would give to the students. Food, water, free accommodation. And so by meeting the students, they realized that the students were not drug addicts, that they
were not CIA puppets. And that helped build broad national support for the student movement. Like literally what the students did is they like walked throughout the country to engage with people one-on-one. Thanks. So, Adam, thanks so much. I'll look forward to your continuing reports from there and in other areas. Well, thanks for having me on the show. It's always great to talk with you. Thanks for listening.
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