Serbia is in an anti-democratic alliance with Russia and China

 

 

Anti-regime demonstrators began to occupy the city center. The authorities decided to deal the strongest blow to the protests. Special police forces are deployed on the streets, armed and fully equipped, ready to apply it. Snipers of the Ministry of the Interior are deployed and waiting on the roofs of buildings. They were ordered to guard the parliament and the president's residence from the protesters. Weapons were also distributed to the batterers.

 

Demonstrators occupy the center of the capital piece by piece, state security forces open fire on almost unarmed protesters. Demonstrators fall wounded and dead, more than a dozen were killed that day. Demonstrators began occupying state institutions, prosecutor's offices and courts in other major cities during the night as well. The state vertical was collapsing at an accelerated pace, the president was waiting for a plane to escape to Russia. The opposition takes power...

 

 

These scenes, already well known to many in the last three decades, are not the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania, nor the revolutionary waves in Kyrgyzstan, nor the fiction of the bloody Serbian "6. October". But it is certainly every dictator's nightmare.

 

"Revolution of Dignity"

 

The tragic scenes of the revolution described above are known as "Bloody Thursday" on Kyiv's Maidan Independence Square, which took place ten years ago on February 20, 2014. And while the deposed Ukrainian president was flying towards Rostov-on-Don, Russia started annexing Crimea and started the first phase of the war with Ukraine.

 

In the Western Balkans, the Ukrainian revolution is called "Maidan" or "Euromaidan", and in Ukraine it is almost a national holiday called - "Revolution of Dignity". Why "dignity"? Because they didn't want to be an imperial province and a Russian colony, which today many in some Balkan states, like Serbia, would like more than anything else.

 

Why does Ukraine want to have dignity, but Serbia does not? Do the shocking surveys of public opinion in Serbia about citizens' views on Russia, the war in Ukraine and the West indicate that more than half of the respondents lack dignity? Or for a large part of Serbia, the concept of "dignity" represents something completely different?

 

The war in Ukraine only brought to the surface the deeply hidden reality of a large part of Serbia, which believes that the defeats in the wars of the 90s in Croatia, BiH and Kosovo were the result of an international conspiracy by the West and NATO against the Serbian people. This narrative is so dominant in the Serbian public that it enables nationalism to be the only and no-alternative political ideology in Serbia, Putinophilia to be a substitute for anti-Westernism, and confronting the past and crimes in the territory of the former Yugoslavia to be - tantamount to treas

 

Erased memory culture

 

In recent years, the pro-regime media in Serbia have intensively written about the international threat of "color revolutions", which comes from the West. However, the Serbian public knows little about what this is actually about.

 

In Serbia's memory culture, it is almost unknown that "colored", "colorful" or "electoral revolutions" originated in the non-violent "October 5th Revolution" in 2000, when Slobodan Milošević was overthrown. In order to restore the regime from the 90s, former radicals and socialists have been working intensively for a decade to expel "5. of October" as a savage coup d'état carried out by Western agents.

 

The date of pride in victory and celebration for the liberated state has been erased from collective memory. Forgotten are the young Otporaši, who as heroes traveled around the former Soviet republics to help their colleagues in the fight against dictators.

 

Three years after Belgrade, peaceful mass protests then became the basis of the tactics of the remaining wave of "plush rebellions" in countries whose elections were captured by pro-Russian autocrats. Revolutions in their name also get a color as a symbol of non-violence. Thus, in 2003 in Georgia during the "Rose Revolution", President Eduard Shevarnadze resigned, in 2004 in Ukraine during the "Orange Revolution" the election theft of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych was stopped, and in 2005 in Kyrgyzstan during the "Tulip Revolution" Askar fled to Moscow by plane Akayev. The US and EU countries openly supported those non-violent protests and political changes.

 

The "Revolution of Dignity" in 2014 took on the color of blood and created a new precedent, which indicates that it is not always possible to defeat violent dictators through peaceful methods. That is why Russia and China within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have prioritized the fight against any form of civil protest, pejoratively calling them pro-Western "color revolutions". Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have been aware of the risk of "plush revolutions" since the end of the 80s and are ready for a new Tiananmen.

 

The color of revolution in the hands of dictators

 

Serbia joined the coalition of anti-democratic states in the fight against "colored revolutions" in mid-2020, still in conditions of complete isolation from covid. A few months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Serbian opposition learned that at the end of 2021, the Serbian Minister of Police, Aleksandar Vulin, and the Secretary of the National Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolay Patrushev, formed a "Working Group to Combat 'Color Revolutions'" in the strictest secrecy, which has the task of to prevent mass demonstrations and to exercise constant surveillance over opposition activists, non-governmental organizations and independent journalists.

 

A few weeks ago, Vulin received even two high decorations from Putin's Russia for that "fight".

 

Listening carefully to Putin's messages, sent through Tucker Carlson's popular recent interview, the Russian president did not want to hide his frustrations over two, as he called them, "coup d'état" in Kiev: the "Orange Revolution" and the "Revolution of Dignity." The war in Ukraine is not because of the threat from NATO, but Putin started it to restore totalitarianism, legalize imperial plunder and save the throne from the "velvet" threat that sooner or later awaits Russia again.

 

In Serbia, they are working intensively under Russian and Chinese instructions to prevent "color revolutions", scaring the public from "Maidanization" and bloodshed. The Serbian opposition constantly excuses itself that it does not want a violent takeover of power, that's why the mass protest marches "Serbia against violence" looked more like a collective valve therapy.

 

Democratic societies have no problem with the specter of "colored revolutions". Dealing with the negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina, the harmonization of Serbia's foreign policy with the EU and the introduction of sanctions against Russia, Western countries ignored the main cause of all Serbia's problems - the restoration of authoritarianism. The elections in Serbia look more and more like those in Russia, and it is impossible to win the progressive regime. According to the theory of "colored rebellions", there is only one way in the fight against quasi-democratic regimes - dictators themselves choose the color of the revolution that is inevitably coming their way.