The Serbian authorities constantly point out that they are bound by an "iron friendship" with the Chinese. The loans that Serbia takes from China are presented as investments. Little is known about these loans, as well as what consequences debtors can expect if they do not return the money. It is presented to the public that all over Serbia we do business and build jointly with the Chinese, from sewerage, through ironworks, mines, smelters, tire factories, parts of highways and high-speed railways, all the way to the construction of projects related to the national stadium and Expo 2027.
Canopy of the Railway Station in Novi Sad, weighing several tons, collapsed and killed fourteen people - children, young and old. Two young people are still fighting for their lives in the intensive care unit.
That November 1, rescuers spent hours trying to separate the concrete slabs from the ground, pull out the injured and the dead. The public was first dumbfounded, then furious. It was clear - lifting a ton of concrete will reveal the dead, but even the dead are not a strong enough reason for the Government of Serbia to reveal secret contracts with Cinema.
The works on the railway station, built in 1964, in Novi Sad lasted from autumn 2021 to summer 2024 and cost 65 million euros. The reconstruction project of the Belgrade Railway Station was carried out by the Traffic Institute CIP. The contractor was the Chinese consortium CRIC&CCCC ("China Railway International Co. Ltd" and "China Communications Construction Company Ltd").
This consortium of companies, as reported by N1 television, was the general contractor for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) on the section of the Belgrade - Stara Pazova railway, responsible for the design and construction of the Belgrade - Stara Pazova railway. As the consortium itself announced in the daily newspaper "Večernje Novosti" at the beginning of 2023, the Chinese contractor is also responsible for the construction of the Novi Sad - Subotica - state border railway project.
BEFORE THE DEBRIS WAS CLEARED, IT BEGAN TO BE COVERED UP
A few hours after the accident, the Consortium of Chinese companies CRIC-CCCC announced that the concrete canopy of the railway station that collapsed in Novi Sad was not the subject of works within the reconstruction of the station, in accordance with the approved construction permit.
All the representatives of the Serbian government gave the same statement. Claims that the canopy has not been reconstructed caused a storm in the public, considering that the government claimed the exact opposite just a few months earlier when they inaugurated the same station and even made promo videos about it. Numerous videos of construction scaffolding and work on the canopy appeared in the media, it is evident that glass parts of the ceiling were added, and the reconstruction of that part of the building was witnessed by experts who participated in the works at the Railway Station.
Under the pressure of public opinion, the Minister of Construction Goran Vesić resigned. Nevertheless, it is eye-popping that the website of that ministry, even after such a tragedy, does not publish contracts with the Chinese. On the website of the Government of Serbia, among the "economic contracts and agreements", not a single one related to the construction of the railway was published.
The revolted public in Novi Sad organized demonstrations, which became violent and resulted in numerous arrests of rebellious citizens. A few days later, the parliamentary opposition organized protests in Belgrade. In addition to the citizens and the opposition demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister of Serbia, one of the demands is to remove the secrecy mark from all contracts with China.
At the time of writing, the prosecutor's office, which is conducting the investigation into the fall of the canopy, has not announced anything for almost two weeks since the accident. The state authorities of Serbia have still not presented documents on what was the subject of the works during the three-year reconstruction of that building, how much was paid for those works and who performed the works. The "absence of consent from the Chinese contracting party" is mentioned as an alleged obstacle to the publication of information.
THE LAND OF PARADISE SWORE...
When asked about the secrecy of those contracts, the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, showed the cooperation agreement concluded by the Government of Serbia in 2009 and accused the former government of secrecy with China.
"Look at the following pages with all the signatures of Mlađan Dinkić and Nikezić, you see - it is a complete document. Just so you can see that I didn't lie to you", Vučić said during a televised appearance.
The presenter was reading the documentation that the president gave him:
"According to the law on cooperation in the field of infrastructure of the Government of Serbia and the Government of the Republic of China, here are all the points and secrecy of the contract is implied."
The secrecy of the contract is valid, the president said, until the government reveals otherwise.
Opposition politician Dušan Nikezić said that the President of Serbia is lying since he was not even a member of the Government when the aforementioned annex to the contract was signed in 2009. Nikezić also states that the annex to the contract signed 15 years ago with Chinese companies is not a secret, and he read what it contained in the Parliament. He says that the document is legally binding. He reminded the current government and who made that decision.
"You know who gave legal force to this annex - it was given by your Parliament in June 2013, you personally voted for this annex which you say introduced secrecy into the agreement with China", stated Nikezic.
Transparency Serbia indicates that there is no basis for the secrecy of the contract on the reconstruction of the Railway Station in Novi Sad.
"On May 28, 2018, the Government of Serbia entrusted the work of modernizing the railway from Novi Sad to Kelebija to a consortium of two companies from the Republic of China for 1.162.810.000 dollars, without bidding. Before that, a contract was concluded with the same consortium for the section from Belgrade to Stara Pazova for over 350 million dollars. The interstate agreement from 2009 was used as the legal basis for awarding these jobs without competition, as well as the laws through which the Parliament approved credit arrangements for certain projects. That the contract concluded by the Government of Serbia and the Serbian Railway Infrastructure with the consortium 'Joint Venture of China Railway International Co. Ltd & China Communications Construction Company Ltd' is not confidential, best confirmed by the fact that Transparency Serbia received it from the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure (MGSI) following a request for access to information in mid-2021. Along with that contract, three years ago the Ministry also submitted annexes that were concluded until then, and which refer to the section of the railway from Belgrade to Stara Pazova, including the value of certain contracted works," stated in the announcement of Transparency.
The organization notes that all of this indicates that there is clearly no reason why the same ministry would seek the consent of the "Chinese side" three years later to provide journalists with information on the value of certain works that have been contracted in the meantime, which includes the reconstruction of the Railway stations in Novi Sad.
SERBIA AS A HIGH-SPEED RAILWAY FOR THE CHINESE TO THE EUROPEAN UNION
One of the main tasks of the railway, which should be modernized with funds from the Chinese loan, is to facilitate the transport of Chinese goods from the Greek port of Piraeus, through Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary, to Central Europe. That and numerous other projects, all shrouded in secrecy, are precisely the reason, according to analysts, that Serbia, as a candidate for EU membership, is often seen as a Chinese Trojan horse that would penetrate the heart of the European continent.
According to the 2016 agreement, Chinese citizens do not need a visa to come to Serbia. It is also the only European country that has a liberal visa policy with China.
The Serbian authorities constantly point out that they are bound by an "iron friendship" with the Chinese. The loans that Serbia takes from China are presented as investments. Little is known about these loans, as well as what consequences debtors can expect if they do not return the money. It is presented to the public that all over Serbia we do business and build jointly with the Chinese, from sewerage, through ironworks, mines, smelters, tire factories, parts of highways and high-speed railways, all the way to the construction of projects related to the national stadium and Expo 2027.
As "Vremena" journalists wrote in earlier issues, Belgrade is the first European city completely networked with Huawei cameras that can recognize faces. Recently, Serbia has also purchased drones and air defense from China.
And all those contracts are treated as secret. And every journalistic question on that topic arouses suspicion.
In an interview with the Voice of America (VOA), journalist and analyst Miša Brkić said in May of this year that he believes that economic cooperation masks and conceals the excellent political relations between the two authoritarian governments.
Brkić reminds that the relations between the two countries began to strengthen at the time when Boris Tadić was the president of Serbia, who advocated the position of "four pillars of foreign policy" and tried to restore the former role of the flagship of non-aligned countries in the new world environment. "Since then, when the first agreement on crediting infrastructure facilities was signed by the government of Mirko Cvetković until today, Serbia has taken slightly more than 17 billion dollars in loans from China. This information has not been publicly announced anywhere in Serbia", says Brkić and points out that Serbia was a global leader in borrowing money from the Chinese state, Chinese banks and Chinese state banks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to data from research by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), during 2021, Serbia borrowed 7,19 billion dollars from China and another 1,91 billion dollars in 2022.
"The Serbian public is neither informed about those contracts and, in general, about all contracts concluded with Chinese partners and the state, nor does it have insight into those contracts. This is China's practice with all underdeveloped and developing countries with which it cooperates in terms of financing projects in those countries", says Brkić.
SECRETS - FROM WHITE SLAVES TO NATIONAL INVESTMENTS
The current government in Serbia, apart from loans, also takes over a number of worrying manners from the Chinese, especially when it comes to human rights and media freedom. A series of examples recorded in the last year or two alone shows how far Chinese influence reaches.
Thus, six Falun Gong activists and two other members of their families were detained on May 7 in Belgrade, ahead of the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping. They were released from custody one evening later, right after the Chinese president left Serbia. According to those arrested, it is about flattering the Chinese authorities by the Serbian authorities; the police did not give them any explanation except that it was a precaution, although they did not plan to organize any rally. By the way, Falun Gong is a group that promotes a Buddhist school of meditation, and its activists have been persecuted in China since 1999.
And such persecution of Falun Gong activists did not happen for the first time in Belgrade: eleven of them were arrested in the Serbian capital in 2014 before the start of the Summit with China, and then they were deported from the country as foreign citizens. This arrest case reached the highest legal instance - the Constitutional Court of Serbia, which ruled in favor of Falun Gong activists in August 2021.
There are also two women from China identified as victims of human trafficking in Serbia, where, according to the indictment that Radio Free Europe (RSE) journalists had access to, they were forced to provide sexual services to men under the threat of death. It is added that their passports were confiscated and that they had no money, and that they were provided with one meal during the day. The indictment was brought against a Chinese citizen, who was arrested in March in Bor.
The Chinese citizen is charged with human trafficking because there is reasonable suspicion that the victims were "misled" that the defendant in Serbia will "find them a job as a masseuse" and "provide an apartment and food", the indictment says. "After a few hours after their arrival... he organized their sexual exploitation by men, citizens of the People's Republic of China, with the threat that they... owed him money for the tickets they bought and that they needed to earn money for work permits."
The Government of Serbia and the Embassy of China in Belgrade ignored journalists' questions about the case.
Trafficking of Chinese citizens in Serbia is mentioned in the Annual Report of the US State Department, published on June 24 of this year. "Traffickers exploit women from the People's Republic of China for sex trafficking, primarily for the needs of workers engaged in Chinese-funded projects - including copper mines," the report states.
Likewise, China is a strategic partner of Serbia, and since 2018 it has been managing copper and gold mines in the east of Serbia, in Bor and Majdanpek, when the company Zijin Mining (Zijin Mining) took over the state Mining and Smelting Basin (RTB) Bor as the majority owner . Workers from Serbia and China are also employed in the mines.
A few days ago, the High Court in Negotin upheld the indictment against three activists of the citizens' association "Ne dam - Nu dau" from Majdanpek, who defended Mount Starica from the "illegal destruction of the Chinese mining company Zi Jin".
"They are accused of religious, racial and national hatred against all Chinese who live and work in Serbia, and this indictment is nothing more than an attempt to stifle the voice of the people and protect foreign capital at the expense of the domestic ecosystem and the dignity of the city," the press release states. associations.
Radio Free Europe also writes that in 2022, the attention of international institutions was drawn to suspicions of human trafficking and the exploitation of hundreds of workers from Vietnam, engaged in the construction of the Chinese tire factory Linglong in Zrenjanin, in northeastern Serbia, a project worth almost a billion dollars. Institutions in Serbia that investigated the case claim that there was no mention of human trafficking.
A similar case was reported in January 2024 by the non-governmental organization ASTRA, on behalf of 11 workers from India, engaged through subcontractors at the construction site of the Chinese tire factory Linglong in Zrenjanin. According to information from September, the higher public prosecutor's office in Zrenjanin has not yet launched an investigation into the case.
Both cases are mentioned in the US State Department's Annual Report for 2024, which states that Serbia "did not investigate credible allegations" that workers from Vietnam and India were subjected to forced labor in a factory owned by China.
During the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Belgrade in May 2024, Serbia and China signed 28 agreements in various fields. Out of the total number of signed agreements, as many as ten related to cooperation in the field of media and communications. Chinese presence in that area is not new. One of the obvious examples of Chinese presence in the media is the marketing of media content through the internet portals of Serbian media.
And while those agreements were being ceremoniously signed, a Chinese citizen approached the journalist and cameraman N1 with the camera on his phone and began to ask them, in the middle of the street, very aggressively who they were and why they were filming. The Chinese citizen had a red cap on his head, the same one worn by dozens of Chinese gathered, that day, in front of Serbian institutions to thunderously greet their political leader who visited Belgrade.
Less than two days of blockade - that's how long it took to see how weak and powerless the public media service is, both from the outside and from the inside. At the moment of writing this text, it is the eighth day of the blockade, and the sixth that RTS is not broadcasting its program. They also seem to be facing a strike inside the house. And the essence of blocking RTS is not in what it publishes, but in what it keeps silent
In the months after the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, the flames of rebellion spread throughout Serbia. The first protests started in Novi Sad right after the tragedy. The authorities responded with arrests, police cordons and intimidation, but instead of calming down the protesters, new protests followed.
The rector of the University of Belgrade, Vladan Đokić, has been the target of top state officials and regime tabloids for months, who label him as an insidious instigator of student protests, an opportunist, "the face of evil" and "the leader of the criminal octopus." How and why a rector became "state enemy number one"
"I'm standing in the cordon, and my daughter is shouting at me 'aw, aw, killers'. What should I do? If they ordered me - I would throw down my baton and bulletproof vest and stand on the side of my child," a police officer from the south of Serbia, who works as needed in the Belgrade Police Brigade, told "Vreme"
The recent formation of the Đura Macuta government is part of the regime's revenge and cynicism. This can be seen most in the "black troika" of new ministers appointed to deal with the parts of society that are the leaders and symbols of the big rebellion that lasted for several months, the cause of which was the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, which claimed 16 human lives. Education, universities, unsolicited media and parts of the judiciary that refuse to listen to orders, either publicly, with announcements, or hiding behind legal procedures, should be dismantled. Those who will have no problem doing everything they are told, even reinforcing the orders with their own inventions, are chosen for this.
Who mentions the extraordinary elections when the rating of the party in power is falling, and according to all surveys, Vučić is not the most important political factor in the country, but the students?
The brutal beating of students and citizens in Novi Sad shows that the regime is not only ready to take revenge - it is actually carrying it out
If in reality the principle of balance is violated - the way the incompetent regime violated the relationship between the concrete elements at the Novi Sad Railway Station - reality will behave like a canopy: it will fail to obey
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