Europa Press
The newspaper La Jornada
Monday, August 12, 2024, p. 27
Madrid. The resumption of a lithium mining project in northern Serbia sparked a wave of protests in Belgrade. Riot police managed to disperse dozens of people protesting on the tracks of the Prokop railway station until early yesterday morning.
The rally at the railway station was a remnant of a mass demonstration on Saturday against the reactivation of the project, which saw other train and metro lines blocked in the Serbian capital.
There will be no extractionand betrayal, treasonwere the main slogans in the protest.
The crisis was triggered by a recent verdict overturning a previous order to halt the Loznica project in the Jadar Valley, near the nature park that bears the same name, which Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto has been seeking to undertake for years and which activists see as a threat.
The ruling, issued by the Constitutional Court, determined that the authorities exceeded their powers by halting the project in 2022 after giving in to pressure from environmentalists against this exploitation, budgeted at around 2.2 billion euros.
Serbia’s government says the Jadar Valley contains some 158 million tons of lithium, nearly 20 percent of Europe’s total estimated reserves, and has said it will halt the project if there is environmental damage, but activists are wary of the authorities.
Seeks to enter the EU
The initiative received a boost with an agreement on critical raw materials signed by the government of Serbian President Alexander Vucic with the European Union (EU). The Balkan nation is seeking formal entry into the bloc, while maintaining close ties with Russia and China.
The EU memorandum on the extraction of lithium and other key materials needed for the transition to green energy will bring Serbia closer to the bloc and reduce European imports of lithium batteries and electric cars from China.
Vucic said Russian intelligence services had alerted him that unspecified Western powers that want to oust him from power were driving the protests. The government and state-run news media have compared the demonstrations to the Maidan uprising in Ukraine’s capital kyiv that led to the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.