July 15, 2024
Responding to news of the attempted assassination of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, Ana Brnabić, current Speaker of the Serbian Assembly and former Serbian Prime Minister, has directed a call and request to “the elites in Serbia and their independent media” to acknowledge the possible real-world consequences of “the hatred that they promote on a daily basis” and “the lies that they spin”.
This call forms part of an almost daily campaign being conducted by the political elite in Serbia, led by President Aleksandar Vučić, against the few remaining media outlets that remain beyond the control of the government. The regime directly controls all national television stations in the country, as well as the highest circulating daily newspapers and portals.
According to independent daily newspaper Danas, Brnabić’s statement is both hypocritical and extremely dangerous, given that it exploits a serious event in order to once again confront political dissidents.
This statement from the Speaker of the Assembly comes a year after the two mass murders in Serbia that prompted hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in protest over the promotion of violence and witch hunts in the country by the government and the media companies it controls.
Notably, journalists and opposition politicians in Serbia have, for the past ten+ years, been accused in tabloid newspapers and on national television stations of planning the assassination of Aleksandar Vučić and his family, as well as of invoking a coup d’état. Of course, these are extremely dangerous lies that are constantly propagated by pro-government media in an effort to confront critics.
A campaign that’s currently underway and is being led by all pro-government media accuses journalist Srđan Škoro of calling for the murder of the son of the Serbian President, which it is impossible to infer in any way on the basis of the statement he made to a local television station that is referred to in the accusation.
Assembly Speaker Brnabić has made similar accusations against Munira Subašić, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica organisation, which brings together women whose children were murdered by Serb forces in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995, accusing her of threatening to murder President Vučić and his children.
