Shortly after a year of protests, this weekend’s elections were believed to be the breakthrough for Serbian environmentalists, said Engjellushe Morina, senior policy officer at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Just as we expected eco-friendly movements in Serbia to win a little bit, we have the Russia debate,” she says, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
She believes the return of the war to Europe has given the ruling coalition parties and incumbent president, Aleksandar Vučić, more power. The governing coalition that approved the mine, led by President Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party, was comfortably leading in the polls as of Thursday.
Back in the village of Gornje Nedeljice, Petković feels that Rio Tinto is not worried about the election results. She thinks the company has invested too much to stop, no matter the outcome. The miner has developed his own technology to extract the jadarite, which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Since the government canceled the project, Petković says, there have been no signs of Rio Tinto preparing to leave. The machines stayed put, and the miner continued to buy up local real estate, she claims.
On March 30, another activist organization, Marš sa Drine, published the details of a phone call they say proves Rio Tinto is preparing to return to work on the mine after the election. The phone call was between a professor at the University of Belgrade involved in the Rio Tinto project and an anonymous source posing as an employee of Rio Sava, the Serbian subsidiary of Rio Tinto. In the conversation, the two discuss the arrival of equipment from the German company DMT and an Austrian company called Thyssen, which, according to the professor, will “probably” arrive in April. Neither DMT, Thyssen, nor the professor responded to WIRED’s request for comment. In a statement, a Rio Tinto spokesperson described the “alleged” recording as “misinformation,” adding that the agreement with the two suppliers was signed before permission for the mine was revoked.
“They lied to us in January,” says Marš sa Drine said on Twitter, urging their followers to vote against the project on Sunday. “Why is ANY equipment, be it bolt or bulldozer, discussed in the context of a project that has been CANCELLED?”
Some believe that Rio Tinto has faced so much opposition in Serbia because of the company’s legacy, which has come with multiple cases of environmental damage. “Mining companies have historically been viewed so negatively that in the eyes of the public it doesn’t matter whether they switch to minerals used for the energy transition,” says Burlinghaus.
Resistance to EV mining across Europe is not nimbyism, said Diego Marin, associate policy officer for environmental justice at the NGO’s European Environmental Bureau. “Communities say, ‘We let our lands be destroyed and sacrificed to make something? Cars for rich people that our communities can never afford,’” he says. poorer.” It’s not that these activists don’t want clean air. But an idea is starting to spread among green groups in Europe: that the green transition is turning into a capitalist rebranding that still focuses on mass production that harms the planet.
