“When someone says ‘Europe!’ to me… I instantly hear the distant thunder of cannons. And I see our homes—burning.”

— Derviš Sušić, “Mother”

“When it was to befall the land of Serbia” this past spring, it was not merely so that the institutions of a legal state might do their jobs. It instead opened the deeper question of whose interests they actually serve—if not those of the citizens and the people, that is, of a just society—then whose? Who sets the rules of political engagement in Serbia, where for three decades, comprador elites have worked for others and stolen for themselves?

In short, it cast light upon the more anonymous, systemic corruption of the post-privatisation pashalik, where the SNS’s well-paid experts serve as glorified clerks, and street-level thugs as guard dogs. Here, one dinar of investor profit—greased with public subsidies—is held sacred, while the lives of those same citizens, waiting for transport to work last autumn in Novi Sad, are worth nothing at all.

The vassalage of Vučić’s bankrupt autocracy is evident not only in Russian intelligence reports or boasts in the Jerusalem Post about arms dealings with the Tel Aviv and Kyiv juntas, but perhaps most clearly in a little-noticed event: this month’s joint military drill between the Serbian Army and NATO forces, Platinum Wolf, held at the Jug base near Bujanovac. The exercise included advanced training in counterinsurgency, with Western experts instructing Serbian soldiers in the suppression of civil unrest.

The fact that the EU has listed the so-called Jadar........

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