Good morning! I don’t wish to enter into a deep sociological analysis, but what happened in Zabjelo — and precisely in Zabjelo — calls for a brief intervention and a polemical text, which is also an emotional reaction. An emotional reaction to the increasing spillover of radicalised violent behaviour patterns inspired by the nationalistic hysteria of elites, who normalise and encourage such outbursts.
Click here to join our Viber group, where we provide live updates and answer your questions in real-time.
Serbian Autonomous Region Zabjelo
For younger readers — if any happen to read this — SAO is an acronym for “Serbian Autonomous Region” — a bureaucratic tool used in the 1990s to mark territory along ethnic lines. The expansion of SAOs in Bosnia and Croatia was a distorted reaction to the constitutionally permitted disintegration of Yugoslavia along republic lines. Since the political changes of August 2020, intellectual elites from Belgrade have increasingly promoted the idea of a Montenegrin Serb Republic, centred in Niksic — and also speak of a “Serbian Boka,” “Serbian Berane,” “Serbian Zeta,” and even “Serbian Pljevlja.” While still marginal, these ideas are gaining followers in Montenegro. Just days ago in Petnjica, the birthplace of Radovan Karadzic, a large stage was set up with a colour screen displaying Radovan and Slobodan — both ethnic Montenegrins and leaders of the criminal Greater Serbian project of the 1990s. And once again, the spectacle was orchestrated by the recently enthroned Metodije Ostojic.
These are the elites — and not just Serbian, but Montenegrin elites, as Montenegro, and with it the very definition of “Montenegrin,” is being dragged back to the 1990s. Through the Democratic Front’s (DF) participation in government, Montenegro is gradually but surely becoming the “second Serbian state.” Not in an ethnic or identity sense, but ideologically, where “Serbian-ness” is no longer just a matter of identity for one ethno-religious group within Montenegro, but a far-right, ethno-nationalist, and anachronistic ideology, exclusionary to all except its most loyal followers.
So, I’m not speaking here about all people in Montenegro who identify as Serbs — I’m talking about the part of that community that aligns itself with such gatherings, celebrates Pavle Djurisic, and shows intolerance toward other communities living in Montenegro. This radicalised faction now includes political and church elites who are leading the way in relativising this dangerous ideology.
What happened in Zabjelo is just a spillover of normalised behaviour, where hooligans are merely imitating what they see from Metodije, Mandic, and Knezevic. This didn’t start with Zabjelo. It started with certain football fan groups of Buducnost and Sutjeska.
Zabjelo is our West Virginia, our rust belt. A post-socialist, post-industrial landscape — a monument to the unnatural and rapid socialist industrialisation that overnight brought people from villages into cities, leaving them to cope alone with the cultural shock of urban life. Many neighbourhoods across Eastern Europe suffer from PTSD caused by these very traumas.
Suddenly, in the same apartment buildings, you had university professors, shift supervisors, drivers, and boiler men living together. Migrants from nearby villages, raised on epic folk myths about Adnan and Jakup as enemies, suddenly had to accept Adnan and Jakup as their bosses or professors. While socialism, under the threat of sanctions, prevented interethnic conflict driven by these frustrations, it didn’t do enough to foster true emancipation.
All of this resurfaced in the 1990s, or more precisely, in the late 1980s. And nowhere is that experience so clearly condensed and memorialised as in the speeches in front of parliament during the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution (AB Revolution). Even the characters from the comic group “The Books of Knjige” would envy the cast of figures who gave speeches during those days.
And so, what can we expect from the children and grandchildren of those families, especially when we know that the mentioned elites intentionally keep them in that state, feeding off the concrete pen fattened by hate. Metodije makes his living by keeping them united in that pen — they fund his golden robes and luxurious, worry-free life. By buying candles and icons, paying for weddings and funerals, they keep him afloat. Milan and Andrija live off them too, using their votes to reach the front row at the trough of power.
This isn’t a structured treatise, it’s just a stream-of-consciousness note, provoked by what’s happening in Montenegro and what continues to surface daily. While we rush toward the EU, blinded by PES’s promises, I fear we’re losing, or have already lost, Montenegro, hijacked by PES’s own coalition partners.
That’s all for today and for this week. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect the views of CdM’s editorial team)
