Good morning! We all know what happened yesterday, so I will not “recount” the sequence of events. I will instead try to raise a few questions here, answers to which could help us better understand the motives and reasons behind the entire drama.
What does Vucic gain from this headache?
We all know that the Serbian ruler has long been, to put it mildly, strange. We also know that Serbian security services are diabolical. However, yesterday’s operation, in addition to being strange and diabolical, was also clumsy and unclear.
To any normal person, it seems absurd to send a plane with nearly ninety men, many of whose names, after a quick online search, appear in news reports related to repression, criminal activities, party and political operations.
Sending them to an event that will gather heads of state and government of the most powerful economic alliance in the history of the world.
If Aleksandar Vucic wanted the kind of drama he is prone to, he got it. Humiliation came as a bonus. Although he seems to count on humiliation. It appears that in his political engagement, humiliation functions as a kind of public performance. Who knows. I will not go into that individual or collective mindset.
On the other hand, “bald thugs from the streets of Belgrade and elsewhere, fans and other scum,” were supposed to display a banner reading “Serbia wins.” What is this about? Is it some kind of fan trick? Some sort of flag-planting gesture, marking territory? Does the President of Serbia live in that kind of film?
Did he intentionally stage this performance, with the intention of having Montenegro send the group back, in order to shift focus from the recent scandalous murder involving people from the top of the Serbian police, who were released yesterday?
Those are internal reasons I do not fully understand.
As for Montenegro, this should be treated as a hybrid attack on our territory under Article 5 of the NATO collective defense framework.
It seems that our allies also helped with this.
I am pleased with the police action. This now needs to continue institutionally. An initiative should be launched to adopt a law on harmful foreign influence. That could be a basis to permanently sanction all those involved in such actions and ban them from entering Montenegro.
The Serbian authorities and their pawns should bear the consequences of what they did. Serbian citizens should not, of course. Many of them showed sympathy for yesterday’s action. And why wouldn’t they, when during protests it was precisely these kinds of people from that plane who were shooting at their backs.
The European Union should also react. NATO should react. Serbia is behaving like Russia. It is destabilising the region and threatening the collective security of the continent. This must be dealt with before the threat grows.
That is all for today.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic
