Varga: How is Russia helping Serbia in the fight against the “colour revolutions”?

Dr Boris Varga, Columnist from Serbia for the The Geopost

In March, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin visited Russia and thanked its authorities for “supporting the legal and legitimate authorities of Serbia and restoring order and stability in the country”. Apart from the intelligence that Vulin boasts about, it is not known how Russia has helped the Serbian regime to create order and maintain regime stability when students and citizens have been protesting peacefully for six months without demanding a change of government.

On the other hand, almost every day, representatives of the Serbian authorities talk about the fact that there is an attempt at a ‘coloured revolution’ in Serbia. President Vucic has said that more than three billion dollars have been invested in the ‘colour revolution’ from the West, and he has singled out the United Kingdom as one of the countries taking part in it.

The claim that there is external support and funding for mass demonstrations from the West has never been substantiated by the Serbian authorities. However, it is well known that Serbia is actively committed to fighting “colour revolutions” not only at the domestic political level, but also at the international level, and in this it joins the leading authoritarian regimes.

Russia and China see mass protests and “colour revolutions” as a major threat to their unchanging regimes, and the issue is high on the agenda of the Moscow-Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.

Serbia officially joined this struggle a few months before the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine in December 2021. Although it is to be formed in the strictest secrecy, Vulin confirmed that Russia and Serbia have formed a Working Group to combat “colour revolutions”, whose task is to prevent mass demonstrations and to exercise constant surveillance of opposition activists, NGOs and independent journalists.

Students in Serbia strongly deny that there has been any revolution to overthrow the government, least of all a “colour revolution”. A pejorative interpretation of this term has entered the Serbian media from Russian propaganda, but it is almost universally accepted that these are state overthrows of the authorities with the help of secret services from the West.

There is no uniform interpretation of the “colour revolution” in the Serbian public media discourse, except that these are revolutions in the post-Soviet space in Georgia, the “Rose Revolution” (2003), in Ukraine, the “Orange Revolution” (2004) and in Kyrgyzstan, the “Tulip Revolution” (2005). These revolutions are hardly related to the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic on 5 October 2000, which was the basis for all “electoral” or “coloured” or “colourful” revolutions.

Aleksandar Vucic’s obsession with the “colour revolution” is not a new phenomenon. Mass protests against the Serbian authorities have been taking place for almost a decade, almost since the Serbian Progressive Party came to power, and in recent months the revolt against corruption has reached its peak.On 15 March, the largest rally in Serbia’s multi-party system took place in Belgrade, attended by more than 300,000 people.

This rally was interrupted in a moment of comemorative silence by an unidentified sonic device, allegedly a weapon for breaking up mass demonstrations, believed to be a sonic cannon. The authorities contradictorily deny all these allegations.

Vucic also said that by Vidovdan (28 June) he would write a book “How I defeated the colour revolution”. Analysts and journalists working on arms issues argue that the authorities’ use of an as yet unidentified agent could be a huge expensive experiment and its shock testing an inhumane act on a crowd of thousands of people standing silently and peacefully.

It is not known whether the use of modern weapons in Belgrade to fight demonstrations is part of the restoration of order and stability in the country, for which Vulin thanked Moscow. Vucic is visibly pleased and is already celebrating his victory, the only question is whether his method from the “book” will enrich the work of the Serbian-Russian working group on the fight against “coloured revolutions” or whether this tool against demonstrators is just a copy of a Russian-Chinese recipe prepared in advance.

/The Geopost