“Rio Tinto get out of Serbia.” Thousands of people chanted it through downtown Belgrade on a Saturday in August 2024, another “You won’t dig” rolling back from the crowd, before the march ended inside the main railway station. Demonstrators blocked the tracks and traffic stopped.
The anger had one target: Jadar, a lithium project that Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining company, wants to build in western Serbia. It would be the largest lithium mine in Europe. Lithium goes into batteries for electric vehicles and phones, and the European Union and the United States both list it as a “strategically important resource”.
A project that was dead, then wasn’t
Serbia has been through this fight before. Deposits near Loznica were found in 2004. Weeks of mass protests, which in 2021 to 2022 included roadblocks on busy streets and bridges in Belgrade, forced the government to halt the plan. Then Prime Minister Ana Brnabić said “everything is finished.”
It was not. In early July 2024 Serbia’s constitutional court overturned the cancellation of the US$2.4 billion project, ruling that the earlier decision was “not in accordance with the Constitution or the law”. Rio Tinto got its licence back, and a fresh round of protests started.
On 19 July 2024, President Aleksandar Vučić met German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and EU energy chief Maroš Šefčovič and signed an agreement on EU access to “critical raw materials” mined in Serbia. Brussels wants less dependence on China for minerals like lithium, and wants Belgrade leaning toward the EU rather than Russia or China. Vučić said the mine would “not endanger anyone or anything” and promised locals new jobs and better salaries.
What the people of the valley say
About 18,000 people live in the Jadar valley, much of it farmland with fertile soil, forest and water from the Jadar river. Some families have farmed there for generations. A local group, “Ne damo Jadar” (“We won’t give up Jadar”), began organising protests in June 2024.
Its representative, farmer Zlatko Kokanovic, described what he expects next to the village: a processing plant a few hundred meters from the church, where “between 4,000 and 5,000 tons of rock material will be crushed there daily, treated with 1,000 tons of sulfuric acid, and washed with huge amounts of water, which will then end up in the River Jadar.” The group fears poisoned water, ruined fields, toxic particles in the air and higher rates of disease and cancer. Kokanovic also had a message for Scholz: “There is three times more lithium in Germany, Mr. Scholz… Go ahead, mine your lithium in Germany.”
Opposition MP Aleksandar Jovanović Ćuta called the plan “an epic crime against people and nature” and warned of “a rebellion” if the government did not outlaw the mining. Biljana Stepanovic of the rights group Proglas put it more simply: “we cannot live without clean air and water, but we can live without lithium batteries and electric cars.”
From Šabac to Belgrade
On 29 July 2024, thousands marched in Šabac, about 50 kilometres northeast of the proposed site, many carrying Serbian flags. Rallies ran the same day in Barajevo, Kraljevo, Ljig and Aranđelovac. In Kraljevo, activist Nebojsa Kovandzic accused the government of putting its own economic and diplomatic interests ahead of citizens.
Environmental groups set a 10 August deadline. They demanded a law permanently banning lithium and boron mining, and said they would block major roads and railways and turn to civil disobedience if nothing happened. Before the Belgrade rally, two leading protest figures said security officials briefly detained them and warned that road blockades would be treated as illegal.
Slobodan Stanimirovic, 58, travelled from Radjevina, near the planned mine. “I am in Belgrade because the survival of life in Serbia is being defended here,” he said.
The government has tried to calm things down. Scholz said the project would go ahead only if it met EU environmental standards, an assurance protesters and environmental groups met with scepticism. Vučić announced a referendum on the project by the end of 2025 and said no operations would start before 2028.
Sources
- 2024 Serbian environmental protests – Wikipedia
- Thousands of Serbians protest in Belgrade against lithium mine
- 2024 Serbian environmental protests
