The mining giant Rio Tinto is moving ahead with a novel form of lithium extraction in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Powerful governments want to see it succeed. But critics say it could contaminate drinking water for a third of the population.
On her way to sing at a birthday party last month, Croatian pop star Severina Vučković was stopped and questioned about her political views by Serbian authorities. Around the same time, Aleksandar Matković started receiving death threats on Telegram.
The first was in Serbian: “We will follow you until you disappear, scum.” A subsequent text was written in what Matković—a Serbian academic at the Institute for Economics in Belgrade who studies Marxism and economic history—described to me as “garbled German.”
Another showed that the sender was just over a quarter-mile from the home of a friend he was visiting on the Adriatic Coast. Also around the same time, teams of police, armed with search warrants, showed up at the homes of five members of the environmental group Eko Straža (Eco Guard) and confiscated their cell phones and laptops.
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