Rio Tinto continues to buy a land in Gornje Nedeljice, a village in the municipality of Loznica. That’s why the locals are wondering if Prime Minister Ana Brnabić really put an end to the Jadar project? They are also concerned by the fact that the President of Serbia, as well as some ministers, are repeating that the biggest mistake is giving up on lithium mining.
Not so long ago in January, after protests organized by citizens throughout Serbia, Prime Minister Ana Brnabić put an end to the cooperation with Rio Tinto. “It’s all over and all requests have been met,” Brnabić said at the time. The Jadar spatial plan was cancelled, and therefore all permits and all agreements with Rio Tinto were cancelled. However, the company has not left Serbia and is still working.
“On the first of August, on the day of the constitution of the National Assembly, Rio Sava bought one household and one plot and transferred them to their own. This terrain is needed for the construction of a high-speed road.
“They didn’t do anything, they just used everything before the elections to calm down people, and it would be a shame if they misused it in the new government and if they would consider that project,” says Zlatko Kokanović, a resident of Gornje Nedeljice.
Apart from the President of Serbia, the current ministers are also saying that the Jadar project should not have been cancelled.
“I used a metaphor that is recognized all over the world, and that is that with lithium Serbia could have invented the Internet. Everywhere in the world when you say that, you think of something revolutionary, of something that fundamentally changes things, that’s what the Internet brought to humanity, it changed business and communication, lithium could have been that chance for Serbia, I will always advocate for better living and business conditions for all citizens of our country”, said the Minister of Construction Tomislav Momirović.
Zlatko Kokanović says that “the point is not what we could get with that lithium, but what we would lose”. “There are tens of thousands of people engaged in agriculture, and now they want to open a factory and employ 500 workers, while 10-15 thousand people will be left without their land and their primary occupation which is agriculture”, says Kokanovic.
The fight for a healthier environment continues also in the parliament. The Democrats are looking for a special session of the Assembly that would produce, as they say, a strategy for the environment, and they say that Rio Tinto was not present at the current level in 2004.
“The topic of Rio Tinto was not of great importance at that time, the mineral was researched all over the world, we could not know what it would turn into at that moment, it only later developed into such a serious problem, and the problem is not that a mine is going to be opened in Serbia, but that ecological standards have not been defined”, said the member of the Democratic party Branimir Jovančićević, Serbian Monitor writes.
