Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised “almost total disarmament” after two mass shootings this week shocked the western Balkan nation. However, it is questionable whether Vucic can keep his promise at the highest level in view of the spread of illegal and unregistered weapons in Serbia and the deeply rooted culture of violence.
Although Serbia has the third highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world at 39.1 guns per 100,000 people, mass shootings are fairly rare; The last was in 2016, when a man killed five and wounded 22 in a shooting at a cafe in the village of Zitiste in northern Serbia. This week’s shootings have inspired Vucic to call for widespread disarmament, much like Australia did after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. However, the measures proposed by Vucic, including a moratorium on new gun licenses and a month-long general amnesty for illegal firearms, fail to address the ingrained violence in Serbia that often benefits Vucic and those in power.
On Wednesday, a 13-year-old boy killed nine people – eight students and a security guard – at a primary school in the Belgrade area with two pistols he stole from his father’s apartment. According to Serbian police, the suspected gunman also had four Molotov cocktails, a map of his planned route and a list of his targets, Politico Europe reported on Wednesday. Six children and a teacher were also injured in the shooting, and the gunman’s father was also arrested.
Just a day later, a 20-year-old gunman killed eight people and injured 14 about 50 miles from Belgrade, apparently using illegally obtained firearms. According to Serbian state broadcaster RTS, the suspected gunman apparently had an altercation in a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, went away to get a pistol and rifle and opened fire. He then continued firing from a car and seemingly indiscriminately shot people in two other villages before police found him at his grandfather’s house, where there was a stash of weapons including an automatic rifle, ammunition and grenades, Portal reported.
In response, Vucic called for a one-month amnesty for distributing illegal firearms and a two-year ban on issuing new gun licenses, as well as increased fines or longer prison sentences for possessing illegal guns after the amnesty period expired. “If they don’t hand them over, we will find them and the consequences will be dire for them,” Vucic said in a press conference on Friday.
His administration has also proposed an increase in police presence, with 1,000 police officers sent to schools over the next six months to “reduce peer violence,” the New York Times reported Friday, and increased surveillance of shooting ranges.
Additional penalties on top of Serbia’s already tough gun laws might theoretically help, but critics question the government’s ability and willpower to actually bring about change – and uphold Serbs’ civil liberties amid ever-increasing surveillance and police presence.
Tackling the deep-seated violence in Serbia will take time
Serbian gun laws are already quite strict, especially when compared to US regulations. Adults over the age of 18 can only hold a firearms license after a thorough background check by the police, which includes interviews with family and friends and a medical examination repeated every five years. People with serious mental illness, drug or alcohol abuse, or a criminal record are to be denied gun licenses, and a license can be revoked if a gun owner is deemed irresponsible, Portal reported Wednesday.
In addition, in order to obtain a firearm, Serbian citizens must complete a training course and pass a firearms law test. Firearms must be kept in a designated closet, and concealed carry permits are difficult to obtain; Firearms are intended to be kept at home or used for hunting.
There have also been successful amnesties in the past; SEESAC, the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons, tracks the number of illegal firearms turned over to the state. After the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, small arms, typical of post-war areas, flooded the region and provided opportunities for people to illegally obtain not only firearms but also ammunition and light weapons such as grenades.
But illegal guns are inherently difficult to monitor and control. “We don’t even have an estimate of how many illegal weapons are out there and what kind,” Aleksandar Zivotic, a historian at the University of Belgrade, told Portal. In addition, it is unclear whether the government has the will to genuinely address gun violence, as Australia and the UK have done following devastating mass shootings.
“The president has announced full disarmament, but that’s more of a populist statement than a realistic measure,” Maja Bjelos, a senior researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy, told Vox. “It is more realistic to expect that some cosmetic changes in legislation and criminal procedures will be made in a hurry and without real public debate and civil society participation.”
However, according to Dragan Popadic, a psychology professor at the University of Belgrade, firearms are only part of the problem. After the shootings, “People have suddenly been shaken into the reality and the ocean of violence that we live in, how it has grown over time and how much our society has been neglected for decades,” Popadic told the Associated Press. “It’s as if flashlights have shone over our lives and we can no longer just mind our own business.”
The intersecting mechanisms of violence in Serbia — the state against its citizens, ethnic tensions exploited to the advantage of the government, and gender-based violence — come from the top down, Bjelos told Vox.
“To understand this situation, one has to understand the nature of the regime and the political leadership,” Bjelos said. “The current regime is repressive and has been labeled a hybrid regime or autocracy by various international organizations. The top leadership, particularly the president, are rebranded nationalists and radicals. The modus operandi of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) is based on violence within the party and against the citizens by usurped institutions.”
Gang and mafia violence is also said to be entangled with the government in Serbia, intersecting with ethnic tensions left over from the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. Vucic has managed to play both of these elements to his advantage, portraying himself as a leader who will root out corruption through weakening democratic institutions and increased state surveillance, while also regularly having conflicts with neighboring Kosovo over the status of the Serb minority there stokes
“The state is the main instigator of violence through institutions (e.g. police brutality), the state media and loyal tabloids, informal groups such as hooligans, right-wing and pro-Russian groups, [and] Criminals,” Bjelos said. “Impunity for perpetrators is the rule, not the exception.”
The Vucic reforms open the floodgates to the abuse of civil liberties
Under Vucic, Serbia has imposed increasingly draconian surveillance measures, including “cutting-edge technology” to keep tabs on citizens and political rivals, Bjelos said. Now the president could use the recent attacks to push through even more problematic laws and policies aimed at control rather than security.
“The public is not against disarmament, but there is resistance to possible repressive measures that could limit civil rights and freedoms,” she told Vox. Those repressive populist measures, she said, include the increased police presence the president has introduced, as well as increased surveillance and his proposed reintroduction of the death penalty, which violates the current Serbian constitution.
Looking even further ahead, Vucic could use this week’s mass shootings to push through a bill — which has been tabled and withdrawn multiple times — that would allow the use of general facial recognition technology to monitor public spaces, as well as other biometrics used in mass surveillance.
“The government is determined to legalize biometric surveillance [through] of the draft law on internal affairs,” said Bjelos. “The introduction of such intrusive technology was initially justified by the government’s need to fight terrorism and organized crime, and later to prevent online sexual harassment of minors and child abduction.” The shifting rationale for such surveillance could easily shift to mass shootings , although Vucic has yet to adopt mass surveillance as a solution to gun violence.
Serbia, first under Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and now under Vucic, is seen as a victim of state co-optation – “a process whereby (political) actors use patronage networks to infiltrate state structures and use these state structures as a cover to hide their corrupt actions”, says a 2020 policy brief from the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. Under Vucic, all political and governmental apparatuses, as well as the media, have become organs — clients — of his political party, whether because they are filled with party loyalists or because of their funding in the case of the government depends on the media.
Under the SNS and Vucic, the state apparatus was switched from public service to serving the powerful few, to the detriment of society. Whether the mass shootings represent a turning point for Serbia to either move further towards authoritarianism or to try to retake the country’s institutions is unclear, but for many it was a wake-up call of sorts.
“People are angry right now,” Bjelos said. “You feel like the whole system has failed from top to bottom.”