In early May 2019, Momčilo Alimpić was carrying out some routine work on his family’s farmland in Rađevina, a hamlet in the hills of Jadar, north-west Serbia. That afternoon, he had been surprised by an unusual clamour nearby. Alimpić followed the noise and found a group of men striding busily across his land. To his astonishment, they told him they were researchers working for the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. They also revealed that the family’s land sat on the periphery of an area rich with lithium, the much-coveted metal found in phone and laptop batteries, which is – far more importantly – key to the global clean energy transition.
“Until then, we had no clue about it. The company hadn’t contacted us, or anyone in the region,” explained Alimpić’s daughter Marija, who works as a language teacher, when I met her and her father for coffee in the autumn of 2024 at a hotel in Loznica, the nearest city to their quiet rural community. Over the next weeks and months after that first encounter with the researchers, as they asked more and more questions, the truth gradually revealed itself. Rio Tinto had spent years quietly doing the groundwork for a $2.4bn lithium mine that would, on projected completion in 2027, stand as Europe’s largest. From those earliest days of creeping realisation, local activism has been fierce and well coordinated, with savvy media campaigns and mass protest an increasingly regular feature of life. “We said we don’t want this in our village,” explained Marija, whose family’s land has been selected as the designated site to dump waste produced by the project. The resulting chemical waste and pollution would blast their arable land and its surrounds into barrenness. “We don’t want this mine,” she told me. “To stop Rio Tinto, people thought we were crazy. But somehow, we have continued to fight.”
In early 2004, a group of geologists working in Jadar had discovered a new mineral with the chemical formula sodium-lithium-borosilicate-hydroxide, soon christened Jadarite. Initial media attention was limited to a cluster of jolly news stories noting its similarities with kryptonite, Superman’s fictional bête noire. The news was quickly forgotten, though not by Rio Tinto. The freshly discovered mineral contained both lithium and boron, another highly valuable raw material used in all manner of industrial production across the globe. Years of research began almost immediately, centred on the practicalities of extraction, an enormously energy-intensive process involving huge quantities of sulphuric acid. The problem is that the proposed mining site and square kilometres of surrounding waste-dumping ground sit on some of Serbia’s most arable land, as well as next to one of its major rivers and national water supplies. Ecological devastation, experts have warned, would be likely to follow: crops would be severely affected and previously healthy rivers would run with toxic industrial chemicals. A 2024 study – publicly criticised by Rio Tinto – by a group of Serbian scientists noted that exploratory drilling had “significantly elevated downstream concentrations of boron, arsenic and lithium in nearby rivers compared to upstream findings”.
Europe is desperate for lithium. The metal was once best known for its psychiatric uses, chiefly as a treatment for bipolar disorder, but the past decade or so has seen lithium rebranded as an essential part of the global transition from fossil fuels to a greener, more sustainable future. Most significantly, as a key component of the batteries that power mass-produced, zero-emission electric vehicles, as well as those that store the energy produced by renewable sources, such as wind or solar. The EU has predicted a 60-fold surge in lithium demand by 2050. It is a key pillar of the EU’s Green Deal and its Fit for 55 package, which demands a 55 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Supply has traditionally been dominated by the likes of Australia, Chile and – most contentiously – China. But the terms of the EU’s 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act have made domestic production a priority, amid much talk of “sustainability” and “resilient supply chains”. The pursuit of Serbian lithium is no longer a European concern, but a question of global geopolitical importance. If this contentious vision of a “sustainable future” is to become reality, then – its proponents argue – Jadar will be of critical importance.
Last summer, I flew from London to Belgrade, at the height of an aggressively broiling heatwave. The streets of the capital were mostly quiet throughout my visit, as temperatures rarely dipped below the high thirties Celsius. Those who can afford it leave for second homes in the relative cool of the countryside. Those who can’t remain to work, or shelter in air-conditioned apartments. The heat has been getting worse every year, came the familiar refrain I heard across the capital, in what is often labelled the most polluted country in Europe. Last autumn, experts from the EU’s Copernicus programme declared that 2024 was Serbia’s hottest summer since records began 130 years ago, as it was across the Balkans.
The slightly eerie calm of the quiet streets was deceptive. In 2022, the Serbian government had annulled Rio Tinto’s mining permits after months of mass protest across the country. In July 2024, however, they were reinstated following a court ruling in Belgrade, accompanied by a glitzy summit in the city attended by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the European Commission vice-president for the Green Deal, Maros Šefčovič, as well as representatives from what Šefčovič labelled the “crème de la crème” of companies with a strong interest in lithium extraction. Serbia’s hard-right president, Aleksandar Vučić, pledged full transparency and the promise “to personally fight for the environment and lives of our citizens in Jadar”.
The backlash was immediate. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Belgrade and beyond – representing a cross section of Serbian society, including city-dwelling artists and students, agricultural labourers and farmers – in opposition to the revived plans. Placards reading “We Do Not Give Serbia Away” became a common sight across the nation over the following weeks. Chants of “Rio Tinto get out of Serbia” and “You will not dig here” were regularly heard on the streets. If the protesters’ focus on the Jadar mining project dominated headlines, the unrest also carried deeper undercurrents. “It’s all interconnected,” said Stevan Filipović, a film-maker and vocal opponent of the Vučić administration. “Every single person taking part in these protests is also against the regime. It is the channelling of two things simultaneously. They’re protesting against the regime generally, but also the mining [project] in particular.”
Western coverage often portrays Serbia under Vučić as merely a Russian vassal state, but the reality is more complex. Vučić – a hard-right nationalist and arch political operator who served in various senior roles under the brutal Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s – has dominated Serbian politics since his election in 2012. Corruption is commonplace and the domestic press is tilted overwhelmingly towards the administration. Deep links between government and organised crime are well established. The Hungarian politician and sociologist Bálint Magyar has labelled Serbia a “post-communist mafia state”, along with his home nation and several others in the region. Serbian openness to foreign investment – Chinese, Russian, Western – is accompanied by brutal gutting of workers’ protections and a collapsing middle class. If international capital increasingly views Serbia as a land of opportunity, ordinary citizens have yet to feel the benefits. Mining is already a significant – and deeply controversial – plank of the Serbian economy. The Chinese-majority-owned copper mine in Bor, in eastern Serbia, has created hundreds of jobs in the region. It has also been the cause of widespread crop destruction, brought on by industrial pollution. According to data from the National Bank of Serbia, investment in mining jumped from €118m in 2021 to 704m in 2023. Over the same period, inequality has continued to deepen. In early November, protesters clashed with police in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, after 15 people were killed by a collapsing roof canopy at the city’s train station. Anger has centred around what protesters have described as sloppy renovation work, due to “rampant corruption”.
Even his detractors concede that Vučić is a canny operator. Relations with Europe are cordial (Serbia became an EU candidate in 2012). The same is true for its relationship with Russia. This strategic ambiguity is good news for Serbia’s political elite. In late October, Vučić told assembled news media that he would “give our best… to accelerate” the process of claiming EU membership. The next day, the Times quoted Vučić rhapsodising about popular Serbian support for Brics, the Russian-dominated economic bloc, “who blackmail us less” than the EU. The reality of this high-stakes realpolitik has not always been reflected in the Western press. On30September 2024, a piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal that seemed to suggest the anti-mining demonstrations were the result of a sophisticated Russian disinformation campaign. This was strange, Filipović told me wryly, considering Putin’s vocal support for the project.
I’d flown into Serbia again the week before the article’s publication. Not much had changed in the intervening months as tensions remained stubbornly high. In August, the government had held crisis meetings following a 30,000-person demonstration in Belgrade. They had taken to the press – ludicrously according to Filipović and Aleksandar Matković, a prominent economic historian and political activist – claiming that the anti-mining protests represented the seeds of a “coup d’état” against the administration, which intimated that special measures would be drafted up to combat the “politically motivated” disturbances.
The blowback to the protests had begun to drift into even more sinister territory. Matković had received anonymous death threats and both men had been placed on a list of “eco terrorists” that has circulated online. A text, sent to Matković’s Telegram account from an unknown number apparently less than 500 metres away, read: “We will follow you until you disappear, scum.” Another, in barely coherent German, told him to “stay out of the public light for a while if you want to keep writing and breathing. Behave impeccably on social media. You must understand that you need to be afraid for yourself and for your little brother,” who does not have a public profile. Was Matković worried for their safety, I asked when we spoke on the phone in October. “I’m not so afraid for myself,” he replied. “It’s the whole country. I don’t know where all of this is heading.”
After my meeting with Maria Alimpić and her father, I’d travelled deeper into Jadar, to a pretty Serbian Orthodox Church on the fringes of Gornje Nedeljice, a village a 20-minute or so drive from Loznica. The church grounds offered an unbroken view of the fertile agricultural land which sits on the site of the proposed mine: ground zero of the bitter lithium controversy. Zlatko Kokanović, a 48-year-old local dairy farmer, had been up in court that morning along with several other villagers, on charges of “assault on an official and for endangering traffic by dangerous action”, following a confrontation with police during one of the summer protests. Kokanović has lived in the village and its surrounds his entire life, as his family have done for generations. “This is not about money. It’s about my childhood, my ancestors,” he said as we sat under the awning of a small hut on his land. This was not some blasted backwater in need of saving. His farm was a profitable concern. Talk of lithium’s “sustainability” was almost grimly funny, he said gesturing to the surrounding kilometres of verdant fields which would be ruined by the proposed mine. What could be more sustainable than agriculture?
Over the years Rio Tinto’s bid to acquire the land had caused ruptures across the local community. One hundred and fifty-seven people in the village – population around 700 – had sold their property amid concerns that failure to do so would result in them losing out and being left with nothing, though the majority were staying to fight the project. Those who had left were sometimes tarred as traitors by their former neighbours. According to Kokanović, who didn’t agree with this kind of rhetoric, such rancour in the community has worked in Rio Tinto’s favour. “The older people, they still remembered the expropriation of land after World War II. They were afraid that the state could come and take your land.”
It has been exceedingly difficult for a great number of Serbs – not to mention Ghanaians, Bolivians, Portuguese, or any other nation dubiously blessed with significant lithium deposits – to reconcile corporate rhetoric about the substance’s central role in the great global green transition to come, and the rather more immediate, localised environmental destruction its cultivation will cause. I was often told by the activists and experts I spoke with in Serbia and beyond that there is simply no such thing as sustainable mining. “It is an oxymoron,” said Filipović. “Lithium by itself is not green, it cannot be because of the chemicals you have to use [to] extract it [and] the amount of water you have to use in that process”. The Jadar project is projected to have a 40-year lifespan. If that is how long Rio Tinto considers it to be a profitable venture, then what happens after, with the earth and surrounding land scarred beyond recognition, and with little hope of a return to agriculture? No satisfactory answer has yet been forthcoming. “Let’s face it,” Marija Alimpić told me, “mining is the most destructive human activity on the planet. Let’s be honest. You cannot make it ‘green’.”
Whatever the country or continent, dissent and protest against lithium mining projects operated by various companies have shared remarkably similar themes, aside from the headline ecological concerns. In late 2023, the NGO Global Witness published a report on the surge in lithium mining and cultivation across Africa. It outlined dire working conditions, the use of child labour, forced evictions and widespread corruption in projects from Namibia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. In March 2023 in Zimbabwe – where lithium has been mined since the 1950s – a local worker named Darlington Vito was shot without warning by a security guard while searching for lithium ore in a rubble pile outside a mine owned by the China-based company Sinomine. Vito later died from his injuries and to date, no formal investigation into the incident has taken place. The same mine was later forced to temporarily close due to labour-law violations. As researchers and academics have pointed out, this doesn’t sound much like a newly ethical or sustainable form of resource extraction, in a continent riven by centuries of brutal exploitation. “History,” as one of the Global Witness report’s authors put it to the press, “is on course to repeat itself.”
During my reporting, the phrase neocolonial was never far from conversation. “The German manufacturing and car industry are big supporters [of this project],” said Matković. German support for the Serbian project contains several glaring ironies. Not least that Germany has its own substantial untapped reserves of lithium, as of now unmined due to concerns over the risk of earthquakes brought about by deep drilling. “Germany says they are going to guarantee the mine will abide by the law, but these guarantees are worthless,” said Kokanović. Neither did Rio Tinto’s track record inspire much faith: in the past, the company has been linked to well-documented human rights violations and labour-law controversies in other parts of the world, including claims that mines in the Solomon Islands run by one of its subsidiaries has inflicted long-term damage on locals’ health, and the 2013 destruction of indigenous landmarks in its Australian homeland.
In mid January, I spoke with Chad Blewitt, Rio Tinto’s managing director for Serbia. He strongly refuted any suggestion that the land acquisition programme around the proposed site conformed to anything other than the highest industry standards. “We haven’t had a single grievance. All properties have been voluntarily purchased.” As for the question of environmental damage, Blewitt invited me to consult the documents that had been publicly available on the Rio Tinto website since June 2024. “They were put together by a team of Serbian and international experts [who have] demonstrated that Jadar will be delivered to EU as well as Serbian standards”. As for the unease generated by Rio Tinto’s history, “the mining industry is very different from even 20 years ago. The standards for water, air [and] soil biodiversity protection have come a long way.” Rio Tinto, he added, is committed to “radical transparency”.
The level of sustained opposition must be frustrating then, I said. “When you’re facing this wave of disinformation… that you’re going to poison rivers; that you’re going to poison and cause cancer in children. It’s distasteful. I can only thank our employees and partners for remaining resilient.”
Who would benefit the most from Rio Tinto’s Serbian project? Rio Tinto, naturally enough. The German automobile industry would also be reasonably assured to do well out of it. It would have obvious political benefits for the EU, which could point to production in Jadar as apparent proof of its commitment to breaking the existing dependence on Chinese supplied lithium (that a Chinese state-owned firm is the biggest shareholder of Rio Tinto is rarely mentioned). Elements of Serbia’s political elite would very likely prosper. What isn’t clear is what good the project would do for the country’s population at large. “There’s no evidence of any of this benefitting the Serbian people,” said Aleksandar Matković. “The cost of development is being forced on us… The mining industry is not a stable industry. And what happens when prices [of lithium] drop [and mining is no longer profitable]? You’re screwed.”
Supporters of the Jadar mine project have often rebutted these concerns as unfair distortions on behalf of a group of doom-mongering agitators. The company has implored its critics to consider the windfall that would accompany production. In a September interview with the Financial Times, Blewitt acknowledged it was tricky to talk about these “immense” benefits without addressing “concern over environmental impacts, human health”. A few weeks before, the company’s CEO, Jakob Stausholm, had addressed a town hall in Ljubovija, in western Serbia, flanked by President Vučić, who added his full-throated backing for the project. The meeting was broadcast for six hours on national TV. The Financial Times also reported the head of state’s enthusiastic vision for the Serbian people. Investment from the likes of Stellantis or Mercedes-Benz, the top tier of the international automobile industry, could, according to the government’s own estimates, boost the nation’s GDP by €12bn annually, close to 20 per cent of its existing whole.
Blewitt spied “a generational transformational opportunity for the [Serbian] economy”. It just so happened that it would be “good for Rio Tinto as well”. Expanded extractionof lithium, this argument runs, will be the rising tide that lifts all boats, as per Rio Tinto’s own impact reports. This assertion rests on shaky ground. During the end of my time with Marija Alimpić and her father, I tried to steer the conversation to these economic talking points. My questions met a polite, but firm, rebuff. It was not a matter for debate. There would be no mine, if Alimpić or any other of the thousands of protesters had anything to do with it. As long as resistance was still possible, however slim the odds, the fight would carry on.
“A Russian company, a Chinese company, any company. It doesn’t matter. We do not want the mine,” Marija continued. “We do not want this sort of colonialist ‘development’. It is humiliating to be spoken to this way. We are not fools because we come [from] a village. We simply do not want it.”
[See also: Serbia’s Russian revolution]
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