Serbian lithium mine European Parliament film screening fuels dispute

Serbian activists were joined by leftist MEPs outside the European Parliament building to protest against the screening of a documentary film on Rio Tinto’s battle with the Serbian authorities, and local environmentalists who the Anglo-Australian mining giant claims have been misled by a shadowy disinformation campaign.

Filmmaker Peter Tom Jones – who heads the Institute for Sustainable Metals and Minerals at KU Leuven university presented his documentary Not in my Country in the European parliament on Wednesday (5 February) at the invitation of MEPs Hildegarde Bentele (Germany/EPP) and Yvan Verougstraete (Belgium/Renew).

The film makes a strong case for mining lithium in Europe, with Jones arguing it is essential for the energy transition and hence tackling global heating, and underlining the fact that the EU is currently almost entirely dependent on China for the raw materials needed for battery production. The documentary raises the prospect of thousands of new jobs, with processing and production taking place in Serbia itself.

It also gives Rio Tinto a platform to present its promise to abide by the highest environmental and social standards, dismiss concerns voiced by protesters over radioactivity and pollution by dangerous acid – and to profess contrition over past mistakes, notably blasting an ancient aboriginal burial site in Juukan Gorge, Western Australia, in 2020 to expand an iron ore mine.

EU partnership

The Jadar mine issue burst back onto the news agenda last July when protests erupted after Serbia’s constitutional court reversed a 2022 decision by the government of president Aleksandar Vučić to withdrew planning approval for the 220-hectare site amid widespread public opposition.

Within days, Vučić had inked a ‘strategic partnership’ on critical raw materials with the EU, at a summit in the Serbian capital attended by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. August saw a mass protest in the capital Belgrade, followed by reports of intimidation, surveillance and the arrest of activists by the Serbian security services.

A demonstration outside the parliament building in Brussels ahead of the screening, which drew several dozen participants, saw Serbian protesters joined by MEPs from The Left group. They clearly saw the film as propaganda for Rio Tinto and the Serbian government.

Jones told Euronews that the film had been updated prior to screening to address criticism by one of the interviewees, the social scientist Jelena Vasiljević, that it was one-sided and that speakers had been “cherry picked”. He acknowledged it had been a “serious omission” in an earlier edit to show harassment of Rio Tinto employees without presenting the state crackdown on opposition activists.

Opponents of the mine cite the global track record of Rio Tinto and the mining industry more broadly, and mistrust in what they view as a corrupt Serbian government as a cause for genuine concern over the potential environmental impact of the planned lithium production.

Serbian politics

Carola Rackete, a German MEP who spoke at the protest, told Euronews she was convinced that a majority of Serbians opposed the lithium mine, and accused the Vučić government of being behind the overturning of its own decision to suspend planning permission for the mine.

Rackete pointed to the fact that several EU countries, including Germany, have deposits of lithium that are not being exploited, but for environmentalists the issue goes beyond the EU’s hunger for the metal needed to secure future electric car production and underpin the energy transition.

“The question generally is that we have to reduce our material consumption…our material footprint is just way too high,” she said. “So we’re not just in a climate crisis, but also the biodiversity crisis, and we need a cap on our resource use the same as we have a cap on CO2 emissions.”

Jones said he had been surprised by the depth of the political dispute around the project. “When we embarked on producing this film, our goal was to create a ‘science communication’ documentary, aligned with the mission of our KU Leuven Institute,” he said.

“However, we quickly realized that the Jadar project is so heavily politicised that it is challenging to separate a fact-based discussion on the intrinsic techno-environmental merits and pitfalls of this mining and refining project from the complex nature of Serbian politics.”

Recent weeks have seen fresh anti-government protests across Serbia, this time triggered by the collapse of a concrete canopy at Novi Sad railway station which killed 15 people and has been blamed on corruption and substandard construction work.

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Vučić has been walking a fine line recently between a rapprochement with the EU – whose candidacy for membership of the bloc has been given a certain impetus by the promise of access to lithium – and Serbia’s historical sympathy for Russia. The president has repeatedly ruled out imposing sanctions since president Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The ‘most politicised mining project in the world’

Speaking to Euronews in December, Chad Blewitt, Rio Tinto’s managing director of the Jadar project – who appears in the film – asserted that the planned mine had been the object of a “well-funded, concerted campaign” of disinformation designed to “create fear and scare people” about its potential environmental and health impacts.

Aleksandar Matković, a prominent campaigner against of the lithium mine, who in common with actors on both sides of the dispute has received anonymous death threats, criticised the filmmakers for singling out comments by an elderly lady who voiced the opinion that local protesters were being bankrolled from abroad.

Vučić himself has made similar claims, but pointed the finger not at Russia, but at the EU and US. Rackete noted it was “a very common playbook” in post-communist countries, including Russia itself, for governments to accuse critics of being foreign agents.

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Julia Poliscanova, who leads the green group Transport & Environment’s work on electric vehicles and supply chains, suggested concerns over a possible lack of government oversight could be assuaged by using third-party monitoring through the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), which brings in civil society and labour groups alongside mining firms.

Jones conceded that the argument would not be won on the basis of science alone. “This project is the most politicised mining project in the world, and it’s impossible to differentiate or to separate the science from the politics and the geopolitics,” he said.

Hildegarde Bentele, who was parliamentary rapporteur on the EU’s critical raw materials strategy, said the future of the mine was a “sovereign, democratic decision” for Serbia. “I can just tell you from my country, that we want batteries,” she said. “Our young people don’t want to work in the farming sector – they want to have highly qualified jobs and they want to be in this future technology.”