🌱The Jadar Valley is located in western Serbia. The largest deposit of lithium in Europe was discovered there in the early 2000s. The British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto has been planning to mine the valuable metal in the region for years. Rio Tinto is known for corruption, land destruction and water pollution.
✊ However, in 2022 (election year), the Serbian government under President Aleksandar Vučić had to declare the project officially dead as a result of huge mass protests. People from different political backgrounds took part in the protests, many united by criticism of the impending neo-colonial exploitation of the European periphery for a supposedly “green” transformation.
😡In reality, however, the plans were never abandoned, but secretly pursued: Rio Tinto has been buying land in the region all along. The intention to mine the underlying lithium was only made public this year. And in July 2024, EU representatives and the Serbian government signed an agreement on lithium mining in Belgrade in the presence of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius.
🔥The protests that had subsided after the government’s announcements in 2022 have now flared up again: In August, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to voice their protest against the ecological destruction of this pristine region.
✊Left-wing activists continue to criticize the fact that an extractivist economy does not benefit the Serbian population. As a result, they experience extreme levels of repression.
🖌Aleksandar Matković is one of them: He is an economist, has been following the protests since the beginning, has also reported on them at events in Germany and has already been to Grünheide with representatives of the BI. After he published an open letter against the planned lithium mining in the Jadar Valley on August 17, he received threatening messages against him and his relatives. Like him, numerous activists are currently experiencing the brutality with which profitable economic projects are pushed through at any price.
🩸The Rio Tinto Group has already caused a number of scandals. The company was involved in the civil war in Papua New Guinea by building the Bougainville Copper Mine (1989). This mine is still poisoning water in the region today. There were protests in Australia because Rio Tinto had blown up sacred Aboriginal rock caves (2020). In March 2023, the company had to pay a $15 million fine for bribery for mining rights in Guinea. A few days ago, Apache Stronghold (a group of indigenous San Carlos Apache in Arizona and environmentalists) asked the US Supreme Court to deny Rio Tinto access to land with a religious site.
✊We stand in solidarity with the protests in Serbia against lithium extractivism. We stand in solidarity with the activists affected by repression, such as Aleksandar Matković.
❗️Share the information! Germany wants to profit from resources and shift the consequences of mining to other regions. Germany has the largest lithium deposits in Europe.
💧Turning off Tesla means fighting for water justice locally and globally and opposing extractivism!