The “war against the wicked enemy” removed the democratic facade of the captured state

“The pandemic has reversed the modern global order and raised the question of freedom, solidarity, multilateralism, and everything that we thought was given and will not change. In Serbia, it has also influenced the restriction of human rights and freedoms, the growth of democratic institutions, and the further capturing of an already captured state,” said the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy director, Igor Bandovic, opening the discussion.

Narratives are usually built around crises because crises justify taking the reins of one’s hand – a firm hand at the expense of democracy. As a result, citizens are expected to blindly trust the state, even though it provided contradictory information – from the funniest virus to small cemeteries.

“The pandemic had only deepened the process of capturing the state in Serbia, which already existed before. It took down its democratic facade. The framework narrative we have observed is “war against a wicked enemy.” This narrative about the war can encourage discipline and solidarity among the population, but it also carries the dangers that all have come true in Serbia. The narratives were used to justify the concentration of power, control over the flow of information, politicization of the health sector, non-transparent spending of public resources, and reckoning with critics who were presented as enemies of the state,” said BCSP researcher Jelena Pejić Nikić.

During the event, she presented the latest BCSP publication, “Covidocracy – an analysis of narratives about the pandemic in the function of capturing the state.” She emphasized that the narrative about the war is a dangerous framework for democracy in Serbia and that citizens today or tomorrow must not agree to its normalization.

Confusing messages from the authorities and the Crisis Response Team showed that “double-entry bookkeeping” was being conducted on the pandemic victims so that the officially announced data were not authentic. Another dominant impression is that they reacted beyond all the principles of the medical profession because both politicians and doctors should calm the people and lead them, and not panic themselves.

“What bothered me the most was that our biological superiority was mentioned. Even the extreme right in the world avoids making that argument public. That is unacceptable. We acted like a drunk man between two fences – hitting in one and the other. We were between two extremes – from ‘giggling’ to the virus, to panic; from the most restrictive measures at the beginning, to one of the most liberal approaches in Europe after St. George’s Day,” – said professor dr. Zoran Radovanovic.

He assessed that there was repression against doctors who expressed any criticism in any way.

“What struck me the most was that the medical profession was divided. Colleagues are outraged at the members of the Crisis Response Team. One reason is data forgery. Also, the inconsistency of the Crisis Response Team, which showed that colleagues there are victims of politics and pressure from politicians.”

When creating narratives, the holders of power use tried and tested tactics that they have been using successfully for years.

“We have a government that has been behaving the same for years in terms of the messages it sends. The word narrative is weak. The government makes claims that are usually not verifiable. For example, we all remember that claim that if we listen to the opposition and let pensioners walk for an hour, all our cemeteries will be small. We had a worse state of the pandemic during the fall in terms of numbers, and pensioners were walking the streets. But, at the moment of the speech, that cannot be checked”, explained Vladimir Milutinović, philosopher and author of the book “Pouring the truth”.