Original article (in Serbian) was published on 07/02/2022
Disinformation about refugees and migrants passing through Serbia from the Middle East and North Africa on their way to the west of Europe dominated the social networks before the coronavirus pandemic. In the past two years, topics about the virus and vaccination have become the main source of fake news, but here and there, the already exposed stories about migrants settling in Serbia according to someone’s “plan from hell” are still being recycled. These days, an old video is being spread with new claims – allegedly, there is “official news” that before the upcoming April elections, migrants will become voters according to the plan of the Serbian Government because “the SNS electorate is drastically falling apart”.
Well-known claims about the settlement of migrants have been “resurrected” in recent days. Such fake news was shared in the Viber group “LRNE – Parents’ Meeting for Survival”. Behind the group is the Doctors and Parents for Science and Ethics movement, known for its controversial attitudes against vaccines and the promotion of ivermectin – a drug against parasites – for the treatment of coronavirus, which we have already written about.
Although the group mostly shares all sorts of claims about coronavirus and medicine, there are some non-medical topics such as migrants. One such message from this group was forwarded to Raskrikavanje by a reader, and it states the following: “Shocking! Official news! MIGRANTS are becoming new voters in Serbia”.
“Due to the upcoming elections and the drastic fall of the ruling party’s electorate, the authorities of the Republic of Serbia have activated a previously prepared PLAN aimed at maintaining the support of the EU and rich Muslim countries that invest huge sums of money to support something that this VIDEO reveals”, it is written in the message. In the following part, people are called for concrete action – and the first and most important step, according to the unknown author, is to share the video “until it’s too late”.
The video in question was posted on YouTube in June 2020, with the same dramatic announcement suggesting that migrants are becoming new voters. The “evidence” offers unfounded claims, which have already been refuted.
One of the claims suggests that Austria is returning migrants to Serbia under a readmission agreement that is allegedly part of a secret plan to enable migrants to settle here.
Serbia signed this agreement with the EU back in 2007 – and other candidate countries and EU countries have such agreements with the EU. It implies that any person who enters from one country to another illegally can be returned to the country from which he/she entered through a certain procedure.
However, this does not only apply to people from the Middle East, but to the citizens of Serbia. Most of them are being deported due to illegal stays in EU countries, primarily Germany, as explained in 2020 by the Commissariat for Refugees to H1. At that time, they also stated that no migrants or refugees from the Middle East or North African countries were returned to Serbia under this agreement.
In its report for 2020, the Belgrade Center for Human Rights states that Serbia has signed a working arrangement with Austria since 2019 to implement this agreement, but it is an operational document. In other words, it does not reveal any plan or conspiracy but regulates the technical details of readmission and transfer.
“As stated in the response of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the working arrangement specifies that in this particular case, the Austrian side must unequivocally prove that a migrant from third countries entered their country from Serbia and in that case, explicit consent of Serbia is necessary for the return. Also, our side can refuse the transfer without giving a reason for it. The Ministry of Internal Affairs also stated that no migrant from the Republic of Austria has ever been returned to Serbia, neither on the basis of readmission, nor on any other basis”, states the Belgrade Center for Human Rights.
The controversial video also raises the question of whether there is a possibility that returned or newly arrived migrants will settle in Serbia. Stories about their settlement began to spread ever since Hungary closed its border in 2015, and Croatia soon did the same, so the number of refugees and migrants stuck in an attempt to leave the country increased in Serbia.
What has fueled the anti-immigrant rhetoric is the disinformation that came from Dveri MP Marija Janjusevic in 2017, claiming that in the five years of the migrant crisis, around 700,000 migrants have sought asylum in Serbia.
However, expressing the intention to seek asylum when entering Serbia and seeking asylum is not the same. Expressing the intention to seek asylum is a formality that refugees and migrants perform when entering Serbia in order to stay in the country legally during transit through it. As few of them want to stay in Serbia, the number of those who really applied for asylum is much smaller, and the number of those who received it is even smaller.
Police data provided by the Belgrade Center for Human Rights shows that from 2012 to 2020, more than 720,000 people expressed intention to seek asylum. However, only about 3,000 ended up applying for asylum. The rest of the people left Serbia for destination countries. In those nine years, less than 200 people received asylum in Serbia.
The anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric of this video is further encouraged by footage of Muslims praying at a reception center in Sid, asking the following: “Is this the future of Serbia in the name of flattering the world and satisfying the interests of individuals?”
An excerpt from the meeting between Aleksandar Vucic and the Afghan Farhad Nuri from 2017 was also shown. Nuri, who was ten years old at the time, was a young painter who lived with his family in a refugee center in Krnjaca and sold paintings and aquarelles to gather funds for the treatment of a sick boy from Serbia. Due to this, he and his family were granted Serbian citizenship in April 2018.
Even then, part of the public took this news as an “argument” for claiming that the government “distributes passports to migrants like candy”. FakeNews Tragac has written about this. The mentioned video also takes this example as proof that Serbs will become a national minority in their own country and warns of the influx of migrant voters. However, for someone to become a voter in Serbia, he/she must have Serbian citizenship, and granting citizenship to the Nuri family, as the Commissariat told the FakeNews Tragac, was the exception, and not the rule.
For someone to become a regular citizen and thus a voter, it is necessary to fulfill a number of conditions. The Commissariat noted that “migrants do not receive Serbian citizenship, but can only enter the asylum procedure”.
Even the Nuri family, despite the fact that its members received citizenship, left Serbia in 2019 and moved to Switzerland.