Security situation in Serbia after an attempted terrorist attack by Ilija Gavrilović

Security situation in Serbia after an attempted terrorist attack on Saturday

Name and surname: Ilija Gavrilović

Affiliation: Master’s in International Affairs, PhD student at the Faculty of Political Science University of Belgrade

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Last Saturday, in Belgrade, Serbian capital, an attempted terrorist attack took place, the circumstances and motives of which are still not fully known. A previously unknown man, a member of radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, attacked a Serbian policeman who was securing the Israeli Embassy and was killed in the exchange of fire, while the policeman was wounded. 

Such events in Serbia are very rare, except for last year's massacres in Belgrade and Mladenovac/Smederevo, but behind which there are completely different motives of the crimes. That is why the attack has rightly worried the public in Serbia and reopened the issue of religious extremism and the activities of the members of the Wahhabi movement, mostly located in parts of the country with a majority Muslim population (city of Novi Pazar and the municipalities of Sjenica, Tutin, but also Preševo and Bujanovac).

Until now, the activities of this movement have mainly been related to the fighting of its members for the Islamic State during the war in Syria, but in Serbia, in recent times, they haven’t made incidents or attacked citizens and state institutions. The attack is therefore a big surprise, because this movement hasn’t been talked about in the previous several years.

Therefore, it is an open question what the reasons for the attack are and whether they are related to on-going events in the Middle East. The first information published by Serbian Minister of Interior Ivica Dačić, after the interrogation of the wife of the deceased terrorist, indicates the existence of a connection between the war in Gaza and the attempted terrorist attack, but there is still a lack of additional information that would certainly confirm that the suffering of the Palestinians influenced the attempted terrorist attack in Belgrade.

Now, public attention in Serbia is focused on those parts of the country where the predominantly Muslim population live due to the suspicion that there are other individuals or groups who would attempt a similar terrorist act. The security services of Serbia have raised the level of threat to national security to the highest level until all the circumstances of the terrorist attack are clarified. 

However, it is unlikely that something similar will happen again, let alone a larger-scale attack, because such attacks are rare in Serbia, as I mentioned, but one should be careful. The attack appears to have been the work of an individual rather than a group (but this doesn’t exclude his association with Wahhabi movement and connections to other members), although it can be said that it was pre-planned. An action by the Serbian Police soon followed, in which another person who was connected to the terrorist, but didn’t participate in the attack, was arrested, and it is likely that there will be more similar actions. 

It is very important to emphasize that such attacks must not produce either anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic sentiment, especially since Serbia is a multicultural country and it is very important that there are harmonious relations between its citizens, regardless of their religion or nationality.

In the end, regardless of what the investigation turns out to be the main motive for the attack, and everything points to what I mentioned above, the event should be given a political context. 

Serbia (in that time Yugoslavia) was among the first European countries to recognize Palestine as a separate/independent state in November 1988, but Serbia has continued to maintain good relations with Israel to this day after reestablishing them in 1992 (they were severed after the war in 1967). Serbia has excellent economic relations with Israel, and even the conflict hasn’t hindered cooperation between the two countries. 

Also, it is interesting that in Serbia (with the exception of Novi Pazar) there were no mass pro-Palestinian protests as in some other countries in the region and in the EU. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Serbia doesn’t sympathize with all the victims of the war in the Middle East, but that the public is mostly indifferent to the conflict, and state policy mostly follows EU foreign policy towards the conflict in Gaza. Although there are some rumors that Serbia is closer to Israel, and even arming it, this has not yet been officially confirmed.