“We want to preserve what we have, and we want to have institutions who can guarantee clean air, clean water, and a clean environment,” continued Živković, highlighting that “around 1.5 million people in Serbia don’t have access to clean water.”
Fear campaign
Rio Tinto has led an extensive campaign of its own to assuage those environmental concerns.
“We respect the right to protest, but what we’re seeing here is a fear campaign — deliberate and wilful disinformation saying that we’re an open pit mine, that we’re going to poison water supplies, that agriculture will not continue … anything that can create fear,” Chad Blewitt, the managing director of the Jadar project, told POLITICO in an interview.
Denying the activists’ allegations, Rio Tinto asserts that the underground mine would fully comply with EU and Serbian environmental laws. In June, the company published preliminary drafts of environmental impact assessment studies covering the mine, a surface processing plant, and an industrial waste landfill.
“We’ve been on this project for 20 years and we’ve spent €600 million on it. This is the most studied lithium project in the world,” Blewitt argued.
Blewitt echoed some of the statements made by Scholz and Šefčovič, namely that the mine will be constructed and operated not only to EU standards, but also “the highest standards in the world.”
But the activists are determined to ramp up the pressure. “They say that the sacrifice is worth it, and we don’t agree,” said Živković.