For world leaders, Serbia is an unusually busy locale right now. Recent visitors have included German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Chinese President Xi Jinping, CIA Director William Burns, and top NATO official Boris Ruge. French President Emmanual Macron will be visiting soon, as well as President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.

Why the parade of foreign dignitaries? The answer is almost certainly lithium.

Serbia’s Jadar region is home to one of Europe’s largest untapped lithium deposits, enough to support 17 percent of European electric vehicle (EV) production, and President Alexander Vučić recently inked a series of deals with the European Union “granting the EU and European carmakers exclusive access to Serbian lithium and paving the way for the construction of one of the largest lithium mines on the continent.”

The Jadar deposit was discovered in 2004 by geologists working for Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. The deposit’s unique mineral, jadarite, contains high-grade lithium and boron. Rio Tinto promises that the mine will produce yearly quantities of around 58,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate (used in EVs and batteries), 160,000 tonnes of boric acid (solar panels, wind turbines, glass for cellphones), and 255,000 tonnes of sodium sulphate (textiles, detergents, glass).

According to the company, “The scale and high-grade nature of the Jadar deposit provides the potential for a mine to supply lithium products into the EV value chain for decades, positioning Serbia as the European hub for green energy.” Some estimates say Serbia could supply 90 percent of the lithium needed for Europe’s so-called “green transition.”

According to Chad Blewitt, acting manager of the Jadar project, “There is no green transition in Europe without this lithium.”

Serbians themselves are less enthused. They are worried about the mine’s adverse impact on agricultural land and water supplies, as well as the government’s emphasis on attracting foreign capital instead of focusing on domestic planning and investment. Neither Rio Tinto nor the Vučić government have allayed their concerns. Instead, they’ve attempted to intimidate and suppress critics of the project. Vučić has even accused critics of the Jadar project of plotting to overthrow him.

In 2022, protests against the mine forced a halt to the project. Rio Tinto’s permits were subsequently revoked. Last month, however, a court decision declared that the project would continue as the revocation was “not in line with the constitution and the law.”

Since then, tens of thousands have taken to the streets to protest the mine, declaring “You will not dig” and “Rio Tinto get out of Serbia.” A protestor named Mica Miliovanovic told Reuters, “We are not going to give up. The mine cannot be built on agricultural land.” Meanwhile, Green-Left Movement co-director Biljana Djordjevic told BBC, “[We] fear Serbia will be sacrificed to provide lithium for electric vehicles that pretty much nobody in Serbia can afford.”

The state is clearly spooked: a march of 30,000 people in Belgrade prompted a government crisis meeting. Leading demonstrators have been detained by security officials for their activism, while police have raided the homes of some protest participants.

#BREAKING #Serbia JUST IN: Aerial footage of the massive protest in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, against Rio Tinto's lithium mine project.https://t.co/AT0f8QBhhb pic.twitter.com/fxsMdCckBS

— The National Independent (@NationalIndNews) August 10, 2024

Aleksandar Matković, an activist opposed to the Jadar mine, received his first death threat on August 14. It read, “We will follow you until you disappear, scum.” Then another text appeared reading “how is the struggle against Rio Tinto going?” (its sender was reportedly standing less than 500 metres away). A third text was even more menacing:

We know about your relationship with the leaders of the revolt. We know that everything originates from you. Even if you behave notoriously and then disappear somewhere, we will follow you. We will track you and you can’t even ask the police for help because you know full well you can’t, believe me. Stay out of the public light for a while if you want to keep writing and breathing. Behave impeccably on social media. You must understand that you need to be afraid for yourself and for your little brother.

According to an August 17 piece by Matković, foreign investments in Serbian minerals have increased six-fold over the past two years, from €118 million in 2021 to €704 million in 2023. “If this trend continues,” he writes, “[mining] will also surpass investments in construction (€853 million in 2023), and potentially the manufacturing industry (€1.15 billion in 2023)—the two branches in which foreign companies invest the most.”

The Serbian government has made tremendous promises related to the “green transition,” including that the country’s GDP will increase 16.5 percent due to EV sales. Maroš Šefčovič, executive vice-president of the European Commission for the European Green Deal, has claimed that lithium mining will add €62 billion to Serbia’s annual GDP.

As Matković points out, celebrations of mining leave out some crucial factors, namely that, “As [mining investments] increase, so does waste and the environmental damage, as well as legal processes related to environmental degradation.”

On top of this, the standard of living in Serbia is falling despite mining investment. Nevertheless, Vučić is pushing ahead with the Jadar project, and he is not alone. There is a European hand here, with Germany leading the intervention in favour of lithium mining.

“Despite mass national protests in opposition to the company,” writes Matković, “the interests of Rio Tinto are now being prioritized [by Vučić] with the support of German Chancellor Scholz and the ruling SNS party.” In doing so, the Serbian government is driving the country into a “colonial position” in relation to the rest of Europe, substituting domestic investment and national sovereignty with a focus on attracting transnational capital.

For its part, Rio Tinto is trying to muzzle environmental criticism of the project. The company has demanded a peer-reviewed journal withdraw a study by Serbian scientists that documents the negative environmental impacts of lithium mining in Serbia, namely the threat of water contamination downstream from the project and a local water supply “loaded with hazardous substances such as boron and arsenic.” Rio Tinto alleges that the study contains “factual inaccuracies, inconsistent application of scientific methodology and numerous other deficiencies.”

Rio Tinto is demanding the removal of a peer-reviewed scientific article published in Nature that documents the environmental devastation lithium mining in Serbia would cause. Rio Tinto is literally attempting to censor scientists and remove scientific publications from the…

— Mila Djordjevic (@milazdjordjevic) August 21, 2024

According to protest leader Nebojša Petković, “We are becoming a colony of all the great powers… The EU is being hypocritical, because they’re supporting a dictator in Serbia who blocked the judiciary, the media and everything else, but that’s acceptable to them because he’ll deliver the lithium they so sorely need.”

According to Balkanist Magazine co-founder Lily Lynch, life in Serbia is growing more difficult by the year, and not just due to political repression and corruption. The climate crisis has had a profound impact on living conditions in the region.

The pollution is killing people at an alarming rate. New research by the Renewables and Environmental Regulatory Institute found that one in ten deaths in Serbia can now be attributed to air pollution… Extreme heat warnings have been issued across the region for weeks. There is consensus among long-time residents and locals: in the past, heatwaves lasted a few days, but now they are unrelenting… The record heatwave has prompted a huge spike in energy consumption, as the use of air conditioning soars. In Serbia, Croatia, and Bulgaria, the summer heatwave has led to record-breaking consumption of energy. With the region still heavily dependent on coal, the heatwave has also meant more carbon emissions—and more pollutants from fine particulate matter in the air.

“The worst is yet to come,” however, as the mining rush shows. “The Balkans are growing unlivable,” Lynch concludes, “and barring a titanic shift in political will, that trend is all but certain to continue.”

Is it any wonder that, for many Serbians, the promise of an energy revolution falls flat? For them, and for so many people living on the other end of the “sustainable” supply chain, the energy transition sounds like empty promises, looks like death threats, and tastes like poisoned water.

On the global stage, meanwhile, the Jadar mine in Serbia is one of many examples—like Panama, Guatemala, Hollow Water First Nation in Manitoba—of the “green transition” running roughshod over local interests.

Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is the author of Canada in Afghanistan: A story of military, diplomatic, political and media failure, 2003-2023 and the co-author of Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy with Yves Engler.