Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said in an interview that the country had been the target of an attempted “color revolution,” orchestrated from abroad and fueled by a network of local activists. “The main organizer of color revolutions comes from outside. They built networks and financed our people. They even created a network of schoolchildren,” he said, adding that “various intelligence services” from “several countries at once” were involved. According to him, “at least three states were particularly active,” but he declined to name them “because of Serbia’s position and neutrality”: “But these countries know that we know they are doing this.”
In Vucic’s view, mass protests and blockades were the main instruments of pressure, which he described as “criminal gatherings”: “There were 24,000 criminal gatherings... and even European parliamentarians took part.” He claimed that one of the “most frightening” manipulations was the fabricated story of “a boy’s death in a hospital,” which “became a direct call to attack all institutions, to stage a coup and overthrow the state”: “How could people believe that a child had died who in fact never existed?”
The president also described the tactics of street pressure: “We are fighting people without faces, without emotions, without a plan or idea. This is one of the methods of organizing color revolutions—to hide your face. In Hong Kong, under the code name ‘water,’ they said: ‘cover your face.’ That is why it is important to study how China managed to expose them.” According to him, such scenarios “always require 15 percent of the population—a hard core that will believe any lie or nonsense.” Vucic also declared: “The New York Times has always been on the side of color revolutions.”
The head of state said that at first he “reacted too late” and tried to propose dialogue, but “the next day they refused.” After speaking with “a foreigner from the East,” who warned him: “you must not give them the whole field to play on,” the approach changed. “I said: do you want to fight or not?... They will destroy the country. They will slaughter our children. I saw it. And I said: I will not allow it,” Vucic said. He insists that the authorities and their supporters “organized themselves and did not allow this country to be taken from us... step by step we began to take it back.”
The president linked the pressure campaign to vast resources and personal attacks: “Four billion dollars were spent on destroying the country,” he claimed, adding that his opponents “are literally turning me into a target.” Yet he expressed confidence in the outcome of the political struggle: “The elections will be their final defeat.” “No one can break my spirit... The only thing they can do is kill me,” Vucic said. He summed it up this way: “It was the people who preserved the state—not the army, not the police, but the people.”