According to The Times, citing sources within the British government, the United Kingdom is considering relocating migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected to Balkan countries — namely Albania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia. What’s more, Britain hopes that EU member states will join this initiative.
This shift in UK policy towards migrants comes amid years of intensive lobbying by the notorious Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, targeting both the Serbian government and the intricate power structures of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The goal? To fast-track lithium extraction at major sites in Jadar (Serbia) and Lopare (Republika Srpska/Bosnia and Herzegovina) — a move that poses a looming ecological disaster of unimaginable scale, as both sites lie dangerously close to major rivers: the Drina and the Sava.
Adding to the picture is a key development that slipped under the radar amid the usual political squabbles over state and entity jurisdiction: in March 2024, the first “strategic raw materials” mine (lead, zinc, and barite) was officially opened in Vareš (Bosnia and Herzegovina), under the management of Adriatic Metals. The ceremony was attended by numerous dignitaries, including British Ambassador to Sarajevo, Julian Reilly — effectively paving the way for further large-scale projects aimed at exploiting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s vast mineral wealth.
Almost unnoticed by the public, a significant legislative shift has taken place in one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two highly autonomous entities — Republika Srpska. In 2024, a new Law on Geological Exploration was passed, stripping local communities of their say in decision-making processes related to mining projects.
At a session held on February 26, 2025 — just a month before the outbreak of the most severe political crisis since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement — the Constitutional Court of Republika Srpska rejected a motion to assess the constitutionality of amendments to the Law on Geological Exploration.
Given that potential lithium deposits in Bosnia and Herzegovina are located in Motajnica, Prosara, across Central Bosnia, and in the country’s east — including the areas around Čajniče, Foča, Goražde, and Srebrenica — it is clear that lobbying pressure from Rio Tinto and other mining corporations, channeled through Western European governments, will intensify on the authorities in both Serbia and BiH.
All of this points to one grim conclusion: the listed Balkan countries — from which Montenegro can certainly not be excluded — are being simultaneously designated as future mining colonies and as geographic zones for concentration camps, where the so-called “civilized world” will relocate unwanted ethnic groups, primarily desperate refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East. Wars, it bears repeating, sparked by the imperialist interventionist policies of the United States and the European Union — refugees who have now become an unbearable burden these same powers no longer wish to carry.
In this context, future generations of Serbs, Bosniaks, and Macedonians are being offered two “promising” career paths: to work in a lithium mine for a pittance while taking part in the irreversible ecological devastation of their own land, or to serve as guards at a concentration camp. Much of what seemed illogical in the political rhetoric of post-Yugoslav comprador elites — such as their failure to grasp that chauvinistic and hate-filled discourse is self-destructive for small, kin-related peoples who are naturally interdependent — now appears entirely logical.
Predatory privatization, the giveaway of national resources, an economy reduced to a futile cycle of debt and dependency — from borrowing money to subsidize foreign investors, to building infrastructure solely to ease the transport of extracted wealth; the fragmentation and grotesque caricaturization of social relations; the debasement and ridicule of moral and ethical values; the absence of any serious cultural policy; the reduction of nationalism to vulgarity and pathological lying — all of it has served one purpose: to cultivate despair so profound that the colonized individual will willingly accept their role, either in the mine or behind barbed wire, because the only alternative would be even worse.
Frantz Fanon observed a similar pattern among colonized Algerians and other African peoples:
“When we consider all the effort that has gone into achieving the kind of cultural alienation so central to the colonial period, it becomes clear that nothing was left to chance — that the ultimate goal of colonial domination was consciously to convince the native that colonialism had lifted him out of darkness, and that the departure of the colonizer would mean a return to barbarism, to the life of the horde, of the pack. Colonialism did not seek to be seen in the subconscious of the colonized as a benevolent mother protecting her child from the surrounding enemies — but rather as a mother constantly restraining her sickly child from committing suicide, from succumbing to his own malicious instincts.”
In the Balkans — in the post-Yugoslav states now re-colonized — the situation is even more dire. The comprador political class has so thoroughly embraced the colonizer’s game that they deliberately manufacture “malignant instincts” in order to better serve foreign powers, even when the general sentiment among the people is overwhelmingly anti-colonial. This is clearly reflected in the magnificent student demonstrations against the colonial regime of President Vučić, as well as in the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands across Serbia protesting the government’s intention to grant Rio Tinto concession rights over the Jadar valley and other potential sites across the country.
Amid the most severe political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the signing of the Dayton Accords — a crisis stirred both by the German colonial viceroy and by domestic actors within the Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska — a major rally was held in Lopare (Republika Srpska), uniting residents from Lopare, Bijeljina, Čelić, and Tuzla — in other words, from both entities — under the banner “Defending Majevica from the Lithium Mine.”
Among the speakers was the mayor of Bijeljina (Republika Srpska), Ljubiša Petrović, who emphasized that the struggle is only just beginning and that the Ministry of Mining and Energy of Republika Srpska is withholding key information from the public. “We are not divided into Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs — we are divided into those who truly love this land and want to preserve its beauty for future generations, and those who do not love it and want to drill it, poison it, plunder it, and drive its people from their ancestral homes,” he declared in a truly anti-colonial tone.
In this context, the unification of mass protests against corruption and corporate lithium mining in Serbia with the same rising sentiments in Bosnia and Herzegovina represents the only real hope of resisting the evident colonial schemes to transform the entire region into a dystopian wasteland dotted with holding centers for the unfortunate — those of the “wrong” faith or skin color.
How strikingly relevant, in this light, are the words of Serbian political thinker and fierce opponent of chauvinism, Dimitrije Tucović, written over a century ago:
“The Balkan peoples, each for themselves, divided, have always been nothing more than a straw in the whirlwind of conquest on the Balkan Peninsula. Fragmented, they have always fallen victim to such invasions, whether coming from the south to the north or from the north to the south. And they will continue to be, for as long as they remain divided — even hostile toward one another, as has sadly so often been the case to this day, despite one profound and self-evident lesson history has given us. That lesson is this: for all of us in the Balkans, salvation lies only in the closest of unions, in the most intimate of alliances.
Only then would we be able to rationally exploit the riches of the Balkans for our own benefit, instead of handing them over to the mercy — and the cruelty — of the plundering exploitation of French, German, English, Austrian and other capital. And those riches are by no means insignificant. They are vast, they are diverse, they are immeasurable.”
It is not yet too late to learn this lesson — but there will be no chance for a retake.
