Serbia Orders Activists to Leave After Confronting ‘Chetniks’
Migrants in Sid, Serbia. Photo: https://www.nonamekitchen.org/Maria Feck
Serbia has ordered three volunteers from a humanitarian NGO called No Name Kitchen, NNK, to leave the country after an altercation at an abandoned factory in Sid, where they confronted members of a nationalist association called Sokoli (The Falcons).
The foreign volunteers said the Sokoli members were destroying the belongings of migrants living in the abandoned factory, but the Sokoli insisted they were only cleaning up the area around the building and were engaged to do so by the local municipality.
A misdemeanours court in the town of Sremska Mitrovica found two volunteers, Adalberto Parenti and Leonie Sofia Neumann, guilty of breaching the peace and fined them 20,000 dinars, equal to about 170 euros.
Parenti, Neumann and their colleague Marina Bottke, who was acquitted of charges, were ordered to leave Serbia by February 7.
Caroline Tomalka, from No Name Kitchen, told BIRN that they are trying to appeal against the decision but are “not very optimistic” of success.
Sid is a small town in north-west Serbia on the Serbia-Croatia border, and is a well-known stopover for migrants who are passing through Serbia on their way to Western Europe.
The migrants are mostly accommodated in official reception centres, but some have been living rough. Some spend time in the abandoned Grafosrem factory during the day and sleep in tents in bushes nearby at night.
No Name Kitchen volunteers visit them twice a week, bringing them food, clothes and water.
Tomalka said that since January 18, people have been attempting to oust the migrants from their sleeping area by cutting down the bushes or destroying their tents and belongings. She said that some of them were wearing Chetnik insignia. The original Chetniks were World War II-era royalists and Serbian nationalists.
The first physical altercation between the volunteers and the Sokoli clean-up workers happened on January 25.
“A worker who got particularly aggressive and hit a volunteer had a Chetnik flag hanging from his own van, and was wearing a typical Chetnik hat, too,” said Tomalka.
“The next day, the volunteers concerned went to the police station to report the incident. The police officer gave the advice to call the police should something similar happen again in future, although police had been present the whole time,” she added.
After a similar incident on February 1, both volunteers and the so-called Chetniks from the Sokoli group were brought to the police station and then to court.
One of the Sokoli members, Slavko Muslic, told the court that the members of the group had been “engaged by the Sid municipality to completely clean up the former Grafosrem company’s field”.
“Today, the third Saturday already, they were engaged in that cleaning up in a space in which there is a large number of tents in which migrants that are not accommodated in any reception centre are staying, and every time when they are cleaning up this field, they have trouble with [a volunteer] and two other females because each time they were resisting the clean-up of the terrain,” Muslic told the court, according to written records from the court session which BIRN has obtained.
The court accepted Muslic’s account that the volunteers attacked him and his fellow Sokoli members.
However, Tomalka insisted that this was not true. “Marina [Bottke] was inside the tent to collect all the stuff inside it, and Adalberto [Parenti] was standing right next to it, packing up a plastic sheet that served as additional protection. One of the [Sokoli] workers approached and started to put petrol on the plastic sheet, as well as on the tent when there was still Marina inside it. She too was partly covered in petrol,” Tomalka said.
“She managed to get out of the tent in time before the worker set the plastic sheet on fire which could have easily spread over to the tent as well,” she added.
She said that the volunteers then decided to leave and wait at a nearby parking lot for their colleagues to pick them up. “When Leonie was on her way to the parking lot, a second worker threw a little explosive at her,” she alleged.
“While the three of them were waiting at the parking lot, the worker who had previously used the petrol and tried to set the tent on fire slapped Marina’s phone out of her hand. The phone fell to the ground, and he destroyed it with his baton stick. Adalberto tried to put himself between Marina and the worker, who kept waving his baton stick, but did not use any violence against him,” she added.
The Sid municipality did not respond to BIRN’s questions about the incident by the time of publication.
Historically, the Chetniks were a loosely structured movement that united Serbian nationalist and royalist movements in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. They also collaborated with the Nazi-led Axis occupation.
Banned and persecuted during the communist era, the movement saw a resurgence in Serbia after Yugoslavia broke apart in the early 1990s.
NNK was established in Belgrade in 2017. Supplying food and other resources to the homeless, migrants and refugees, it operates mainly out of iSid and Velika Kladusa in Bosnia.



