In the first week of an amnesty after mass shootings plunged their country into shock and soul-searching, Serbians surrendered more than 13,500 weapons, from guns through hand grenades to anti-tank launchers, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition.
But in a deeply divided nation awash with lethal weaponry, where war criminals are glorified, reality shows on state TV star convicted murderers, and memories of savage recent conflicts run deep, many doubt whether the president’s pledge to “disarm” the country will be enough.
Eighteen people were killed and 21 injured this month in two shootings in as many days. In Belgrade, a shooter – allegedly a 13-year-old schoolboy using two of his father’s pistols – shot dead eight pupils and a security guard. A 10-year-old girl who was injured died on Monday, bringing the toll to 10. Six other children and a teacher were injured.
The suspect is in custody and undergoing psychological evaluation, but is too young to be held criminally responsible. His father is accused of training the teenager to handle weapons and failing to adequately secure the pistols.
The following day, a man brandishing an assault rifle and a pistol killed eight people and injured a further 14 in two villages about 30 miles south of the capital. A 21-year-old suspect is in custody.
The president, Aleksandar Vučić, a populist, pro-Kremlin authoritarian whose political roots are in far-right nationalism – he was briefly the information minister under the Serb leader Slobodan Milošević, who died during his trial for war crimes – decried “an attack on our entire country”.
Vučić announced the month-long gun amnesty, promising that people could hand over illegal weapons, ammunition and ordnance, as well as legally owned arms they no longer wanted, anonymously and without fear of prosecution.
Vučić won some praise, in particular abroad, for the move, with some commentators contrasting his decisiveness with the apparent inability of the US – which this year alone has witnessed 22 mass killings in which four or more people have been killed, excluding the perpetrator – to tackle its accelerating gun violence.
He has further pledged a two-year moratorium on new gun licences, a review of current licences, more psychological checks, 1,200 extra police officers in schools, and longer jail terms for gun crimes and illegal weapon possession.
But while their president was promising “a sharp response, urgent measures and severe penalties” to tackle gun crime, many Serbs were asking what else may lie behind it – and how far Vučić, who has been in power since 2014, may have contributed to the excessive violence in the country, in its politics and on TV.
Some support the government’s measures. “There is too much violence. I do not know how they did not address this issue so far,” said Ivan Petrović, a retiree. But others are not reassured. “I do not know what to think. I have a kid and I do not feel safe. I keep my eyes peeled in the playground,” said Vesna Dragišić.
Thousands took to the streets of Belgrade on Friday in a second opposition-led “Serbia against violence” protest march, demanding the resignation of the interior minister – the education minister has already gone – and an end to what many see as a culture of violence fanned by the media and ruling party politicians.
Vučić has accused his opponents of seeking to exploit the tragedies for political ends, and announced plans for his own rally in late May. On Sunday he said would stand down “soon” as leader of his governing Serbian Progressive Party, pledging new parliamentary elections before the end of September.
Nobody knows how many guns there are in Serbia, a country of about 6.8 million people. Maja Bjeloš, a researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, said it was unclear how many weapons were registered, let alone how many were held illegally.
“The police have said there are over 900,000 firearms legally held by citizens … The president said there were 400,000, then two days later 700,000,” Bjeloš said. “We have disinformation from the government. But estimates for the total – legal and illegal – run from 1.5m to 3m. That’s frightening.”
She said weaponry left over from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s accounted for only part of the arsenal. “There’s a tradition of firearms in the home, passed from generation to generation, of firing in the air during festivities,” she said. “Poor security at arms factories and police stores account for some. And criminal networks, in and outside Serbia.”
Repressive, knee-jerk measures would not help, Bjeloš said: “Serbia has among the most police officers per capita in Europe, but that has not left citizens feeling safer or resolved the violence problem.”
Despite ready access to weapons, mass shootings were rare in Serbia before this month; the last major incident was in 2013. But amid hardship, the legacy of the war, endemic corruption and high levels of violence in society, politics and the media, experts have long warned that the presence of so many guns posed a threat.
Zoran Gavrilović, a sociologist at the Bureau for Social Research, said the shootings had not surprised him. “The social climate was leading to this. We have a violent society. It was just a matter of time for it to erupt,” he said.
Many blame Vučić, if not directly, accusing the president of deliberately sustaining a climate of violence. “Indirectly, Vučić is the main culprit – he is the one who created this atmosphere of hate, and all the attacks in his media,” said Marinika Tepić, a senior opposition politician. “Serbia is not a powder keg; it has exploded.”
Vučić and his ruling party regularly demean their political opponents and foreign rivals as “scum”, “thieves” and “paedophiles”, while parliamentary sessions are dominated by crude and aggressive insults.
“We will not be healed, even if all the weapons were taken away and all the sociopaths were put behind bars, as long as our destiny is shaped by the one who unlocked and rode that evil,” tweeted the opposition leader, Zdravko Ponoš.
Nearly 450,000 people have signed a petition calling for two pro-government public TV stations to lose their licences over violent reality shows that, by some estimates, have made up 60% of their recent programming.
Mobsters, war criminals and notoriously violent football hooligans regularly feature in scenes that have included women being beaten and threats being made at gunpoint, running alongside political programmes featuring Vučić and his allies haranguing their opponents.
“There is an ‘industry of populism’ in Serbia designed to promote Vučić and denigrate his opponents,” Gavrilović said. “The violence of the reality shows serves to legitimise the aggressive political vocabulary. Hate speech, by Serbia’s main social and political actors and via its main media, has become the country’s number one language.”
Since Vučić came to power, Serbia has fallen from 54th to 93rd of the 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom index. Independent media have been progressively squeezed out and journalists attacked.
In theory a candidate for EU accession, the country is torn between the west and its historical political and economic ties to Russia, a Slavic and Orthodox Christian ally.
In a scathing report last week, the European parliament highlighted several stumbling blocks to accession, including Belgrade’s refusal to align with EU sanctions on Russia and its reluctance to recognise Kosovo as an independent state. Pro-Russia rhetoric from government-controlled media and government officials did not help.
Viola von Cramon, a German MEP and the parliament’s rapporteur for Kosovo, said the rule of law, media freedom, and relations with Kosovo and with Moscow were the key issues. “Serbia needs to show clearly it wants to join the EU,” she said. “The time of ‘sitting on two chairs’ and balancing between the west and Russia is over.”
Klemen Grošelj, a Slovenian MEP, highlighted a lack of progress on an independent judiciary, and media that were “neither independent nor objective”.
“I’m very pessimistic,” he said. “When I visited after the fall of Milošević, there was this positive energy. Unfortunately, it faded away; there is no real and honest political will for changes to be part of the EU. Serbia will soon need to make a choice.”
• This article was amended on 15 May 2023 to remove a reference to a “pro-Nazi … T-shirt” worn by the suspect, which came from comments by Aleksandar Vučić that have since been debunked.
