Together Party Submits Request to Halt the Jadar Project Assessment Process

Nebojsa Zelenovic (BetaPhoto/Milan Obradovic)

The Together Party submitted on Sept. 23 a request to the Ministry of Environmental Protection to suspend the evaluation of the scope and content of an impact assessment study submitted by the Rio Tinto mining concern.

The Party’s co-president, Nebojsa Zelenovic, said that his party was at the negotiating table with different associations across Serbia, discussing with them opportunities to stop Rio Tinto’s Jadar project, promising to present the measures they would agree upon in the coming days.

"It will be a general plan, but also individual actions will be presented, too. The plan is to inform the public about once all the arrangements have been made. I am convinced that this is the only way to force the authorities to abandon this project. It won’t happen unless everyone gets involved, and it’s up to us to do this as soon as possible," Zelenovic told reporters.

The opposition politician underlined that both institutional and non-institutional forms of resistance are necessary, recalling that the project had been suspended before, with road blockades two and a half years ago. "If we don't do something similar immediately, it’s possible that we won't be able to stop a single step by Rio Tinto in the future," Zelenovic warned.

Together’s another co-president, Biljana Stojkovic, pointed out that many illegal actions had been identified, explaining that the initial impact assessment study had been based on one project, but that it’s now divided into three parts - mining, infrastructure and a landfill - and that the part submitted to the Ministry referred to mining only.