Emboldened by Trump, Serbia’s Leader Cracks Down on Activist Groups

Unable to calm student-led protests that just kept growing, Serbia’s strongman leader, Aleksandar Vucic, reached for some tried-and-tested scapegoats, unleashing his media attack dogs on foreign-financed groups that have nettled him for years.

But what started as a familiar ritual of intimidation against groups that document issues like corruption, human rights abuses and electoral fraud — and which Mr. Vucic blames for the protests — has recently taken an unusual and menacing turn.

Encouraged by the Trump administration’s assault on the American agency U.S.A.I.D., Serbian authorities on Feb. 25 sent dozens of police officers, many of them armed, to raid the offices of four nongovernmental organizations. They made the raids without warrants.

One organization, Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability, said it was raided and that officers carted away copies of 8,500 pages of documents. Another target, Civic Initiatives, said it surrendered 1,300 pages and thumb drives containing confidential personal information about its staff and finances.

Both had received a small part of their financing from U.S.A.I.D., as did a third group. The fourth group did not receive aid from the U.S. agency.

The government justified the action by referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the American aid agency and its denunciation by Elon Musk as a “criminal organization.” That, said Nenad Stefanovic, the anti-corruption state prosecutor who ordered the raids, raised concern that recipients of American grants were involved in money laundering since they had used funds tainted by what Mr. Musk said was criminal activity.

He said Serbia had requested assistance from the U.S. Justice Department. The Justice Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. On Tuesday night, President Vucic posted a picture of him meeting Donald Trump Jr., the U.S. president’s son, in Belgrade.

“They are just using what Trump is doing in America against all the people they want to frighten here in Serbia,” said Maja Stojanovic, the executive director of Civic Initiatives. She said her organization, which has provided legal aid to detained student protesters, used to get around 10 percent of its funding from U.S.A.I.D.

President Vucic, she said, “sees the most powerful country in the world acting like this and has decided he can get rid of people here he doesn’t like.”

When a Serbian journalist recently tried to ask Mr. Vucic about reports linking his son to organized crime groups, the president responded by accusing the reporter of working for “criminal organizations.” He asked her: “How much money have you received from U.S.A.I.D.?”

Serbia figured prominently in the White House’s explanation of why it was shutting down foreign aid, with Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, citing $1.5 million that was granted to advance diversity in Serbian workplaces as a prime example of the “insane priorities” of U.S.A.I.D.

The description of a 2022 grant in Serbia was accurate, but the L.G.B.T.Q. activist group that received the money, Grupa Izadji, was not among the targets of the recent raids.

Also left alone have been the biggest beneficiaries of American aid money, more than 90 percent of which has gone to government and state-affiliated institutions, including the national Parliament. After Mr. Musk branded U.S.A.I.D. a criminal enterprise, Parliament quickly scrubbed the aid agency’s logo from the home page of its website.

Its speaker, a Vucic loyalist and former prime minister, Ana Brnabic, who worked for years on projects financed by American aid, joined in assailing U.S.A.I.D. and its beneficiaries in Serbia as a threat to national security and sovereignty.

Following the 2000 downfall of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s authoritarian leader during a series of wars with its neighbors in the 1990s, U.S.A.I.D. financed projects that it hoped would fortify the country’s weak democratic institutions, judicial system and civil society.

The targets for Serbia’s Trump-enabled crackdown have all been private organizations that the government accuses of orchestrating student-led protests.

The protests, which have spread across the country, reaching into towns that in the past voted heavily for Mr. Vucic, began in November after 15 people were killed by the collapse of a concrete canopy at a railway station. The students and opposition politicians — who protested in dramatic fashion last week by setting off flares and smoke bombs in Parliament — blamed the tragedy on shoddy work by contractors tied to corrupt officials.

Playing off nationalist sentiments, the government initially blamed the unrest on money and activists from neighboring Croatia, Serbia’s bitter enemy during the Balkan wars in the 1990s. In January, five Croats working for nongovernmental groups were detained in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and expelled “for reasons of state security” related to the protests.

But Croatia has since faded as a culprit, replaced by U.S.A.I.D. and Serbian groups it has helped fund.

The recent raids on the four nongovernmental groups and threats of criminal prosecution have sent shivers through Serbia’s small but vibrant nonprofit sector. They have also highlighted how the Trump administration’s crusade against the “deep state” has roiled not only Washington but distant lands where authoritarian governments have long bridled at constraints on their powers by groups they don’t control.

“There used to be red lines beyond which Vucic would not go,” said the Ivan Djuric, an analyst at the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability, one of the raided organizations. “But when the U.S. government started demonizing U.S.A.I.D., Vucic decided he can do whatever he wants.”

For Mr. Vucic, he said, the Trump administration’s signal that it is open season on civil society groups came at a particularly opportune moment as the nationwide protests — the biggest challenge to his decade-long grip on power — entered their fourth month.

Ms. Stojanovic of Civic Initiatives said the government, caught off guard by the size and stamina of the protest movement, had for months floated conspiracy theories that foreign-funded “traitors and mercenaries” were responsible for the unrest.

Pro-government media in December branded Ms. Stojanovic, her husband, the former head of a long defunct nongovernmental organization, and a third person as a “Black Troika” working with foreigners to destroy the state by manipulating students.

The attacks on U.S.A.I.D. in Washington as a “criminal organization” took the campaign of vilification to a new level.

“Everyone is now afraid of being connected in any way to U.S.A.I.D.,” said Steven Dojcinovic, the editor of Krik, an investigative media outlet long in the government’s cross hairs, “It is like being part of a narco-cartel.”

He said his news organization had not received any American aid money but had still been pilloried by vicious pro-government tabloids as “part of a big crime family” directed by the U.S. aid agency during the Biden administration.

The governments of Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Trump, have also seized on the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. as a club with which to beat their domestic opponents. That ignores the fact that the aid agency ended most of its funding in their countries after they joined the European Union in 2004.

Cheering what he said was Mr. Trump’s effort to “drive a stake through the heart” of “the monster” financed by U.S.A.I.D. to serve “the liberal-globalist empire,” Mr. Orban last week accused foreign-funded groups of trying to “topple” his government and vowed to expunge them.

“These international networks have to be taken down, they have to be swept away,” Mr. Orban said on state radio. “It is necessary to make their existence legally impossible.”

Unlike Hungary, which received only tiny amounts of money from U.S.A.I.D., Serbia, which has applied to join the European Union but is not yet a member, has been a major European recipient of American aid, most of which went to the government.

Among those who benefited was Jelena Milutinovic Ziljkic, the prosecutor investigating the raided nongovernmental organizations for money laundering. U.S.A.I.D. paid for a trip she took to Italy last year to study the Italian justice system.

Serbia’s biggest source of foreign aid, however, has been the European Union, which has provided more than $6 billion in loans and grants to build roads, improve sewage systems and pay for other projects. It has also given more than $35 million to support nongovernmental organizations, including those now under attack.

Bojana Selakovic, the coordinator of National Convention, an independent body lobbying for Serbia’s long-stalled entry to the European Union, said the “Trump effect” had set back her country’s European aspiration by emboldening Mr. Vucic’s nationalist, populist instincts.

President Trump, she added, “has allowed Vucic to say he is acting in line with Western values and do things he could only dream of doing before.”