Since last May, she stood in front of the excavator and thus prevented it from burying Bara Reva near Belgrade, the actress Svetlana Bojković it became a symbol of environmental movements in Serbia.
After that, environmental protests became an important civic activity in Serbia, thanks to the country's prime minister Ana Brnabic tell the population that Rio Tinto no longer has any rights to explore lithium and boron in Western Serbia, and no other company has requested such rights.
Right at the time we are talking, it was reported from Gornji Nedeljice that the Rio Sava company has started clearing the forest on the plot of land it became the owner of just seven days after the aforementioned revocation of all permits for the Rio Tinto company to mine Jadr.
What is the truth, whether Jadar was stopped as the Serbian government claims or not as the events on the ground suggest, Svetlana Bojković says that "we will have to find out the truth about it, because there will be a reckoning."
He assesses that due to the latest news from Jadro, it seems as if the environmental protests have not yielded results, but he believes that "it is very important that awareness has spread in our country to defend nature, and this will result in better air that we breathe." The persistence of people fighting against pollution, I believe, will result in good results."
Since the first of February, the Ministry of the Environment has introduced an application with which it is possible to report an illegal dump or any kind of pollution. "Any improvement is surely the result of environmental movements," comments Svetlana Bojković on this application, and expects that there will be a lot of work for local communal services to which citizens' applications will reach, "because Serbia has turned into a big landfill."
The demands of environmental protests are focused on environmental pollution, and the topic of ecology is, for example, the way we treat each other. Bojković believes that for now, at this stage, it is enough if we concentrate on "the protection of rivers, land, air and the living world, because ecology primarily refers to those areas", although he believes that "the public space is polluted, starting with the assembly with their attacks on dissenters. It might be possible to extend the concept of ecology to the pollution of human relations, but I don't think it should be expanded."
One of the accusations of the authorities against environmental protests is that they are not for the welfare of the state, that they prevent the state from using its sources of lithium, which is rare and in demand in the world.
"Both the private and state sectors both in our country and in the world give almost complete priority to economic growth and earnings in relation to the importance of environmental problems. In the name of what is it done? Because of this attitude towards the environment, they create and threaten our survival, but it motivates us even more to fight and defend."
Svetlana Bojković does not mind that the government describes environmental protests as political, and accuses their organizers of not fighting for clean air but for the government. He says that this is expected because politics interferes in all areas of life. However, this will not prevent her from participating in this type of activism. "As I've said before, once I'm in, I'm not leaving."
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