Portrait of Milos Savic,
In the story, we visit Savic at his home in a more poor neighborhood
of Bor, approx. 5-10 minutes from the city centre of Bor. He lives in a
small house with a lot cracks in the walls of the house, which he says
is from the explosions of the mining.
He lives about 50 meters from the mining pit of the ‘Jama’ mine in the city of Bor.

The
‘Jama’ mine is the closest to the city centre of Bor, where it should
be possible to get it from an angle where you can get both the city and
the enormous mine in a picture.

In 2018 the Chinese company Zijin
Mining bought the state-owned mining company in Bor and its mines. And
also another mine in a village nearby, Metovnica. Ever since that,
production has gone up and locals are now complaining about their land
getting expropriated, cracks in their houses because of explosions from
the mine, and pollution in general.

Serbia is a country that
politically juggles between East and West – it’s nominally on EU path
but lately has started to court a number of Chinese investors who are
interested in outsourcing dirty industries from the Asian giant. Serbia
is a convenient partner because its proximity to the EU gives easy
access to European market, but also due to the country’s willingness to
make deals labelled as state secret, where the investors don’t have to
disclose any details on the deal.
Most of those investments have
stirred fears for potential environmental impact, because in recent
years Chinese investors have taken over Serbia’s steelworks, a number of
copper and other mines and started building a tyremega factory.

For @informationdk