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    Serbian Leader Says Kushner Deal Is Not an Effort to Influence Trump

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    After news reports that Jared Kushner plans to redevelop a site in Belgrade bombed by NATO in 1999, Serbian politicians clashed over whether the deal was appropriate.The president of Serbia on Monday batted away any suggestion that he might have intentionally tried to steer a valuable real estate project in Serbia’s capital to Jared Kushner, Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, in an effort to influence Mr. Trump should he return to the White House.“I died laughing,” the Serbian leader, Aleksandar Vucic, said at a rally, referring mockingly to news reports that Mr. Kushner was close to an agreement to invest $500 million in redeveloping a high-profile site in central Belgrade, the capital. “I read in some papers that I used this for a political influence on Trump, that corrupted America or someone in America. I am a miracle. It is incredible what all I can do.”Mr. Kushner, who was a senior White House adviser under Mr. Trump, has teamed up with a second former Trump aide, Richard Grenell, on the plan.The tentative agreement between the Kushner team and the Serbian government would grant Mr. Kushner’s investment firm a 99-year lease, at no charge, and the right to build a luxury hotel and apartment complex and a museum on the site of the former headquarters of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense in Belgrade, which was bombed by NATO in 1999.News of the proposal provoked strong objections on Monday from opposition party leaders in Serbia during a meeting of the parliament.Opposition party leaders said they had not been properly informed of the plan and called it inappropriate that an American company owned by a Trump family member would be allowed to earn profits off a site that a United States-led coalition bombed 25 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russia Sees a Western Hand Behind Serbian Street Protests

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      The accusations made by Russia’s ambassador to Serbia were the latest efforts by Moscow to thwart a diplomatic campaign to lure Serbia out of Russia’s orbit.Fishing in Serbia’s troubled waters after a contested general election, Russia on Monday accused the West of orchestrating anti-government street protests in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, that flared into violence on Sunday evening.Claims of a Western plot by Russia’s ambassador to Serbia, Alexander Botsan-Harchenko, were the latest efforts by Moscow to thwart a so far mostly fruitless diplomatic campaign by the United States and Europe to lure Serbia out of Russia’s orbit and break traditionally strong ties between the two Slavic and Orthodox Christian nations.Previously peaceful street protests in Belgrade over what the opposition says was a rigged general election on Dec. 17 turned ugly on Sunday after protesters tried to storm the capital’s City Council building and were met by volleys of tear gas from riot police officers.The Russian ambassador, in a television interview, said there was “irrefutable evidence” that the “riot” had been incited by the West. This echoed claims by Serbia’s strongman leader, President Aleksandar Vucic, that his government had come under attack from outside forces seeking a “color revolution,” a term coined by Russia to describe popular revolts that it invariably dismisses as Western conspiracies.“This was an attempted violent takeover of the state institutions of the Republic of Serbia,” Mr. Vucic told Pink TV, a pro-government television station, deriding accusations of election irregularities as “lies” ginned up by his political opponents.There is no evidence that Western governments instigated the past week’s street protests against Mr. Vucic and what his opponents believe was a stolen Belgrade election.Protests against the election continued on Monday. A demonstration led by university students attracted only a modest turnout but blocked traffic on a central Belgrade street to government headquarters.Protesters in front of Belgrade’s city council building on Sunday.Oliver Bunic/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA report last Monday by election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that Serbian voters had been given a wide choice of candidates and that “freedom of expression and assembly were generally respected.” But, it said, the governing party had enjoyed a “tilted playing field” because “pressure on voters as well as the decisive involvement of the president and the ruling party’s systemic advantages undermined the election process overall.”Mr. Vucic’s governing Serbian Progressive Party trounced the opposition in this month’s parliamentary vote but fared less well in an election for the Belgrade City Council, eking out a narrow win that the opposition attributed to voters whom they say were illegally bused into the capital from other areas of the country and from neighboring Kosovo and Bosnia.While accepting defeat in the vote for a new Parliament, the opposition vowed to overturn what it sees as a rigged result in the Belgrade municipal election and has staged daily street protests over the past week.Western countries, wary of burning bridges with Mr. Vucic, have been muted in their criticism of the election. The U.S. ambassador to Serbia, Christopher R. Hill, last week called on the country to address “deficiencies” in the electoral system but stressed that “the U.S. government looks forward to continuing our work with the Serbian government” and bringing it “more fully into the family of Western nations.”Serbia applied to join the European Union in 2009, but its application has been stalled for years. There has been growing pressure from the West on Mr. Vucic to pick a side since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year.Mr. Vucic condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but has balked at joining European sanctions on Russia and shown only fitful interest in settling a long-running dispute over the status of Kosovo, formerly Serbian territory that declared itself an independent state in 2008. Kosovo, inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians, severed its ties to Serbia after a 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Belgrade and other cities that left even many pro-European Serbs deeply suspicious of the West’s intentions.President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia during a public address in Belgrade, on Sunday.Darko Vojinovic/Associated PressBad blood has slowly eased between Serbia and the West, which blamed Kosovo, not Mr. Vucic, for exacerbating tensions after a flare-up of violence in mainly Serb areas of northern Kosovo in September. That stance led to accusations of “appeasement” of Belgrade from European politicians and commentators who see Mr. Vucic as the principal threat to peace in the Balkans.Instead of giving Mr. Vucic more leeway to break with hard-line Serbian nationalist forces closely aligned with Russia as Washington had hoped, the recent election appears to have only pushed him closer to Moscow.After the clashes in Belgrade on Sunday evening, Serbia’s prime minister Ana Brnabic, a close ally of Mr. Vucic, thanked Russian security forces for sharing information pointing to a Western hand in the opposition protests.“It probably won’t be popular with those from the West, but I feel especially tonight that it is important to stand up for Serbia and to thank the Russian security services that had that information and shared it with us,” Ms. Brnabic said. More

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      What is Behind the Rising Tensions Between Kosovo and Serbia?

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      Clashes in northern Kosovo that injured dozens of ethnic Serbs and NATO soldiers are the latest flare up in a long-running standoff between Kosovo and Serbia.Dozens of NATO peacekeepers were injured this week in northern Kosovo when they clashed with ethnic Serbs, raising fears of a larger escalation between Serbia and Kosovo.The violence came after Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leadership sent heavily armed security forces to take control of town municipal buildings, the latest turn in a dispute that has roots going back to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Kosovo, where a majority of the population is ethnic Albanian and Muslim, declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after NATO’s bombing campaign that drove Serb forces, responsible for years of brutal mistreatment of ethnic Albanians, from Kosovo.Since then, the two countries have clashed over Kosovo’s treatment of its minority ethnic Serb population.The fighting in recent days — mostly skirmishes, but also some shooting — began when the Kosovan government deployed its security forces in several towns to install the ethnic Albanian mayors who had won in local elections last month. Local Serbs had mostly boycotted those votes.Each side has blamed the other for the fighting. NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, called the recent clashes “unacceptable” on Tuesday and said that 700 reserve troops had been deployed to help the peacekeeping mission there, which included 3,800 troops before the conflict. In response to the violence, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, said in a statement released by his office that he had put the army on the highest level alert.Here is what we know.How did the violence start?The recent clashes were centered on four northern municipalities bordering Serbia that are home to much of Kosovo’s Serb minority.Serbian nationalists living in Kosovo, many of whom still regard the Serbian capital, Belgrade, as their true capital, have staged protests throughout the past decade to resist integrating with Kosovo.The boycott of local elections last month was prompted by a Serbian political party in Kosovo. In a statement posted to Facebook days before the election, the group dismissed the process as “undemocratic” and urged Serbs to stay home on voting day.“Serbs should watch with contempt all those who go out to participate in this illegal and illegitimate process that is against the interest of the Serbian people,” the post said.To ensure that the ethnic Albanians who won recent mayoral elections could take their posts, Kosovo’s central government last week sent in armed security forces to the area, a move that was condemned in unusually strong terms by the United States, Kosovo’s main international backer. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Friday accused Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leadership of “escalating tensions in the north and increasing instability.”Over the weekend, Serb protesters gathered outside municipal buildings in a number of Serbian-majority towns, facing off with Kosovo security forces and troops from a NATO-led peacekeeping mission called KFOR.A total of 30 NATO peacekeepers, including 19 Italians and 11 Hungarians, suffered injuries in the clashes. More than 50 Serbs were treated for injuries, Mr. Vucic said.The NATO mission’s commander, Maj. Gen. Angelo Michele Ristuccia, in a statement urged both sides to “take full responsibility for what happened and prevent any further escalation.”A total of 30 NATO peacekeepers, including 19 Italians and 11 Hungarians, suffered injuries in the clashes.Georgi Licovski/EPA, via ShutterstockTensions in the region had been building since the elections last month.In a televised statement early Tuesday, Mr. Vucic blamed Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, for fueling hostilities. He also criticized NATO’s peacekeeping mission, saying it had failed to protect the Serbian population and was enabling the “illegal and forceful takeover” of the majority-Serbian municipalities by the Kosovan government.Mr. Kurti, Kosovo’s prime minister, applauded the NATO forces, saying they had been trying to curb the “violent extremism” in the streets. “In a democracy there is no place for fascist violence,” he said in a statement on Twitter. “Citizens of all ethnicities have a right to full & unencumbered service of their elected officials,” he added.What’s behind the conflict?The latest escalation is part of a dispute over the status of Kosovo, which declared its independence 15 years ago, almost a decade after NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 that drove Serb forces, then engaged in brutal mistreatment of ethnic Albanians, from Kosovo.While an independent Kosovo has been recognized by the United States and many European countries, Serbia — as well as its key allies, Russia and China — still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence. It has called the split a violation of U.N. resolution 1244 that dates back to 1999 and the end of the Kosovo war.President Vucic and other Serbian leaders claim Kosovo as being the “heart” of their country, in part, because it houses many revered Orthodox Christian sites. Mr. Vucic has ruled out recognizing Kosovo and vowed to “protect” ethnic Serbs.Troops from the NATO-led peacekeeping mission secure an area near Zvecan, on Tuesday. Armend Nimani/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSerbian nationalists in Kosovo have been joined by more moderate Serbs in demanding the implementation of a 2013 deal brokered by the European Union that calls for a measure of self-rule for Serb-dominated municipalities in the north, a provision Kosovo has reneged on.In February, leaders of Kosovo and Serbia tentatively accepted a peace deal, which was mediated by the European Union and rejected by nationalists on both sides. It has not been formally signed.What is the regional backdrop to the tensions?Tensions between the two ethnic communities have flared regularly over the past decade, making the region a hub of unpredictable violence.Clashes erupted last July in response to a new law that would require ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to switch from Serbian license plates to Kosovar ones. The recent escalation of hostilities comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has absorbed the attention of Kosovo’s important allies, the United States and the European Union.Serbia, a candidate to join the European Union, has been a close partner with Moscow for centuries. While it voted in favor of a U.N. resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Serbia has refused to join sanctions imposed on Moscow by Western countries.“Serbs are fighting for their rights in northern Kosovo,” Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia said on Monday during a visit to Kenya. “A big explosion is looming in the heart of Europe,” he said.Joe Orovic More

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      With a Neutral Stance on Ukraine, Viktor Orban Pulled in Voters

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      BUDAPEST — Savoring the election victory of a rare European leader who has not condemned him as a war criminal, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday congratulated Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for winning a fourth term and said he looked forward to an expansion of “partnership ties.”At a time when Russia’s relations with the European Union and the United States are unraveling over the war in Ukraine, Hungary, a member of the European bloc, has mostly sat on the fence in response to the Russian invasion, in part to avoid upsetting a natural gas deal cemented by Mr. Orban during talks with Mr. Putin in Moscow shortly before Russia invaded.A thumping victory in Sunday’s election for Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, suggested that the Hungarian leader would stick with a policy strongly endorsed by voters.But following a vote that independent election observers said was unfairly tilted in the governing party’s favor, there is also growing pressure on Mr. Orban to change course or risk not only alienating Hungary’s allies but losing billions of dollars in badly needed funding from the European Union for failing to uphold the rule of law.Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent liberal in the European Parliament, described the election as “a dark day for liberal democracy, for Hungary and the E.U., at a perilous time.”Mr. Putin got more mixed news from elections Sunday in Serbia, where Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s populist pro-Russia president, won re-election, according to preliminary official results issued on Monday. But it looked as if President Vucic could lose his increasingly authoritarian grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.The Kremlin congratulated Mr. Vucic nonetheless, calling for a strengthening of what it described as a “strategic partnership” in the interests of “brotherly Russian and Serb people.”Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s pro-Russia president, won re-election on Sunday, but could lose his grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.Andrej Cukic/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Orban’s Fidesz party has been divided over how to respond to Russia’s aggression, with its more traditional nationalist wing, steeped in the history of Hungary’s own past suffering at Russia’s hands, uncomfortable with cozying up to Mr. Putin.But its hopes that Mr. Orban, who went from being an anti-Kremlin liberal firebrand in 1989 to Mr. Putin’s closest partner in Europe, might again change direction after the election seems to have been diminished by the scale of his party’s victory. It won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament while an openly pro-Putin, far-right party, Our Homeland Movement, secured enough votes to enter Parliament for the first time.“Putin is right. Ukraine is getting what it deserves,” Janos Horvath, a supporter of the far-right party, said after casting his vote. Ukraine, he said, echoing a favorite Kremlin talking point, mistreats its ethnic minorities, including Russians and Hungarians, and “must be stopped.”The crushing defeat of Mr. Orban’s opponents, who campaigned on pledges to show more solidarity with Ukraine and Hungary’s allies, makes it unlikely that Hungary will now join NATO and the European Union in condemning Mr. Putin over his military onslaught or in supplying weapons to help Ukraine defend itself. Hungary, unlike Poland, has steadfastly refused to let weapons pass through its territory to Ukraine.While increasingly isolated from his foreign allies, Mr. Orban won strong domestic support for his neutral stance on the war, turning what had initially threatened to become an electoral liability into a vote-getter. He did this through relentless misrepresentation of his opponents’ position, deploying a vast apparatus of loyal media outlets to convince voters that his rivals wanted to send Hungarian troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia, something that nobody has suggested doing.Supporters of Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party on Sunday.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesAt the opposition’s final rally in Budapest on election eve, Fidesz activists masquerading as journalists presented the opposition’s main candidate, Peter Maki Zay, with a white T-shirt emblazoned with a red target, shouting that this was what Hungary would become if he won. A video of the encounter was later posted online by Fidesz-friendly media outlets, which repeatedly cast the election as a choice between “war and peace.”Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Russian atrocities. More

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      Eastern Europe Tests New Forms of Media Censorship

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      With new, less repressive tactics, countries like Serbia, Poland and Hungary are deploying highly effective tools to skew public opinion.BELGRADE, Serbia — When Covid-19 reached Eastern Europe in the spring of 2020, a Serbian journalist reported a severe shortage of masks and other protective equipment. She was swiftly arrested, thrown in a windowless cell and charged with inciting panic.The journalist, Ana Lalic, was quickly released and even got a public apology from the government in what seemed like a small victory against old-style repression by Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic.But Ms. Lalic was then vilified for weeks as a traitor by much of the country’s news media, which has come increasingly under the control of Mr. Vucic and his allies as Serbia adopts tactics favored by Hungary and other states now in retreat from democracy across Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe.“For the whole nation, I became a public enemy,” she recalled.Serbia no longer jails or kills critical journalists, as happened under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. It now seeks to destroy their credibility and ensure few people see their reports.The muting of critical voices has greatly helped Mr. Vucic — and also the country’s most well-known athlete, the tennis star Novak Djokovic, whose visa travails in Australia have been portrayed as an intolerable affront to the Serb nation. The few remaining outlets of the independent news media mostly support him but take a more balanced approach.Ana Lalic, a Serbian journalist, last month in Belgrade. She was arrested in 2020 after reporting on a severe shortage of masks and other protective equipment that could be used against the coronavirus.Marko Risovic for The New York TimesAcross the region, from Poland in the north to Serbia in the south, Eastern Europe has become a fertile ground for new forms of censorship that mostly eschew brute force but deploy gentler yet effective tools to constrict access to critical voices and tilt public opinion — and therefore elections — in favor of those in power.Television has become so biased in support of Mr. Vucic, according to Zoran Gavrilovic, the executive director of Birodi, an independent monitoring group, that Serbia has “become a big sociological experiment to see just how far media determines opinion and elections.”Serbia and Hungary — countries in the vanguard of what V-Dem Institute, a Swedish research group, described last year as a “global wave of autocratization” — both hold general elections in April, votes that will test whether media control works.A recent Birodi survey of news reports on Serbian television found that over a three-month period from September, Mr. Vucic was given more than 44 hours of coverage, 87 percent of it positive, compared with three hours for the main opposition party, 83 percent of which was negative.A billboard depicting President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia was displayed on a building in Nis in December, ahead of his visit to the city.Sasa Djordjevic/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNearly all of the negative coverage of Mr. Vucic appeared on N1, an independent news channel that broadcast Ms. Lalic’s Covid-19 reports. But a bitter war for market share is playing out between the cable provider that hosts N1 — Serbian Broadband, or SBB — and the state-controlled telecommunications company, Telekom Srbija.Telekom Srbija recently made a move that many saw as an unfair effort to make SBB less attractive to consumers when it snagged from SBB the rights to broadcast English soccer by offering to pay 700 percent more for them.Telekom Srbija’s offer, nearly $700 million for six seasons, is an astronomical amount for a country with only seven million people — and nearly four times what a media company in Russia, a far bigger market, has agreed to pay the Premier League each season for broadcast rights.“It is very difficult to compete if you have a competitor that does not really care about profit,” SBB’s chief executive, Milija Zekovic, said in an interview. The offices of the N1 cable news channel in Belgrade. N1 and a smaller station, Nova S, are the only TV outlets in Serbia that give regular airtime to opposition politicians.Marko Risovic for The New York TimesTelekom Srbija declined to make its executives available for comment, but in public statements, the company has described its investments in English soccer and elsewhere as driven by commercial concerns, not politics.“Their goal is to kill SBB,” Dragan Solak, the chairman of SBB’s parent company, United Group, said in an interview in London. “In the Balkans,” he added, “you do not want to be a bleeding shark.”Eager to stay in the game, Mr. Solak announced this month that a private investment company he controls had bought Southampton FC, an English Premier League soccer team. Broadcast rights for the league will stay with his state-controlled rival, but part of the huge sum it agreed to pay for them will now pass to Mr. Solak.Government loyalists run Serbia’s five main free-to-air television channels, including the supposedly neutral public broadcaster, RTS. The only television outlets in Serbia that give airtime to the opposition and avoid hagiographic coverage of Mr. Vucic are Mr. Solak’s cable news channel N1, which is affiliated with CNN, and his TV Nova.Without them, Mr. Solak said, Serbia “will be heading into the dark ages like North Korea.”Telekom Srbija recently snagged from SBB the rights to broadcast English soccer by offering to pay 700 percent more than what SBB had previously paid.Marko Risovic for The New York TimesSpace for critical media has been shrinking across the region, with V-Dem Institute, the Swedish research group, now ranking Serbia, Poland and Hungary among its “top 10 autocratizing countries,” citing “assaults on the judiciary and restrictions on the media and civil society.” Freedom House now classifies Serbia as “partly free.”In each country, security forces — the primary tools for muzzling critical voices during the communist era — have been replaced in this role by state-controlled and state-dependent companies that exert often irresistible pressure on the news media.Poland’s governing party, Law and Justice, has turned the country’s public broadcaster, TVP, into a propaganda bullhorn, while a state-run oil company has taken over a string of regional newspapers, though some national print outlets still regularly assail the government.In December, Law and Justice pushed through legislation that would have squeezed out the only independent television news channel, the American-owned TVN24, but the Polish president, worried about alienating Washington, vetoed the bill.Hungary has gone further, gathering hundreds of news outlets into a holding company controlled by allies of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Only one television station with national reach is critical of Mr. Orban and financially independent from his government.Mr. Orban’s previously divided political rivals have formed a united front to fight elections in April but have been unsuccessful in shaking his stranglehold on the news media.“It is very difficult to compete if you have a competitor that does not really care about profit,” said Milija Zekovic, the chief executive of SBB.Marko Risovic for The New York TimesIn Serbia, the media space for critical voices has shrunk so far, said Zoran Sekulic, the founder and editor of FoNet, an independent news agency, that “the level of control, direct and indirect, is like in the 1990s” under Mr. Milosevic, whom Mr. Vucic served as information minister.Journalists, Mr. Sekulic added, do not get killed anymore, but the system of control endures, only “upgraded and improved” to ensure fawning coverage without brute force.When United Group started a relatively opposition-friendly newspaper last year, it could not find a printer in Serbia willing to touch it. The newspaper is printed in neighboring Croatia and sent into Serbia.Dragan Djilas, the leader of Serbia’s main opposition party and formerly a media executive, complained that while Mr. Vucic could talk for hours without interruption on Serbia’s main television channels, opposition politicians appeared mostly only as targets for attack. “I am like an actor in a silent movie,” he said.N1, the only channel that sometimes lets him talk, is widely watched in Belgrade, the capital, but is blocked in many towns and cities where mayors are members of Mr. Vucic’s party. Even in Belgrade, the cable company that hosts the channel has faced trouble entering new housing projects built by property developers with close ties to the government. A huge new housing area under construction for security officials near Belgrade, for example, has refused to install SBB’s cable, the company said.Viewers of pro-government channels “live in a parallel universe,” said Zeljko Bodrozic, the president of the Independent Journalists Association of Serbia. Channels like TV Pink, the most popular national station, which features sexually explicit reality shows and long statements by Mr. Vucic, he said, “don’t just indoctrinate, but make people stupid.”A new housing area under construction for security officials near Belgrade has refused to install SBB’s cable, the company said.Marko Risovic for The New York TimesThe European Union and the United States have repeatedly rebuked Mr. Vucic over the lack of media pluralism, but, eager to keep Serbia from embracing Russia or stoking unrest in neighboring Bosnia, have not pushed hard.This has given Mr. Vucic a largely free hand to expand the media control that Rasa Nedeljkov, the program director in Belgrade for the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, described as “the skeleton of his whole system.” In some ways, he added, Serbia’s space for critical media is now smaller than it was under Mr. Milosevic, who “didn’t really care about having total control” and left various regional outlets untouched.“Vucic is now learning from this mistake by Milosevic,” Mr. Nedeljkov said. Mr. Vucic and his allies, Mr. Nedeljkov added, “are not tolerating anything that is different.”Belgrade this month.Marko Risovic for The New York TimesOnce powerful independent voices have gradually been co-opted. The radio station B92, which regularly criticized Mr. Milosevic during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, for example, is now owned by a supporter of Mr. Vucic and mostly parrots the government line.Journalists and others who upset Mr. Vucic face venomous attacks by tabloid newspapers loyal to the authorities. Mr. Solak, the United Group chairman, for example, has been denounced as “Serbia’s biggest scammer,” a crook gnawing at the country “like scabies” and a traitor working for Serbia’s foreign foes.Mr. Solak, who lives outside Serbia because of safety concerns, said he had become such a regular target for abuse that when he does not get attacked, “my friends call me and ask: What happened? Are you OK?” More