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Srbija 2020

The Secret Plan

No one saw it coming.  

In the dog days of August, when the residents of the White City were either sunning themselves in remote foreign countries with exotic foreign tongues (i.e., Montenegro) or remaining as motionless as possible to combat the searing summer temperatures, the streets of the Serbian capital were clear and easy to navigate.

It is a documented fact that many of those people who stay in Belgrade for the summer holidays do so EXCLUSIVELY to be able to obtain easy parking places and drive fluidly around the city only because they can.  

Slowly, however, we call began to drip back into the arteries of Belgrade as August faded into September. The horns were in a steady crescendo; the lines to cross the bridges began to lengthen with the twilight shadows; and 5-minutes trips from the center to New Belgrade gradually began to weave themselves into the fabric of nostalgia and bucolic memory.

This is normal. This happens every year. But then came September 8.

On September 8, in a move that was met only by sporadic grumbling and the odd expletive (many of them from me), the Wise Rulers closed down one of the least beautiful and most chaotic nerve centers of this city. The many overlapping access tentacles of Autokomanda were suddenly withdrawn.  

As an isolated incident, this would normally be filed under Typical Urban Inconveniences and become the topic of Kafana-based gripes and harangues. However, the citizenry has been eerily silent about this closure. Moreover, anyone motoring around the White City will soon notice that “roadworks” have closed down or choked off a great many of the other city thoroughfares. The remaining streets have great swatches of asphalt removed from them, gaping holes yawning widely, or frenetically waving traffic cops directing the flow of vehicles with one hand while sending SMSs with the other.

And still there is no outcry.

Theoreticians and scholars agree that it is IMPOSSIBLE for all of Belgrade’s needed “roadworks” to be launched all at that same time by coincidence. If you ask me (and sooner or later SOMEBODY will), it is all part of a Secret Plan. The plan is in fact so secret, so deeply held, and so couched in arcane ritual, that no individual knows the full version of it. I have pieced together some of the evidence and an undeniable pattern is beginning to emerge. 

New Belgrade has been PRIVATIZED.

Highway access at Autokomanda has been denied, and the closing of the Bridges Branko and Blue are just around the corner. Renovation, modernization, reconstruction – NO, I say. It is the systematic isolation of New Belgrade from the city center. What other explanation is there other than that the great Bloks have been sold to Undisclosed Businessmen with Foreign Sounding Company Names?

As a resident (and soon virtual inmate) of New Belgrade, I am very concerned. Has my household and family been sold as part of the New Belgrade privatization along with the airport, Mercator, Chinese Market, B92, and a huge number of Undisclosed Businesses with Legitimately Foreign Names? 

The only ray of hope which I can discern for those of us stranded over here in New Belgrade, once it is completely severed from its sibling across the river, is that at least we will have less traffic to contend with, fewer “roadworks” to impede our paths, and no bridges about which to complain.