Belgrade is full of spies and is the new Casablanca.
According to Rashatudi, the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, says that this country has seen a record number of foreign spies entering, and in the midst of New Year’s Eve celebrations, a large number of them entered Belgrade, and now the capital of Serbia has moved to Casablanca in Morocco. World War II is similar.
Vucic said about the wave of spies entering Serbia: “The night before Christmas this year, Belgrade became the new Casablanca.” We get similar reports all the time, there are no spies who have not booked rooms in our hotels and there have never been so many spies here.
In popular culture, the city of Casablanca during the Second World War has long been known as a city full of various Nazis, war fugitives and spies from all over the world, and thanks to the same name as a classic Hollywood movie of the same name produced in 1942, it gained its fame.
Since then, the Moroccan city, which was once a French colony, has been featured in many spy films.
Vucic says that the influx of spies into Belgrade occurred amid ongoing tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, and he believes that the city has not been so surrounded by intelligence and espionage activities since at least the era of World War II.
He added that intelligence agents have “done their work” and are preparing “certainly different measures”. However, the Serbian president did not clarify from which countries the spies came to Belgrade.
Serbia and Kosovo have been at loggerheads for much of 2022 over Pristina’s plans to ban vehicles with Belgrade license plates from entering Kosovo’s buffer zone. Belgrade has deployed heavily armed Albanian policemen in densely populated areas of Serbia, and on the other hand, local people are reacting by holding protest rallies and creating street barriers.
The situation in Kosovo remains tense. On December 10, 2022, Serbs living in the north of Kosovo protested against the arrest of several Serbian policemen by the Kosovo authorities, claiming war crimes and terrorism related to the war of 1998 and 1999, and since then, these protests have led to several rounds of protests. There has been a conflict between the Serbs and the Kosovo police.
In 2013, Serbia and Kosovo signed a mediated agreement to normalize relations, but the talks soon stalled. About 50,000 Serbs live in the northern part of Kosovo and refuse to recognize the government of Pristina and consider Belgrade as their capital.
Earlier this week, tensions escalated again after two young Serbs were shot and wounded while driving near the city of Štrps. This happened in the frenzy of the Orthodox Christian Christmas celebration, and it was later revealed that the attacker was of Albanian origin.
