Bilderberg Group Invites Serbian PM

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By Danijel Kovacevic

The staunchly pro-NATO Bilderberg Group has invited Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic to attend its next next invitation-only conference in June in Italy – in what looks like a tribute to her Atlanticist credentials.

Serbia’s Prime Minister, Ana Brnabic, is the only person from the Western Balkans so far to have received an invitation to this year’s Bilderberg group meeting from June 7 to 10 June in Turin, Italy.

Brnabic apparently received the invitation while attending the global business conference in Davos, Switzerland.

The official explanation is that Brnabic was given a call after her presentation at the New Leaders for Europe group meeting at the Davos forum.

As the only prime minister there from the region, Brnabic also participated in the report on migration and borders.

“It is a great honour for Serbia and a great opportunity for us to show our priorities, but also that Serbia is one of the important factors not only in this part of Europe”, Brnabic said on Tuesday.

Belgrade political analyst Cvijetin Milivojevic notes that the Bilderberg group supports NATO integration, free markets, strong ties between the US and Europe and the development of armed forces on the NATO pattern.

“So they did not invite someone from the Serbian government, who is, for example, pro-Russian or pro-Chinese oriented, or even someone who advocates sitting on two chairs. They called Ana Brnabic, who is synonymous [in Serbia] for the Euro-atlantic narrative,” Milivojevic told the RTRS broadcaster in Bosnia’s mainly Serbian entity, Republika Srpska.

Since its inaugural meeting in the Hotel Bilderberg in the Netherlands in 1954, it has become an annual forum for informal discussions, designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.

Every year, between 120 and 150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media are invited to take part.

It is seen as a forum for informal discussions about megatrends and the major issues facing the world today.

According to the Bilderberg group website, “the meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed”.

It adds: “Thanks to the private nature of the meeting, the participants are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions. There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.”

The Atlantic Council of Serbia said the reason for inviting the Prime Minister of Serbia most likely relates to the topic of this year’s meeting.

“They will probably talk, not about Serbia itself, but probably about the Western Balkans,” Vlade Radulovic, from the Atlantic Council of Serbia, told the media.

However, Daniel Estulin, journalist and author of a critical book and documentary about the Bilderberg group, said that the invite “can’t be good news” for Serbia.

“People who go to the Bilderberg group meeting represent a particular ideology that has nothing to do with nation, state or borders but has everything to do with super-national organizations, and the fact that Serbia’s Prime Minister was invited is a sign of more trouble in your part of the world,” Estulin told BIRN.

Balkan Insight

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

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