Written by: Đorđe Šćepović
This isn’t an April Fool’s joke – it happened on April 4th. Dritan Abazović declared: “Everyone to the protest – Montenegro is not for sale”. According to several media outlets, the leader of the URA movement has called on “all citizens who want to protect Montenegro – its natural beauty and authenticity – and who oppose selling it off, to come out and protest this Saturday”.
Once the Prime Minister, now merely the head of URA – a party that seems to have faded into political irrelevance – Abazović is rallying people to protest over... what, exactly? Because someone is allegedly planning to sell Montenegro? It’s not April 1st, but it might as well be. This could pass for a prime-time comedy skit.
Panta rei – everything flows – as Simplicius summarized Heraclitus’ philosophy. Perhaps it’s Heraclitus’ idea that “no one steps into the same river twice” and that “in the flow of time, a lost opportunity is lost forever” that best captures this surreal moment.
Everything changes. Everything moves. Everything except, as his former patron Vulin once labeled him, “Dritan Abazović, the shell game hustler”. He doesn’t change. Not with time. Not with circumstance. Always ready with a quip, always up for the hustle – whether petty or grand, poorly paid or handsomely rewarded. The hustle is the point. Especially as elections loom. Local or national – it makes no difference. A hustler only sees opportunity.
And yet, this isn’t a tabloid headline. It’s not one of Dragan Koprivica’s satirical punchlines. It’s real. Dritan Abazović, standing before us, declaring, “Montenegro is not for sale!” The very man who sold off everything that could be sold is now urging people to rise against the sale of Montenegro. The same man who handed over Montenegro’s churches to the Belgrade Patriarchate now dares to say: “Montenegro is not for sale”.
And then, in a dramatic burst of patriotic zeal, he warns: “Today they’re targeting Velika Plaža. Tomorrow it’ll be Lake Plav, Mount Lovćen, the Old Town of Kotor – if we don’t resist now, we’ll lose everything”.
I’d wager that Abazović heard this exact kind of rhetoric hurled at him daily while he was Prime Minister. And now, as a spent political figure – a discarded servant of Vučić, clinging to the margins, circling the political drain – he’s regurgitating the very same words citizens once used to condemn him for selling out Montenegro.
And no one – absolutely no one – has sold out and betrayed Montenegro like Dritan Abazović.
Had he stayed in power just a little longer, Mount Lovćen itself might have ended up on the market – the very symbol he now invokes as a rallying cry. He would have demolished the Mausoleum, rebuilt the so-called Njegoš chapel – just the Karađorđević chapel – if only he’d had the time. If only the opportunity had lasted a little longer.
As Simplicius once said, “everything flows”. And now, the current of Abazović’s power and influence has completely dried up. His time is up. The hourglass has run out of sand. And thankfully, for all of us who once called for resistance – the same resistance he now falsely and hypocritically claims to champion – he won’t be stepping into that same river again. He will never again hold power.
Like the philosophy we referenced earlier, this illusionist, this grave-digger of a civic Montenegro, now has to face reality: “A missed opportunity is gone forever”.
Back in August 2020, Abazović had a chance to steer Montenegro away from disaster. But he chose to dig in. He aligned himself with those rooted in blood-and-soil ideology. Together, they set out to reshape Montenegro – not by building up, but by tearing down its civic, multiethnic foundations.
They built a dictatorship while preaching freedom. They took control of every institution, spinning fairy tales about “thirty years of oppression”. That’s why, in Dritan’s Montenegro today, journalists, intellectuals, and civic activists are being persecuted.
That’s why students who dared to challenge the status quo are being intimidated and criminalized. Sadly, some of them backed down in the face of regime propaganda and their attack dogs. Fear overcame their sense of purpose.
But at least they tried. And for that, no one has the right to judge them. Especially not those who only show up to protests when their party tells them to. Not the ones who attend just to count heads and assess the crowd. Not those who, in their local offices and institutions, only care about scoring points for themselves.
The students tried. Unlike those – and especially not Dritan Abazović – who now mourn the very pit they helped dig. After turning Montenegro into a playground for chauvinism, now he’s calling for resistance?
This isn’t April 1st – it’s April 6th. April 5th marked the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo. It lasted four years. Over 1,425 days, nearly 12,000 people were killed, including 1,601 children.
Until recently, Abazović’s allies were the ones celebrating that siege. The ones who glorified war criminals. The ones whose so-called heroes ended up in The Hague.
Today, those same people are selling Montenegro. And just yesterday, it was Dritan Abazović. The same man who, in August 2020, willingly stepped into their river.
But as his masters in Belgrade like to say: “A hustler stays a hustler”.
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