Good morning! After a local portal in Berane published a tendentious headline in which Cetinje and Rozaje were compared with Berane in terms of the amount of the capital budget intended for municipalities, hysteria began on the networks about the northern region, which was crucial in the counter-revolution in 2020, ended up falling short in dividing the prey.
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Neglecting Berane or how the counter-revolution swallowed its children
The iron law of oligarchy by Robert Michels says that the power of the elite, i.e. oligarchy, is inevitable in every democratic organization as “part of the tactical and technical needs of that organization”. The meaning of Michels’ concept is that all forms of organizations, regardless of how democratic they were in the beginning, eventually inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies, which makes true democracy practically and theoretically impossible, especially in large groups and complex organizations. Citizens delegate their sovereignty to MPs, MPs to government members. Authority and power are concentrated and narrowed. The masses are there to win the elections, after that they are forgotten. Noisy leaders who were in charge of everything, in the end remain only unwanted witnesses. Various forms of Nebojsa Babovic and Mladen Premovic either fall out of the wheel or slide into some peripheral but comfortable part of the mechanism. The powerful only associate with the powerful.
Berane is the hero city of the counter-revolution of 2020. Just like Cetinje was a hero city in 1944. Only revolutions are remembered, and counter-revolutions are quickly forgotten. Do you remember the cartoon To Spring in which the little gnomes under the ground fight with the winter that does not give up. Winter is strong and threatens to turn the wheel back, but at the end, spring still wins. Spring is a revolution for you, and the counter-revolution is the Granny March, which is tiring and boring, but temporary. The wheel of history cannot be stopped. That is why today in Cetinje the Order of the National Hero stands in the assembly hall, and Berane fears that it will be forgotten.
Frankly, Berane has been a long-neglected municipality. But Pljevlja, for example, hasn’t. After the change of government, there was mass employment in the municipal giants in Pljevlja, but big profits remained with big fish. Once those fish were in Podgorica, today they are in Mitrovica. The one in Kosovo.
Berane is not interesting to anyone except in the time of elections, because there is nothing left to take from there. What remains is self-delusion about one’s own greatness, which politicians feed on in every election.
I don’t know what the people of Berane were thinking – that after the election the sea coast will move to the north, so Babovic could finally make true his dream of becoming a captain? Or that everyone will move to Podgorica, and Babovic to his summer house by the sea? And become the PR of Budva Municipality? His accent is too strong for something like that, and he doesn’t brush his hair like his friend from Mojkovac who currently leads Budva.
However, economic rationality does not follow political wishes and imaginations. Berane is economically unattractive today. That’s why you need to sit and work hard. Apply projects. There are some very successful companies located in Berane. So, it can be done. There is certainly no shortage of talent. That city is no worse than others in Montenegro. It just needs to sober up from the nationalistic drunkenness and the burden of counter-revolution. Serbia will not build anything there as it promised. Berane is located in Montenegro, it now has people in important positions. It just needs to finally come to senses, stop hiring people at management positions, stop listening to chronically lazy people and start working on itself. If Berane people don’t take care of themselves, no one else will. And neither the people of Cetinje nor the people of Rozaje will be blamed for that.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
