Army returns to Pirot, rural doctors get 20% pay rise
Touring villages near Pirot and Babusnica, the Serbian president said the army's return to Pirot has already been decided and promised to propose a 20 percent raise for doctors working in rural areas.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic spent Saturday, August 1, touring villages in south-eastern Serbia, and used the trip to say that the decision to bring the army back to Pirot has already been taken. The same tour produced the first hard number for rural healthcare: a proposal to raise the salaries of doctors working in rural areas by 20 percent.
His first stop on Saturday was Temska, a village near Pirot, at the Pancic family’s farm and rural tourism estate. From there he went on to Gorcince, in the municipality of Babusnica, to the Nikolic family farm. The tour had begun a day earlier in the municipality of Knjazevac, where he visited a mobile clinic in the village of Vasilj, and continued in Svrljig at the Belmuzijada food festival.
The garrison is coming back
Vucic presented the garrison question as settled, with no conditions attached and no date left open for negotiation.
“The army is coming to Pirot, we have already determined that,” he said. He also pointed to the town’s earlier status: “Pirot has always had a tradition when it comes to the army.” On the return itself he said: “Its return is important and certain.”
He explained what a garrison does for a small town by comparing it to a factory:
It is like when a factory comes to town. Then you need vegetables, meat, everything… They go out into town, and since they draw a salary, they spend it in the tavern.
What was left unsaid matters as much as what was announced. No unit was named, no location was given for the barracks, and no date was offered for the first soldiers. The next place where the promise can be checked is the Defence Ministry and its deployment plan.
How much more would village doctors earn?
The line about salaries came in Temska. “My proposal will be that for those doctors who work in rural areas we raise the salary by 20 percent,” Vucic said.
He paired it with a figure from the tour itself: the mobile clinics passed through six villages and detected serious illness in eight people. He tied those findings to the reason for the raise, since a clinic can reach a village, but without a doctor who stays there the treatment goes no further.
The wording stopped at a proposal rather than a decision. That distinction is worth keeping in mind until the autumn, because the public sector pay rise is attached to a specific date while this percentage, for now, is not.
Roads, a school and a sports hall
In Knjazevac he spoke about local streets and gave the shortest deadline of the whole trip.
We have to do all the local streets through the town and we will be out with the machines within the next three days.
On the route towards Sokobanja he said the worst stretch is the one to Citluk: “I have seen that the whole road to Sokobanja has bad sections. The stretch to Citluk in particular is a terrible road.”
The priority for eastern Serbia, he said, is the expressway linking Zajecar, Knjazevac and Svrljig. “I will do everything I can for us to start work on that from 2028,” he said.
Machines are due on the road towards Zvonacka Banja in about ten days. Three projects were named for Babusnica:
- the road to Zvonacka Banja
- the “Vuk Karadzic” secondary school
- a sports hall
A Ministry of Economy programme sets aside 8 million euros in grants for young people, returnees, furniture production and tourism.
In Gorcince he was asked about the monastery of St George. “I see you are all attached to the monastery in Gorcince. We will see how much the state can help as well,” he said. In Temska he remarked on the village layout: “Look at the size of your streets, like boulevards in Belgrade, there is not a street of 300 metres here, they all run two kilometres.”
Pensions and salaries from December 1
The pension increase has been announced for December 1, with the intention that public sector salaries also rise from that date instead of January 1. A one-off payment to pensioners is planned for September.
Alongside the promises came a figure for the average wage in Babusnica: 202 euros in 2012 against 798 euros today. That number is the measure of the whole tour of the south-east. Growth is counted from a low base, and how much of what was said on Saturday reaches people will show up in the December payslips and on the first day a soldier walks into a barracks in Pirot.
