Vucic Announces Expert Group on Ibar, Points to Tutin

The expert group on Ibar will be formed as early as next week, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced on Thursday, August 13, during a visit to the village of Veliki Popovic in the municipality of Despotovac. Alongside that deadline, he made a claim he had not raised before: that the construction of a small hydropower plant near Ribarice was once requested by the municipality of Novi Pazar, together with an organization he described as “the Bosniak council or some organization like that.”

The first part of that statement, about the existence of earlier documentation, has support in state planning documents. The second part, about who requested the project, is not confirmed in publicly available records so far.

“You will see that it was requested at the time by the municipality of Novi Pazar, and it was requested then by the Bosniak council or some organization like that. They requested it because of the construction of a small hydropower plant near Ribarice, as I have said before,” Vucic said, adding that “there is some pre-project documentation for that,” but that the expert group “will look at all of it.”

The president did not specify the year of the alleged request, the name of the document, or the exact name of the organization he referenced.

What the state plans say

The Program for the Realization of Serbia’s Energy Development Strategy for 2007 to 2012 lists the Ribarice hydropower plant as one of three new hydropower plants whose construction was planned, alongside the Bistrica pumped storage plant and the Vrutci hydropower plant.

The location is defined precisely in that document: on the Ibar, about four kilometers upstream from Ribarice, at the end of the backwater of the Gazivode reservoir. The projected parameters were:

• an earthfill dam 94 meters high
• a reservoir with a volume of 82 million cubic meters
• a capacity of 46.7 megawatts, with two units
• an estimated annual output of 76.1 gigawatt hours

The same document reveals how old the concrete plans for that site actually are. A feasibility analysis was carried out back in 2002, based on the technical solution from the preliminary design, with the investment estimated at 93.1 million euros at the time. The plan called for the preliminary design and feasibility study to be updated during 2007 and 2008, followed by a main design and tender documentation.

The project did not disappear from later plans. The Spatial Plan of the Republic of Serbia for 2010 to 2020 explicitly lists the Ribarice hydropower plant and a cascade of run-of-river plants among the potential hydropower systems on the Ibar. The Water Management Strategy through 2034, adopted in 2017, again places the Ribarice site among locations under consideration for developing the Ibar’s hydropower potential.

Who requested the small hydropower plant near Ribarice?

The document closest to what the president described as a “small hydropower plant” does not come from Novi Pazar but from Tutin, the municipality the site administratively belongs to.

At a session held on June 21, 2018, the Tutin Municipal Assembly adopted a decision to draft a Detailed Regulation Plan for building small hydropower plants on the Ibar River. Article 2 of that decision set a preliminary coverage area of about 500 hectares, and the cadastral municipalities the plan area runs through include Ribarice, along with Godovo, Spiljane, Gnilo, Dobrinje, Draga and both Mojstirs. The decision itself explains that Tutin’s spatial plan envisaged building several small hydropower plants on the Ibar as a “more sustainable planning solution” instead of the large Ribarice hydropower plant with a reservoir covering more than 2,200 hectares.

The distinction matters for checking the president’s claim. The large hydropower plant from the state’s energy and spatial plans and the concept of a series of small hydropower plants from the Tutin decision are not the same project, so the existence of older documentation for the first does not confirm the claim about who requested the second. No document has turned up in publicly available records confirming that the city of Novi Pazar or the Bosniak National Council filed such a request. That does not mean the initiative the president referenced does not exist, only that it cannot currently be verified.

The fifth statement in five days

The announcement of the expert group caps a string of statements. On August 9, Vucic said for the first time that Belgrade had called in experts, including civil engineers, with the message:

“Since they are harassing our people so much, let’s see, we have various reasons to change the flow of the Ibar, so let’s see what the Albanians will do and how they will behave.”

The next day, in Prijepolje, he said this was not a threat and that it concerned a watercourse on Serbian territory, announcing that scientists and engineers would look into the options. That same evening, appearing on Radio Television of Serbia, he mentioned Ribarice for the first time and said the Ibar was an internal matter for Serbia.

Reactions came from several quarters. Kosovo’s acting minister of industry, entrepreneurship, trade and innovation, Fitore Pacoli, called the statements “deeply concerning and unacceptable,” citing international obligations on transboundary waters. Albanian diplomat Ferit Hodza said water “does not carry a passport.” The European Commission said statements about the Ibar do not help normalization. Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Djuric accused Pristina of trying to divert attention from the position of Serbs in Kosovo.

We have reported previously that any serious intervention on the Ibar would also raise the question of consent under international treaties on watercourses, meaning Vienna and Podgorica. The composition and mandate of the expert group, which according to the announcement should be formed by the end of next week, will show whether the work amounts to revising a two decade old plan or something else.