Why a luxury compound funded by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is drawing protests
Serbians are not happy with Jared Kushner's latest real estate venture.
Thousands of protesters gathered in Serbia's capital Belgrade on Monday to protest a project by Kushner – President Donald Trump's son-in-law – to transform a pair of buildings bombed by NATO 26 years ago into a Trump tower and luxury hotel.
The real estate development, funded by a Kushner-founded investment firm, has touched off a firestorm of opposition in the Balkan nation, fed by cascading anger over government corruption.
Kushner's firm plans Trump tower in Belgrade
Monday's protest centered on two buildings in downtown Belgrade damaged when NATO bombed the area in 1999 while the region was embroiled in conflict.
Last year, Affinity Global Development, a real estate firm founded by Kushner in 2021, struck a deal to turn the site of the bombing into a 30-floor, 820,000-square-foot luxury complex, including towers with the signature "Trump" logo, according to design pictures on the firm's website.
Kushner is the husband of Ivanka Trump, President Trump's oldest daughter.
Per the terms of its contract, the complex must include a memorial of the bombing, according to the Serbian government. "It will include a commemorative civic feature," according to a since-removed webpage from an architecture firm on the project.
But for Serbians who gathered outside the site in the thousands on Monday, the proposed hotel was a slap in the face to its history.
"We protest because this building has been given to someone to make profit," Ognjen Pjevac, a 20-year-old Belgrade state University student who joined the protest, told Reuters.
"It should remain here as it is a testimony to NATO aggression," he added.
Vučić and Trump build ties
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has curried favor with Trump and his allies, including other Trump children. Earlier this month, Donald Trump Jr., Trump's oldest son, also paid Vučić a visit.
In February, as the Trump administration sought to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, Serbian police raided the Belgrade offices of at least two civil society organizations connected to the agency. Prosecutors said the raid was triggered by Trump administration accusations of abuse of USAID funds.
The relationship between Trump and Vučić is still murky, said Kurt Bassuener, co-founder of the Democratization Policy Council, a Berlin-based think tank. "Certainly, there's a lot of ideological connectivity," especially with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is friendly with both leaders, he said.
"The reactionary political spectrum in Europe was waiting very expectantly for Trump to come, hoping that that would put wind in their sails to pursue the agendas they already had," he said. Still, "most of them thus far have been disappointed because they haven't gotten that much air time," he added.
Anger at the Kushner development has fused with anti-government protests, which touched off last November after the collapse of the roof at a train station in Novi Sad, Serbia's second largest city. Sixteen people died in the disaster, including an 18-year-old on Friday.
The disaster prompted accusations of government corruption and incompetence, sparking protests the next month. A rally on March 15 drew more than 100,000 people, witnesses and a security source told Reuters.
"This has been percolating for a very long time," Bassuener said of Vučić, who has been in power for more than a decade. Since the train station collapse, the student-led movement has continued every other Saturday, "crisscrossing" the country and its four main universities, he said.
"It's the sense that there's an absolute lack of accountability," he said.
Kushner's project touches historical wound of 1999 bombing
Monday's protest fell on the 26-year anniversary of NATO's bombing of the building, then the army headquarters of Yugoslavia, a former nation that has since broken apart into multiple countries – Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s threw Serbia and its surrounding states into internal turmoil. Yugoslavia's six republics began to pull away one by one, beginning with Slovenia in 1991. After Albanians in Kosovo rebelled for independence from Serbia in 1991, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević attacked, killing more than 11,000 and forcibly expelling more than 1.5 million in Kosovo in what the State Department called ethnic cleansing.
In response, NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, including the strike that damaged the army headquarters in Belgrade, killing some 500 citizens. In investigations after the fact, humanitarian organizations also raised concerns about several factors in NATO's conduct, including the targeting of a Belgrade TV station and the use of cluster bombs, which take a disproportionate civilian death toll.
Contributing: Reuters