When Did Belgrade Get a Metro?!

Do you notice anything wrong with the video below? It was available on the CNN website a few days ago and shows footage from the riots that took place on July 29 in Belgrade during the Serbian Radical Party meeting in support of Radovan Karadžic.

If you have ever visited Belgrade, you should be able to spot some rather unfamiliar things in that video. CNN has mixed in footage of riots that took place in Budapest, Hungary, with that of the riots in Belgrade. "Surely, this is a simple mistake by the editing team," I hear you cry. Well, someone must have been pretty incompetent to mix in footage from over one year ago!

If you look carefully, during the first 19 seconds you can see/hear:

- Hungarian police officers
- Hungarian flags
- Cars on fire (no cars were torched in the Belgrade riot)
- The Hungarian language
- Hungarian license plates
- Water cannons to disperse protesters (that didn't happen either in Belgrade)

Then we are shown real footage of what actually happened in Belgrade on Tuesday. That's all good then, but during the last 12 seconds you can see:

- that suddenly Belgrade has acquired a metro system (wouldn't that be lovely?)

Okay, so what on earth's going on here? It's not as if there was a lack of footage from the Belgrade riots that CNN felt they needed to pad out their report with some other footage (which is not exactly a credible practice for a worldwide news outlet, is it?), Some comments on the web seem to hint that perhaps CNN were deliberately trying to make the protests seem more violent than they actually were - I don't really believe that, but still, how does somebody accidentally edit in footage from an entirely different country and which was filmed over one year ago?

It does leave you thinking whether you can actually trust what you see on CNN or indeed any other news outlet. The fact that CNN has yet to give any official statement on the matter just adds further to the mystery. What do you think?

Here's some quite lengthy 'as it happened' footage of the riots on Tuesday - perhaps somebody could forward it on to the CNN news team?

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Pro-Karadžić Meeting Violence

As everyone guessed, violent conflicts between Serbian police and football hooligans, thugs and children with nothing better to do have taken place during the pro Radaovan Karadžić rally in the centre of Belgrade. I've just watched a section of those present at the meeting in Republic Square (Trg republike) broke off and began throwing rocks, sticks, fireworks, homemade bomb-like devices. They also smashed a couple of shop windows on Makedonska street.

(FoNet)

Honestly, half of those guys fighting the police looked 16 years old. They weren't even alive, or just had a few years, during the Yugoslav wars. What exactly do they identify with? What has it even got to do with them? I understand to some extent the older generation still believing Karadžić is a war hero - but these kids are just looking to cause trouble and in doing so completely cancel out the message the peaceful protesters want to make and the Radical Party of Serbia and their allies just loose even more credibility.

The centre now looks a complete mess. Hopefully, those caught by the police will face the full brunt of the law - they need to finally realise that they can't cause violence in the city centre whenever they feel like it.

I'll write more about the protests in a bit once more information becomes available.

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