Nebojsa Pantelic, a member of the security team that was guarding the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic when he was assassinated by a sniper outside his Belgrade office in 2003, said the people in his village were unlikely to be swayed by the amnesty offer.
“Everyone here has guns but nobody is giving them up,” he said. Many of the weapons are old family heirlooms and ancient hunting rifles.
Precise figures on how many guns, both legal and illegal, there are in Serbia are hard to come by. The government releases only patchy numbers. A 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based group, put the total number of guns in civilian hands in Serbia at 2.7 million and placed the country in third place for per capita gun ownership. along with Montenegro, another former part of Yugoslavia. They were behind only the United States and Yemen, a country at war.
Aaron Karp, a senior lecturer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., and the principal author of the report, conceded that because of sketchy official data from Serbia, the number is “a best effort,” adding, “The method is solid but it is not a reliable number.”
Whatever the actual figure, Serbia has a relatively low murder rate, ranking alongside Sweden, though a series of gruesome murders by organized crime groups have given the country an unsavory reputation for extreme violence.
Well-documented links between the government and organized crime, including a notoriously violent group led by Veljko Belivuk, Mr. Petrovic said, have also undermined trust in Mr. Vucic’s pledges to get a grip on guns, and have added to a climate of fear that only increases the appetite for weapons. Tensions over Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, have stoked those feelings, he said.
