Jared Kushner Is Building on a NATO Bomb Site in Belgrade
A firm headed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is set to build a luxury hotel atop one of the most famous sites of the NATO bombing of Belgrade. For all its nationalist posturing, Serbia’s government really wants the US tycoon’s money.
Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, left, then US president Donald Trump, and Avdullah Hoti, prime minister of Kosovo, signing the 2020 Kosovo and Serbia economic agreement in the White House on September 4, 2020. (Joyce N. Boghosian / the White House via Wikimedia Commons)
In March, Serbian activist Aleksandar Jovanović reported that the Serbian government was poised to hand over the site of the General Staff Building in Belgrade — famously bombed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999 — to a company headed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Minister for Construction and Infrastructure Goran Vesić subsequently confirmed that the Serbian government had authorized him to sign a ninety-nine-year lease on the site to Affinity Partners, Kushner’s firm.
Thus, it is more than apparent that the alignment of two far-right forces — Kushner as representative of MAGA, and Aleksandar Vučić, president of Serbia currently teasing friendship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia — is not rooted in any meaningful defiance of “globalism.” Instead, the alliance seems to be about a series of multinational capitalist deals, with architecture as the result. Kushner has already circulated a series of renderings from Studio Genesis via his X/Twitter account.
The hypocrisy of both Kushner and Vučić is obvious. They are prepared to demolish the sections of the General Staff Building, also known as the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense Building, that were bombed by NATO on April 20, 1999, in response to the Serbian nationalist-led genocide in Kosovo. NATO’s bombing, supported strongly by the United States under President Bill Clinton, mostly killed civilians and arrived after a truly meaningful difference in the war could ever have come.
Given the “America First” claims of the MAGA movement and the seemingly mutual disdain for NATO in both Trump’s inner circle and Vučić’s government, the General Staff Building might seem to be off-limits. In fact, as prime minister, Vučić participated in a public ceremony there marking the sixteenth anniversary of the bombings in which he joined in public statements denouncing NATO — as well as others diminishing the scope of the genocide.
Such a site could be expected to be a Serbian nationalist shrine — and in part, it is. Its veneration infuriates victims of the genocide, and its presence has angered Western critics of Serbia’s so-called illiberal regime. Yet the Kushner plan shows how Vućić and his fellow nationalists love money more than any sentiments about contemporary Serbia.
Capitalist Complex
Today the plywood fencing surrounding the two sections of the General Staff Building often attracts posters and banners memorializing the NATO bombing’s victims and criticizing the Western powers. But in recent years, the government has scraped these away rather quickly. This fits a pattern in Vučić’s behavior, nodding toward nationalist movements while often officially disavowing them. Not far from the General Staff Building, at the National Assembly, the Association of Families of the Kidnapped and Killed in Kosovo and Metohija built a “wailing wall” in 2015. Placed ahead of a human rights organization’s planned memorialization of the Srebenica genocide, the memorial consisted of a metal fence on which there hung a banner of 2,500 Serbs lost or killed in Kosovo, along with anti-NATO slogans. Damaged by left-wing protesters in 2017, the wall disappeared during the pandemic when Vučić’s government replaced it with a banner celebrating the Serbian-Chinese alliance.
Vučić had already since 2017 explored the possibility of demolishing the buildings and replacing them with a new capitalist complex. The Serbian Association of Architects then nominated the buildings for the UNESCO World Heritage List as a standing reminder of the “suffering and brutality of the NATO forces.” Vučić then backed off. But today, he is enjoying the headwinds of an ascendant economy (4.4 percent growth in the second quarter of 2024) and exploring alliances with Western forces (Rio Tinto’s lithium mine, a gift to the European Union and Germany) that once would have been unthinkable.
As for Kushner, the ideological space is quite fluid. His Affinity Partners has enjoyed having $2 billion of its $3 billion investments come from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. While he toys with a $500 million project in Belgrade, Kushner also is chasing resort projects in Albania with the support of that country’s prime minister, Edi Rama. These were always the softer reaches of the Eastern Bloc, and with the Cold War over the United States can plant its glass towers here.
Buried Heritage
There is another layer of injury here, too, as the General Staff Building is a symbolic link to communist heritage on two levels. Built in two sections across Nemajina Street, the complex is the work of architect Nikola Dobrović, who intended it to be a unifying symbol of the people’s state.
Built between 1957 and 1965, the design presents cantilevered, stepped sections over the street facing each other to form a symmetric passage. The uses of stone facing render the form almost geological, and this is, indeed, no accident. Dobrović was recalling the canyons of the Sutjeska River upon which Josip Broz Tito’s Communist partisans won a decisive victory over fascist armies in June 1943.
Thus, the alliance between the MAGA capitalists and Vučić would simultaneously erase a widely viewed remnant of NATO’s 1999 bombing, a work of the Yugoslavian modernism intended to signify the strength of a Communist-led state, and a memorial to a victory over fascism. Instead, Kushner’s company would install shiny, placeless glass towers while renovating the adjacent nineteenth-century Seventh Regiment Army Barracks. The substitution of the contradictory, contested, and ruined forms with the seamless and ahistoric unity seems like the autopilot of global investor capitalist design. It’s a bad resurrection of modernism’s universalizing tendency too — making right-wing nationalists the perpetrators of the faceless, tradition-trampling “globalism” they claim to despise.
All of this takes us back to the late Cold War, and in turn, Ronald Reagan. Like Trump, Reagan also weaponized a nationalist, Christian race-baiting discourse to whip up political support domestically and internationally, but his central goal was the spread of American multinational capitalism. The Soviets’ worst godlessness turned out to be not worshipping capital.
If one building stands out as an architectural symbol of the Reagan-era free-market doctrine of prosperity, it is surely Der Scutt’s Trump Tower, finished in 1983. The glassy skyscraper form, with its gilded entrance, upstaged its surroundings while embracing no traditions of form, material, local history, or symbolism. It became its own monument to itself — a model for each proudly individualist American.
Four decades on, at the sites that were broken from any form of socialism, Trump’s son-in-law seems destined to export Trump Towers, as a way of marking the reach of his own financial empire. The ultimate American capitalist fantasy of the 1980s is unleashed: Trump Towers in the heart of the socialist cities, partially funded by Saudi Arabia, with local opposition crushed by complicit politicians.