Government of the Republic of Serbia
Around 47% of Serbian citizens have a positive attitude towards migrants, and about 60% feel empathetic, this was showed in the public opinion survey regarding migrants presented on 9 February in Belgrade. There are around 7,000 migrants currently in Serbia.
Marko Lazović, the Director of the ProPoziv Agency which performed the survey, said that in comparison to June 2016, the percentage of people with a positive attitude had risen slightly, however, so has the percentage of those with a negative attitude which had been 19% in June, and now it was 34%.
The most positive attitude have citizens of Tutin, Sjenica, and Preševo, who have the most contact with migrants. “The increase in positive attitudes in these three municipalities, is possibly due to the religious component”, said Lazović at the press conference held in Mixer House in Belgrade.
Half of the respondents think that migrants are peaceful, around 51% are worried that migrants carry diseases, 37% are worried about criminal activities and terrorist attacks, while 3% say that they find migrants “disgusting” or they “cannot look at them”.
In almost all municipalities, where there are migrant housing centres, citizens believe the crisis is only going to get worse, more than 50% of respondents think that Serbian Government should deal with the crisis, 22% think it should be the local self-government, while 49% think that the European Union is best suited to help the migrants. The vast majority of respondents, 84% think that Serbia has behaved better during the migrant crisis than other countries.
The survey is a project of the “Ana and Vlade Divac” Foundation. It was performed between 1 and 25 December 2016, and it included 2,792 respondents from Belgrade and seven municipalities with migrant housing centres – Dimitrovgrad, Lajkovac, Preševo, Sjenica, Tutin, Subotica and Šid.
Source: Beta, taken from www.euractiv.rs
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