Former NBA player Miloš Babić will travel six and a half hours to vote in Chicago: “I don’t want Serbia to become North Korea”

Former NBA player Miloš Babić has decided to vote in Chicago in the Oct 25 parliamentary elections, even though he lives with his family in Tennessee — a drive of around six and a half hours, as the newspaper Danas reports. Babić, who in the 1990s played for Cleveland and Miami and was part of the Yugoslav basketball generation of Vlade Divac and Toni Kukoč, is today a successful businessman in the US.

In an interview for the Serbian Times portal, quoted by Danas, Babić says that the day before the elections he will set off with his family towards Chicago to vote at the polling station opened at the Consulate. He jokes that his sacrifice is negligible compared with that of Serbian students, who — he says — have crossed Serbia several times on foot and by bicycle, facing violence and mistreatment.

His motive, as he himself expresses it, is the greatest he knows: “mama Serbia”. “I am afraid that what we see today in Serbia could very soon turn into a total dictatorship, that we become a new North Korea, Belarus,” Babić says in the interview, adding that Serbia is at a great turning point and that everything must change — from the political system to the environment. He offers, after his own vote, to personally drive fellow countrymen in the Chicago area who find it difficult to get there themselves to the polling station, and even to take them out for lunch afterwards.

The news comes on the day when the deadline for registration of Serbian citizens abroad for voting expires — midnight on Oct 3 Serbian time — a process which, as opposition representatives have warned, is accompanied by numerous administrative obstacles for the diaspora.