On November 1 2024, at 11:52, fifteen people sitting on benches and waiting for their ride lost their lives when a multitone concrete, metal and glass canopy collapsed on them on the newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad. Two of them were little girls of 9 and 5 who were traveling with their grandfather. All died. Two people survived but remained invalids. One of them is a young mother who lost her legs.
The tragedy caused uproar in Serbia, where people have long been complaining about the rampant corruption of government officials. Poor oversight of the renovation and corruption was blamed for the tragedy, and officials made matters worse by keeping the contracts secret. People took it to the streets in daily protests, with the students at the forefront of the movement. Determining criminal liability for the fall of the canopy is one of the key student demands, but they also asked for more, a fundamental change of the system.
Belgrade bridge blockade @EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC
An ever increasing part of the society is rallying around the students, in support of their demands. This is a story of one of those protests, a student march from Belgrade to Novi Sad on the third-month anniversary of the train station tragedy.
A swarm of bees
The students are like a swarm of bees: it seems as if everyone knows what to do and how to do it and gives his best all the time. There’s no false modesty, they’ll tell you exactly what they want and what they demand from both the government and the society as a whole. But there’s no vanity too. Imagine living in a real country such as that! I read tens of statements and posts these days from journalists, writers, actors, singers or plain ordinary people from the neighbouring countries who find the purity and the universality of this student movement their strongest impression. Moreover, everybody who had a chance to talk to them concluded that they’re not demanding ONLY a change of government, but something much larger: a functioning society. They dared to ask for a system that will work perfectly, a utopia, an ideal. Somebody could argue that it’s naive, that it’s doomed to fail. I beg to disagree. Because – for the love of God! –why ask for anything less!
Thursday, January 30
The beating of four students in Novi Sad early on Tuesday brought discontent and anger to a boil. One of the students was a girl of 22 who was attacked by two masked men with baseball bats who came out of the Serbian Progressive Party’s (SNS) premises. She was beaten up and ended with a broken jaw. It turned up the heat and a new wave of protests started in tens of cities. The same morning the prime minister announced his resignation and later in the day the mayor of Novi Sad did the same.
"The more you talk, the more you dig in” @protestografija.cloud
The students didn’t accept what’s been done by the government till now toward fulfilling their demands and they don’t accept the president’s calls for a dialogue. They’re right of course, because it’s all a farce. You can’t negotiate for the institutions, especially the public prosecutor’s office, to start doing their job. They either work, or they don’t. One banner on the protest explained that clearly: “It’s damn hard to have a dialogue with a broken jaw”.
*
This morning a group of several hundred of students from Belgrade started an 80 kilometres journey on foot to Novi Sad in order to reach it by Saturday. They’ll mark three months from the tragedy with their colleagues from Novi Sad and other cities and block three bridges, one of them for 24 hours. Another group will start tomorrow on bicycles. And yet another one on motorcycles on Tuesday.
Bikers taking part in the Novi Sad protest @EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC
My wife Nevena and I decided to go, and we're taking our teenage kids with us – it will be a real-life lesson in civil disobedience and citizens’ rights.
*
It’s like a reality show starring the marching students! All social networks, and independent media are literally following each step they make. People get out of their houses and flats to the streets, welcome and hug them like they’re some kind of liberators. And they walk carrying banners, chanting slogans… Damn, it’s making us realize we’ve been under occupation all this time.
They named the march “Just a step away from justice”. Their positive spirit and determination proved to be so contagious that it spread all over the region in a matter of a few hours. People from all over Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia follow their progress, enjoying that every town and village on the way prepare hours ahead, gather in the street cheering with excitement that’s rarely been seen in the past decades, handing out home-cooked food and drinks and hugs to this army of elves marching through their streets and sleepy hollows. No wonder everybody who’s watching is crying, the emotions are just too overwhelming. Someone noticed that “half of Serbia is crying and another half is cooking for students”.
“Everybody to the bridges, the Belgraders are coming!”
I just heard on TV a student saying to a reporter: “In every city we get a crazier welcome”. They reached the town of Stara Pazova at fiveish and were confronted with a feast in the park consisting of 50 litres of soup (ciorba), 60 kilograms of sremska sausages, 15 kilograms of traditional Slovak meatballs, 50 kilograms of pork roast, homemade ham, bacon, barbecue, cauldrons of goulash, salads, different kinds of pastry, cakes, donuts, fruit and so on. They took out some benches and tables, portable toilets, a generator with electric sockets for charging phones, and three flats for those who want to rest indoors. Sounds a bit exaggerated? Probably, but that’s how things are done in the Balkans.
Friday, January 31
We woke up a bit early. Nevena decided to work from home, Vanja’s high-school’s blocked anyway in support for students’ demands and Dušan’s school teachers and administration collectively voted for not working that day for the same good reason. We made coffee, turned on the morning news and grabbed our phones. “When they reached Inđija”, said Nevena, “hundreds of people gathered in the streets”. “Yeah”, said I, probably reading the same article, “they too prepared a feast, but as there remained too much of it they gave it to the policemen, the firemen and the ambulance technicians who worked the night shift. Nice move!” “That was good, but listen to this. I can’t believe my eyes”, Nevena continued scrolling through the article (she’s always been two steps ahead of me). “The mayor of Inđija locked the sports centre where they were supposed to sleep! So, they slept on a football stadium instead, on the ground, in January!”
Dušan, our younger son, entered the living room asking what’s for breakfast. “Not now!” we yelled simultaneously. “Take some cereals and sit here with us”, said Nevena lovingly, transforming the tone of her voice in a sec from a threefold Gorgon to the patience of one Penelope. “No, thanks”, he replied sincerely and added: “Now I know why Vanja sleeps late!” He took his so-called breakfast and went back to his den.
I didn’t check, but I guess the students heard about the cowardly mayor’s cowardly move before they actually got to town, so they took a lot of tents and sleeping bags with them. The folk from Inđija offered their flats and beds but students refused the hospitality as there were too many of them and they wanted to stay together. So, the Inđians got them more of them sleeping bags and lots of new Styrofoam boards to put the bags on.
Jokes are flooding the net. Just read one from a young woman addressing her friends on X: “To the women from Novi Sad who haven't gotten married yet: everybody to the bridges on Saturday – the Belgraders are coming, it's our last chance!” Another girl from the village of Maradik, around 30 kilometres before Novi Sad, answers: “The girls from Srem are waiting at the intersection. You’ll get only the leftovers..”.
“Follow the Yellow Brick Road!”
Someone compared this march of 80 kilometres that divide Belgrade and Novi Sad to the journey down the yellow brick road from the Wizard of Oz, the students to Dorothy and the people she meets along the way to those who become her friends – Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man. The comparison isn’t that bad when you think about it. For when we finally reach our destination everybody will clearly see that every wizard is a phony hiding his insecurities behind a curtain.
*
I just heard that the cyclists are about to start their ride. Several hundred students on bikes met in Belgrade in Ušće park, which lies on the confluence of river Sava and Danube. They plan to reach Novi Sad at around the same time as the marching students. Their hosts will welcome them on the Varadinski Bridge and then they’ll join the critical mass of 3000 cyclists in Novi Sad.
*
We followed the march live till late in the night. Somebody’s post on Facebook provided us with an explanation for this sudden burst of emotion: “All of Serbia’s in tears because it’s never been happier”.
Saturday, February 1
We dusted our whistles that still remember the student protests of the nineties against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, woke the children and jumped in our little car. Soon enough we found ourselves in the company of many who did the same.
The traffic jam at the exit for NS was kilometres long, we were moving at about 10 km/h. And just when I was about to start cursing the Sumerian gods of asphalt and one lane exits, deliberately forgetting the parental vow of protecting children’s ears from bad words, the jam became a meme: the cheerfulness and the merriment of protesters hanging out from the windows of their cars in the midst of a highway road was so unexpected that it turned my otherwise proverbial grumpiness into a fair level of good mood and genuine satisfaction.
Blocadă pod Novi Sad @EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC
“Until we find a spot to park at, we’re all enemies”, I said to Nevena. “And when we park, we can be friends again”. Fortunately, although it didn’t have anything to do with fortune but with my keen sense of organization, we found a parking spot a couple of kilometres away from the Danube bank, where everyone else was spinning around and around like on a merry-go-round, and just a hundred meters from the small restaurant we decided to have lunch at.
Inside, a cosy atmosphere, a genuine mom-and-pop joint. A waiter and two guys sitting, drinking coffee.We picked a table and cautiously commented on the protest that was about to start. It would be bad manners not to mention the protest to the folks of NS today. Still, it turned out that caution was unnecessary. There’s no one here neither young nor old who’s not supporting the students and not feeling angry or vengeful.
The two coffee drinkers are taxi drivers who don’t have any fares due to the blockades. They’ll join the students and their fellow citizens a bit later, they say. The more talkative of the two cabbies says in a confidential voice that he had to sell a pretty thick gold chain he acquired long ago to send his kids to university. “Education’s important”, he says with a grin. He doesn't want his children to grow up in an insecure society that doesn't provide employment opportunities and a life worth the effort. The silent cabbie laughs and takes a sip from his cup of bitter Turkish-style coffee. The talkative one joins him and they both laugh heartily. I imagine them in school, chuckling at the back of the classroom. They probably matured a bit from then but there is no doubt they developed an authentic sense for human condition. And that might, I think, be just enough to get us out of this abyss.
The deafening silence of a revolution
The students from BG reached NS yesterday evening. Thousands of citizens joined students of NS Uni to welcome their guests, these modern pilgrims. I heard it was like that time when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli met up with Gandalf and the Rohan army at Helm's Deep.
They went to the railway station together. It was time for the 15 minutes of silence. You know, this silence… At first, it started as one minute of standing still in silence for each of the victims, totalling fifteen minutes, but it soon grew to an institution. Since day one silence begins simultaneously in the cities in Serbia at 11:52 and ends at 12:07. If the protest is organized in the evening silence is repeated again at the beginning of the protest. It’s a time for collective meditation, a cathartic moment for a society that has long been in apathy. The energy is overwhelming.
The Novi Sad train station @Vrsan Leštarić
Sometimes when a bad thing happens in the region a minute is added to these fifteen minutes. Like that December attack in a Zagreb school when a nineteen-year-old attacked several kids and a teacher in an elementary school with a knife killing a boy of seven; or the fire in the nursing home in a Belgrade suburb this January with eight causalities.
The biggest protest till now was organized on Slavija square in Belgrade on December 22. Nevena and I were just two souls in a mass of one hundred thousand people. Everyone was silent in unison for a quarter of an hour. We all dived into ourselves and took a look at what there is on the bottom. Many shed a tear on the way down. It’s hard not to when you feel that multitude of people around you with a common goal. When we surfaced and let out a cry we saw that we became richer for the faces of all the others with whom we shared that silence.
It seems that silence is not only able to awaken our empathy but also the awareness for the necessity to change our system of values. And to start feeling shame for tolerating mobbing and arrogance all these years.
*
During these fifteen minutes of silence passers-by, faculty students and high-school students go out of their buildings and block a main street in the vicinity. Then they return to their chores whilst students go back to block their schools and faculties. Our elder son is a second-grade high school student and hasn’t attended classes from the end of the winter holidays on 20 January. The younger is seventh grade in an elementary school and they too have skipped whole days in support for student demands and on other days they hold classes of only thirty minutes.
“One of the largest student protests since 1968”
Words of support and unprecedented solidarity pour in from across the region, from all the countries that once formed the republics of Yugoslavia, from cities large and small in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. The latest news about public support for the student movement came from the Nobel Committee, which accepted the students' nomination for the Peace Prize, from Marina Abramović who named them the heroes of today, from Madonna: „What the media isn’t telling you is that one of the largest student protests since 1968 is happening right now – in Serbia”, reads a part of the post that she shared on Instagram together with: “Support unity all around the world!”
But here’s one I like best: Croatian film director and writer Rajko Grlić said one of these days in a TV interview: “I look at the situation in Serbia […] with great optimism and perhaps even greater jealousy. Optimism because the kids, uninfected by daily politics, attack politicians with a language that these people simply don’t comprehend and against whom they therefore have no chance. With jealousy because I’d like to see something like that in my own hometown”. He added: “My only fear is whether, when these politicians fall, and they will fall, they [the students] will be able to shape the government according to the values they now hold so well. How will they survive the collision with the ‘political reality’ of a huge corrupt state apparatus?”
*
As expected, the protest was huge. As one physicist and science journalist said “love has literally exploded in Serbia”. As always it was a mix of civil disobedience and a carnival. The latter is as important as the former because absolutists don’t have a sense of humour and hence don’t like seeing other people having fun. It makes them nervous.
The protest in Novi Sad @EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC
The protests turned from dissatisfaction with a corrupt, criminal government into something much greater: a demand for far-reaching reforms, for a state that is on the side of its citizens, no matter who’s on power. Politicians are public servants, they come and go. Students are fighting for Serbia to become a country they wish to stay in, live and work in, start a family and have children of their own who will not have to fight for justice when they grow up.
*
At the end of the Novi Sad protests, a seven hundred strong army of taxi cabs volunteered to take the students back home to Belgrade, free of charge. But Belgrade is not the end of the road for the students. Next stop: Kragujevac, 150 kilometers South of Belgrade. The students of the Kragujevac Uni called for a 15-hour blockade on February 15. I guess we’ve got our next Saturday planned.
