Students’ protests in Serbia

Students in Serbia are the ones currently holding the class on justice.

For the past month, Serbian people have been protesting in the streets after the collapse of the awning of a railway station in Novi Sad on the 1st of November, leading to the death of 15 people, with 2 still left in a hospital, fighting for their life.

The railway station has been in reconstruction for 3 years now and immediately after the collapse, the authoritarian Vučićs government began their new narrative spin, trying to derail the investigations saying that every part of the railway station has been reconstructed, aside from the awning. Their attempt to blame this all on Titos government from the 1960s, failed when one of the architects in charge of supervising the reconstruction, went on a free-media cable channel and denied these allegations, stating that, he himself, supervised the reconstruction of the awning, and that he tried to call officials attention to the disregard for regulations and protocols during the reconstruction multiple times. 

For a few days, secret documents such as contracts between the state officials and private construction companies started surfacing, and it became clear that the government officials, ministries and other government bodies, were involved in an elaborate embezzlement scheme with a consortium of Chinese companies to defraud the country, leaving the reconstructive project severely deregulated, with a lot of the procedures not followed up on and the awning ultimately collapsing. 

20 000 Serbian people took to the streets of Novi Sad on 5th of November gathering in front of the city hall in a peaceful protest asking for officials resignations and the arrests of responsible individuals, that broke into riots conducted by the youth, leading to unlawful arrests of young people and  the fabrication of indictments. Bloody hands became the symbol of the unrests that kept on transpiring in the following weeks, with protests continuing and finally spreading through the fabric of society. With a student being arrested, students started blocking the street in front of their faculty at 11:52am, the exact time the awning collapsed. The oppressive regime sent masked men to attack students, and these men have later been identified as members of the ruling party. In the days following, the students started barricading themselves in the faculty building with requests that all arrested on November the 5th be released from jail and the masked men arrested and prosecuted for attacking students peacefully protesting. Soon many students from other faculties in Belgrade started joining the barricades. Right now students throughout Serbia are barricading themselves on their faculty properties. They have given the regime a set of requests, such as the release of the documentation regarding the reconstruction and collapse of the railway station building to the public, the freeing of all youth imprisoned during the protests in the 30 days following the collapse, the arrest and prosecution of the masked people who were sent in an organized groups to attack students. 

By Marija Tasić
Green Youth of Serbia and a student