Slavija, 20° 27′ 44“, December 22, 2024
I still don’t know what happened at Slavija square on the evening of December 22. Posts from social networks, edited by filters of various individuals, groups, media and parties, often accompanied by Balašević’s refrain “Live freely!”, are only an attempt to interpret the most important event not only of this year, but also of the past quarter of a century, the dimensions of which no one yet understands. In this sense, any comment, advice, proposal, interpretation of the protest at Slavija, and especially the student rebellion, diminishes the capacity of the event itself and further blurs the image which is only vaguely similar to what the media is showing us. This article will, inevitably, also contribute to this. Perhaps only the artifacts of the rebellion from the “stUUdents” exhibition in the FLU Gallery could tell us something important about it. Everything else is still just a hunch.
That evening, I stood at Slavija, not far from the Tucović monument which Goran Vesić – responsible for the death of fifteen people in Novi Sad – moved closer to the National Bank building at the beginning of his disastrous career. The people around me greeted the arrival of the students with sincere delight. The scene was reminiscent of the energy of solidarity pouring into the roundabout, which for the first time in many decades was functioning flawlessly, without marked lanes which are supposed to manage traffic. Banners, messages from students and graduates that they will never give up on their demand for responsibility, emerged from the fountain, that freakish monument to investor urbanism. Almost at the same time, Belgrade Waterworks and Sewerage, together with city manager Miroslav Čučković, responsible for the death of seventeen people in Obrenovac during the flood in 2014, gave a statement about multimillion-dollar damage to the fountain’s “smart” sensors.
The older generation expected a different kind of protest, similar to those we’ve always had, with a sound system, a stage, speeches and the like. But, something different was happening around us. Something unlike any protest we’ve ever seen. It seemed as if the students were speaking in a different language. I can only imagine how strange this all seemed to Orlić’s special forces from the BIA, crowded on the roofs of nearby buildings, because they did not know what to convey to their boss. Even less did Orlić know how to convey it to Vučić, who was supposedly ecstatic about the opening of a new section of the highway to Vrnjačka banja. They know what it means when a group of people argue about money, they know how to interpret if someone is wearing the flag of another country, they are experts in saying that anyone who fights for their rights in this unfree society “doesn’t love Serbia”. This government understands the language of violence best and knows how to use it for its own promotion, whether by beating someone or presenting anyone who thinks differently as violent. However, Vučić’s government does not understand the language of non-violence, nor the call for citizens to join the demands for the establishment of the rule of law and responsibility for crimes. Corruption is a crime – this is the main message from Slavija! Together with: Every life is important! Although Prime Minister Miloš Vučević thinks differently. Not 15, not 155, not 1,555 lives. Nothing matters except that the corrupt machine of government continues. To the future, as President Vučić sees it, filled with collateral victims of a criminal government.
But when a crime is committed, as a result of megalomaniacal corruption, as happened when the canopy fell at the Railway Station in Novi Sad, a silent protest is warranted. And there are no student leaders to be appropriated by any party, no matter how much they might want to use the political potential of student blockades for their own purposes. The president would like that too. Then again, it’s hard to do that without the sort of iconic representatives we remember from 1996/97. Today, like the two Čedomirs, those erstwhile heroes of the opposition are part of Vučić’s choir that sings the “song of shackles”. Today’s student protest is a generational rebellion different from the kind of organisational structure that the system in Serbia rests on, with Vučić at the center, surrounded by the corrupt directorial world of “2,000 decent people”, all the way down to the lowest level. A wink from above is enough for everyone in the hierarchy to grab a club, don a hood, and turn into a hooligan. Likewise, for the sake of loyalty to the president, henchmen renounce their professional identity, as the actors Goncić and Ristovski did, ostensibly dissociating themselves from the “single-mindedness” that prevailed in the actors’ guild association.
When the quietest hour came on December 22 at Slavija, we could only hear the cawing of crows and the buzzing of drones above our heads and raised phone flashlights. Occasionally, someone’s cough. Maybe that silence would have been normal if it had happened in some place other than Slavija, one of the noisiest places in the country. The question on everyone’s mind is how a hundred thousand people fell silent with such force, simultaneously, without a centralized command system, without the repression of a leader, without a sound system and a party hierarchy that disciplines its members. At that moment, Orlić’s agents froze on the roofs, and Vučić realized that he could no longer use Informer’s software for “head counting”. Before his eyes, an unprecedented dispossession took place, as a result of which he became as light and insignificant as a fairground balloon filled with helium. Even his voice sounded different when he addressed the public through his channel @budućnostsrbijeav. He spoke out of his irrelevance, because the order of equality and solidarity that was briefly established at Slavija no longer recognized the vertical Progressive organization based on violence, corruption, crime and humiliation of victims.
At Slavija, no one was giving lessons, and yet, the message was crystal clear not only in Serbia, but in all distant meridians of the world which saw images from that square, shining in the shape of a hand with fingers spread. Only it was not red like Vučić’s bloody hand, but bright, in the color of justice which will be carried out on the perpetrators of the crimes in Novi Sad.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 31.12.2024.
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