The Brooklyn Rail

Good Friday 

On April 18, the student blockade of RTS (Radio Television of Serbia, state owned public radio and TV broadcaster), had already been ongoing for five days. On the street before the TV headquarters, people milled about happily, talking and enjoying the sunshine. In the leafy streets surrounding, people sipped coffees, and cats slept on top of Yugos. It was Good Friday, so the Orthodox church around the corner was packed.

The Serbian Broadcasting Corporation building is set back from the road, in a kind of open courtyard. Miscellaneous supporters, chatting, eating food, circulating. Two large tables heave with food donations, and all the food is free, and for everyone, not just students. Children are painting eggs at arts and crafts stalls and there are also special stickers with slogans from the movement which can be stuck on to the eggs. People sit on fold-out chairs reading the newspapers. Up on the gallery, banners attest to the presence of students from many faculties (all the faculties are involved), and are regularly changed, presumably so that they can all be seen. 

The RTS building was bombed by NATO twenty-six years ago, on April 23, 1999, and a part of the headquarters destroyed by this bombing remains. Sixteen employees, most of them technicians, make-up artists and security workers, were killed in the bombing. NATO justified this act as necessary to “disrupt and degrade the command, control and communications network” of the Yugoslav Armed Forces, and claimed that “RTS made a significant contribution to the propaganda war which orchestrated the campaign against the population of Kosovo,” but the bombing has also been considered unjustified and a war crime. 

Today’s blockade is mainly the initiative of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, who accuse RTS of unfair representation of the student movement. The role of RTS in nineties warmongering is, however, very alive in living memory, and mingles strangely and uncannily with this present-day accusation. Several older people in the crowd make reference to RTS’s role in the war straight away. Some students from the philosophy faculty concede that RTS is not the worst of the television companies, and they aren’t entirely sure about the blockade, since, honestly, RTS have some good programmes. RTS is not Pink News, after all— Vučić’s personal TV channel.

The stairs leading up to the first-floor gallery are blockaded by business students, although you wouldn’t think that’s what they are at first. They are wearing yellow vests with the name of their faculty, and seem sleepy, perched on picnic chairs in front of the stairs that lead, presumably, to the entrance of the TV broadcaster. They do shifts of 8–13 hours, says one of them. Outraged that another television station claimed that their university was still running (it is blockaded), they are particularly pleased to be here.  This checkpoint, although benign, is firm: no one can pass except journalists with press passes, or students with valid student ID. 

This is also the policy for the movement’s famous (infamous) plenums (assemblies), which is how students have been organizing themselves and their demands since the movement started in November; to attend one, you have to present your student ID, which in Serbia looks like a passport, complete with grades and stamps, and you have to be a member of that specific faculty. Otherwise, you have to be vouched for by a member of the faculty, and this would have to be agreed by the assembly. In this case, the decision to block the stairs is partly for the sake of this coherence, and partly, I am told by another student, because of the widespread distrust of state construction: they do not want too many people standing on the stairs in case they collapse. 

*

Speaking of barricades, a necklace of silver bins closes the street the TV station is on at each end and inside this area people mill around happily, talking, hanging out on sidewalks, eating. At the lower end, people in yellow vests marked “IT” redirect traffic, and cars sometimes stop and unload donations, packs of bottled water, food, for the occupation. The bins are occasionally moved aside to let bikers come in: BMWs, KTM Dukes, Hondas, and Toyotas gather and disperse. Strings of four or five veterans patrol around in a military way. These—the tech workers, bikers and veterans—are three of the “groups” of civilians who have put themselves “in the service” of the students. 

*

For Easter, a landmark event has happened: students from Novi Pazar, a majority Muslim town, who voted to join the movement in January, have come up to Belgrade to relieve students celebrating Easter. In the crowd, a young man, maybe a student, has a sign that says, “Everyone wants to know the nature of the friendship,” with a photo of a Bosniak and a Serbian boy with their arms around each other, backs to us, identifiable, respectively, by a tarboush and a šajkača. Curious about it, I ask, but another man, aged about sixty, jumps in. He tells me about the role RTS had in warmongering, and that the students have brought about a unity he never would have thought possible. He finishes by saying he hopes that the movement will mean that Kosovo comes back into Serbia. 

Despite the aura around the tired students, the people most eager to talk are often men of about his age, who tend to promote the idea that the leaderless students are their saviors, while simultaneously speaking for them.

*

There are no speeches to drain everyone’s energy. Instead, there is the occasional announcement over megaphone. This evening, Good Friday, around 8 p.m., it is as simple as “There was no daily broadcast today,” which is greeted with applause. The broadcaster is still operating at a minimum. I am given conflicting reports: some think from a town near Croatia called Šid, and others say the TV has broadcast from a bunker, or from Vučić’s office, others say they are broadcasting from a truck nearby. They also have another studio, in Belgrade, which is similarly blockaded. 

*

To get to the student blockade from Republika Square, you walk past the National Museum, National Assembly, and Pionirski Park. The park is entirely fenced off with metal barriers. From afar, you can see green tents, and hear vague applause. It has the effect of canned laughter, since you cannot tell who is in there. Between the park and the assembly is a row of white military tents—the ones shaped like roofs—white, with transparent parts on the edges in the shape of windows. Their fronts are open, and inside each tent is a rag-tag bunch—in one, people play cards; in another, blue inflatable mattresses are piled in a corner. There are plastic tables in the street, which is itself under construction. Drunk people sit on benches, insulting people who get too close to the tents or to the park. From a purely aesthetic point of view, it looks like a bunch of people who’ve been put there, who are in a state of waiting. 

The movement refers to the Pioneers Park encampment as a “zoo,” as a social experiment of some kind. Indeed, the first groups to populate the park were “Students 2.0,” the “students who want to learn” (and who are apparently being prevented from doing so because of the blockades). They were simulating reading. But they were far too young to be university students. Ćacilend/Ћациленд. In Serbian, pupil (as in high school pupil) is usually đaci (ћаци), Ćaci, sounds like that word, slurred, or spelled badly. The Ćaci is a fake student. Soon after this the park began to be populated with all kinds of groups who were paid to be there by the day. They are paid between thirty and one hundred euros a day, depending on their status. They are simply, poor people, dealers, Roma, and then, the red berets were the final touch—these are war veterans from the Republika Srpska—notorious for unprosecuted war crimes in the ninties. They presented themselves as necessary to “protect” the “students” “who want to learn.” In addition to the uniformly green tents in the center of the park, big white military tents were erected. 

Unlike the real students, who have walked and cycled thousands of kilometers in all weathers to other towns, including Strasbourg, Niš and Novi Pazar, the inhabitants of the government 2.0 camp are not very hardy. They had a lot of electric heaters, some of which set the tents on fire. And there have been rumors that many of these “paid protagonists” were actually sleeping at Hotel Balkan (one of two rather grand hotels—the slightly shabby smaller little sister to Hotel Moskva—the architectural embodiment of Vučić in relation to Putin).

*

Around the back of the blockaded TV broadcaster, around 10 p.m., a bedraggled group of philosophy students seem to have a rather less glamorous post to guard than the business students. “Because nobody gives a fuck about philosophy,” they say with humor, indicating that the layout reflects “society,” pointing to the shady mosquito-infested corner they find themselves in. Natural Sciences has a worse spot. Their entrance is barricaded, with fences, but there is a large gap beside the barricade through which you could pass. But no one is forcing their way through. The atmosphere is fun and the students are themselves very young.  

*

The movement is not a “violent” one, to use the word often thrown at movements by governments—that’s to say there has been little to no property damage, save for some paint thrown at the Novi Sad City Hall in early November, soon after the accident on November 1, 2024. Organizers of the protests have claimed that the “rioters” on this occasion were provocateurs tied to the ruling party, and this created fear about outside agitators. The movement has self-consciously built an identity around discipline, cleanliness, politeness, and respect, with the idea of rising “above” the violence and patent “disrespect” of the corrupt government. Indeed, accusations of violence and property damage are mainly levelled at the government, whose phoney “pro-government” camp nearby has ruined the grass and polluted the public park. 

This attitude occasionally seems to verge on puritanical. People who were perceived to be potentially destructive during the plenum were kicked out near the beginning of the movement. The philosophy students on the RTS barricade tell me they voted out alcohol. “We still drink. But it’s in the cabinets in the occupations. It’s moderated.” Trash is cleared away, and there’s a big emphasis on hospitality, care, and kindness. 

*

The students I speak to are apprehensive about “Western” misunderstandings of the movement, since in response to the massive demonstrations at Slavija Square, comparisons were made with Georgia. “People thought it was an anti-dictatorship, pro-EU protest, but now there’s some understanding that this is a movement for a bare existential minimum. The bare existential minimum of liberal democratic functioning, which is going to allow us to talk about some more sensitive issues later,” said O.B., a twenty-one year old student from the Philosophy Faculty, when I interviewed him. “Right now, that’s not so important. It’s more to make the government fulfil our demands, either by bringing the government down, or making them first fulfil our demands or collapse on their own, or according to some people to go for a transitional government, or by there being snap elections—this would make the regime collapse.” O.B goes on: “That’s the best thing about the protests actually, from the beginning, I believe they were anti-regime protests, but they weren’t labelled as such, and this allowed us to gather more support.” 

The students, “leaderless,” are indeed very clever in not positioning themselves explicitly against Vučić. Lots of people tell me this – including older people at the blockade, who explain that Vučić’s repressive measures lead to more unity for the students. Vučić, the reverse of the students, is not so clever. Unlike Tito in 1968, he hasn’t thought of trying to bring the students “in house.” But Vučić is not Tito, precisely. Instead, Vučić has tried to mirror the students’ movement, and make one of his own with the “Zoo,” the Students 2.0, and his grassroots, Putinesque movement. In response to the students’ four demands, Vučić has made his own. “I don’t believe there’s even any EU country with such liberal demands,” laughs OB. Vicic’s demands are something like: allowing students to study, opening the blockade, etc., etc. 

Each faculty has agreed on four demands, which are the same across the movement: 

1. 1. Transparency regarding the train stations’ renovation 
   2. Accountability for attacks on student protesters
   3. The dismissal of charges for those arrested at demonstration 
   4. A 20% increase in funding for state higher education institutions 

They have done this through the plenum. A few weeks earlier I sat in Café Centrala in Dorćol with O.B. and two of his friends from different faculties. What’s fascinating is how much political identity differs from fac to fac: the law student is in favor of a transitional government, the political science student complains that there’s not enough to connect the plenum to the state, the law student counters that he thinks plenums are good for some things, but not for making all decisions. At the end of the day he’s in favor of some minimum of representative democracy, since otherwise it falls to a tyranny of decision makers. According to this budding lawyer, the plenums are draining, and he’s insisted in his faculty that they have to be called at the end of each assembly. They cannot just automatically roll on. This seems to create something like adherence to the process.

Because sixteen people died because of the regime, the students had a consensus on what justice should mean: prosecution of those responsible for the accident. And as for the police, who people in the blockade tell me are on the side of the students: there are of course students who are anti-police, but there is a consensus and a discipline about not insulting the police. Many believe the police to be blackmailed, in one way or another “by the regime.”

As for the lack of property damage, this is also part of the students’ imperative to be exemplary, compared to the government. It is a violence they cannot afford. In the first protests in November in Novi Sad, eggs, paint, and unsanitary water was thrown at the town hall, but this turned out to be done by members of the ruling party. In the 2023 protests against election fraud, claims were made that bricks thrown at the town hall were exclusively thrown by members of the SNS, Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (although this wasn’t true). “Because of this, it was said ‘This is not a violent protest’ and there was no further discussion about it. That was one of the principles.” 

The students are playing with the realm of the symbolic, they have understood something very profound in response to Vučić’s stagecraft, and they act based on this symbolism. The main “property” damage is thought to be carried out by the government. On November 15 the fake government camp, Ćacilend, was further barricaded from the rest of the world by dozens of tractors donated by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, dripping with fuel, and protected by the police. These were stationed all along the edges of the park. “The tractors were mutilated and destroyed, sugar was poured in,” MC, a sociology student, said. All of this was done by young men wearing head-to-toe black. No one knew their names and they didn’t reveal their identities. They stood along next to the tractors all day. Moreover, the tractors were already in a state of disuse: O.B., told me, “They were a bunch of old tractors, Yugoslav-era machines. A friend of mine says in his village, they don’t even keep these tractors inside—they’re useless and worthless.” 

The ritualistic qualities of the movement seem to give it strength. The blockades happen every day without fail, in silent memory of the sixteen victims. “Yes, and in a way it’s really dogmatic. Some people think this is bad but I’d argue that we, who have lived on the periphery of modern capitalism for all of our lives, in somewhat miserable circumstances, need something to hang on to. And this dogmatic approach that we have created, is something we can hold on to and we can believe in.” (O.B.)

The stakes are pretty high, and—as I already observed from the “service” relationship to people on the blockade—there are some pretty weird inversions of intergenerational relationships. Or else a bizarre fetishization of youth. “If the student movement doesn’t succeed, we have no way of getting out of the social and political crisis that we’re in.” Other people say, “This is the first thing that’s ever worked as a means of rebelling against the regime and government. I believe that students, hearing that day after day, have realised they have nothing to turn to” (M.C., 21). O.B. and M.C. are sceptical of this perspective, which allows adults to absolve themselves of the guilt of unfinished jobs (’68 and the ’90s movements). “It sounds like a purely Italian fascistic fetishization of youth itself. But it’s not. The generation older than our parents is really miserable right now. They’re—to use a very Serbian expression—tickling our balls. You’re supporting the movement, but you’re liberating yourselves from thinking” (O.B.).

 

Saturday 

On Saturday I go to meet Ana Dragić, artist and cultural worker, who lives near the blockade. On her balcony is a paving stone from her street (Dvadeset sedmog marta), which is constantly being renovated. The stones continue to pop up. She lives on the sixteenth floor and her rent recently increased by thirty-five percent, after an influx of rich Russians avoiding the front and as a result of general inflation. This community is wealthy in comparison with the existing population of Belgrade. Dorćol, another neighborhood, where my philosophy students hang out, is a Russian diaspora, full of expensive brunch spots. Some consider the presence of the Russians—apolitical as they are—to be a soft power strategy on the part of Vučić.  

She was not much surprised by the canopy collapse. “The Novi Sad canopy collapse was like a metaphor for everything this government has been doing to the country, it’s just crappy work, they do nothing well. The only thing they excel at is selling public property and the city’s cultural and historical landmarks in non-transparent ways, be it for their own profits or in partnership with all types of questionable investors.” Republic square, for example, took years of renovation to transform from parkland to concrete. “This is a city for twisting ankles.” 

The concrete canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad collapsed on November 1, 2024, falling on people sitting on benches or walking through the entrance. Fourteen people were killed immediately, and three others were injured, two of whom have since died, bringing the total to sixteen. Though the station was officially opened in July 2024, the prime minister pointed to the building’s original construction date of 1964 to deflect attention from the recent sixteen million euro renovation undertaken by the CRIC-CCCC (China Railway International Co. and China Communications Construction Company), which was completed in 2022. Additional revamp works, including on the canopy, were reportedly carried out earlier last year, but the infrastructure minister Vesić lied and said the rooftop had not been included in the works.

There were protests in Novi Sad, the biggest the city had seen for years. Then, the student movement started on November 15, when people in Novi Sad blocked a road and held a silent vigil, staying silent for fourteen minutes at 11:52, which is the time at which the canopy collapsed, and the students stayed silent for one minute for each of the victims. The vigil held now lasts sixteen minutes. When Dragić, thirty-six, first went to a demonstration, she was completely taken aback by the students’ efficiency. “We were taken by surprise by our own youth. In Belgrade, students and faculty members, in particular from Belgrade's Faculty of Dramatic Arts, blocked roads on November 22 and were attacked by people in cars.

On the way down from Ana’s building to visit the occupation we bump into a man of about sixty-five, wearing a golden corduroy jacket. He is one of the lawyers who went on strike in January. Lawyers were one of the few sectors able to organize a successful strike, which was a month long. They, like the bikers, IT workers, and veterans are another group to have put themselves “at the service” of the students, and are providing legal support to them pro bono. 

Once at the blockade, we observe the silence. It’s an uncanny performance of living statues. People do not move much. Loose hairs blow in the wind. Dogs raise their heads and then bed down again at their owners’ feet. Suddenly, people stop where they are, in the streets. In front of the TV station, the crowd fills the road. Nearly all of the dogs stay quiet, except for one slightly yappy and neurotic chihuahua, whose owner seems a little bashful about their dog in comparison to everyone else’s. The silence is overwhelming, which makes disrespect for it—only by two passersby—seem all the more explicit. It’s very ritualised, and the students, accompanied by supporting citizens, do this every day. Observing it, one has a compulsion to stay silent oneself, of course. And this has been the overwhelming experience of the last months: with the daily blockades, which daily ritualise the deaths of the sixteen. Cars stop and people join. It’s hard to argue with a funeral. 

The breaking of the silence, at the end of the sixteenth minute is crazy. Whistles blow and the hustle and bustle starts again. We have a look around. Everything is free. We look at the signs, tags chalked on the floor, and banners hung from the gallery. I am particularly impressed by a young man standing with a banner that says:

STUDENTS OF MACHINE ENGINEERING AGAINST HEAVY MACHINERY

And chalked on the floor there’s also: 

STUDENTS AND FACULTY UNITED

RIP RTS

PUMPAJ

EVERYONE WITH THE STUDENTS

NATIONAL MUSEUM WITH THE STUDENTS

LOVE WINS

A VERY BEAUTIFUL ATMOSPHERE, NOONE IS F**KING ANYONE (no one is rude to anyone) 

The atmosphere is festive, and popular songs by Idoli, a Belgrade punk band from the eighties, play. “We are dancing,” by Prljavo Kazalište comes on, and words are being replaced with “Pumpaj, pumpaj all night.” “Pumpaj,” (ПУМПАЈ), the movement’s slogan, may have come from a video of a wedding, where a musician riles up a crowd; the term is “generally used to encourage someone to keep going, push harder, or raise the pressure.” This is the slogan of the Serbian student protests. Added recently was the concept of “Dinstaj” (ДИНСТАЈ) coined by Jovo Bakić, professor at the University of Belgrade. In a TV interview, the professor compared the Vučić government to a beef stew, that needs to be simmered slowly in order to finally soften—referring to the tough character of Vučić’s regime and its indigestibility, and the need to continuously put a flame under it. 

The Dinstaj idea speaks to the steadiness of the movement, its peaceful character, and it also doesn’t seem coincidental that the word has a culinary meaning. Food, at this blockade, and in the movement in general, has a huge significance—this is obvious. On Friday at the barricade, the philosophy student S. told me, “With all the food we receive, and the donations, I think we could last till October. Unless Vučić fucked us.” How could he fuck you? “He could turn off the AC.”

Both of these words: Pumpaj and Dinstaj, are imperative. Pump it! Stew it! 

We started talking to some people, a man and his daughter, whom Ana met at a previous demonstration—the demonstration where the sonic weapon was used. The man is a video artist and a veteran of the 1996 student movement that eventually toppled Milošević. The difference between then and now, he says, is that in the nineties we wanted our leaders dead and now we just want them to be locked up in prison for life. This man was at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, where this student movement started, and in the nineties that was also the case. We stand in the burning sunshine and I get all the deep state gossip from him. His daughter is at the Third Gymnasium. She is in a minority of protesters, against a majority of pro-regime parents, but they have nonetheless been blockading. 

 

Sunday 

On Sunday morning we go back to the blockade before leaving Belgrade, it’s too early for the silence. The students are still blocking the stairs and there’s an altercation with a person who has come, determined to get through. However, the students just call to each other “Pumpaj pumpaj pumpaj” and a crowd gathers. There’s no aggression. What I witness is a calming down of the aggressive man. He is surrounded and reasoned with, and eventually a policeman comes and reasons with him a bit more. There’s another altercation about half an hour later, where the person is screaming about Milošević, but it’s all quite unclear. There’s a kind of intelligence to the way it’s deescalated. We feel as if we are witnessing completely different generational relationships, the precondition for which doesn’t exist in the places we live. There’s an Easter feast, and it is true that there are fewer people, but it doesn’t seem to matter. 

 

Some days later

Between all of the big protests in major cities since November, students have been walking thousands of kilometers to different towns and meeting and being met by people in villages along the way—from Niš to Novi Pazar, from Novi Sad to Niš, biking from Niš to Belgrade, running from Niš to Belgrade. At the time of writing this, a convoy of students had just arrived in Strasbourg by bicycle. This has had the effect of joining places that “do not necessarily have anything to do with each other,” O.B. told me. When Novi Pazar voted to join the movement in January, this was significant. Novi Pazar, a Muslim town, is very far away from Belgrade both in terms of distance and in terms of imagination. Says M.C., “Students are literally connecting the smallest village by physically being there, with the mentality of what’s happening in a bigger city that they’re coming from.”

The universities are almost all blockaded (with the exception of the police training faculty, the military training university), and they have the support of the professors who are also on strike. The year will be cancelled. Some universities were slower to blockade than others, for example the faculty of machine engineering, because they had to obtain the trust of management (because they have an air tunnel, rockets, nuclear things). There are echoes of previous movements in that the Drama Arts school was first to “rebel,” the philosophy and philology departments are always first to blockade. The movement is disciplined and united in its outward face, led by students, despite its plurality and cross class basis, and this level of organization is certainly impressive, if “dogmatic,” as O.B. calls it. Perhaps these walks also serve to get past the populist media. There are interesting accounts of the students being received like partisans or heroes, and strange intergenerational reversals, as O.B. and M.C. described.

There are a lot of Serbian flags, and also sometimes even a use of Chetnik symbols. There are some who think this is a naïve repurposing of symbols, a kind of camp. But O.B. hates this, his family were partisans. Belgrade is so dense, there is a sense of old symbols and experiences rearing their heads in unarticulated ways, but as a visitor, one is ill equipped to get through all the codes, historiography, revisionism, and various accounts.

As well as donations there are unforeseen levels of hospitality, and the students have the support of over 90 percent of the country, people say. In Niš, where Ana went in a blabla (Serbian rideshare) car for the protest, she witnessed unforeseen levels of hospitality and a festive atmosphere, where the people of the town were bringing really good food. Doctors were providing proper cooked meals like goulash, and the head of a cardiology hospital and his team opened up several wards in the hospital to host student protesters. Ana told me about the arrival of students in Belgrade for the protest of the fifteenth (which is when Vučić used the sonic weapon), there was an official welcome for all the students from elsewhere the night before, a big red carpet in the middle of the city center, and it was like the tour de France. The students are extremely effective at blocking and redirecting traffic and coordinating within themselves, and their extraordinary efficiency and collective intelligence adds to the representation of them as highly capable of self-organizing on a larger scale, or even by some as saviors, people who will be able to run the country. But the students I spoke to were perfectly critical of this fantasy.

Yesterday O.B. wrote to me to tell me the blockade had only just ended, because the students had succeeded. The government had cancelled the current council for the electronic media regulatory board, (REM) and elections would be underway soon. A new protest was planned for the first of May.

The blockade ended on the 28th of April after fourteen days, having succeeded in having the current council for the Electronic Media Regulatory (REM) cancelled, and replaced with new elections. This was one of the students’ key demands. As of today, the students have demanded the dissolution of the national parliament and for early parliamentary elections, in line with Article 109 of the constitution. The students justify their demand for dissolution as “the most trusted social group” and mention the government's not meeting their previous demands. The judicial workers' union announced a full scale strike on Monday, citing years of government neglect, and failure to address demands. The medical school is also on strike as of Monday, faculty members say they consider it as their contribution to the blockade. The strike will continue until student demands are met, say faculty staff. Some students are currently running from Belgrade to Brussels.