Police defends the Serbian Progressive Party and their activists — this is the last phase of the protest, whose dynamics are rapidly changing from day to day.
The protests became violent in several places in Serbia after supporters of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) shot at demonstrators who were peacefully protesting and demanding the calling of early parliamentary elections with rather dangerous pyrotechnic devices and other objects.
The police openly sided with the violent members of the SNS and thereby triggered a wave of public anger not seen in the past nine months, since the beginning of the protests. In response to the violence from the SNS offices, citizens in several cities smashed windows and demolished the premises of the ruling party in Novi Sad, Valjevo, Belgrade.
The streets of Serbian cities in the evening become a battlefield between demonstrators and supporters of the ruling party, whom the police defend.
The cynical firecrackers were not the primary reason for the provoked anger among citizens, but the last drop in a wave of repression and state violence against dissenters, which the Aleksandar Vučić regime launched after it assessed that it had defeated the “color revolution,” that is, after the decline of the wave of mass protests that had seriously shaken his power during the winter.
After suppressing the mass student protests with sonic weapons, ending the commemorative silence blockades at intersections, and the return to schools of education workers and the academic community in the spring, the regime declared the danger over and immediately began reprisals.
After suppressing the mass student protests with loud weapons, ending the commemorative silence blockades at intersections, and the return to schools of education workers and the academic community in the spring, the regime declared the danger over and immediately began reprisals.
There are testimonies about lists of names compiled in the hierarchy of SNS headquarters that are passed down from the top to local party apparatus in order to deal with dissenters or those from their ranks who faltered before the mass student protests and did not show sufficient loyalty to Vučić.
Employees in state-owned companies are being fired or punished, not only those who protested against corruption and demanded accountability for the death of 16 people due to the collapse of the canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad, but also those who refused to attend the pro-regime rallies of support obsessively organized by Aleksandar Vučić.
Turning the young against each other
The cause of the outbreak of collective anger was undoubtedly the precedent of abuse of power by Aleksandar Vučić and the institution of pardon, when in July and August he absolved from responsibility those who attacked and endangered the lives of demonstrators. It concerns a group of young SNS activists who were accused of beating a female student and breaking her jaw, and a girl who hit a peacefully protesting student with a car was also pardoned.
The regime’s bizarre selection lies within the deepening of social divisions not only through violent turning of citizens against each other, but specifically the young against each other. The pardoned individuals are perpetrators of violence who in fact endangered the lives of their peers, and the additional brutality is that in both cases brave young women were the victims. The brutal message is that all those who will in the future deal with Vučić’s opponents in the most brutal manner will be freed and rewarded.
Comparing Serbia with the regime in Belarus or with Latin American juntas is no longer a metaphor. Those who participate in demonstrations are being arrested and prosecuted en masse, several hundred citizens have been detained since the beginning of the protests, for which purpose an illegal facial-recognition software is most likely being used. The police more readily draw batons and, in full gear, charge at small groups of demonstrators, as evidenced by brutal beatings of young demonstrators, threats of rape against girls…
Intervention operations are carried out by praetorian parts of the security apparatus from the Unit for the Protection of Persons and Facilities, which resembles the “personal guard” of Slobodan Milošević — the Special Operations Unit from the 1990s.
For some time now Vučić has not been able to establish his authoritarian control over the state, and the demonstrators are not sufficiently organized to take power — either on the street or through elections. It would be risky for him, as Slobodan Milošević did in 1991, to deploy the army and tanks on the streets or to declare a state of emergency, but he is already announcing a determined state response.
Aleksandar Vučić has ceased to be the president of all citizens, calling his opponents terrorists and spreading complete hysteria and violent rhetoric on loyal media that provokes further internal conflicts. Such violent political-technology has been applied since Vučić came to power, almost every time before elections are called, but this time all dissatisfied citizens are being physically directed directly against members of the SNS and there is no turning back — to peaceful protest or silent resistance.
Encouraged falsely by numerically smaller protests, Vučić during the months-long demonstrations returned to his “factory settings” — to the violent logic of the Serbian Radical Party in which he politically matured in his youth. That is the language of force, violence and cruelty toward the weak. In a hysterical desire to deal triumphantly and at all costs with the demonstrators, Vučić’s regime is breaking teeth.
Protesters immediately recognized this and sent him a message back by smashing not only the offices of the ruling party, but also the premises of the party of his mentor, the leader of the Serbian radicals Vojislav Šešelj.
The war returns home, to Serbia
The impression is as if Serbia is evolutionarily entering a phase of completing the wars of the 1990s, a natural confronting of the past without external pressure, without demands to respect the Hague Tribunal’s verdicts, without internal civic demands to condemn the occupation of Croatia, to recognize the systemic genocide in BiH, and ethnic cleansing with elements of genocide in Kosovo.
Somebody would say this is divine or cosmic justice. It is not — it is the logical sequence of events. Serbian analysts write that the war, after ravaging the neighboring republics, is returning home to Serbia, from where it was launched. For all those who started it or their pupils are now in power in Serbia — Aleksandar Vučić and Ivica Dačić, with the support of Vojislav Šešelj, are surrounded by criminals and those convicted of war crimes. They do not know dialogue, but only violence. They threaten physical extermination and respect only brutal force.
In Serbia currently a conflict between pro-European and anti-European forces isn’t played out. Against left and right. Citizenship and nationalism. In Serbia an internal conflict is playing out between two nationalisms — the old one from the 1990s and a new one that will inevitably replace and overthrow it.
The student and civic protest over nine months has transformed from leftist, urban, civic into patriotic and nationalistic. All those who hope that after Vučić’s fall revisionism of World War II and rehabilitation of the Chetnik movement will be abolished will be disappointed. That Serbia will politically face the crimes of the 1990s in Croatia, BiH and Kosovo. That it will understand why NATO intervened against Serbia — it will not.
New ones will come who will also shout “Ustaše”, “Šiptari”, “faggots”, who are already heard too irritatingly at the protests. The only thing that will not be present are family albums and faces of politicians in the media who have held power in Serbia for three and a half decades and kept it in the prison of the 1990s wars.
How and when that change will take place will depend on the massiveness of the protests and the turnout of voters in the still-unscheduled elections. It will depend on undecided local conformists. On all those who sit and drink their lemonade while on the next street an almost civil war is taking place.
It will also depend on whether someone will suffer in these street clashes and whether the state will again stain its hands with blood, as in the case of the canopy. And finally — on whether people in state bodies will awaken and rebel because of the daily beatings and arrests of their own people?
The more the mutual exhaustion of the two sides proceeds in violence, the less it will look like peaceful resolution of the crisis can take place. Like Slobodan Milošević, Vučić will not allow himself to lose in elections, but he will not want to hand over power peacefully to opponents either. The key question is whether he will have enough strength to strike at the demonstrators, which the former Serbian dictator did not have.
Boris Varga. Serbian political scientist and journalist.
The articles published in the “Opinions” column reflect the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the position of the Center
