In the seventeenth month of a student-led mass movement in Serbia, the death of a student at the Faculty of Philosophy triggered an orchestrated attack on the University of Belgrade by the country’s government-police-tabloid complex. On the eve of the police raid, protesters gathered in front of the rectorate, and the rector delivered a historic speech situating the university as the last autonomous institution in the country ready to confront ruling-party power. But the question remains: what kind of politics, and in whose name?
We stood on the street that divides the University of Belgrade Rectorate from Student Park, counting police officers who, lined up in a row around the building’s facade, were “protecting” the building from students and professors. There were maybe thirty of them, though we knew armored vehicles and riot police were stationed nearby. The protesters — students, professors, deans, citizens — were breathing down their necks less than half a meter away.
In my small wannabe avant-garde group, we fantasized about an Iran-style hostage crisis, in which we would, as an unexpected force, overpower those thirty-odd men in blue and take them hostage inside the rectorate building. Our first demand would be the return of all student documentation previously seized from the Students’ Archive at the Faculty of Philosophy. We would immediately restore the banner proclaiming “Students Win,” which the police had removed from the rectorate facade earlier that day, in a gesture that seemed to say: After seventeen months of a popular, student-led mass social uprising, enough of you, squatters, we’re taking things into our own hands now. This was a pipe dream: in reality, members of the Criminal Police Directorate were not only outside but inside, too, holding the rectorate hostage, along with Rector Vladan Đokić and the staff, while carrying out a thorough search of the building.
Among those gathered outside the rectorate, I see…
Auteur: Lela Vujanić
