In the week leading up to a major protest in Belgrade this past Saturday, Donald Trump Jr made his appearance in the Serbian capital. President Aleksandar Vučić hosted him at his residence on Andrićev Venac, named after Yugoslavia’s most celebrated writer and Nobel laureate, Ivo Andrić. With considerably less literary talent but a remarkable gift for political fiction, Vučić gestured toward the Belgrade Waterfront, a luxury development on the river Sava synonymous with corruption, presenting it as a symbol of progress. Then, pointing toward the protesters, he described them as obstacles to that progress.
Still, Trump Jr must have known — however little it may have mattered to him — that his host has faced months of opposition from the country’s brightest young minds and most thoughtful citizens. Operating outside the institutional system — because in a country where elections have been rigged for nearly fifteen years, no other option remains — Serbian students have conducted a modern form of door-to-door campaigning, walking from village to village and town to town.
This campaign reached its peak on Saturday, when around half a million protesters gathered in Belgrade, according to estimates. The atmosphere was magnificent — everywhere, except around the national parliament and the presidencial building, where Vučić had stationed his criminals and hooligans, poised to attack at any moment. The gathering, was, nonetheless, violently disrupted in the twelfth minute of a planned fifteen-minute silence for the victims of the Novi Sad railway station roof canopy collapse — an incident last November that killed fifteen people in the country’s second city — by an attack with a weapon that many suspect was a sonic…
Auteur: Filip Balunović
