April 10, 2025
Source: Byline Times
Student protesters in Novi Sad, 1 February 2025. The banner reads “We’ve read Orwell, we know what’s happening”. Photo: Nicole Burgund
“Children are the ornament of the world,” goes one famous Serbian poem by Ljubivoje Ršumović. Today, in Serbia, they are on everyone’s mind.
A generation written off by many as disconnected social-media addicts has proven to be quite the opposite, galvanizing society with their singular brand of civil disobedience, at once rebellious and virtuous, digitally savvy and frankly analogue. They’ve been compared to the liberators of 1945; they’ve been called the avant-garde of Europe; they’ve been nominated for a Nobel Prize and received shout-outs from the likes of Novak Djoković and Madonna.
At the same time, President Aleksandar Vučić insists that he’ll defeat the “colour revolution,” while daily acts of manipulation, intimidation and violence against the students and their supporters continue. After five months of protests, how this all will play out is anyone’s guess. But the students show no sign of giving up.
How Did it Begin?
In coverage of events in Serbia, international news media make passing reference to it—it didn’t make headlines in the midst of wars, fires, and pre-election madness—but it is the beating, bleeding heart of the movement.
At 11:52 am on 1 November 2024, the concrete canopy of the train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, collapsed. Thousands of people pass through the station daily (I myself use it twice a week). On that clear, sunny, autumn noon, fourteen were killed, three others grievously injured; one of them succumbed a month later in hospital, and another died in March, five-and-a-half months after the collapse. All but two of the victims were under 25, and four were children.
The station had been recently reopened—without the required authorisation—after reconstruction and renovation. While the public reeled in grief and rage, the response from the Government, led by President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), was characteristically inadequate, which many regard as an attempt to cover up its own culpability due to widespread, systemic corruption.
But to narrate all this is nearly impossible, since there are so many actors and so many confusing, conflicting reports from officials, including whether or not the canopy had been part of the reconstruction. In the weeks following the collapse, there were no immediate arrests; television was filled with expert panels speculating on how it happened and why, and which companies were involved—but to date (early April), there has been no official explanation for how it fell. It bears mentioning that state-run and pro-regime media dominate the national broadband; only one cable provider includes the two independent news channels.
Immediately after the collapse, peaceful protests were held in Novi Sad and elsewhere in the country. Most strikingly, every Friday at 11:52 am, people would walk out of their universities, schools, or places of employment, and observe fourteen (later, fifteen, and now sixteen) minutes of silence, one for each of the victims.
At the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, where I teach as a foreign lecturer, we stood on a campus green; at other places, people blocked the roads. To stand with a group of people in silence for a quarter of an hour is quite an experience: a mass gesture of solidarity, both collective ritual and individual meditation. It is heavy with grief—even months later, you can read it on faces, in bodies. There are hundreds of protests a day across the country at this point, and they always include the sixteen minutes.
The fact that even these shows of empathy and solidarity were not respected reveals the level to which Vučić’s regime will stoop. At first, disruptions came in the form of allegedly disgruntled citizens trying to get through a blocked road, or jeering, or hitting protesters. A man drove his car into a small gathering of Belgrade Philharmonic musicians, breaking one person’s arm and injuring a few others.
Student protesters in Novi Sad, 1 February 2025. The banner reads “We’ve read Orwell, we know what’s happening”. Photo: Nicole Burgund
“Children are the ornament of the world,” goes one famous Serbian poem by Ljubivoje Ršumović. Today, in Serbia, they are on everyone’s mind.
A generation written off by many as disconnected social-media addicts has proven to be quite the opposite, galvanizing society with their singular brand of civil disobedience, at once rebellious and virtuous, digitally savvy and frankly analogue. They’ve been compared to the liberators of 1945; they’ve been called the avant-garde of Europe; they’ve been nominated for a Nobel Prize and received shout-outs from the likes of Novak Djoković and Madonna.
At the same time, President Aleksandar Vučić insists that he’ll defeat the “colour revolution,” while daily acts of manipulation, intimidation and violence against the students and their supporters continue. After five months of protests, how this all will play out is anyone’s guess. But the students show no sign of giving up.
How Did it Begin?
In coverage of events in Serbia, international news media make passing reference to it—it didn’t make headlines in the midst of wars, fires, and pre-election madness—but it is the beating, bleeding heart of the movement.
At 11:52 am on 1 November 2024, the concrete canopy of the train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, collapsed. Thousands of people pass through the station daily (I myself use it twice a week). On that clear, sunny, autumn noon, fourteen were killed, three others grievously injured; one of them succumbed a month later in hospital, and another died in March, five-and-a-half months after the collapse. All but two of the victims were under 25, and four were children.
The station had been recently reopened—without the required authorisation—after reconstruction and renovation. While the public reeled in grief and rage, the response from the Government, led by President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), was characteristically inadequate, which many regard as an attempt to cover up its own culpability due to widespread, systemic corruption.
But to narrate all this is nearly impossible, since there are so many actors and so many confusing, conflicting reports from officials, including whether or not the canopy had been part of the reconstruction. In the weeks following the collapse, there were no immediate arrests; television was filled with expert panels speculating on how it happened and why, and which companies were involved—but to date (early April), there has been no official explanation for how it fell. It bears mentioning that state-run and pro-regime media dominate the national broadband; only one cable provider includes the two independent news channels.
Immediately after the collapse, peaceful protests were held in Novi Sad and elsewhere in the country. Most strikingly, every Friday at 11:52 am, people would walk out of their universities, schools, or places of employment, and observe fourteen (later, fifteen, and now sixteen) minutes of silence, one for each of the victims.
At the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, where I teach as a foreign lecturer, we stood on a campus green; at other places, people blocked the roads. To stand with a group of people in silence for a quarter of an hour is quite an experience: a mass gesture of solidarity, both collective ritual and individual meditation. It is heavy with grief—even months later, you can read it on faces, in bodies. There are hundreds of protests a day across the country at this point, and they always include the sixteen minutes.
The fact that even these shows of empathy and solidarity were not respected reveals the level to which Vučić’s regime will stoop. At first, disruptions came in the form of allegedly disgruntled citizens trying to get through a blocked road, or jeering, or hitting protesters. A man drove his car into a small gathering of Belgrade Philharmonic musicians, breaking one person’s arm and injuring a few others.
Students protest in front of the Constitutional Court, Belgrade, 12 January 2025. Photo: Nicole Burgund
“Everyone to the Blockades!”
Later, on 22 November, a group of four people attacked students from the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts as they were observing the fifteen minutes of silence, and that was the last straw. The drama students blockaded their school three days later; other faculties followed almost immediately, in Belgrade and in Novi Sad, and then in short succession throughout the country. Within a matter of a few weeks, all the faculties of the state universities were under blockade and have remained so.
The students occupy the buildings, monitoring who may enter. They regularly hold plenums to vote on crucial matters: indeed, the university system is currently in their hands, which is no small responsibility. There are no classes (fall semester came to a grinding halt with a few weeks left to go), no exams, and no sense of when things might to return to normality. The President of the National Assembly, Ana Brnabić, threatened that if classes did not resume by 17 March, the entire academic year would be lost. But that, as one student commented, is the least of their worries.
The backbone of the movement is a set of four clear, concise demands, and until they’re fulfilled, the blockade will continue. The students have refused proposals for “dialogue” and negotiations from both the Serbian Government and (reportedly) the European Union.
The first demand is to make public the complete documentation connected to the reconstruction and renovation of the Novi Sad train station. The other demands relate to the arrest of all perpetrators of violence against protestors; the dismissal of charges against students and professors arrested during protests; and a 20% increase in the budget for higher education.
At present, the government insists it has fulfilled all the demands, but the students disagree. While a law was recently passed to address the fourth demand, the others have received only superficial responses. Publication of the documentation has been promised and purportedly done several times, though each time there have been crucial gaps, and months later, we are still waiting for key documents that would point to the responsible parties.
Some arrests have been made, but one of the men caught on camera beating up students was recently photographed standing behind the President at an official event. Arrested protestors were pardoned by the President, but a pardon implies guilt and does not exonerate them.
The Response of the State
At the highest official level, the students have, in turn, been dismissed and demonized. President Vučić insists that they are paid by foreign agents (an old narrative here). In December, he nevertheless tried to placate the apparent traitors by offering them low mortgage rates for their first home—something that is unlikely to resonate with nineteen-year-olds, but sounds good to the broader public. Nevertheless, public support for the blockade has gathered momentum, as seen in the huge response to the students’ calls for two nationwide general strikes, on 24 January and 7 March, as well as massive protests hosted by the largest cities.
Meanwhile, intimidation and aggression continue on multiple fronts: with every passing day the students and their families are targets of threats and physical attacks, which seem to be increasing in frequency and violence.
On 2 January, the online issue of the Novosti newspaper published copies of the passports of two students involved in the blockade—they happen to be Croatian passports, which feeds into the foreign-agents story. The tabloid news channel Informer regularly slanders individual students.
The Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) has been contacting students involved in the blockade, as well as their parents, inviting them to “informal” or “friendly conversations.” In one case, a mother of one law student reported two agents showing up at the school where she works, “on orders from Belgrade”; in another instance, a father was coerced into early retirement from the police force due to his son’s involvement in the blockade.
In the early hours of 14 January, seven law students were attacked in three incidents, in which unknown individuals “for Vučić” threw plastic and glass bottles at them and pushed one down the steps of the building entrance. On 16 January, a car mounted the sidewalk during the daily fifteen-minute commemoration and hit a young woman from behind, carrying her on the roof for several yards before she fell off, sustaining traumatic head injuries.
Since then, there have been several reports of vehicles driving toward or into protestors, in some cases hitting them. And in the early hours of 28 January, students were attacked with baseball bats after putting stickers on a trash bin outside the SNS headquarters in Novi Sad; one young woman’s jaw was broken in three places. Later that day, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned, allegedly as a concession to the protestors, but really because the four perpetrators came from his offices. And that was only January; February and March saw much of the same.
Peaceful, Organised and Apolitical
And yet, through it all, the students have behaved with exemplary integrity. The blockades themselves, though lambasted by the Government as illegal and violent, are a form of civil disobedience—a practice that has a long tradition as a final resort when up against a power that plays by no rules whatsoever.
Indeed, the blockade is explicitly non-violent, with students always attempting to de-escalate the daily provocations, much to the bafflement of their detractors, whose inflammatory tactics are best represented by one of their chosen symbols, a red hand with the middle finger raised. During demonstrations, student monitors wearing neon vests manage the movement of participants to ensure safety and respect for all. And they even clean up after themselves, with organised crews taking charge at the end of every protest.
The functioning of the blockade is a model of self-organisation and cooperation. It follows the guidelines laid out in the Blokadna kuharica(Blockade Cookbook), a 71-page handbook that describes a similar blockade in Zagreb, Croatia in 2009, when students took control of the Faculty of Philosophy for 35 days, demanding free tuition for higher education.
The organisation is based on a direct democratic process in which students at each faculty hold multiple plenums each week to discuss issues connected to the blockade. These can go on for hours—especially, as one of my students joked, when the philosophy students weigh in. Majority rules on the votes. As per the Kuharica, the movement must be collective: it has no leaders, no official spokespeople. Students who appear in the media have been nominated by the plenum and do so in rotation.
Within the collective, working groups focus on specific areas, such as PR, document analysis, security, and protest planning. At our faculty, the creative team organizes a weekly program with lectures, workshops, theatre performances, film screenings, a support group, and table tennis. And while decisions take place at the faculty level, there is a broad, consistent consensus across the 85 faculties and vocational schools currently under blockade in Serbia, achieved through umbrella working groups comprised of delegates from each. Announcements are posted on official blockade Instagram accounts, impeccably worded and cleverly designed.
Crucially, the students have insisted that the blockade remain unaligned with any political party or agenda, be it pro-government or opposition, pro-EU or pro-Russia. This is a fine line to walk, since the sentiments expressed at rallies are certainly critical of Vučić, and also because various anti-regime groups (including some unsavory extremists) have piggybacked on the protests.
More controversially, the students recently had to swiftly condemn an alleged plot by a handful of their own ranks to call for an interim government, as well as infiltrate Radio Television Serbia and the Parliament. In their announcement, they reiterated the apoliticality of their cause, which remains focused on its four demands, as well as its call for functional and impartial institutions.
At daily protests across the country, emotions range from exhilarated to somber. Banners and floats express scathing wit and tremendous empathy; veterans march solemnly in uniform; bikers thunder through; agricultural workers park their tractors at key points like giant green bodyguards. And when the deafening whistles and horns suddenly give way to silence, it is simply breathtaking.
Yet perhaps the most dramatic elements are the walks: students from across the country have trekked for days along rural routes to converge in the cities of Novi Sad, Kragujevac, Niš and Belgrade, respectively. The distances of these pilgrimages have increased, with some crossing over a hundred miles in wind, rain, and snow. Along the way, they pass through towns and villages, where the sentiment traditionally leans pro-government, and are greeted with hugs, cheers, food, and tears.
Any speculation about a mastermind behind the movement is moot and undermines its authenticity. It’s no secret that the students are advised by professors and other experts concerning highly technical matters, especially concerning the law and engineering. They need to be able to articulate with great precision, for instance, the legal violations committed by the state on a daily basis, or the reasons why their demands still have not been fulfilled.
Nevertheless, the movement is student-run to the very core. At every turn you see them doing the thing that cannot be faked.
Latest Developments
One of the slogans of the protest is “Everything must stop,” and by mid-March, it felt like things were both grinding to a halt and speeding up. Classes at many high schools and even elementary schools were fully or partially cancelled due to student blockades and teacher strikes. Daily protests were held in hundreds of towns and cities across the country, as well as throughout the region and beyond.
The Bar Association of Serbia called a thirty-day strike due to the erosion of the legislature’s integrity. On 6 March, the Parliament held its first session since Prime Minister Vučević announced his resignation—but the ratification of his resignation was listed as item 61 on the agenda.
The opposition obstructed this absurdity with horns, noisemakers, and smoke bombs; one member of SNS threw a water bottle, inadvertently, at a colleague, and gave her a concussion. The second nationwide general strike took place the next day, and on 8 March, protests across the country marked International Women’s Day with a particularly charged air.
Two days later, students blocked the entrances to Radio Television Serbia, as well as its regional affiliates, after one of its journalists referred to the students as a “mob” while interviewing President Vučić
.
Tractors brought in by the Government to protect an alleged counter-protest, Belgrade, 15 March 2025. Photo: Nicole Burgund
Meanwhile, the regime ramped up its strategies of disruption and intimidation in anticipation of 15 March, when hundreds of thousands were expected to descend on Belgrade for one of Serbia’s largest protests ever.
A camp of young people in the park behind the presidential headquarters was set up as a purported counterprotest to the larger student movement, under the slogan “We want to learn.” It was remarkably well-appointed, with new tents, heat lamps, catering tables, and a long line of portable toilets.
One journalist attempting to interview the “Students 2.0” was broadly harassed and subsequently detained by the police on the grounds that he posed a threat to public order. A founder of the Archive of Public Meetings was detained for several hours; when his friends tried to contact him, the phone service stated he was unavailable, yet a locating service for his iPhone indicated that his phone was in use (many “conversations” with the Ministry of the Interior are merely a pretext for installing spyware).
President Vučić announced that he expected major violence on behalf of the protesters on 15 March and promised to arrest all the troublemakers. Transportation from key cities to Belgrade was abruptly cancelled that day: Serbia Railways announced it would not run, and private bus companies cancelled their routes. Likewise, public transit in Belgrade was shut down “due to security concerns.” The people came anyway: students quickly set up a Google Form to organize ridesharing from around the country. Analysis of the number of attendees is still in progress, but preliminary estimates are around 500,000. The unrest Vučić kept predicting didn’t come to pass, despite his best efforts.
Something awful did happen, though. The state’s apparent use of a long-range acoustic device during the most powerful moment of the protest, as hundreds of thousands paid silent tribute to lives lost in the rail station collapse, was only the latest, and the loudest, display of the nature of the Vučić regime, which can only rule through manipulation and violence (though it denies any such weapon was used).
A day later, I was in a taxi at 4 am, heading to the airport. When conversation inevitably turned to the protests (because this is all people are talking about), my driver said he’d been there, and described what the moment felt like: something massive, a train, or a plane, racing toward you. And because internet service was down, you couldn’t find out what was happening.
I asked how his ears were. Fine, he said, it was more of a feeling. Like a huge blow. Then a stampede: in hundreds of videos, footage shows the crowd scrambling to either side as if an invisible rocket really were barreling down the middle of the street. Dozens reportedly went to the hospital with injuries (headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, panic attacks, disrupted pacemakers), and doctors were forced to mark their reports with “P” for protest and forward them to the Security Intelligence Agency.
The Minister of Public Health denies that Belgrade hospitals treated people with such symptoms, and Belgrade’s Public Prosecutor has ordered an investigation into individuals who “spread false information and raised public panic.”
My taxi driver, an affable man in his fifties, repeated something I’ve heard from many of his generation: he’s been on the streets protesting for thirty years, and nothing has changed.
As our conversation progressed, more details emerged, filling in a portrait that in many ways typifies the Serbian experience over those three decades: when the civil war in Yugoslavia broke out in the early nineties, he tried to emigrate to Germany. Because he failed to get his paperwork in order, the authorities there deported him back to Serbia, where he was arrested for draft-dodging and sent to fight in Bosnia; on the first day, he said, fifteen members of his unit were killed. “Kids,” he added. “We didn’t have a clue what we were doing.”
This time around, it looks like they finally hold the cards.
Nicole Burgund is a foreign lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Meanwhile, the regime ramped up its strategies of disruption and intimidation in anticipation of 15 March, when hundreds of thousands were expected to descend on Belgrade for one of Serbia’s largest protests ever.
A camp of young people in the park behind the presidential headquarters was set up as a purported counterprotest to the larger student movement, under the slogan “We want to learn.” It was remarkably well-appointed, with new tents, heat lamps, catering tables, and a long line of portable toilets.
One journalist attempting to interview the “Students 2.0” was broadly harassed and subsequently detained by the police on the grounds that he posed a threat to public order. A founder of the Archive of Public Meetings was detained for several hours; when his friends tried to contact him, the phone service stated he was unavailable, yet a locating service for his iPhone indicated that his phone was in use (many “conversations” with the Ministry of the Interior are merely a pretext for installing spyware).
President Vučić announced that he expected major violence on behalf of the protesters on 15 March and promised to arrest all the troublemakers. Transportation from key cities to Belgrade was abruptly cancelled that day: Serbia Railways announced it would not run, and private bus companies cancelled their routes. Likewise, public transit in Belgrade was shut down “due to security concerns.” The people came anyway: students quickly set up a Google Form to organize ridesharing from around the country. Analysis of the number of attendees is still in progress, but preliminary estimates are around 500,000. The unrest Vučić kept predicting didn’t come to pass, despite his best efforts.
Something awful did happen, though. The state’s apparent use of a long-range acoustic device during the most powerful moment of the protest, as hundreds of thousands paid silent tribute to lives lost in the rail station collapse, was only the latest, and the loudest, display of the nature of the Vučić regime, which can only rule through manipulation and violence (though it denies any such weapon was used).
A day later, I was in a taxi at 4 am, heading to the airport. When conversation inevitably turned to the protests (because this is all people are talking about), my driver said he’d been there, and described what the moment felt like: something massive, a train, or a plane, racing toward you. And because internet service was down, you couldn’t find out what was happening.
I asked how his ears were. Fine, he said, it was more of a feeling. Like a huge blow. Then a stampede: in hundreds of videos, footage shows the crowd scrambling to either side as if an invisible rocket really were barreling down the middle of the street. Dozens reportedly went to the hospital with injuries (headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, panic attacks, disrupted pacemakers), and doctors were forced to mark their reports with “P” for protest and forward them to the Security Intelligence Agency.
The Minister of Public Health denies that Belgrade hospitals treated people with such symptoms, and Belgrade’s Public Prosecutor has ordered an investigation into individuals who “spread false information and raised public panic.”
My taxi driver, an affable man in his fifties, repeated something I’ve heard from many of his generation: he’s been on the streets protesting for thirty years, and nothing has changed.
As our conversation progressed, more details emerged, filling in a portrait that in many ways typifies the Serbian experience over those three decades: when the civil war in Yugoslavia broke out in the early nineties, he tried to emigrate to Germany. Because he failed to get his paperwork in order, the authorities there deported him back to Serbia, where he was arrested for draft-dodging and sent to fight in Bosnia; on the first day, he said, fifteen members of his unit were killed. “Kids,” he added. “We didn’t have a clue what we were doing.”
This time around, it looks like they finally hold the cards.
Nicole Burgund is a foreign lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia
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