On Saturday, the political crisis in Serbia reached its climax yet. Both the students, who lead mass protests against the Serbian political system, and Serbia’s ruling party SNS staged mass protests. They clearly showed one thing: There is not one Serbia, but two.
If there is anything that symbolizes the state of Serbia, it is the title photo of this entry, taken by an unknown photographer on the highway to Kragujevac in Šumadija in Central Serbia.
Two girls in the car in front of him show their middle fingers to the bus going in the opposite direction. The bus is headed for Sremska Mitrovica in the northern province of Vojvodina.
The young women are headed for the mass rally students had organized in Kragujevac on Saturday.
The bus is carting its passengers to the Kontramiting of Serbia’s ruling party in Sremska Mitrovica. Kontramiting is the local term for a government sponsored rally against protests critical of the government.
This is two Serbias in one photo.
For anyone familiar with current affairs in the country, there is more depth even than this.
David vs. Goliath
It is David vs. Goliath.
David, the students and large parts of the population, who fight for democracy, the rule of law, for government agencies that just do their job without political meddling, for ever present corruption to be rooted out.
They fight on their own, with no help from the outside, except the sympathy and best wishes of ordinary people from around the world.
No government, no parliament, no international organisation has yet spoken out on their behalf.
Goliath, that is Serbia’s ruling party SNS and the country’s President Aleksandar Vučić. Vučić has turned the political system into a one man rule. With a weak opposition, Serbia de facto has a one party system, with large parts of the media landscape under the party’s thumb.
More than two months of mass protests, following the collapse of the canopy of the train station of Novi Sad that killed 15 people, have severly weakened Vučić’s hold on power.
For its Kontramiting, SNS used the state’s ressources – and more – to mobilize as many people as it could to signal that they had regained control of Serbia’s streets.
This all is the story this one photo tells.
Had it been taken by a press photographer, it would have good chances of winning numerous press awards.
But it is better it was taken on the fly with a mobile phone than had it not been taken at all.
Other Images Will Prevail
Yet, it probably will not be this photo this year’s Serbian Day of Statehood, Sretenje, will be remembered by.
It will be remembered by the images showing the masses attending the two rallies.
And here, for the first time since the protests started, SNS and Aleksandar Vučić likely have the upper hand.
They herded in tens of thousands of people on the main square in Sremska Mitrovica. The square looks densely packed, as these images by state owned public broadcaster RTS show.
(Balkan Stories can not show the photos here for copyright reasons.)
There are numerous reports that SNS had pressured public employees to attend the rally. It is an open secret that in most parts of Serbia’s large public sector, a membership with the ruling party is advantageous in getting hired or promoted – and that a certain degree of loyalty is expected.
Atop of that, dozens and dozens of busses brought in a large number of people from neighboring Republika Srpska (RS). RS is a largely autonomous state within Bosnia and Hercegovina, its inhabitants are mostly ethnic Serbs. RS is ruled by Serb nationalists, who have close ties to Aleksandar Vučić.
The President of RS, Milorad Dodik, clearly tried to help his ally out of a jam.
This wasn’t even kept secret at the Kontramiting.
One photo shows people holding a banner behind Serbia’s President, reading: „Doboj uz Vučića“, „Doboj for Vučić“. Doboj is a major town in Republika Srpska.
This Time, The Students Could Not Deliver
The students can not deliver any photos comparable to the Kontramiting.
They had chosen Kragujevac as the stage for their protests on Sretenje.
This was a heavily symbolic move. Kragujevac was the first capital of modern Serbia. It was here that the first constitution of the Serbian Principality was passed in February 1835. This marked the quasi independence from the Ottoman Empire, which nominally remained suzerain for a few more decades.
Sretenje, February 15th, celebrates the passing of this constitution – and, in a way, the forging of the Serbian nation.
By occupying this city on this day, the students signalled: We are the Serbian nation.
This was underscored by a masterful choreography the days before the rally: Groups of students from all over the country marched to the city by foot. In each town they passed through, they were celebrated like heroes and liberators.
Relay runs reminded Serbians of how Serbia’s first constitution was delivered to all towns in the country after it was passed in 1835. (That it was revoked two weeks later, and that almost all copies were destroyed, is an ironic detail.)
Bicyclists drove through the country by the hundreds, Motorbikers joined in. This made for tons of emotional and evocative photos showing an entire country on the march to a better future.
As masterful as the preparations may have been, they had overlooked one detail: Kragujevac’s city layout.
The city doesn’t have a central square large enough to hold a large crowd and make it look big. The city’s streets are short and narrow in comparison to the capital Beograd or Novi Sad, the country’s second biggest city – both of which are infinitely better suited for mass protests for exactly these optical reasons.
Atop of that, the entire rally did without major speeches or events, and was scheduled to take place over 15 hours – which deprived it of a central temporal place atop of not having a central gathering point.
Masses of people wandered around for hours, dispersed all over the city center.
There are numerous images showing exactly that.
Yet, on the one place at the river banks of Lepenica, near the market and the victory column, that came close to being the center of the rally, there were never more than perhaps 20.000 people at any given point and time.
This was the only place from which any drone footage was taken.
This reduced the massive crowd to a handful of videos and photos that showed only a fraction of the actual attendants.
What It Looks Like Counts
When Aleksandar Vučić announced beforehand, that there would be 120.000 people at his Kontramiting, while there were only 16.000 in Kragujevac, he was only half wrong. He knew then that it would look that way.
In political propaganda – a tool both sides used and use – this is all that counts.
Perhaps this explains his self confidence with which he proclaimed – again – that he was writing a book about how he had defeated the „color revolution“.
The so called color revolutions toppled the governments of the Ukraine and of Georgia in the mid 2000’s. They were, in part, assisted by activists from the Serbian group Otpor that had helped organize the mass protests that ousted Serbia’s ruler Slobodan Milošević in October 2000.
After that, Otpor activists received financial assistance from the United States.
Calling them a color revolution paints Serbia’s current mass protests as instigated by outside powers, calls their activists agents of foreign and hostile governments, makes their supporters out to be puppets.
He knew all their tricks, Vučić said, and his book was to be a manual how to defeat such revolutions: „In China it will sell tens of millions of copies, it will sell tens of millions of copies worldwide“, he proclaimed on stage.
Modesty, it should be said, isn’t a characteristic commonly ascribed to Aleksandar Vučić.
The President also said that a new government would take office in mid March. At least half of all cabinet members would be new faces.
The mass protests forced the current government to resign a few weeks ago. The resignation has not yet taken effect as Serbia’s National Assembly could not yet confirm it.
In addition, the directors of many government agencies would be replaced. Serbia needed change, Vučić said.
According to the site Arhiv javnih skupova (roughly: Archive of public gatherings), between 21.000 and 23.000 people attended the Kontramiting in Sremska Mitrovica. Their estimate is based on photos from the rally, and on the area the people occupied.
Maybe This David Is More Powerful Than It Looks
In all the contest between the students and SNS who could more credibly claim to represent the Serbian nation on its national holiday, another part of the second Serbia was largely overlooked.
The mass protest in Kragujevac was by far not the only one in Serbia this Saturday.
Just a few kilometers from the Kontramiting, many took the streets in Šid, a suburb of Sremska Mitrovica. According to activists, it was the biggest protest to date.
It looks like a huge crowd for Šid, which has 16.000 inhabitants. It is likely that people from Sremska Mitrovica swelled their numbers as their home town was already occupied by SNS‘ kontramiting.
A large number of people were also protesting in Valjevo, in Western Serbia, not far from Kraguvjevac.
Overall, tens of thousands participated in protest marches all over the country – just like every day in Serbia for the past two months or so.
The perhaps most impressive rally – at least in relative terms – took place in Aleksandrovac, a small town of not even 6.000 people in the South of the country. Footage from Saturday night shows at least 1.000 people, probably significantly more, marching through the town’s main street, banners, posters, whistles and all.
As usual, not even critical Serbian media devoted a lot of attention to these small places. They are considered peripheral, marginal even. Yet, it is many places like these where the discontent with SNS‘ 13 years in power manifests itself every day.
It is these protests that, too, show a picture of another Serbia.
And maybe a picture of a David who is not was weak as he looked in Kragujevac on Sretenje.
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