No matter what the outcome of the ongoing mass protests in Serbia will be, they already have left a permanent legacy. It’s not what you think.

A photo showing what this title photo shows would have been highly unlikely, if not unthinkable, in Serbia just a few months ago.

A Muslim boy in Novi Pazar, draped in the flag of his home region Sandžak, waves the flag of the Republic of Serbia.

Likewise, no one would have thought that the founder of a local opposition party in Novi Sad would ever attend a political event in Novi Pazar, and wear a T-shirt celebrating the majority Muslim town in the country’s South.

Sandžak and the rest of Serbia, those were two different worlds in the eyes of many just a few months ago.

Sandžaklije and Serbs, those were two different peoples to most.

Today, it seems, they are one. At least to a majority of those active in the mass protests that have dominated public life in Serbia ever since December.

It’s not just these two images.

The students leading the mass protests have made it a point to highlight how the Muslims among them also carry the protests.

There are hundreds of photos and video clips documenting this.

This is more than just the appeal to national unity against a regime the students and their supporters consider corrupt, which very much is part of the students‘ strategy.

This marks a tectonic shift in how wide parts of the Serbian population at large perceive the Serbian nation as such.

„Don’t You Have Any Sandžaklije to Beat Up?“

There is a lot to unpack in order to understand this.

Perhaps a good start is not the very beginning of how a sizeable minority of South Slav speaking Muslims came to live in a country the vast majority of whose inhabitants have been brought up to consider themselves Orthodox Christians.

Perhaps the better start is to look at how protesters against another regime seen as corrupt and authoritarian looked at this same minority just a generation earlier.

When students and workers were revolting against Slobodan Milošević in the 1990’s, they didn’t think of involving any Sandžaklije in their activities at all. And this is in spite of the fact that resistance to the nationalist rhetorics of the Milošević regime, the wars in Bosnia and later in Kosovo Milošević instigated and supported, and the genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, was strongest among the Muslims in the province in Southern Serbia and Eastern Montenegro bordering Kosovo.

When anti-Milošević activists were harassed or beaten by police in Beograd, they often told them: „Go to Novi Pazar. Don’t you have any Sandžaklije to beat up?“ or „Go to Kosovo and harrass some Albanians.“

This an activist from the 1990s recalls in a Facebook posting lifelong antifascist and antinationalist activist Aida Ćorović shared, remarking just how big the difference was between then and now.

Aida was herself born in Novi Pazar, and was one of the very few activists from the region that were allowed to play any role in the anti-Milošević protests. If anyone recognizes the difference, it’s her.

A lot of it can be attributed to her own activities, but that’s another matter.

Those remarks reveal that many dedicated antinationalists in the 1990s did not see Sandžaklije as their equals. Sandžaklije, they were „others“, just like Albanians. Objects for whose rights and perhaps dignity one was willing to fight for – or at least pretend to – but not necessarily subjects capable of contributing to change themselves.

And at the very worst, they were people who were expected to bear the brunt of the regime’s wrath for one’s own activities.

„Davud Is One of Us“

Two weeks ago a new generation of activists demonstrated how that is over.

The daily „Informer“, a tabloid with very close ties to Serbia’s ruling party SNS, had singled out Davud Delimeđac, a student of politology, and his mother as a target for particularly vile personal attacks.

Davud is an activist in the students‘ protests and had insisted in public statements that the murder of more than 8.000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in July 1995 had been genocide, committed by soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska (a Serb dominated state within Bosnia and Hercegovina). This is in line with the practically unanimous consensus among international historians, and with several verdicts by international courts, including the ICTY.

The Informer attacked this position as treason and as anti-Serbian, and did not shy away from publishing the health records of Davud’s mother.

Davud, too, is from Novi Pazar, and as one can tell by his name, he is a Muslim.

Beograd’s students decided that, after weeks of accusing student activists in general of being foreign agents, or the puppets of foreign agents, the attacks on Davud were enough, and that they had had it.

They blocked the Informer’s headquarter in a rally that lasted several hours. Around 10.000 people are said to have participated, and not just students but ordinary Belgradians sympathizing with the protests.

Davud was one of them, and that’s that.

Pazar je svijet

A banner mounted to the perimeter fence around Informer’s HQ underlined that point.

It read: Pazar je svijet.

Novi Pazar Is The World.

This picked up a slogan protesters in the capital Beograd have used since the 1990’s: Beograd je svet. Belgrade Is The World*.

The slogan was on display again last weekend on Novi Pazar’s old citadel, when thousands of protesters from all over Serbia joined their comrades in Sandžak’s capital.

It is the same slogan as on the T-shirt Miša Ronin Bačulov from Novi Sad is wearing in the photo above.

This shows two things: How ethnic Serbs in the wider protest movements in their majority do not only accept the contributions their Muslim compatriots make to movement, but how they in fact rely upon and cherish it.

And how Muslims from Sandžak have become a very self confident part of the protest movement, and are willing to contribute to what they see as necessary change for the greater good of the nation.

This is a first in Serbian history.

The Historical Background

The region now colloquially referred to as Sandžak had been conquered by Serbia and Montenegro from the Ottoman in the 1st Balkan War in 1912.

Neither of them really wanted its inhabitants, as they were Muslims in their vast majority, and particularly Serbia had been eager to purge all traces of the roughly 450 years of Ottoman rule in Serbia proper most of the century before, and particularly after formal independence in 1882.

Yet, Sandžak’s geographical location made it important, as it connected Serbia and Montenegro, and would block any attempts by the Austro Hungarian Empire to divide them.

For most of the 20th century, the region was more or less neglected. More in the times of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that emerged after WW I under heavy Serbian dominance, less during Socialist Yugoslavia.

Royal Yugoslavs couldn’t stop seeing Sandžaklije as being Muslims, and wouldn’t have minded them disappearing. There were some attempts to facilitate „population exchanges“ with the Republic of Turkey that had emerged from the debris of the Ottoman Empire and had carried out similar propgrams of reciprocal mass deportations with Greece and Bulgaria.

Socialist Yugoslavia did modernize the region, but never made it a focal point of their modernization programs. They felt a bit uneasy that many Sandžaklije resisted their progressive policies as much as they could, even though many others embraced them.

Not to forget the separatist tendencies in the region that persist to this day. Many Muslims in Sandžak see themselves as brethren of Bosnian Muslims, and never accepted having to live in another state – which mirrors the nationalist stances of minorities elsewhere in the region. This is in spite of the fact that Bosnian Muslims do not have very warm feelings towards Sandžaklije.

They seem them as „a breed apart“, as Robert Rigney puts it in a reportage published here a few years ago.

Nevertheless, in socialist times the region became a national center for textile industries, particularly for jeans manufacturing. This is still an important part of local and national economy in Serbia. (Also see this reportage.)

It’s fair to say that during this time, local Muslims were and felt far more integrated than today, even though they never were – or felt – to the same degree as Bosnian Muslims had.

This changed during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Sandžaklije saw Slobodan Milošević’s policies as a threat, and identified with the suffering of Bosnian Muslims at the hands of Serb nationalists in Bosnia the Milošević regime wholeheartedly supported and enabled, and later with Albanians in Kosovo.

As a reaction, many grew even more conservative and religious, and the old clan structures that had never fully disappeared were revived. Calls for secession or autonomy were to be heard, and ethnic tensions grew.

The general suspicion many Muslims in Sandžak have towards central authorities in Beograd did not diminish greatly in later years as the nationalist consensus in Serbian politics grew ever greater and ever more visible.

Also, many actors on the national political stage are remnants from the 1990’s, sliding in and out of office in mostly ever changing parties in ever new alliances.

Vučić Ain’t Sandžak’s Favorite

Serbia’s current President Aleksandar Vučić is a perfect example of that. During the war, he had been an activist, in the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) of Vojislav Šešelj, which advocates a Greater Serbia including parts of Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro to this day, and briefly even its general secretary.

On July 20, 1995 he gave a speech in Serbia’s parliament about the ongoing war in Bosnia.

„Pa, vi bombardujte, ubijte jednog Srbina, mi ćemo stotinu Muslimana, pa da vidimo sme li, međunarodna zajednica ili bilo ko drugi, da udari na srpske položaje, može li se tako ponašati sa srpskim narodom“

„You bomb, you kill one Serb, we will kill 100 Muslims. Let’s see then, if the international community can attack Serbian positions thereafter and treat the Serbian people like that.“

This did little to endear him with Muslims in Sandžak.

(Read here and here for parts of the transcript.)

At this time, soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska – not to be mistaken for Serbia – were murdering thousands of Bosnian Muslim boys and men in the area around the Eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

Vučić said in several interviews since that the quote was taken out of context, and that this was among several other things that at the time he thought were right but would not say again today.

Last year, he mobilized against a UN resolution that called the mass murder of Srebrenica a genocide on an international level.

It is fair to say that under his Presidency, the denial that killing 8.372 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica could even possibly be genocide has become a corner stone of Serbian politics.

(Read more about the context here.)

Muslim majority towns and villages in Sandžak have opposed him ever since he first ascended to power as Prime Minister more than a decade ago, and even more so since he became President.

Protests Even In Small Towns And Villages

When protests broke out over the collapse of the canopy of the train station in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people, Sandžaklije soon headed the call.

The catastrophe of Novi Sad is widely blamed on corruption and clientilism – a system Vučić’s party SNS is said to have perfected under his rule.

Like in many other parts of the country, local and national grievances soon were understood to be part of the same problem, and were addressed jointly. Be it plans for lithium mines in the West of the country, poverty and poor public services in much of the East, or decades of neglect and rejection of open nationalism as in Sandžak.

In Sandžak, Serbia’s poorest region, protests spread to small towns and villages quicker than they did in many other regions of the country – even though the students of the university of Novi Pazar were among the last to join the nationwide students‘ strike in all institutions of higher learning.

But they quickly became an indispensable part of the national students‘ effort – in terms of mobilization, in terms of organisation, and in terms of propaganda.

Muslim students in visibly religious attire or with Sandžak flags soon became an ubiquitous element in the photo and video messages Serbia’s students spread in the country and around the world.

They, too, were part of Serbia, that message read, in more than a thousand words each picture.

More so, in a movement that tries to portrait itself as the actual representation of the Serbian nation vis a vis its elected government and President, the message read: They, too, are part of the nation.

It was understood by everyone at least vaguely familiar with the situation in Serbia.

True, not even all of the protesters want to hear that message. Not even all of the students do, even though they have explicitely banned all nationalist gestures and symbols from the protests they lead.

The protests have grown so large the ban can not possibly enforced.

A Legacy That Will Remain

Even Vučić and his nationalist party SNS have a rightwing opposition, and they are present at each larger protest. While being on the fringes there, they liberally sport gestures, flags and other symbols that celebrate mass murder, aspirations for an ethnically „cleansed“ Greater Serbia, and other staple items of Serb nationalist dreams. Even some students were seen with nationalist symbols.

Serbia still has a long way to go before it universally embraces the Muslims from the South of the country as their own. But it’s getting there.

Sandžaklije and their symbols have outperformed the nationalists in terms of presence in the public sphere, in terms of public attention, and in term of sympathy gathered.

In the eyes of the vast majority of those who actively supporting the protests, they are a part of the Serbian nation, which, for the first time in Serbian history, seems to transcend ethnicity and religion, at least to them.

Serbian Muslims have for the first time actively participated on the political stage of their country, and tried to help make possible what they and many others think is a better future for the country.

Even if one disagrees with their goals, or their strategy, even if one regards the mass protests as illegitimate, or even unconstitutional, this is something that has to be aknowledged. It’s not very likely to go away.

In this sense, the mass protests have forged a new nation.

Even if they fail, this is a legacy that will remain.

Title photo: (c) Miruglj via Twitter/X

*The different spelling of the word svet/svijet (world) represents the two different idioms being used in Serbia. The first is the Serbian idiom, used in most parts of Serbia, the latter the Bosnian idiom Muslims in Sandžak speak or claim to speak.

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