Community pain

Diana Hrka, the mother of Stefan Hrka, a twenty-seven-year-old boy who died under the canopy in Novi Sad, announced a hunger strike at the commemorative meeting on November 1. My decision, said this brave woman, has nothing to do with students, it has nothing to do with citizens either, it's my decision. I need to know, she added, who killed my child. While she is on hunger strike, she will be in front of the Belgrade City Assembly.

Diana Hrka's attitude - can it be said differently? - causes admiration. She had every right in the world to withdraw and grieve in silence and solitude, because she experienced the greatest pain a human being can experience: she lost a child. Pain is always personal pain. However, this woman decided to bear her pain publicly, to transform it into a common pain, to share it with the citizens of this country. Her pain became political. Dijana Hrka's pain from this moment on is the pain of every citizen of Serbia, who preserved in him the core of humanity in the inhuman regime of Aleksandar Vučić ("victim's tent" in Novi Sad, said Vučić's spokesman DJ Vučićević; he also meant Stefan Hrka, Dijana's son). Diana Hrka said that it was her personal act, but her personal act, from this moment on, binds every citizen of this country.

She chose the Assembly of Belgrade as the place where her body will be located until she takes food into herself. For months, it has been one of the scariest places in Serbia: not far from there, the regime of Aleksandar Vućić - and probably he himself (it's so stupid) - installed an unsanitary settlement for the gathering of thugs and paramilitary units for rapid action against the citizens of Belgrade. That place is a symbol of what Diana Hrka does not agree to. And while that pain woman seeks justice for her son's dream - and sixteen other people, she did not forget to mention them in her speech, who died at the place where her son also died - she will be not far from the clown of the regime, a certain Uglješe Mrdić, a member of parliament, who claims that, together with two red berets (why on earth, they?), he is on hunger strike because he is dissatisfied with the work of the prosecutor's office. Ever since Tomislav Nikolić sat on Styrofoam in the same place and went on a hunger and thirst strike (for unspecified reasons), through the three-minute hunger strike of Aleksandar Martinović (it's hard to remember why), here is another hero of the regime who, for higher reasons, sacrifices himself for his beloved Leader and Serbia and the people and the homeland (he says, love for Serbia is his greatest motive) and everything else that comes to his mind, which is nothing but an obsession with simplicity. And now Diana Hrka, mother of courage, will sit next to the clown.

Diana Hrka did not utter a single unnecessary word. She said that she loves her children the most in the world. And that what they are going to do is for them. But by working for them, she works for all the citizens of this country. That is why her most deeply personal act is, at the same time, the most deeply political.