Everything that this society is going through from November 1 to today will pass. No matter how things look to us, no matter how our feelings change from day to day, the fall of Aleksandar Vučić's regime is inevitable. What that fall will look like, no one can predict now. We have been served too much and a great evil has come before the rebellious citizens.
We have strong arguments for the claim that the decline is imminent: the youth of a country that has almost no youth has risen, and that is the youth that everyone has written off, claiming that it is apolitical and disinterested; this country has never had longer continuous protests; there is no city, place, village where progressives are welcome...
However, one argument is the strongest, and perhaps remains unnoticed in the shadow of political events. This regime is falling because normal people have stood up.
Let me define exactly what I mean. First, I deeply dislike the term "ordinary people", but maybe that's just my personal problem. I use the term "normal people" here because I don't have a better one, for all those who have a clear political stance, but are not organized activists or politically engaged. I mean people who want to live a normal, orderly life and unmistakably feel the difference between justice and injustice, they go to the polls. I mean, actually, most people in this society.
Surreal reality
I mean one Alexandra, with whom I spoke for "Vreme" last Saturday. In a way, this text is not a classic journalistic comment, but a personal impression of a journalist about a brave woman. I mean on 920 people who were detained from the fall of the canopy to today. I am thinking of my neighbor, the mother of a child with autism, who on June 30, at the blockade of a Belgrade intersection, was dragged on the ground by four policemen while they were taking her into custody, as if it was really necessary for the four of them to drag her, as small as she is and, above all, calmly.
I'm thinking of all those people for whom a conflict with the police force, an alleged conflict with the law, was unimaginable, and then it happened to them. All of them now live in a state of cognitive dissonance, in the conflict of two beliefs: that they are exemplary citizens who have never had a conflict with the law and that they are the target of the prosecuting authorities, by all accounts, falsely accused of crimes that they had no idea about.
At the end of June and beginning of July, when the police issued mass IDs and detained people for a short time, most of them saw it as a medal. That is both correct and understandable. However, in August things get complicated and police brutality becomes much more serious and dangerous. People are going through serious fear for life and safety, they are going through terrible humiliations and a blow to their dignity. Normal people go through it, those who never in their life thought that something like that could happen to them.
Staying normal
After we published her story, Aleksandra contacted me. Of course, I have no intention of transmitting a private message publicly. However, I have a need, and that's why I repeat that this is not a classic journalistic text, to convey an insight, an impression, something I don't know the name of. People like Aleksandra and thousands of others who are going through traumatic experiences with the police and the judiciary these months are people we must save and protect at all costs.
Why? Because at these protests, on the streets, there are mostly people like them, those whom we have called "normal people" for the purposes of this text. And not only on the streets, just imagine how many are scared of the streets these months, but they are waiting for those elections that will help to burst this bubble in which the regime keeps us and in which it increases the pressure, while we resist, as anyone can.
But this is a text about all those who in this struggle use the only thing they have: their own voice that they raised and have themselves, in the most banal, physical sense, so they go to protests, to show how many of them there are. And we repeat, people like them are the most, if they had not stood up, there would not have been half a million people on the streets, for example, on March 15.
That is why police and any other brutality, even other methods of intimidation, are aimed precisely at them. The regime knows that these people are the biggest threat to the survival of the corrupt system because they are the majority in this society. That is why, first of all, we have to take their word for it when they say that they are innocently accused. It is necessary in order to remain normal, sober and brave. Otherwise, they will be crushed one by one, and we, who have a platform to speak out, will be consumed by the guilt of our silence.
