This year started with the death of colleague Vladan Radosavljević. On January 4, he was torn apart by dogs on Kosmaj. They were not strays, but animals trained for aggression. At the time, no one could have known what this tragedy heralded in the society of hate speech, political hatred and legitimized violence. But as if it was foreboding...
In the first part of the year, one affair followed another. There was no epilogue, nor did they exist for the government and the media under its control. At the same time, the position of Serbs in Kosovo worsened. This problem for a large part of participants in political life - both in power and outside it - has become a kind of abstraction. There is not much room for living people, but there is room for cheap quasi-patriotism, demagoguery and judging whose ego is bigger.
In any case, the first and last word on Kosovo was and still is the president of Serbia. Whenever he dealt with it, it went wrong. The case in the village of Banjska, where three Serbs and one Albanian policeman were killed, burned to the ground the entire policy that Aleksandar Vučić led towards Kosovo. But the regime does not look back on this. Why would it? In the case of Krajina when they were radicals, the guild was paid by the Serbian population there, as now - when they are called progressives - it is paid by the Serbs from Kosovo.
We still have to believe that these people, who have been humiliated and insulted for years, will still avoid the fate of their compatriots from 1995 in Croatia. And what the last decade of the XNUMXth century really looked like in these areas, about which the regime directly lies today, the photographer Dragoljub Zamurović, a first-hand witness, tells on the pages of "Vremena".
Unfortunately, the last year will never be forgotten. It was marked by two unimaginable tragedies. First, an unimaginable nightmare happened in the "Vladislav Ribnikar" Elementary School - a child was killed by nine other children, his classmates and a guard. Soon, a mass crime took place in the villages of Dubona and Malo Orašje: nine young people were killed there, including two minors. If the tragedy in "Ribnikar" could not have been prevented, the one in Dubona and Mali Orašje was - because of the perpetrator's threats and rampage with illegal weapons, the locals persistently called the police for years. When she finally came, it was too late.
Both tragedies were an alarm for society to stop, look itself in the eyes and ask where it is, what it is like and how it got there. The government's reaction was, to put it mildly, inadequate and shameful. The phrase "the system did not fail" came from her ranks. Shocked by all this, citizens took to the streets in Belgrade and several other cities. At the end of May, tens and tens of thousands of people blocked the highway that crosses the capital of Serbia. The protest was called "Serbia against violence" and although it lasted all summer, the regime did not fulfill any of the protesters' demands. Among other things, they demanded the dismissal of Interior Minister Bratislava Gašić and BIA director Aleksandar Vulin, and an end to hate speech on television.
But what kind of country and society is it in which parents of murdered children have to organize a protest to fight for a memorial center? Ninela Radičević and Ivan Božović, the parents of murdered Ana, talk about this for "Vreme".
Even during the citizens' protests, Aleksandar Vučić offered the opposition elections. They were accepted only when the number of demonstrators poured into the streets. The opposition believed that they knew what election conditions awaited them and claimed that they could prevent election theft. She was furiously mistaken. The elections held on December 17 were a festival of irregularities from start to finish. Serbia may have seen greater vote theft, but not greater electoral engineering with voters from the country and its surroundings.
This is why there are still more protests going on. The government does not care for them. However - as stated in the analysis of our New Year's issue - 35 kids are being held in custody, claiming that they destroyed the constitutional order by banging on the doors and windows of the City Assembly, but not Milan Radoičić, even though he himself admitted that he organized and led a paramilitary unit in the village of Banjska.
What awaits humiliated and offended citizens in the coming year? Obviously, everything except the predictability of public life, tolerance of diversity and dialogue. Aggression and violence continue, not a single problem from 2023 has been solved, and new ones are coming. However, you should choose 2024. At some point something has to change for the better, so why not in the year ahead.
