"Suddenly there was a sound some noise. I felt as if something had rolled above us. The silence was suddenly broken. People around me panicked. Many screamed loudly and ran away from the street. I felt dizzy for the rest of the evening."
For the German tabloid Bild, an eyewitness described the moment when, during the demonstrations in Belgrade, interrupted 15 minutes of silence for the 15 victims of the collapse of the canopy at the train station in Novi Sad last November. According to the newspaper, everything is fine with that eyewitness in the meantime, reports Deutsche says.
Something similar was described by Velta journalist Tatjana Om, who was on the spot. On her platform X account, she posted: "After 12 minutes, all of a sudden, I couldn't figure out what it was. I was pressed against the front door (hotel, ed. ed.) with others".
The situation was confusing, she said. "I felt extremely dizzy for about half an hour, with some strange inner restlessness," Om described. At first, she says, she blamed the crowd for those symptoms, but it could also be due to the use of who knows what else. Because: "More and more people are reporting similar symptoms," says the journalist In vain.
BILD reports that "military analyst Aleksandar Radić told channel N1 that the noise was apparently caused by acoustic weapons. 'The authorities have had a sound cannon for years,' said the expert."
The German newspaper added that "Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said on Sunday that the claims about sound cannons were 'lies'. Instead, it was allegedly an anti-drone rifle. Vučić demanded: 'Someone must be held accountable for spreading such brutal disinformation.'"
"Reports on this continue to be vague and inconclusive," it says Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "however, there is increasing evidence that the Serbian police may indeed have used those weapons against their own peacefully demonstrating population over the weekend."
"It is considered certain that the Ministry of the Interior of Serbia will possess such a weapon, also known in English as a 'long-range acoustic device', or LRAD for short," the Frankfurt newspaper said, adding that the use of such weapons is prohibited in Serbia.
"Until now, it was not known that the Serbian police had ever used such a device, the extremely loud sounds of which not only cause pain in the ears, but can also cause permanent hearing damage. If the suspicion is confirmed in the coming days, it would be a new setback in the way the regime of President Aleksandar Vučić is dealing with the demonstrations in Serbia, which are now in their fifth month."
The biggest challenge for Aleksandar Vučić
"Students and their supporters generally behave in a very disciplined manner and constantly call for a renunciation of violence," says the Swiss Noje cirher caitung and explains that, "when the representatives of the political opposition revolted in the Serbian Parliament a few weeks ago, the students immediately dissociated themselves from them. The movement deliberately avoids any appropriation of internal or external politics," the newspaper writes.
"Mass protests are the biggest challenge for Aleksandar Vučić, who has been ruling the country for thirteen years," it said. "Like the previous protest movements, the president is responding to the public's dissatisfaction with a strategy of concessions and discrediting. Several ministers and Prime Minister Miloš Vučević have already had to resign because of the protests, while Vučić has repeatedly spoken of an attempted colored revolution in Serbia, accusing the students of being controlled by foreign forces," the Swiss newspaper writes. And adds:
"Vučić recently received support from Donald Trump Jr., the son of the American president. In the publicly broadcast conversation between Trump and Vučić, there was talk, among other things, of the possible support of the protest movement with funds from the American development agency USAID. Similar to Romania, where Washington intervened to a significant extent in the controversy surrounding the cancellation of the presidential elections, Serbia is also becoming a projection surface for debates and struggles for power that have only a superficial connection with that country," the Swiss newspaper concludes.
Just as they don't trust Vučić, they don't trust Brussels either
Cate from Belgrade reports as follows: "Whoever has looked into the faces of those people, some of whom are very young, who has seen how bravely and persistently they are fighting for their future - and who must have realized that the European Union has no role for them, but that the mere mention of the EU at best causes a shrug of the shoulders, can judge how deeply the EU has fallen. This is not surprising," writes the author of the article Ulrich Ladurner.
"The European Union has been wooing Aleksandar Vučić for years. Serbia is, of course, a candidate for joining the EU. Even worse, Angela Merkel and other politicians were full of praise for him. He should have brought Serbia into the EU, but he did the opposite from the EU, and one can't help but get the impression that this suits various officials in Brussels to a great extent. They are not serious enough about the expansion of the EU to make an effort to engage in dialogue with the Serbian people and to support them when their authoritarian ruler is oppressing them." Cate.
And he concludes: "If Ukrainians are wondering what it's like to be a candidate for EU membership, the answer would be devastating. Serbia has one of the largest deposits of lithium in the country. In July 2024, the Serbian government signed an agreement on the extraction of raw materials, and of course, it was full of praise for the president And what arguments could anyone use to contradict them? If the Serbian people get rid of their ruler, it's tragic, because the times we live in are times of polarization and violence.
Lack of international pressure
So what now, the author asks? Krsto Lazarevic in the comment for Berlin Tageskeitung. "Serbia is not a democracy in which new elections could be called. Vučić rules by bypassing the media and the judiciary. According to international election observers, there were major irregularities. Free and fair elections would require a transitional government."
At the same time, the German commentator states, "there is a lack of international pressure. European politicians courted Vučić: Olaf Scholz provided lithium for the German automobile industry, Ursula von der Leyen praised Serbia's path to the EU, and Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party remains part of the CDU and CSU political family. It is not surprising that you don't see EU flags at the protests."
"Germany rightfully has a bad reputation"
Under the title "Vučić is losing his country", a journalist Florian Hassel za Süddeutsche Zeitung assesses: "It is a great misfortune of the Serbs that the world is hardly paying attention to Belgrade at the moment." And adds:
"Contrary to what Vucic would have us believe, the Serbian protests are not aimed at revolution, but at true democracy. However, in order to achieve this, the president and his loyalists would have to give up their often undemocratic control over the state apparatus - the police and secret service, public prosecutors and courts, as well as the media."
"In Serbia, it is often criticized that there is no strong opposition, because, like in Russia, it is not given a chance to develop. And among many Serbs, propaganda and fairy tales allegedly planned from abroad are doing their job," says the German journalist.
"Vučić can rule as he sees fit and because he is supported by the EU and Germany - first through Angela Merkel, and then through Olaf Scholz. The Serbs can only hope that the future German federal government will give up that wrong policy, which has rightly brought Germany into disrepute in the eyes of many Serbs."
