site.btaSerbia Three Months after Deadly Collapse of Railway Station Canopy in Novi Sad

In an interview for BTA, Serbian Vesna Radic shared her thoughts and hopes in the context of a series of protests that were triggered in her country after a railway station canopy collapsed in the city of Novi Sad on November 1, 2024, killing 15 people. The canopy collapsed even though it had been renovated for three years including by Chinese state companies.

Radic said: "My hope is in the young people. They have spirit. Their campaigns cannot be compared to the protests held against Slobo [Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and of Yugoslavia], but they can be a magnificent, beautiful continuation of them! The students will achieve the change and democratization of the whole society that we, their grandmothers and mothers, failed to achieve 30 years ago."

Thousands of discontent people expressed their position online by sharing news articles and posting comments under videos dedicated to the tragic incident. Video footage of a students' march from Belgrade to Novi Sad, which was completed on February 1, exactly three months after the collapse, garnered hundreds of thousands of views online.

On Sunday night, Serbian actor, producer and activist Dragan Bjelogrlic said: "If we lose this battle, we will lose the entire 21st century, and as a nation we cannot afford to do that." He urged his compatriots to join the protests en masse.

Unlike other demonstrations so far, the tragedy in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad has presented the country with a real possibility of early parliamentary elections. Dialogue between protesters and the government seems increasingly impossible, except as an exchange of messages on social networks.

Another Serbian, Tanya Markovic, told BTA: "We want the institutions to work, the prosecution service and the court to do their job, to find and punish those responsible for 15 lives lost in Novi Sad, not the President to order them what to do and when to do it. Our demands are not addressed to [Serbian President] Aleksandar Vucic, and that is why we see no point in talking to him."

Repeated invitations to talk to the students have remained unanswered since November, whether they came from Vucic or from representatives of the executive and judiciary in Serbia.

On Monday Vucic published a short video on Instagram where he criticized the speakers at the last rally in Novi Sad.

Members of the opposition also published videos criticizing the government, however, so far, the students have been resisting political figures from any political formation joining their movement.

In his article, quoted by the Serbian newspaper Danas, Bulgarian analyst and former student leader Ivaylo Dinev called the protests "the largest student movement in modern Europe, which has received support from various social groups in Serbia".