Serbian students lead mass movement against autocracy

Serbia’s students have brought to life a mass movement and grassroots democracy rarely seen in the country. In the morning, they block roads; throughout the day, they occupy their faculties, march across the city and the country and shut down highways and ministry buildings.

The movement aims to win justice for fifteen people killed in a train station collapse in Novi Sad on 1 November, and hundreds of thousands identify that goal with the daily mass protests of the students. Pushed into action by the tragedy, the students have questioned Serbia’s whole system of greed and autocratic governance.

The current president, Aleksandar Vučić, has spent years curbing democracy and allegedly lining his and his colleagues’ pockets at the expense of the mass of the Serbian people.

Vučić, who has held positions of power since the Milošević era, has usually seen off opposition protests. But this student movement has been different. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in disgrace after a mass 24-hour highway blockade, and several ministers have faced the chopping block. Unable to convince the population that the students are foreign agents, Ustaše fascists or separatists, the Serbian government has never appeared as powerless as it is at this moment.

The student movement is a dazzling display of the power of activism and democracy rooted in the people. While change is usually said to come from the best ideas and the ballot box, the masses in Serbia are showing that real change, change that can undermine an entire system of authoritarianism, comes from mass struggle.

What started as daily vigils was transformed by right-wing violence into a militant challenge to the entire system. Defending themselves against a physical attack, students in the Dramatic Arts Faculty of Belgrade took over their campus building and declared it under their control.

Soon, nearly all of the 80 major faculties in Serbia were taken over by students demanding the publication of documents regarding the station collapse, the release of their arrested comrades, justice for the attacks on students and a 20 percent funding increase for education.

The blockades are places in which a form of radical democracy has begun to grow. As described in a letter addressed to students of the world, the dramatic arts student group Svi U Blokade (SUB) describe:

“We have suspended classes, dissolved all student representative groups, self-organised plenums ... and begun to apply pressure ... We have begun to set up kitchens, dormitories, pharmacies, workshops, cinemas and classrooms for self-education ... We organise blockades through work groups ... open to everyone who wants to participate ... [They] present their ideas to the plenum ... an open forum for all students of the faculty ... [and] direct democracy is put in practice.”

The blockades have shifted power away from the government, but also from the more moderate opposition forces that have led many of the recent protest movements in Serbia. Centring resistance on the active participants of the struggle in the blockades makes those who refuse to take part have no influence, like the student union president who, on television station TV PINK, called the protests “the greatest destruction of higher education”.

The blockades have also used pressure from below and grassroots democracy in the plenums to keep leadership away from opposition politicians and in the hands of the masses themselves. After calling only a couple of symbolic demonstrations and a fist fight in parliament, those politicians have gained no leadership as the mass of students have voted for militant actions and systemic change, not just the election of the other political team.

Rather than scaring people off, the student occupations have drawn wide layers of the population into street politics. Students called one of the largest protests in Serbian history, have inspired teachers and workers into strikes and protest action, have led hundreds in days-long marches from city to city. Three months later, they continue to hold the vast majority of university faculties under student control.

With the occupations as focal points for organisation and protest, workers, unionists, parents and pensioners have all made their way into the blockades. Students have keenly adopted the concerns of various groups, supporting farmer and media protests, and travelling to the energy ministry to join rallying power plant workers. As one postal worker said in an article in the socialist newspaper Kontranapad, “If the students could respond and come to our protest, let’s stop our work too!”

Farmers have played a key role in maintaining the blockades and protests, providing tractors for barricades, soup kitchens and spit roasts, and food for weary marchers halfway between Belgrade and Novi Sad. Teachers have also shown solidarity and drawn in workers across Serbia, first in the universities as faculty members rushed to the blockades to support their students, conduct classes on the streets and participate in plenums.

The teachers have been an icebreaker for workers in Serbia. Every time they have joined a blockade, defied government threats, gone on strike or rallied in the city, they have inspired other workers to join them.

Lawyers and actors joined the teachers on strike, while bus drivers refused to run services transporting strikebreakers. In the main news stations of RTS, workers demanded that the chief editor allow students to join their program or resign. Power plant workers, who had promised to strike further after a one-day suspension of work, overcame an order not to protest and began hour-long stoppages.

This was not guaranteed. “One part of the trade union is in connection with the regime and participates in the local government”, according to a coal miner in Kolubara speaking to N1 News. Across the country, various repressive and demobilising tactics have been attempted, workers being threatened with the sack or hauled into ministry and management buildings for lengthy interviews about their political support for the students.

Trade union leaders have played no better a role than student union leaders. They have signed wage rise deals in exchange for calling off strikes and have taken to the media and to parliament to denounce the idea that they might strike against the government. However, they have also been dismissed in individual workplaces—one union meeting of electricity distribution workers ended with the union officials being booed out of the room by their own members.

By reaching out to workers on strike, pensioners, lawyers, high schoolers and more, the students have given ordinary people a chance to feel their own power. By creating opportunities for mass struggle, students have accomplished what a thousand speeches and essays couldn’t: they have convinced hundreds of thousands of people they have the power to change society.

Whether or not their movement wins, the students have started a radical process in Serbia. Instead of elections and bills, politics is now plenum democracies and protests. The idea that university faculties could be run by mass meetings rather than board meetings has gripped Serbia.

During the 20 January teachers’ strike, Dušan Kokot—a leader of the Nezavisnost (Independence) trade union faction, a more militant faction of the unions—declared the strike gathering a plenum and turned to the crowd for a decision on, “Who is in favour of a general strike?”

Of course, this is not the same as a student plenum, which Kokot noted in an interview with Vreme, but it gives workers a taste of their power. If this level of democracy were exercised not just in a protest or on a campus, but in every workplace, town and city, Vučić’s corruption and greed wouldn’t stand a chance. This could also be pushed by organising all sympathetic workers into a network of activists who could transform Serbia from the ground up.

Regardless of what building is occupied next, who protests next, who resigns next, the university students at the centre of the movement aren’t letting up. On 15 February, tens of thousands from across the country converged on the city of Kragujevac to protest together, following other inter-city marches to try to join the various city-based protests into one.

While the government insists it is meeting the protesters’ demands, one student who had marched from Belgrade to Novi Sad explained to Radio Free Europe, “The system needs to change; if the system hasn’t changed, our demands have not been met”.