The danger when democracy and justice become subjective or defined by a particular group
Vladimir Radomirović is the editor-in-chief of Pištaljka, a whistleblowing platform in Serbia
Corruption Kills is the slogan of Serbia’s Student Revolution that has been shaking the country and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) for the past three months. The mass protests started after a canopy collapse at the Novi Sad train station on November 1st killed 15 people, and accusations of corruption in the reconstruction of the train station swirled.
Students began protesting in the streets in late November and then blockaded universities after they were attacked by SNS officials trying to break up the protests. The authorities, mindful of criticism of a heavy-handed approach from the EU if they employed the police to disperse small crowds of students from busy streets, sent party loyalists to try and break them up. The method backfired spectacularly. In January, tens of thousands of people accross the country joined the protests, after multiple students were hit by cars while they tried to block city traffic. In a recent incident, SNS loyalists guarding their party headquarters in Novi Sad beat up a female student who wrote anti-government graffiti on the wall of their building.. This led to the resignation of the prime minister and the possibility of a snap election.
The protests have drawn enthusiastic support from Slavoj Žižek and Yanis Varoufakis, with Žižek even claiming that the Serbian regime under President Aleksandar Vučić has eliminated its political opponents and that their deaths were “often masked as traffic accidents”. “The situation now is much worse than in the worst years of (Slobodan) Milošević’s regime”, says Žižek without providing an ounce of proof for the wild claim that Vučić is getting rid of his political opponents by staging traffic accidents.
Unlike Žižek, I lived in Serbia under Milošević, worked as a journalist and protested in the streets against the President’s abuse of power. I can testify that the situation is incomparably better now than it was in the 1990s. Back then, only a handful of private media outlets were allowed to operate, and many journalists faced censorship, harassment, threats, kidnapping, bans, judicial sanctions, and even assassinations, both by the regime and by NATO and NATO-supported terrorists.
At the time, Žižek was the darling of the ruling party in Slovenia and, as Neža Lipanje notes in her 2015 article, he “never publicly condemned or questioned the openly anti-immigrant policies of the Slovene ruling party and remained publicly silent on the issue of the erased”. The “erased” are some 25,000 people from the southern Yugoslav republics whom the Slovene authorities deleted from public registers and who were unable to access basic rights, including healthcare. What would be the correct term for a Marxist philosopher who never questions, let alone opposes, xenophobic policies of his own country?
Žižek, however, has a point. Corruption is a huge issue in Serbia. As I noted in an earlier article for BRAVE NEW EUROPE, we are run by a corrupt political class that abuses institutions to stay in power and avoid investigations into their ill-gotten wealth. Some of these politicians sue Pištaljka when we publish evidence of their corruption. The courts have largely sided with the right of the press to investigate and publish articles critical of the ruling politicians. “This is the task of the press in a democratic society that tends to curb corruption and other forms of crimes,“
a recent verdict in favor of Pištaljka reads. Judicial independence of this sort was impossible in Serbia of the 1990s.
A whistleblower recently reminded me that I first used the phrase “Corruption kills” in a radio interview in 2011. This was after a city bus rammed into two students sitting on a bench in a Belgrade park. Both were killed. The whistleblower had been warning that the city allowed substandard privately-owned buses to operate in the streets. Some buses had issues with brakes and steering. This was apparently what caused the accident. After seven years on trial, the bus driver was acquitted. The owner of the bus company and the city transportation officials were never charged.
In an even more chilling case, several dozen patients were apparently denied life-saving procedures because some doctors in the Belgrade emergency medical service were taking bribes from funeral homes. This case from twenty years ago of what could potentially be qualified as mass murder was never investigated. Some eight years ago, Pištaljka uncovered a previously hidden report from the ministry of health that detailed suspicious deaths of as many as 53 patients. The report had not been acted on.
Corruption does kill. It kills in Serbia as it does in the rest of the world. That is a fact. However, we have yet to see clear evidence of corruption in the Novi Sad train station tragedy.
Prosecutors have indicted 13 people over the canopy collapse, including a government minister who had resigned after the accident. The indictment details lack of oversight and control that caused the tragedy. Two of the indictees are local employees of a Chinese company that was tasked with reconstruction of the railway in Serbia, part of the Belt and Road Initiative. One indictee is a professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Civil Engineering. And this is where things get complicated.
The students, in a largely decentralized protest, issued their demands early on:
- Publish all documentation regarding the reconstruction of the train station,
- Punish and hold accountable all people who have attacked the students,
- Pardon all students who were arrested on trumped up charges,
- Increase payments from the budget to the universities by 20 percent.
As a journalist, I am grateful to students for insisting that the government publishes all documents about the train station. Some media had asked for documents immediately after November 1st, but the government and state institutions declined to release them, stating that the prosecutors were in charge of all documents. After about a month, the government backed down and now we have about 15,000 documents for everyone to dissect. I also have nothing in principle with the other two demands.
But, in all earnestness, how does an increase in government spending (some 100 million euros) add to the accountability for the Novi Sad tragedy? This makes me very suspicious. The government eventually met this demand as well, without even consulting Parliament.
Another reason for suspicion is that the Faculty of Civil Engineering insists that their professor is not guilty for the deaths of 15 people and that he should be released from detention immediately. Politicians are to blame, said the Faculty in a December 4 statement. At the same time, the Faculty supported the students in asking for the release of all documentation. How could they argue that the professor, Milan Spremić, was not guilty if they had not seen the documents? Prosecutors claim that the professor, who was in charge of the project, made the initial mistake when he failed to order a full inspection of the building before the reconstruction began. This initial mistake eventually led to the tragedy, prosecutors argue.
Another slogan that students use is “You Have Blood on Your Hands”, directed at the government. Red paint sprayed all over towns, actors and opera singers
raising their hands in red gloves to protest the government after performances, these are powerful crime and punishment symbols. But why stop at the politicians? Whose hands are clean?
I have doubts about the Faculty of Civil Engineering staff in this matter. And what about the motives of the university staff in using the protest to get a 20 percent raise? I suspect some of the 100 million euros will probably go towards raising staff salaries.
Students have organized themselves in plenums at all schools, even at private universities. They have no leaders, no official bodies, no standardized procedures. That is how they managed to catch Serbia’s President Vučić off guard. The government had no clue how to deal with highly motivated, stubborn, decentralized and seemingly leaderless pressure.
Plenums decide on everything, from whether the demands have been met, to how they communicate with the press, to what each blockaded school needs. (Energy drinks top all lists.) The thing is, no one knows how the plenums operate. The media are barred from entering schools, there is no tally of votes, no one knows how many students attend the plenums and how the voting is handled.
Plenums have now entered other institutions, as well. Many elementary and high school teachers have gone on strike, in support of students’ demands. Strikes are coordinated via communication apps, with activists proposing that parents should stop sending their children to school. Some parents have obliged. And some teachers say they will continue striking, even after the government’s deal with the teachers’ unions to increase their salaries. These teachers say this is what “student plenums“ have decided.
This week, theaters are striking in support of the students. Almost all theaters, schools, and universities, are publicly owned. The private sector has largely avoided protesting or striking, except for the influential cable TV stations owned by the tycoon Dragan Šolak.
These TVs follow the protests 24/7, disregarding all other news. During a recent failed call for a general strike, these TV stations declared they would support the call by ignoring all local and international news and reporting only on student protests and traffic blockades. This was a management decision. Mind you, the tycoon and his managers are not calling for plenums to run their company. Neither are the USAID-funded groups that have rented billboards across Belgrade to show their support for the students.
But now some opposition figures and teachers want to replicate the method. “Abolish the parliament, abolish democracy, let plenums decide“, is their battle cry.
Savo Manojlović, leader of the “Kreni promeni“ (Go Change) opposition movement says that the student plenums and their professors should form an expert government. “But only once the government lays down its arms and accepts the concept of an expert government stemming from students’ plenums”, explains Manojlović. Elections? Forget about elections. All we need is plenums.
A lecturer at the Belgrade Faculty of Dramatic Arts argues that “meritocratic plenums“ should be installed in “universities, local communities, towns, cities, and other institutional structures“.
Pištaljka has been reporting about corruption for the past 15 years, while also helping whistleblowers who expose it. We investigated a minister who built himself a luxury condo in the center of Belgrade, a local official who listed his 7- and 9-year old children as company owners and invested tens of thousands of euros in these companies, a prison warden who used prison labor to build himself a holiday home, a string of corrupt deals at Serbia’s public TV worth tens of millions of euros. And hundreds of other cases. We will report on corruption in the reconstruction of the Novi Sad train stations if we find evidence of it, or if a whistleblower comes forward.
We know full well that all governments are corrupt. And while it is unclear how the current situation in Serbia will be resolved, the solution to curbing corruption is certainly not to abolish democracy and put our fate in the hands of an unelected meritocracy.
Great article! Absolutely agree!
Brilliant article! The very first voice of reason that has emerged out of this entire mess.