Where next, relatives: Belgrade against violence

On Saturday, June 3, it will be exactly one month since a thirteen-year-old boy armed himself entered the "Vladislav Ribnikar" elementary school and killed nine students and Dragan Vlahović. Just a month.

Those four weeks were marked by shock, disbelief, pain and sadness on the one hand and the inappropriate reaction of government representatives on the other. They were marked by four protests against all kinds of violence, to which the President of Serbia and his media and members of parliament responded with even greater verbal violence and a counter rally. Although with attacks and aggression they only brought more and more people to the streets, as if they could not stop.

The "Serbia against violence" protests were unobtrusively organized by the opposition parties, with the exception of the so-called of the state-building-patriotic block (Dveri, Zavetnici, New DSS, POKS) who did not like something about it.

Politicians stayed away, there were no party signs, no speeches, the stage was left to the citizens. Everyone was surprised by their number in Belgrade: both the organizers and the authorities and the participants themselves. You could see many amazed faces of people looking around and beaming saying "look how many of us there are". The people who are oppressed by the abnormality they stumble upon every day have realized that they are not alone. The feeling that something had changed, that something had broken in the constraints of society spread through that vast mass.

These gatherings began to draw energy from themselves, they turned into a pilgrimage of those who still believe, or have begun to believe, that progressive impositions can and must stand in the way.

The government, which in similar situations was able to act powerful and untouchable, began to seem grotesque and shaken. No matter how much the scumbags from Pink adapted reality to the wishes of the President of the Republic, they did not succeed in repainting it.

And now what? Where next cousins, what did Johnny Štulic say once upon a time? How to get out of this situation? You can't protest on the street forever. Summer is coming, people will slowly start to leave Belgrade, which has become the main arena for comparing the forces of the progressive and the other Serbia. Even faster than usual, because the Government made a decision to extend the school year for all primary and secondary schools ends June 6th.

The time has come for the opposition politicians, who on so many occasions, with their narrow-minded disputes, have masterfully succeeded in turning the unwilling citizens away from the authorities and drowning them in any hope of change, to mature and start doing their job in the interest of the citizens they would like to represent.

The time has come for them to come out of the shadow of the many kilometers long columns of people and stand in front of the citizens united around the clear goal to which these Belgrade marches are leading, which goes beyond the resignation of the Minister of Police and changes in REM.

By God, the time has come for those who disputed the results of the last Belgrade elections to demand early elections in Belgrade. To remind the President of Serbia that he promised this a long time ago, that he is constantly saying that the opposition only needs to ask for elections, and that they will win them. All those people who come out week after week in Belgrade to protest against violence would stand behind the demand that elections be called in Belgrade.

The time has come for concrete political action, for the "Serbia against violence" protests to give birth to a serious opposition coalition with the name, for example, "Belgrade against violence", which would include all the parties that organized these protests.

The time has come for the leaders of those parties to take responsibility. And the extent of this responsibility will be shown once again by the citizens at the "Serbia against violence" protest on Saturday, June 3 in Belgrade.