Think of the headline: "Pakistanis at the Book Fair." The first thought would be that they are guests of honor, writers and cultural representatives of Pakistan. In today's Serbia, however, such a title could have a completely different, darker meaning.
The Minister of Public Investments of Serbia recently stated, regarding the objections of educational workers about the conditions of future schooling, "If our professors will not teach and students will not learn, just as we imported drivers and construction workers from Pakistan, we can import students and professors. The system will continue to function."
Will the same logic be applied to Book Fair? If publishers refuse to participate, will extras be found to act as publishers, librarians, proofreaders, proofreaders, journalists, authors and presenters, visitors? Will it be enough for someone to fill the planned space and time so that it can be announced that the event was successfully held?
The problem is not with the people of Pakistan, but with the government, which sees people as cheap, replaceable parts of the machine. Knowledge, experience, dignity and belonging to the community are not important in that play. It is only important that the scenes remain in place and that the message is made: the system works.
Last greeting
Last year, the representative bodies of the Association of Professional Publishers of Serbia, and just these days the management bodies of the Association of Publishers and Booksellers of Serbia, invited their members not to participate in Belgrade Book Fair in 2026.
The decision of the leading publishers is not an ordinary dispute over the lease of stands, time or organizational details. It is the consequence of a much deeper disturbance: representatives of the authorities see cultural manifestations and institutions less and less as public goods, and more and more as spaces that they manage without the obligation to respect the people who give these institutions content, reputation and professional integrity.
There are no publishers' representatives in the new Board of the Book Fair, and their official requests to be involved in decision-making have not been answered. It is no longer a warning before a possible crisis. It is a conscious shutdown of one of the most important cultural events in Serbia.
Institutions without a profession
The publishing community was left without a representative in the Board of the Book Fair, while the director of the Belgrade Fair was appointed as the head of the Board. This gives the organizer who manages the space and charges for its use a decisive role in the body that should represent the wider cultural interest and supervise the organization of the event.
It's not just a personnel issue. It is an unacceptable model of management and a feature of hysterical party politics towards culture.
As a 'gesture of goodwill', the appointed members of the Board told the publishers that they can send ideas and initiatives, reducing them from the position of equal decision-makers to petitioners. They are 'allowed' to speak, but not to decide. Their remarks, questions and suggestions may be heard, but the Board and the Management of the Fair are released in advance from the obligation to take them into account.
It is forgotten that the publishers are the program foundation of the Book Fair, while the Belgrade Fair is the provider of organizational and technical services that the publishers pay for. If the city administration appoints the Board and presents the event as its own, then it should be its patron — as is the case with other city events of international importance — and not its political commissar and commercial lessor.
Additional suspicion was caused by the news about the establishment of a new company that became the owner of the Belgrade Fair. Publishers are not clear with whom they are really talking, who represents whom and who is responsible for the decisions made. In such circumstances, the publisher's participation would not only be a business risk. It would become a decoration used to legitimize decisions they are not behind.
From a public good to a space rental agency
The Belgrade Book Fair has been developed and improved for almost seven decades. It is sad to think that he could meet his seventieth birthday abandoned by those to whom it is dedicated and who created it.
Photo: Tanjug/Sava RadovanovićBook fair once upon a time
That is why the Book Fair does not belong to the management of the Belgrade Fair or any city government. Thanks to the publisher's trust and common interest, they are its chosen organizers. Their obligation is not to appropriate the event and destroy it through incompetent management, but to preserve it and hand it over to the next generation in a better condition than when they found it.
Today's management and the (in)competent Board behave as if the Book Fair is primarily an agency for renting out fair space. Publishers are expected to finance the event, provide its content and attract visitors, but not to participate in shaping and developing the conditions for its holding.
This is the essence of institutional humiliation: money, content and audience are demanded, and the right to decide is denied!
Political technology of silencing
After experiences with BITEF, film festivals, management and board changes in theaters and other cultural institutions, the case of the Book Fair is not an isolated incident. It is the expected consequence of a system in which independence is punished, critical artists are exposed to violence, and blind obedience is rewarded.
An even more dangerous consequence of violent partisan management of culture is the creation of a society in which people stop believing that conversation makes sense, that expertise will be respected, and that arguments can make a difference. The publishers' decision not to participate is therefore not a whim or an expression of personal frustration. It is the last resort of a community that has been deprived of regular mechanisms of action. When institutions close the door to dialogue, dissent becomes one of the last forms of defense of professional and human dignity.
Pupils — new readers, new possibilities
An example of a possible answer already exists. National Humanitarian Book Fair was held in April 2026 in 16 cities of Serbia, on the initiative of the network of student parliaments and with the support and participation of publishers who did not participate in the Belgrade Book Fair last year.
Books did not wait for readers to come to the central fair hall in Belgrade. They reached Subotica, Sremska Mitrovica, Šabac, Pančevo, Valjevo, Kragujevac, Bor, Užice, Požega, Niš and other cities. The income from the token tickets was intended for NURDOR.
That event showed that cultural life does not have to depend on political mercy, but also something that is unpleasant for any authoritarian government: citizens, students, teachers and cultural workers know how to organize themselves.
However, alternative manifestations must not be used by the government as an excuse to destroy existing institutions. The National Student Fair in several cities will be developed as a new, decentralized model, but at the same time the Belgrade Book Fair should be defended as a common cultural heritage.
Serbia does not need to choose between one and the other. She needs both. Otherwise, aggressive primitivism will gradually (consume) the remaining features of cultural life and leave the country without institutions that preserve its memory and produce its identity.
Publisher's fair or exhibitor's fair?
If the Fair is left without a publisher, the responsibility will not be on those who refused the humiliation. It will be up to those who believed that seven decades of cultural life can be replaced by a protocol, filled squares and an announcement that everything went well.
We should not be surprised if this year's Fair, like the previous one, is formally "saved". The management may find new exhibitors, fill the halls or by temporary concessions induce some publishers to change the already announced decision. Maybe it will be declared a great success again!
We have a government that reduces culture to rent, building, advertising, transportation, unnecessary expense and opportunity for political promotion. But an institution is not a building, just as the Book Fair is not a hall.
The book fair is made up of books and the joy of meeting the people who write, translate, edit, publish, store and read them. When the joy of those people disappears, all that remains is an empty space - to be released. And that is exactly the goal.
