Požarevac welcomes students. What is life like in this city where you often grumble, but always vote for the government
Donations are still being collected for student which should arrive in from various sides Pozarevac during Saturday and Sunday, for when it is scheduled a large protest.
Some are coming on foot from the direction of Jagodina and Kragujevac and will be welcomed on Saturday evening.
To the anger of the opposition-minded citizens, the city administration refused to open the Sports Hall so that they could spend the night there, and the students were also refused by the church.
However, the people organized themselves and privately provided accommodation for about five hundred newcomers so far.
"I told them that six people can stay at my place, and if they bring sleeping bags, they can sleep ten," Saša, a resident of Požarev who has been living in Belgrade for a long time, tells us.
Nothing without a party
Saša shares the fate of many fellow citizens who finished some schools and never returned to the town near Morava. And they leave even if they haven't finished school - Požarevac is full of Viennese registrations on weekends.
The fact that this is a guest worker area of the city is causing a boom in fast and dirty construction by a couple of local magnates. A square meter in a new building has long since exceeded a thousand euros, which is shocking for the conditions of the fire.
That's why water pipes burst in at least five places every day - they are long overdue for replacement and cannot support that number of buildings.
In the city leaning on the Kostolac thermal power plant and the coal mines in Drmn - which are the cash cow of the progressive-socialist authorities - there has been no industry for a long time.
When approaching from Belgrade, if the wind is good, the visitor will smell the smell plasma biscuit. Admittedly, he has been lacking lately because the factory has not yet recovered from last year's fire.
But, except for Bambi, everything that used to work has grown into weeds - the sugar factory, the Požarevac meat industry that made the famous Požarevac sausage, the once large agricultural machinery factory "Morava" is not so big now.
Anyone who wants to work in Požarevac is either tied to the party or curses the party because because of it, he has to sign fixed-term contracts and watch illiterate colleagues trade diplomas and advance.
"Without a party membership card, you can't go anywhere in public companies and separate companies. The main employer is Pro Tent, where everyone comes on a contract, they keep them like that for years, and they take part of their salary for the party," said the famous Pozarevac oppositionist Ljubomir Jacić for "Vreme".
Verified by the authorities
The city that was the second capital of Knez Miloš has not stood out for its opposition since the return of multi-party system.
The 1990s were spent in the reign of terror of Milošević's clique - more Marko than Slobodan - and their mobsters.
Jacić knows this very well, as one of the founders of the Democratic Party and its first president of the local committee in Požarevac.
Požarevac showed his teeth around October 5th, when there were protests twice a day, until the countryman fell. From the era of the nineties, the grave of Slobodan Milošević remains today and the amusement park Bambiland is overgrown with weeds.
Since then, Požarevac has returned to factory settings - reliably with power. In the last local elections, the list named after Aleksandar Vučić took almost two-thirds of the votes.
According to Jacić, today's reign of terror is quite comparable to that of JUL and SPS. He sees the fact that the socialists are still strong, networked, and wealthy as a specific characteristic of Pozarevac.
And yet, sometimes Požarevac knows how to stand up. "Now these children have brought us some light," says one high school teacher about the current protests. On Friday (May 30), Pozarevac high school graduates celebrated the end of school.
And the local high school students were among the few in Serbia who blocked the school. And among the rarer ones who received almost undivided support from teachers. That's why, as "Vreme" wrote, the principal of the school, Daniela Žukovski, was threatened with dismissal.
Help needed
However, Požarevac is more firmly in the hands of the progressives than other towns of a similar size. Thus, civil protests rarely gathered more than two hundred people.
On Friday, for example, 16 minutes of silence was observed again in Tabacka Čaršija, and in the photo of the local media Boom 93, you can see exactly - eight people.
"And a few months ago there were a couple of hundred," says Jacić. "Students did not manage to penetrate the soul of the voters. There is great fear among the people. Požarevac is a very difficult city and it is only slowly liberating itself."
"Obviously, Serbian Kumrovec needs help. It is no coincidence that the students chose Požarevac as the first city for the protest exactly seven months after the murder under the canopy," concludes Jacić.
The main part of the protest, starting at 1 a.m., will take place right in the Tobacco Bazaar on Sunday, June 11.
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Admittedly, the students subsequently called for a walkout streets of all cities in Serbia. Thus, Požarevac will not have his five minutes to be in the center of attention again. And this town needs that.
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