At a time when Aleksandar Vučić was happy to compare himself to Zoran Đinđić, he promised that a monument would be made to him and placed on Student Square.
"Whenever a regime comes to power, the monuments symbolizing the 'predecessors' are taken down, and new symbols are erected according to the taste of the rulers." Now we have an unusual phenomenon that deviates from the current practice. SNS has become accustomed to erecting rival monuments, in order to steal symbols with which it actually has nothing to do. From the combative tone and vocabulary, it could be concluded that this is what we are talking about when it comes to the monument to Đinđić". Dragoljub Žarković wrote then.
And he continued: "Vučić, the contemporary prince Miloš, whom he quotes every now and then (...) is all in the symbolic plane and drags behind him a sack full of similar tricks, such as the one with the monument." It is difficult to catch him both by the head and the tail and that is considered a skill".
Eight years ago, the SNS announced that the DS had forgotten to erect a monument to Djindjic, that it had squandered its chance, and that now "the Serbian Progressive Party and Aleksandar Vucic are to blame for the false democrats."
They forgot about the monument, thundered the progressives, because they only cared about their "pockets and wallets, luxurious mansions and expensive cars." They also added the "harsh truth" that the "false democrats" did not think of Djindjic while they sat in comfortable armchairs and held power at all levels, because they were "too busy with their combinations, fixing tenders and jobs, looting state funds and extorting people's money at every step".
"If the thing about the monument was an improvisation, the attack by joint forces on the weakened DS is a constant of Vučić's policy." Why is that so", Žarković asked himself and gave the answer:
"The 'yellow dredger' must for a long time be the on-call culprit for everything that the progressives failed to fix or recover during the four years that they were effectively in power. They are a great alibi for their own incompetence."
Deep Veil of Forgetfulness
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, promised back in 2016, when he was the mandate for the composition of the new government, that the monument to Zoran Đinđić would be unveiled in the Student Park on March 12, 2018, on the 15th anniversary of his murder. Today, eight years later, the aforementioned initiative seems to have been covered by a deep veil of oblivion, writes the portal demostat.rs.
Vučić then did not miss the opportunity to say that Đinđić's Democratic Party did not see fit to erect a monument to him until 2012, and that in Serbia, "reformers suffered also because Serbs often cannot see beyond their emotions and anger."
The official decision to erect a monument to Djindjic was made in June 2016 at a session of the Belgrade Assembly, when the Committee for erecting a monument was also appointed. In March 2017, the City announced an international competition for the preliminary design of the monument. 40 authors participated in the competition, and the winner was the work "Arrow", author Mrđan Bajić and his team.
It was then announced that the monument will be located in the remodeled Student Park, it will be 6,2 meters high, in the shape of a white-silver arrow pointing towards the sky. Zoran Đinđić's thought served as a guiding idea: "Look to the future, and there we will meet you and me".
Also, it was planned that the monument would be accompanied by a sound installation, so that Đindjić's words could be heard, and it was in charge of Biljana Srbljanović.
Why are there no monuments?
On March 12, 2018, the Government of Serbia decided to transfer RSD 13.257.000 to the City of Belgrade for the construction of a monument to the murdered prime minister. In 2021, it was announced in some media that the monument was completed and that it was located by the sculptor Bajić, and the reconstruction of the space between Studentski Square and Vasina Street was cited as an obstacle to its installation.
In the spring of 2022, it was officially announced that "at the end of next year, the conditions should be created to erect a monument to Djindjic on Student Square". At that time, the city's chief urban planner announced that it was necessary to finish the reconstruction of Vasina Street and the Student Park and to relocate the traffic, as well as to carry out an archaeological survey of that area.
Not even two years later, there is no indication whether the monument to the murdered prime minister will actually be found on Studentski trg, Demostat notes.
Moral law and other old objections
Ever since Bajić's sculpture with a sound installation by Biljana Srbljanović won the competition for the conceptual design of the monument to Zoran Đinđić in Belgrade, the controversy in the public has not subsided for a long time. From whether the current authorities have the moral right to erect a monument to Đinđić, whether just participating in the competition meant betraying his ideas, to remarks that the work is too abstract, that the broken arrow is not Đinđić's vision, that one must recognize from the plane who the monument is for dedicated, down to the fact that the choice of quotations for the sound installation is poor and banal.
Mrđan Bajić complained about whether you should brush your teeth if Eichmann says you shouldn't, and Biljana Srbljanović reminded that 90 years ago the mayor of Belgrade, Kosta Kumanudi, a proven fascist, despite all the resistance of the public, managed to put up a sculpture of Ivan Meštrović The winner - at least on Kalemegdan, when they didn't let it be on Terazije (because of the expressed genital organ).
At that time, Srbljanović made an excuse that it was not Vučić who erected the monument to Djindjić, but the state.
"I don't see any similarity or parallel between Đinđić and Vučić. Absolutely not," she said then. "First of all, I think that Djindjic was not interested in the government, and Vučić is only interested in the government. I think that Vučić is much more skilled at seizing and retaining power, which, obviously, can only be done here in a totalitarian way. If Djindjic could have done that, he would not have been killed."
