May is approaching, and with it the first anniversary of two mass murders, in the Elementary School "Vladislav Ribnikar" (May 3) and in the villages of Dubona and Malo Orašje (May 4). In those two days, it seemed as if something that had been simmering in this society suddenly exploded and poured out on all of us. We thought: this is it, this is the culmination of evil and violence that we have felt hovering over us for years, but were unable to recognize and name. It stung us, caused discomfort in our stomachs, but we didn't know what it was.
KK (13) killed 3 girls, one boy and a school guard with a firearm on May 9. He wounded five students and a teacher. Already in the first few hours after that terrible event, it was clear that there is neither intelligence nor mercy in a society that does not want to admit how big a problem it has. The media went wild, publishing the identity of the perpetrator and the victims before all the parents of the murdered children were informed of what had happened. Politicians remained silent until late afternoon when the then Minister of Education blamed "Western values" for the event. Anger was pouring out on social media and many seemed to have simple answers to complicated questions.
Everything was clear to some. Nothing was clear to the others except that this would happen again if the former did not shut up. And it happened again the very next day - on the night of May 4, Uroš Blažić (21), armed with a rifle, got into a car and went on a killing spree, leaving behind eight dead and six wounded.
CAN POLITICS BE BUILT ON DEATH
Protests under the name "Serbia against violence" soon followed. A few months later, a broad coalition of opposition parties will grow out of them, which demanded, and then won, the extraordinary parliamentary elections held on December 17. Those elections are still going on, and the coalition, born out of the desire to build a policy contrary to the one that, they say, led to two mass murders, is disintegrating right before our eyes these days.
That the regime of Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party is a serious generator of verbal and physical violence, as well as serious psychological and emotional abuse of the entire society, is not disputed at all. However, something else is at issue, something that in the days and months after the mass murders, it was inappropriate to ask out loud.
And that is: can Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party be overthrown through murdered children? The political angle of what happened in May of last year cannot be avoided and putting the two mass murders in a wider social and political context is not "politicization" but the duty of anyone who still cares to think. But, as part of that thinking, the above question seems unavoidable, and we all, as a society, bypassed it and right after the traumatic events that left 19 people killed, we jumped into the election campaign - for parliamentary and local elections.
Today, one year after the May murders (we do not use the word "tragedy" on purpose), does anyone remember the first protest called "Serbia against violence"? Do we remember those tens of thousands of people on the street, that devastating silence and that need to huddle together and just be silent together, because words no longer exist? Does anyone remember the Gazelle bridge, which is not visible from the people who covered it, although they don't really understand why they are taking that route? But then it didn't even matter to us. It was only important that we go out and show each other that we are not alone, that everything is not lost and that, if we cannot find, at least together we invent reasons for which there is still hope.
THE DEATH OF EMPATHY
Hope is indestructible and only thanks to it, we continue to exist as a society. But even 19 lost lives are not enough for this society to learn how to behave in a crisis. Two mass murders in two days is absolutely a crisis. In that crisis, we heard from the then Prime Minister Ana Brnabić that the system did not fail. And it really isn't. The system did not fail because there was no system. What the then prime minister called the system in May 2023 collapsed and fell into pieces long before the murders in "Ribnikar", Dubona and Mali Orašje took place.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, went public on the night of the "Ribnikar" incident and disclosed so much personal information about the family of the minor perpetrator that he crossed even his own, very thin limits of decency, decency and, ultimately, humanity.
Then chaos ensued. In "Ribnikar" we had a conflict, unimaginable: a conflict between parents of children who survived and children who did not. The fight for the memorial center, the fight for the part of the school where the murder happened not to be used because it is an execution ground, not part of the school. Confessions of parents of murdered children, from which we gradually realized how far insensitivity goes and how little will there is among people to at least try to understand what the parents are going through.
No, no one can know what it's like for them, it would be crazy to pretend to know. But even those who stood in front of them and looked into their eyes did not make the slightest effort to hear them, to find out from them how they are and to appreciate their feelings. Until January of this year, we had almost every week something that sounds incredibly terrible, and it happened - a protest by parents of murdered children. They are begging and demanding that a memorial center be built for their children. Only after a series of protests, meetings, promises, shifts, was the decision made to build the memorial center anyway.
And in parallel with that agony, the trial of the parents of the minor KK began, from which the media regularly broadcast and recounted every sigh and every tear of the parents of the murdered children. Instead of sympathy and respect, these people got a morbid reality, in which they found themselves against their will.
During that time, nobody even mentioned Dubona and Malo Orasje anymore. Only the families remember the dead, and the wounded are a separate story. Thanks to the Javni servis portal and the personal involvement of Veran Matić, we found out little by little that the wounded from Dubona and Mali Orašje are still recovering, that some of them have gone through multiple hospitalizations, that they bear a huge part of the treatment costs themselves and that they are in a municipality that officially a part of Belgrade, but many people's relatives cannot get to the hospital and bring the essentials because they don't even have money for public transport. We found out that many of those wounded young people were the only employees in their families, that they supported entire households with just a few tens of thousands of dinars, and that now they are not only unable to work, but also pushed deep into the abyss of poverty. The system, they say, has failed.
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
A year later, we are no better. We didn't even try to make sense of these completely senseless deaths. In a year in which two mass murders took place, in October one boy killed another in Niška Banja. In the same year, 28 women died in partner and family violence. In this year, only in its first third, seven more women were killed. A seventy-five-year-old man died in prison as a result of sexual abuse. In the prison where he was for a misdemeanor, for throwing a firecracker.
And then there is Danka Ilić. Actually, where is Danka Ilić? Less than a year after we survived the mass murder of children, two men hit a two-year-old girl with a car, then did who knows what with her body, because Danka has not been found yet. These days we learn that one of the suspects for helping to cover up this crime died in custody and that the MUP was lying to us. They said he died of natural causes. And then the report of the Institute of Forensic Medicine arrived, stating that this death was violent. The police officers, eager to force a confession, seem to beat the suspects to death and thus actually, paradoxically, destroy the truth, facts and evidence. The system, again, failed.
One year after the May murders, we sit still, paralyzed by the evil that overwhelms us, arguing about whether to go to the polls or not, until the system fails in just one thing - the systematic destruction of compassion and hope. They have already destroyed our reason.
