The Pressure

Written by Aleksandra Bosnić Đurić

Although the term "parallel reality" is often used to explain the situation in Serbia to outsiders, a more fitting word that captures the full picture might be "pressure". This seems to encompass everything: coercion, force, collective madness, the spread of fear and uncertainty, humiliation, the absence of justice and freedom, and any rationality. It represents a specific state that is imposed on citizens as the new normal.

People often say it's the same everywhere – corruption, manipulative governments, propaganda. While that's true, we also have political prisoners who have been in detention for fifty days, including students and a professor. They arrest writers and columnists for verbal offenses, run us over with cars while we protest, subject us to mysterious sonic devices, and punish us whenever the regime decides we've become too disobedient, too reactive, or too much of a threat to this new ultimate reality.

Here, the police follow orders to beat peaceful citizens, students, their parents, and professors. We also have the deportation of foreign nationals declared "security threats," harassment and attacks on journalists, arrests of activists, and tabloids that daily lynch those who don’t comply. This continues, and the pressure is only mounting. It’s only getting worse.

Some will respond, "You should solve this through politics, after all, 'every nation gets the government it deserves'." This painfully simplistic remark reveals a complete lack of understanding of the difference between causes and effects, insights and conclusions, and any ability to react empathetically. Perhaps the only thing worse than this is the regime's favorite message for all the "apolitical" people who go about their lives without getting involved: they all say, "They're all the same".

Monday, April 28, will remain a memorable day for many residents of Novi Sad. The dean of the Faculty of Sports and Physical Education, who had decided to resume online classes after a five-month blockade and was determined to follow through with this decision, called for police intervention.

Soon, special police units, followed by riot police in full anti-riot gear, arrived. Initial reports were brief, with the public first learning that several people had been injured during the police intervention in Novi Sad. An emergency medical station was set up outside the Faculty to treat those in need. At one point, the police attempted to bring the dean through a side entrance, but the gathered citizens pushed him back and doused him with water. The police withdrew shortly afterward.

However, the footage we saw was disturbing. We watched as Smiljana Milinkov, a gentle professor from the Faculty of Philosophy, was thrown to the ground by a police officer. There was a moment when a student, who had just a few days earlier biked to Strasbourg in a completely different reality, lost consciousness after being struck in the head with a metal police shield. We also saw a student bleeding from his mouth.

Soon after, the first testimonies began to emerge, including one from Professor Vojin Ilić of the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad. He described finding himself between two police shields when riot officers sprayed the crowd with pepper spray: "It was horrifying. The pepper spray was mixed with neurotoxic additives. All of us in the front rows were struck with metal shields. I was hit in the shoulder and also got pepper spray in my mouth and eyes. The amount of neurotoxin caused numbness in my arms and legs, and I felt weak."

According to Professor Ilić's account, many professors from the Faculty of Technical Sciences were struck with batons that day. Some were hit in the fingers, hands, and heads. One of his colleagues had his arm broken, another had it crushed, and another received a severe blow to the head. "Despite those blows and the pepper spray (or whatever it was)", the professor said, "we will always stand with our students on the front lines, and we will not let anyone harm them."

However, in an alternate, regime-controlled reality, everything was presented as the complete opposite—quite Orwellian. According to Ana Brnabić, the president of the national assembly, the protesters were showing "what fascism looks like in practice", and she couldn’t recall anything like it ever happening in Serbia. "They (the protesters) lynch people in the streets, chase them, prevent ambulances from passing, just because someone disagrees with them in terms of opinion and stance".

From a completely different perspective, Svetlana Stanarević, a professor at the Faculty of Security, stated that excessive force was used against the students and citizens who blocked the entrance to the Novi Sad Faculty of Sports on Monday, April 28th. The footage from the incident shows citizens, mostly young people, with their hands raised.

She argued that the police were largely misused for political purposes, and that special units and the gendarmerie used force on peaceful citizens and students: "They have no violent means on them, nothing to indicate that they were prepared or using violence. Yet we see police officers in full gear, with batons, actually hitting these citizens, striking them in the head. That can only be excessive use of force. And we have injuries". She added that, "on the other hand, based on the footage, we can see the dean who was splashed with water or verbally insulted, we see students trying to help him out of that situation, to move him to a safer place. After that, we see him in the hospital, where he appears to be completely fine, standing and making calls... We don't see him in any serious health condition".

In the parallel, regime-controlled reality, citizens are expected to silently endure both the repression and the pressure they are under, just as they are expected to accept the simulated truth, life, and meaning offered to them. In the real world, however, the truth is that Serbia is undergoing a form of devolution in the modern concept of politics—a system of patterns that were historically established to peacefully and predictably resolve tensions within a pluralistic society.

This devolution is caused by the systematic suspension of existing political institutions, primarily the abolition of the independence and autonomy of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, concentrating all political power in a single instance. This has made the political system incapable of resolving contradictions within complex societal relations following constitutional and legal norms. The slide into a primordial societal state, where opposing groups resolve their conflicts through the use of force, represents an extremely dangerous trend. A trend that leads society to a "zero position", where oppression inevitably becomes a two-way street.

And as Thomas Hobbes once stated, it results in only one thing – “the aggression of all against all”.