Arriving in Strasbourg on Tuesday 15 April, after a 1,400 km journey by bicycle across Europe that began on 4 April, 80 Serbian students from the town of Novi Sad met their compatriots living in France, Germany and Switzerland, among other countries, before visiting the headquarters of the European Parliament and the Council of Europe on Wednesday 16 April, institutions to which they asked for support in their fight against the excessive use of force by the government put in place since 2017 by the nationalist president, Aleksandar Vučić.
More than a thousand people from the Serbian diaspora gathered in Place Kléber, in the heart of Strasbourg, to welcome them with great fervour on Tuesday.
“What impresses me about them”, confided Nataša Devetaković Ličina, one of the coordinators of the event, who came from Geneva, “is that they are fighting to transform the country, whereas the opponents of our generation left in the 1990s thinking that nothing would ever change in Milošević’s Serbia. These young people, who have never experienced a liberal democratic regime, want to stay, but they want to change the regime”.
All those who came to cheer the cyclists were happy to be able to “finally do something” to support an enduring movement in Serbia since a canopy collapsed at Novi Sad station, killing 16 people on 1 November.
Clearly due to corruption, the accident triggered a series of demonstrations that culminated on Monday evening in a blockade of the offices of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade and of the headquarters of Radio Television Vojvodina in Novi Sad. “The public broadcaster is working against all of us”, the students summed up in a post on Instagram, denouncing the invisibilisation of their movement by a government that portrays them as “agents of foreigners”.
In Strasbourg, it was a “very strong message” that the Serbian students wanted to send, declared their spokesperson. “We want truth, justice, democracy in Serbia, an end to impunity and, above all, an end to corruption”.
They delivered this message within the walls of Parliament to three MEPs - Slovenian MEP Irena Joveva, French MEP Fabienne Keller (Renew Europe) and Croatian MEP Gordan Bosanac (Greens/EFA).
It is up to these elected representatives to inform the President, Roberta Metsola, and to create the conditions for “finally holding a specific debate in Parliament on the situation in Serbia”, Fabienne Keller hopes, as the right and far right have so far been opposed to this.
In the afternoon, a similar approach was made to the authorities of the Council of Europe, represented by the Deputy Secretary General, Bjorn Berge, and Matjaz Gruden, Director of Democratic Participation.
Once again, a letter was sent requesting that the situation in Serbia be examined by various bodies of a pan-European organisation of which Serbia has been a member since 2003, namely the Group of States against Corruption, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (in particular to investigate allegations of the use of acoustic weapons against demonstrators) and the Commissioner for Human Rights, who was asked to investigate the elements contained in the letter.
“These students take us back to the fundamentals of European values, and they are asking us to make a stronger commitment alongside them”, Fabienne Keller concluded.
No certainty at this stage.
Link to the letter to the European Parliament: https://aeur.eu/f/gg3
Link to the letter to the Council of Europe: https://aeur.eu/f/gg5 (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)