Students in Serbia Have Done More Than Merely Block Their Universities

Students in Serbia have done more than merely block their universities. For the first time in thirty years, they have lifted the stone beneath which, now fully exposed to public view, a horde of scorpions and reptiles has slithered forth — each one now unmistakably revealed for what it truly is, unable to convincingly deny its nature any longer. Even their much-criticized political neutrality — often dismissed as a harmful stance — cannot be considered a flaw when viewed through the lens of what is genuinely demanded from a true political alternative. After all, what guarantee is there that a new government would behave any differently than Vučić’s regime? Would it, too, have its own cadre of corrupt beneficiaries who, sooner or later, would bring about the collapse of yet another train station? How would it position itself toward the multinational mining giants who remain unyielding in their ambition to turn Serbia — and Bosnia and Herzegovina along with it — into a lithium wasteland? What stance would it take on Kosovo, and toward the remnants of the Serbian people still living there? And what kind of policy would it pursue with regard to Serbia’s kin in historical suffering across the globe — the Palestinians, the Syrian Christians and Druze, the Houthi in Yemen?

At a historical moment when the European Union designates lithium mining in the Jadar region as a strategic project, when the Trump administration is testing the waters for turning Serbia and neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina into dumping grounds for hundreds of thousands of unwanted migrants from the United States, and when the propaganda puppet occupying the role of president is desperately clinging to power by falsely claiming that Serbia is the only European country supplying arms to Israel — a state that has recognized Kosovo’s independence — even as ethnic cleansing and genocide unfold in Gaza, it becomes clear that student neutrality is not a sign of naïveté, but rather of sheer astonishment at the weight of the historical burden of hypocrisy and evil now laid at their generation’s feet.

It is unnecessary to once again explain the implications of the lithium mines in Jadar and Lopare, just as it is redundant to point out that accepting America’s unwanted migrants would not be a humanitarian gesture, but rather a new chapter in an imperial policy of mass deportation in service of corporate agendas — a policy currently playing out in Gaza, and one that could all too easily be replicated tomorrow in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. In such a scenario, anyone who resists economic coercion could find themselves at risk of being simply deported to another country, where their existence wouldn’t stand in the way of someone else’s prosperity.

In this light, the student uprising that is, from the ground up, reconciling Balkan Christians and Muslims — more specifically, Serbs and Bosniaks — is not merely a manifestation of youthful idealism, but perhaps one of the wisest and most noble acts in our modern history. For it is not just a message of mutual respect expressed through the offering of halal and Lenten meals — it is, without any exaggeration, a matter of physical survival.

Likewise, all those politicians and religious leaders who have rushed to proclaim the “naturalness” of hatred in the wake of these events — who hasten to remind us who “they” are, what “they” did to “us,” and how various butchers and marauders from the past are actually our national heroes — are not merely corrupt, foolish, or evil. Whether out of pathological ignorance or, more consciously, out of demonic greed and selfishness, they are diligently working to erase every trace of anti-colonial political resistance in the Balkans.

his is precisely why the student uprising is not merely a rebellion — it is a cry of memory, of resistance, and of refusal to live according to someone else’s scripts and projections. Their seemingly “neutral” stance is, at its core, a radical rejection of all the lies being offered — both from those in power and those eager to replace them without changing a single thing. It is a refusal to accept that the region’s fate is predetermined, that there is no room for a voice that seeks not privilege and numbing conformity, but truth. In that silence, in those written slogans, in that refusal to participate in the rotten division between “us” and “them,” lies a premonition of something far greater than day-to-day politics — the possibility that the Balkans might finally speak in its own voice, and not someone else’s.

A voice that Aleksandar Vučić, no less, had the audacity to brand as Nazi.

How did he do it? The event in question perhaps most vividly epitomizes the culmination of the societal breakdown in Serbia during the 1990s. Miloš Pavlović, the leader of a group of regime-loyal students who call themselves “students who want to study”—most of whom are party loyalists of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party and petty criminals—was splashed with beer in a tavern. In response, President Vučić orchestrated a full-blown media spectacle: Pavlović was taken to a hospital, and shortly thereafter, he addressed the nation from a wheelchair, claiming he had been attacked by “Nazis.”

Here, it is worth quoting the long-forgotten hero of decolonization, Aimé Césaire, from his Discourse on Colonialism (1950):

“And now it is my turn to speak. I make this statement: colonization = thingification.
I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ about diseases cured, about raised standards of living.  But I talk about societies emptied from within, about cultures trampled underfoot as if by military boots, about institutions systematically destroyed, about lands confiscated, religions smashed to pieces, magnificent artistic creations wiped out as if they had never existed, about extraordinary human potentials reduced to ashes in the dust and smoke of history.”

If this generation remains steadfast — if, despite all pressures, it preserves the moral clarity and courage to reject both divisions and the lure of power — then those who now stand at the front lines of the blockades will not be remembered as “children who didn’t know what they wanted,” but as those who knew what must never be allowed to happen again. History may not honor them immediately, but it will have the final word. And it will say: it began with them.

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