(12 Apr 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Novi Pazar, Serbia – 12 April 2025
1. People waiting for students to arrive
2. Various of students lifting their bikes up
3. Students on bikes arriving
4. SOUNDBITE ( Serbian), Jovan Saric, student:
"I don’t believe we will stop the blockades until our requests are fulfilled. We will see what the the situation will be like. There is a lot of pressure on professors and universities, but we will see.”
6. Students arriving
7. Various students hugging each other, celebrating
8. Student crying
9. Students hugging, showing diplomas
10. SOUNDBITE (Serbian), Una -Teodora Zecevic, student:
"Yes, it was difficult (to walk) but we encouraged each other which is the most important, that’s why I continued to walk.”
11. Various people jumping, singing
12. SOUNDBITE ( Serbian), Rifet Rifativic, local resident:
”I wish I were a student right now. If I ever had a chance to regret not being a student, it would be this moment, because being a student now is an absolute privilege and because what students are doing hasn’t happened in 40 years and they are obviously showing us how much smarter they are than all of us who are older than them.”
13. People chanting
STORYLINE:
On Friday evening, protesting university students behind monthslong anti-corruption demonstrations started gathering for their rally on Saturday in the predominantly Bosniak Muslim southwestern town of Novi Pazar.
University students have been a key force in the nationwide movement triggered by a rail station canopy collapse that killed 16 people in the north of the country on Nov. 1 and which many blamed on rampant government graft.
Hundreds of students arrived to a cheerful welcome in Novi Pazar after walking or cycling for days, bridging an ethnic divide stemming from the wars in the 1990s that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslav federation.
Earlier today, chanting patriotic songs, thousands of supporters of Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic gathered in downtown Belgrade, a day ahead of what authorities expect to be a huge rally in his support.
The president and his allies have claimed that unidentified Western intelligence services were behind the student-led protests with the aim to unseat him from power by staging a so-called “color revolution.”
He has offered no evidence for such claims.
Authorities have threatened legal action against university students and professors, journalists reporting from the protests and even state prosecutors who refuse to trigger court proceedings.
Vucic is a former extreme nationalist who now says he wants Serbia to join the European Union but has faced accusations of stifling democratic freedoms while maintaining close relations with Russia and China.
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