Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Belgrade on Thursday to demonstrate outside Serbia’s state television headquarters.
The demonstration was led by university students angry that RTS television is carrying President Aleksandar Vucic’s accusations that demonstrators were paid by the West to protest.
Classes at more than 40 university faculties throughout Serbia have been suspended for days.
Booing and hollering, the protesters brought sacks allegedly holding bundles of money in front of the downtown RTS station in the country’s capital, Belgrade.
The station has been accused of spreading the nationalist pro-government narrative for years.
The protest is part of broader demonstrations that erupted in the wake of the collapse of a concrete canopy in the northern city of Novi Sad last month, which resulted in the deaths of 15 people.
Many in the Balkan nation blame the collapse on rife corruption that has led to sloppy renovation work on the station building in Novi Sad.
That renovation is part of a wider deal with Chinese-backed companies involved in numerous infrastructure projects across the country.
The canopy collapse became a flash point for broader dissatisfaction with what is seen by some as Vucic’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
Almost daily protests have gone on since Nov. 1 in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and other cities, occasionally erupting into violence.
Vucic announced at a news conference on Wednesday evening that documentation regarding the renovation of the Novi Sad railway building would be made public, as per the students’ requests.
Prosecutors have launched an investigation and arrested 13 people in relation to the collapse, but a government minister has been released, fueling speculation that the government is pressuring both the police and the judiciary.
On Wednesday, as the president spoke, hundreds of students also blew whistles and horns outside his official residence in Belgrade, which could be heard in the live television coverage of his speech.
The students on Thursday said they also want the people who attacked protesters arrested.
“We came to give back the money,” one of the students told the crowd as they symbolically left improvised money bags outside the television building.
“You can hand them [bags] to the president and tell him that we want a public apology.”
Vucic has faced other anti-government rallies since he first came to power as deputy prime minister in 2012, but this is the first time he has conceded to protesters’ demands.
“Everything we have and what the prosecutor’s office has ... will be made available to the public tomorrow,” Vucic said.
He said those arrested during protests had been released and pledged to pardon all who could be convicted at subsequent trials.
“For these people who hear this noise, it’s the noise of somewhere around 600 of them ... I respect and appreciate them immensely,” Vucic said in the live TV broadcast.
Irina Sekulic, a student activist, said the daily protests will continue until authorities catch the people who often clashed with students at the rallies.
“We will not back down,” she said.
Savo Manojlovic, leader of the Kreni-Promeni (Move-Change) opposition movement, criticized Vucic’s handling of the documents relating to the disaster.
“What a disgrace, [that] the documentation ... is not with prosecutors but with the President. This is the collapse of the state,” he wrote on X.
