Serbia has banished the monsters from Belgrade – it was, and still is, a truly wonderful revolution
The Guardian · Barbi Marković ·
The Student List has shown my generation, who protested against the Milošević regime in the 1990s, how we should have done it, says Serbian writer Barbi Marković
On Halloween, a few days after a student-led movement swept aside an illiberal, seemingly invincible regime in my native Serbia, I was sitting on the Vienna tram and watched various friendly and malicious monsters getting on and off around me. Witches, devils and unicorns were politely making their way to their respective parties.
Not all monsters wear fancy dress. Later that evening, I walked past a Serbian restaurant; in front of it stood a group of grumpy-looking men. They were smoking, spitting and swearing. I recognised the hardened, couldn’t-care-less attitude, the smell of corruption, the penchant for violence. Yet they looked as though their lives were coming to an end. These men are the losers of the revolution that is taking place in Serbia. Their smuggling routes and deals are under threat. Their criminal networks no longer function.
There are other bogeymen that have lost the power to terrify. The slimy neoliberal aliens that grouped around their great leader, Aleksandar Vučić, our own version of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in David Lynch’s Dune. The poor and desolate creatures known in Belgrade as sendvičari, or “sandwich people”, because they would allow the government to recruit them for political rallies in exchange for a sandwich.
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