The Blue Cordon Disco

They keep showing the police cordon a banner that says Flash Gordon Will Come to Break Through Your Cordon.

Between them and the police cordon we’ve seen cordons of judges, journalists, university professors, lawyers, doctors, taxi drivers, architects even former police officers. Twenty five actors walked from Belgrade’s Atelje 212 theater stopping traffic on January 21 to get to the student protest in Kolarceva street. On January 20, teachers completed their own protest and joined the students. Coming to their Disco at the Blue Cordon is a question of style, honor and custom in Belgrade but people come there to defend their professional honor, show who’s who and also demonstrate a rebellion of entire professions or personal courage. Much of the "in crowd" are there as well to get their pictures taken and go to some other place to have fun leaving the students in the rain and cold. There’s also a large number of people who come there to clear their guilty conscience.

The game is not as merry as it seems. On Monday morning, just after 5:00, at a moment when the January night was giving way to daytime, when the "in crowd" left, when the street lights had gone out, while the first buses were starting on their routes, Ceda Jovanovic, a thin young man with bags under his eyes, climbed upon the improvised stage in Kolarceva street and recited some dangerous verse on life and death from a song by Gavrilo Princip (the man who killed Archduke Ferdinand and triggered W.W.I). He stood up calmly looking straight at the police cordon and shook his head as if to say no, as if he was saying: don’t count, there’s enough of us and the way forward is only through the cordon.

The students then started their morning dance, several young men did pushups and one girl kneeled down on the street, shaking with exhaustion and the morning cold. In some ways that dance is a dance for life. A kind-looking woman walked among them with food and drink in her hands as many other people have and crying so hard she didn’t see me before she bumped into me as I stood there touched by the entire scene. The students aren’t pathetic at all and they make jokes about the whole thing. On Monday evening, as rain fell, they played volleyball wearing waterpolo caps. One girl danced for hours, a young man continued where she left off although he had fainted twice already.

There was also too much fancy writing by reporters and too much parading with humility to win over the police and see them smiling under their helmets. Some of the police smile sometimes, others try to justify themselves, still other beat people up regardless of age or sex as they did on Monday on Terazije square and other places in Belgrade to stop the rebellion from spreading outside the center of the city. On Tuesday, Vuk Draskovic spoke at the Zajedno rally, saying "thank you for the smiles" and sending the police a message to think twice about senseless orders. A day earlier Draskovic voiced admiration for Belgrade’s students and called his supporters to spend at least one shift between the students and police. The crowd in Republic Square moved to join the students in Kolarceva and for a brief moment a red canvas was spread in front of the police but it came down quickly. The students lowered their protest banners to let the Zajedno leaders know that this is something they’re doing on their own. The opposition leaders accepted that and pulled back. The next day Draskovic called Belgraders to go help the students with their presence and whatever else they can and the coalition finally acknowledged their right to play their own game.

Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Pavle blessed the students on Monday when he came to see them: "You are expressing your feelings of truth and justice and democratic respect for the freely expressed will of the people in a peacefully way, worthy of both yourselves and our ancestors because you are not here for one side or the other, against one side or another, but for what was always sacred to our people and our church."

The rebellion which the regime hopes will die out is taking new forms.

While the police cordons have been guarding empty Terazije square for days, some 100,000 perhaps even more people are protesting and blocking vital roads every evening across Belgrade.

A game of hide and seek has been underway for days in various parts of Belgrade with the police trying to prevent people from all parts of town from getting to the students. One group from New Belgrade walked down a number of streets trying to get across the bridges into central Belgrade before they climbed on trams and got to the railway station before walking up to Kolarceva street.

State propaganda and the public appearances of several figures in the authorities show their growing paranoia. Graffiti in central Belgrade was changed from Dedinje (the suburb Slobodan Milosevic lives in) to Deadinje. The events that are changing Serbia are being portrayed by the state media as the actions of the fifth column. Someone in the state propaganda machine said the whole thing had been planned in some center and been code named Brainstorm, then the signs of the storm were seen in Bulgaria, then former state security officers (now state media commentators) began searching for foreign spies among the opposition and they even wrote about foreign spies in their own ranks. Mira Markovic, JUL directorate chairman, went the furthest when she wrote that the power cuts just before the new year were "sabotage by political avengers over the election results which they didn’t like". This was denied on January 20 by Serbian power company (EPS) deputy chief Bogdan Djurdjevic who said the power cuts on December 31 last year "had nothing to do with parties" but were imposed when electricity consumption reached critical levels. It seems funny but someone was questioned by the police about those blackouts.

Everyone is wondering what President Milosevic is doing while his entourage is taking counter-productive steps which are undermining his authority. His case seems like a bad joke.

Last week he sent signals that he was relenting but changed his mind.

The mess in Nis was resolved finally in favor of the opposition. The Belgrade election commission (GIK) declared 45 rulings by a district court void on January 14. Serbian deputy Prime Minister Ratko Markovic spoke out against the GIK decision and called for its annulment. The Serbian Socialist Party (SPS) and Serbian Radical party (SRS) lodged appeals at the last moment. Seselj bragged that the socialists wanted to be late but that he prevented that with his appeal. Dragoljub Jankovic, president of Belgrade’s first district court asked the Supreme Court to hand the election case over to some other court but did not explain why a suit filed by Zajedno had been ignored. The GIK then asked for the Supreme Court president and his deputies, the president of the Belgrade district court and his deputies and the First District Court in Belgrade to be exempted from a ruling on its decision.

SPS spokesman Ivica Dacic played it cool a day earlier when he told BK TV that the SPS will accept any court ruling. The Serbian government issued a statement claiming that the justice ministry had found no wrongdoing in some of the municipalities where the OSCE fact-finding mission reported election fraud. The government did not mention court rulings and did not say what was done against the people who obviously broke the law during the elections. The government backed its justice ministry which the president formally asked to investigate election irregularities and accepted a report by the justice minister who Djindjic accused of involvement in the election fraud. That government also includes minister Branislav Ivkovic who Belgrade Mayor Nebojsa Covic accused of election fraud.

The government promised to accept the election will of the people in "system institutions" and then went on to clean up the mess in its own way. It is doing nothing to investigate the violence in Belgrade nor is it saying anything about the plain clothes police thugs who beat people up or about the investigation into the death of Predrag Starcevic. On the contrary, there are signs it is hiding things. The police college (where the government must have some influence) fired professor Branislav Aleksandric because he revealed that Starcevic died of inflicted injuries not a heart attack. Those decisions are naturally causing new public reactions.

In one of his speeches on Republic Square and in an interview to the BBC’s Serbian language service on Tuesday, January 21, Draskovic called for the arrest of the JUL directorate accusing them of preparing a civil war in Serbia. An Italian daily quoted his words on the ruling elite in Serbia for a headline: Una Banda Di Quatro (gang of four). For its part, JUL is accusing everyone of being the fifth column which is "abusing the displeasure of the people".