Procession Through the Cordon

In the early morning of January 27, over 100,000 Belgraders were on the streets again. That day, just before 4:00 am, the police cordon that stood in front of protesting students for seven days or 178 hours withdrew, leaving the students with their seventh victory against the police. And they were off for their walk again in a relatively small column that grew by the minute.

An opportunity to end that exhausting student act of symbolic self-sacrifice for civil rights formally came from Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle who asked the authorities for permission to take a religious procession through the streets on St. Sava day, the patron saint of schools in Serbia. There usually is no procession on St. Sava day in Belgrade and the gesture was actually a strong political message from the Serbian Orthodox Church and it came after Church elders said they would stand on the side of the people if there was any violence; after the Church Holy Synod issued its statement in December; after the Patriarch’s Christmas message. It was a vast, silent procession with only the sound of psalms and church bells breaking the silence of the sunny winter morning.

The Patriarch spoke to address the students, stressing their "caring for the truth, justice and respect of human dignity and their democratic expression of human will". The Church won’t have another opportunity up to Easter to send a message this powerful; we don't know about the special messages.

The tools the Serbian church has are only indirect, it does not control any Demo Christian party and has no instruments of direct political action.

Reasons for direct Church involvement in politics are rare but they usually follow mass movements and they follow and speed up the main course of popular sentiment,

In 1989, the Church joined what was called "the happening of the people" by carrying the remains of medieval Serbian King Lazar to areas outside Serbia populated by Serbs; in March 1991 Patriarch Pavle was first misunderstood and then applauded for his efforts to avoid a conflict between the rebelling children in Belgrade’s Terazije Square and their parents gathered at the pro-regime rally in New Belgrade; in 1992, the Church issued a sharply-worded statement to take an anti-regime and anti-Communist stand which did not have a decisive effect on political processes at the time and it tried in vain to unite opposition leaders in the spirit of the prevailing doctrine of uniting the Serbs at the time; in 1995, the Church organized a number of small gatherings with daily tolling of church bells to mark the exodus of the Krajina Serbs. Since then there has been virtually no strong political stand from the Church.

The regime disregarded its symbolic opportunity on St. Sava day (the saint is also known for making peace between two feuding brothers) and did not decide to permanently withdraw the police from the streets as a strong gesture towards an understanding. Instead, that same afternoon, the regime showed who had the naked power and re-deployed police cordons on Terazije Square. That was another fruitless effort to limit and break up the two-month old civil rebellion against policies personified by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Caught up in what is called the dictator’s horrifying fear, the president does not seem to see the extent of events and is using strong doses of propaganda defined by his wife to try to prove that this is all the work of some international plot.

Rumors circulate about him and they’re being printed almost as if he were Roman Emperor Caligula which is probably normal in times like these. The rumors say he is sick and saying he’s had enough, or that he’s healthy, drinking only whiskey and not talking to anyone, that he thinks what his wife writes, that he believes mercenaries are plotting against him, that he won’t give up power, that he hit someone or just threw him out, that he is being misinformed or really well informed, that he has special video reports made on the demonstrations, that he’s preparing to escape to Greece, that he’s going to be the Yugoslav president and distance himself from everything.

The opposition is making noise, marching and waiting. In Smederevska Palanka it decided to constitute parallel local authorities to protest the fact that the Socialists constituted the local assembly with "their majority". In Belgrade, the time of the daily protests has been moved to the evenings and the "Get a Rhythm So They’ll Get Lost" action is turning into a series of marches by several columns from all over town into central Belgrade.

On Wednesday, January 29, the students organized "a public exercise of organized movement through a populated area" and blocked all of central Belgrade in the middle of the day.

On Sunday, January 26, there were incidents and police beatings during the evening protest and cars were driven into the crowd but on Tuesday night things were much calmer. Columns of demonstrators from Vracar, Slavija, New Belgrade and other parts of the city reached Republic Square.