Issue 277 - January 25, 1997

The authorities are trying to buy time and exhaust the protest, the civil rebellion is spreading to all classes and to many parts of town

Bojan Radun claims that the student protest has influenced the relations between the students and professors which are much clearer now. "It is now plainly evident who is who, since the professors who really care about their schools are here with us, while those others are at home and are preparing to hear the prime-time state TV newscast"

"There have been thefts at the elections in Serbia"

"I would say that the demonstrators are applying a wise, effective and original method of exhausting the police and putting genuine pressure on them"

The attempt to assassinate Pristina University's rector, Radivoje Papovic, and the murder of Zenun Durmishi are the latest outbreaks of armed violence in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Durmishi is the fourth victim this year, while Papovic is recovering after a car-bomb planted in a vehicle he drove past went off, wounding his driver too

The series of murders and terrorist attacks which marked the beginning of the new year in Kosovo (four murders in January only) was "crowned" by the assassination attempt of Radovan Papovic, rector of the University in Pristina and the representative of the SPS in the Serbian Assembly, and by the big protest organized in front of the School of Philology in Pristina in response

"Establishing a branch of an Italian, Austrian or German bank in Belgrade’s main street would mean more for returning the confidence of the citizens in our system than the bunch of laws, treatises and speeches."

Professor Nikola Koljevic, former vice-president of the Serbian Republic (RS), shot himself in the head with a gun on January 16. Doctors at the Belgrade Army-Medical Academy (VMA) are still fighting for his life

Did Serbia face a state of emergency last December 24? Was the counter-rally organized to hide a kind of coup d’etat by the worst of the hard-liners in the regime? A large part of the public thought that and Belgrade Mayor Nebojsa Covic, after being thrown out of the SPS, seemed to give those suspicions credibility. He told Dnevni Telegraf daily on January 18 of some new details which show that the usual political routine was bypassed. A VREME source close to the police and their analysts responded in detail to Covic’s remarks