In the tragic series of events that have been rapidly changing in recent months, important signs are emerging that show the intensity of the destruction of society as a result of Aleksandar Vučić's personal power and demands for unquestioning obedience. The physical violence that has flooded the political and social landscape of this country is only the obvious part of the repression. Much more devastating is the one that has occurred deep within – in the people. From that crack, a picture of the moral and human collapse on which such systems rest is gaping. As in Orhan Pamuk's book Cevdet Bey and his sons, the regime is held on to people as slaves, raised to submit, to fear and to be absorbed into the community, on those who have not progressed through personal effort, by opposing, but rather by submitting, coming under the protection of another, by slavery.
"I worked for 30 years in the police, and it's interesting that no one called me from the people I worked with, from ministers, prosecutors, colleagues... Just to ask how my son is. I'm horrified that fear has prevailed over humanity, and if that was the regime's goal, then they achieved their goal," Police General Bogoljub Živković testified to Radar after the brutal attack on his son Petar, a law student, for whose participation in the protests he was also given early retirement.
This time, the intimidation is not only aimed at rebellious citizens, but also at people in the system.
Once, a long time ago, I asked dissident Milovan Đilas what was the hardest thing for him during his time as a political apostate, and he said: “The fact that no one has rung my doorbell for years.” That terrible silence from his former friends and colleagues best describes a system that kills humanity. And the closer its epicenter is, the greater the magnitude of enslavement and servitude. That is why Bogoljub Živković was not called by his former friends. That is why Minister Zlatibor Lončar was not obliged by human and medical ethics to take an interest, at least as a doctor, in the shattered head of student Petar Živković. His role now is to put the new political star Miloš Pavlović in a wheelchair, dramatize his “injuries to the head, chest, and back” and repeat the given qualification about the fascism of the blockade students. The fact that we can find a connection between his past work, the mortgage with which he entered politics, and the fact that he is abusing medical institutions and ethics for the umpteenth time only proves the obviousness of the political cannibalism of the current government. Of course, they don't care about that unfortunate young medical student Miloš Pavlović. Nor about his professional and human destiny and future reputation. They grabbed him as a symbol, as a sledgehammer that they can swing in the media, not caring at all about what the future of the young man who has been pushed into confrontation with colleagues and professors will be. Just as, after all, he was sent into the fire, to the Student City in Pionirski Park, which has become a forbidden city for all other students.
Minister Ivica Dačić is also receiving the same treatment at various levels. The humiliating way in which he is included in a tabloid television program to comment on secret police footage that has been released before him, and then he is reminded of the president's threat to the police that anyone who refuses to make arrests will be dismissed. And then the police, acting on that order, begin mass arrests of students, so that the main client of all the violence is satisfied.
It is obvious that by mass arresting students, the government tried to cover up and prevent reactions in the media due to the surveillance and beheading of the son of a former police general. But this time, the intimidation is not only aimed at the rebellious citizens, but also at people from the system. Because they know that despite their heads down, perhaps in the police, there is a smoldering resistance. There are signs. And that pelcer was planted by the students in the rebellion.
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