Police clash with anti-government protesters in Serbia over student expulsion
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Protesters clashed with police on Tuesday in a southwestern Serbian town following the reported forced expulsion of a group of students from a faculty building where they had been camping for months as part of nationwide anti-government demonstrations.
Hundreds of protesters in Novi Pazar chanted slogans against Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic and demanded that the students be allowed to return to the building.
Protesters threw bottles at police who responded with batons. Police said in a statement they were attacked and acted with restraint while preserving public peace. Officers later withdrew as the students chanted “victory.”
On Tuesday evening, protests were held in several cities and towns in support of the Novi Pazar students. In nearby Kraljevo, demonstrators outside the ruling Serbian Progressive Party were sprayed from a water hose while pelting the building with eggs and bottles. Police in the northern city of Novi Sad pushed protesters away from the ruling party’s offices there.
In the Novi Pazar violence, anti-government activists alleged that the unidentified men who broke into the state university building between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Tuesday, with faculty officials, were members of a private security company in Kraljevo.
Videos of the alleged break in were posted on social media. Parliament Speaker Ana Brnabic said the intervention was requested by the faculty management.
Political tensions are sensitive for Novi Pazar, a multi-ethnic town some 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the capital of Belgrade. There is a divide between Bosniak Muslims, who make up the majority of the population, and Serbs, which stems from ethnic wars in the 1990s triggered by the breakup of former Yugoslavia.
Last November, student-led demonstrations first erupted in Serbia after the collapse of a concrete canopy at a renovated train station killed 16 people. Many blamed the tragedy on alleged widespread corruption in state-run infrastructure projects.
Vucic has stepped up pressure on universities to curb the protests challenging his increasingly authoritarian rule.
Most faculties in Serbia have restarted lectures and exams in recent weeks to avoid a study backlog but street protests persist, with protesters demanding snap parliamentary elections.
A large student-led gathering in Novi Pazar in April was seen as an important step toward bridging the ethnic divide there.
