The anti-corruption "rebellion" in Serbia will go on despite the regime's spin or violence, one fearless student has said.
"It won't be an easy fight, or a short one", said Milica Mudrić, a 22-year-old PR and marketing student at the Faculty of Philosophy, a university in the Serbian city of Novi Sad.
Over 200,000 people gathered in the rural town of Niš, in southern Serbia, on Saturday (1 March) to keep pressing for transparency and accountability over the collapse of a railway station roof in Novi Sad on 1 November, which killed 15 people.
Some groups of students had walked 130km in freezing weather to be in Niš, backed by gifts of food and shelter by local communities along the way.
The protesters stood in a 15-minute silence in memory of victims at 11.52AM (the time of the roof tragedy), bringing central Niš to a halt.
It was just the latest in a series of rolling, student-led protests that began four months ago and which include an ongoing blockade of all of Serbia's university campuses.
And for Mudrić, one of the students who helped to begin the anti-establishment pushback, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić’s handling of events so far was missing the point.
The roof collapse was "the drop that ran over the glass" for the whole of Serbian society, said Mudrić.
"That [roof] canopy collapsing was a direct consequence of the deep-rooted corruption in Serbia — that’s the bottom line and that’s what everyone is aware of," she told EUobserver in an interview.
The tragedy was "something we just couldn’t swallow, but they [the Serbian state] wanted us to do exactly that", she said.
"People were shocked, hurt, and angry and wanted some answers, as I think everyone has a right to know what happened, whose fault it was, and how would it be handled," she added.
"It’s a big movement that just came from people’s desire for answers, ordinary people, who just want this to be a better country one day and for the institutions to work as they should," she said.
The movement's logo became the image of a red hand, which you can see "everywhere round here" on walls in Novi Sad, Mudrić said.
"It means 'the blood is on your hands' and since then, the red hand has become the symbol of this rebellion, if that’s what I should call it," she said.
The government reaction so far has been to charge 13 people with the Novi Sad disaster and for Serbia’s prime minister, Miloš Vučević, to step down in an effort to appease discontent.
But that falls far short of the root-and-branch reform of public institutions that people have been calling for as a result.
"Our strength comes from our honesty and our transparency," Mudrić said
"We have five requirements [for accountability and reform] and then every university has its own. Some are intertwined, some are similar," Mudrić noted.
Vučić has also accused activists of being managed by Western intelligence services to destabilise his Kremlin-friendly administration.
"There will be no colour revolution [in Serbia]," Vučić said on Saturday, referring to the wave of non-violent protests which toppled corrupt and authoritarian regimes in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine, as well as Serbia, some 20 years ago.
And protesters, as well as independent journalists who try to cover events, have faced dozens of minor acts of violence by police and by pro-Vučić hardliners, as well as more serious attacks.
In one incident in Belgrade on 15 January, a driver hospitalised a 20-year-old student at a rally by ramming her with his car.
"He [the driver] hit this girl really hard - she ended up on the roof of his vehicle and then slid down onto the road — and he didn't even stop," said Mudrić.
"She had severe trauma and was in emergency care in Belgrade hospital, but she's doing OK now, she's not in a life-threatening condition," Mudrić added.
Many other students who speak to media prefer to be identified only by their first names for fear of reprisals, such as interrogations by Serbia’s security services.
But Mudrić said she was happy for EUobserver to publish her name and photo because of the level of solidarity among her fellow students and in wider Serbian society.
"It took a lot of nerves and bravery to start something," she said, speaking of the first student rallies four months ago.
"Some people got really scared by that [the car-ramming incident], but at the end of the day, we have each other and we know if anything happens to any of us we will be there for each other," she added.
"Our strength comes from our honesty and our transparency," Mudrić said.
And the level of support among the broader Serbian public indicates that she might just be correct about the pull-factor of their simple values.
"People are bringing us food, other supplies," she said, speaking of her Novi Sad university campus.
"They are there for us for mental health check-ups, doctors' appointments. People are here for us from different professions — attorneys, professors, school-teachers, pensioners, everyone is involved in the story that has started and we are hoping for the best," she added.
"I am grateful to anyone who gives support, because in these hard times people should stick together," she added, when asked if she hoped that EU institutions and leaders would voice solidarity with their cause.
And Vučić's talk about colour revolutions was missing the point, because the protesters weren't looking for geopolitical regime change, so much as for basic decency in public life, Mudrić said.
"We’ve only reached out to institutions to do their job. The way he [Vučić] is portraying this, as if it was a personal attack against him, or something against him, is just spinning the narrative around," she said.
"It is something very new," also said Vesna Pešić, an 84-year-old Serbian ex-politician and academic.
"It went like the wind all around Serbia, gathering masses of people, even high school children, who want Serbian institutions to answer who is guilty and what kind of corruption stands behind the railway-roof collapse," she said.
Pešić herself took part in the so-called Bulldozer Revolution 25 years ago, which peacefully toppled the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević.
She has also continued to speak out against Serbia’s anti-democratic backsliding and corruption in the past two and a half decades, alongside the country’s new generation.
And amid Vučić’s widely-documented and growing authoritarianism, Pešić paid tribute to young activists such as Mudrić and her colleagues for showing wider Serbia a more positive political model.
"It's a conflict between the state and all of society ... a society represented by decentralised students who blockaded their faculties, sleep there, live together, and decide everything democratically," Pešić also said.
Speaking of how students were organising themselves at Novi Sad university, Mudrić said: "It’s literal democracy in real time, voting, listening to each other, speaking with each other, saying what we’re going to do next".
And all that meant the blockaded campuses had now become a "scared space" for fundamental European values in Serbia, Pešić said.
Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.
Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.