5th President of Georgia Salome Zurabishvili responded yesterday’s rally held in Serbia, claiming that the protests in Serbia and Georgia are both a fight for freedom.
“Protests in Georgia and Serbia are one and the same fight for freedom, independence, democracy and against Russian domination”, she tweeted.
Tens of thousands of protesters led by university students held a noisy rally Friday outside Serbia’s state television headquarters in Belgrade to protest what they called the broadcaster’s pro-government bias.
The rally came a day after one student was seriously injured when a driver rammed his car into a protesting crowd.
The demonstration, one of the biggest in years against alleged pro-government bias by the RTS television station, is part of wider protests that erupted after the fall of a concrete canopy in the northern city of Novi Sad last November, killing 15 people.
Blowing whistles, booing and jeering, the protesters said they are angry that state television is reporting President Aleksandar Vucic’s accusations that the students were paid by foreign secret services with an intention to overthrow him and his populist government by force.
The protesters went silent for 15 minutes in memory of each of the rail station canopy collapse victims. They also chanted demands for a general strike throughout the Balkan country.
Many in Serbia blame the deadly collapse on rampant corruption in the country that led to sloppy renovation work on the station building in Novi Sad — part of a wider deal with Chinese state companies involved in a number of infrastructure projects in the Balkan country.
