March 15, 2025; Belgrade, Serbia
At exactly 19:00, for the first time in my life, I stood among more than half a million people, at the largest civilian protest in modern Serbian history, experiencing a complete silence that rippled across Belgrade. We felt an acute sense of the mass, extending beyond the city centre, stretching across the bridges to New Belgrade and Zemun. The silence was meant to last 15 minutes, honoring 15 victims of the corrupt autocratic regime that has been ruling Serbia since 2012. What struck me most was how the silence spread, from the center to the peripheries, through individuals—spontaneous volunteers—who carried the word outward. This counterintuitive feeling of silence spreading unfolded as a profoundly transformative experience.
Earlier that day, Belgrade had been anything but silent. Even the night before, the arrival of students who had marched from across Serbia had been met with deafening cheers. Whistles, chants, songs, the motivational slogan “Puuuumpaaaaaj!”(2), vuvuzelas, instructions from protest stewards, loudspeakers blasting from windows, and the occasional rhythmic pounding of rain, all contributed to the release of long-suppressed voices. This silent ritual had been performed many times during the protests since the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad on November 1, 2024—a disaster caused by a negligent government renovation project. In the months following, students led blockades, inspiring teachers and lawyers to go on strike, farmers to join on their tractors, and citizens to engage in their protests and boycotts.
The student uprising took many by surprise. For years, opposition parties, NGOs, and environmental activists had struggled to mobilize large-scale resistance against Aleksandar Vučić’s regime. Ruling Serbia since 2012, Vučić established a system of concentrated power by dismantling institutions and employing authoritarian tactics. A “former” nationalist, member of the far-right Radical Party, and Minister of Information under Milošević, he rebranded himself as a pro-European reformer to win Western support—while at the same time consolidating control over the media, judiciary, and security services; exploiting state resources, suppressing political opposition and civil society; and eroding parliamentary and electoral integrity. Foreign support, mainly driven by neo-colonial interests—especially related to the exploitation of lithium and other natural resources—has made the struggle against this pseudo-democratic, deeply corrupt regime a Sisyphean task.
The students, unburdened by apathy, petrified understandings of social organization, or political baggage, who ignited a movement of unprecedented scale. They began by blocking universities, relying on their autonomy and the widespread support of their professors. Following the principles of direct democracy, they make their decisions through student plenums closed to the public. What started as an anarchist echo of the Paris Commune’s principles revealed a new generation of thinkers equipped for contemporary models of resistance. Since its beginning, the movement grew exponentially, like the silence that day, radiating from the center to the peripheries: political, class-based, and geographic. Critics labelled it a utopian Gandhian experiment. Yet, as students marched toward cities such as Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Niš, reaching forgotten villages and towns along their way, they walked their talk, connecting with those disconnected from social media and independent news sources.
The rejection of personality cults further distinguishes this movement. It has no leader—the representative speakers constantly change, maintaining a visible gender balance. More importantly, they strategically strip the president, an autocrat who monopolized public discourse, of his voice. When he called for negotiations, the students refused the offer, having no interest in addressing the Nominal Institution of Limited, Largely Ceremonial Jurisdiction. Instead, they demand accountability from the state institutions that had remained silent.
The regime responded with diverse forms of repression: smear campaigns, intimidation, and physical violence. Thugs drove vehicles into crowds, running over students and citizens in the streets. Demonstrators braced accordingly for provocations and performative clashes intended to justify further repression. But what was not anticipated was the attack on the silence.
Fig.1
In the 11th minute of silence, that is, on March 15th, 2025, at 19:11, an LADR—a military-grade acoustic weapon—informally known as a “sound cannon” disrupted the crowd, causing panic, trauma, and a stampede. It was a psychological as well as a physical assault aimed at turning a nonviolent protest into chaos, one that would put an end to the blockades. Nevertheless, the collective body resisted the urge to escalate panic and regained its autonomy.
Just as the sound cannon generated waves of silent state terrorism, so did the mass silence amplify the fundamental strength of unity in large numbers. Silence, so often wielded by authoritarian regimes to suppress, had been reappropriated and turned into a revolutionary tool. As such, it was seen not only as a vulnerable point of the protest but also as the state’s most valuable target. The silent attack disrupted the program for that evening, but it also set off an even louder uprising. And for the first time, because of the nature of the attack on our silence, the international media took notice.
“The blockades will end when we say so, and only when our demands are met,” exclaimed the students. This statement reinforced the continuous rejection of a singular violent revolution, advocating instead for a long-term process of deeper systemic change.
In her book Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World (3), Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran speaks of radical political love—a love not of hippie-style optimism, but of urgent necessity—a love for those who come from different sides of the political spectrum. Here, such a love was made tangible: in food and donations for students and strikers, in the unprecedented solidarity across political and class lines, in the collective refusal to engage in violence despite provocations. And, particularly, in the mass silence.
On March 21st, a sixteenth victim died after months of battling for life in the hospital. The silence grew longer; the noise that followed was louder. After March 15, Serbia saw an explosion of decentralized self-governance. Citizens, following the students’ direct democracy model, formed local assemblies. Spontaneous actions increased: regime accomplices found themselves pelted with eggs; media strongholds were boycotted and blockaded. The power of this movement lies not in centralized control, but in its capacity for fragmentation and persistence.
As protests spread across the country and across the region—from Romania to North Macedonia, from Greece to Turkey—our hope is not for more countries to suffer in silence, but to join in their reappropriation. To make the noise that spreads in its wake exponentially louder.
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- Footnotes
(1) Silence!
(2) Pump it up!
(3) Temelkuran, E.. Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World (Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021).
Images
Photo illustration: Uroš Pajović. Source photographs: Marija Pavlović; Public Work.
