Gendarmerie Clears Crowd in Uzice, Two Detainees Freed

The seventh day of blockades in Serbia found a new center of gravity on Saturday evening, July 11, and it was outside Belgrade. In Uzice, about 350 people moved onto State Road First B No. 23, better known as the Zlatibor highway, and brought traffic to a halt. After warnings and orders, a Gendarmerie unit and rapid-response police pushed the crowd off the roadway and restored the flow of vehicles.

What followed turned a highway incident into the political point of the evening. Two people were detained during the intervention but were released shortly afterward, reportedly so they could receive medical assistance. Citizens then gathered outside the Uzice Police Department to protest the way the crowd had been dispersed, greeting the released men with applause.

Uzice as the evening’s flashpoint

The scene from Uzice overshadowed events in other cities. In Belgrade, participants gathered at Autokomanda, one of the capital’s busiest junctions, at around 8 p.m. Unlike in Uzice, police there let vehicles through the roundabout and prevented any blockade from taking hold. On the Ibar highway, near Sremcica, about 150 people briefly stopped the road toward Barajevo, and traffic was quickly cleared.

In Novi Sad, several intersections were blocked and demonstrators placed rubbish containers on pedestrian crossings. There too, according to accounts from the scene, emergency vehicles and families with children were allowed through. The difference in police conduct from city to city, hard clearing in some places, letting cars through the crush in others, became one of the evening’s main themes and the basis for competing interpretations.

Opposition figures argued that the clearing in Uzice was disproportionate and that it, rather than the blockade itself, raised the tension and drew citizens to the police station. On the other side, the official rationale remained the same as in previous days: keeping state roads open and preventing long jams on the main highway routes.

Why does it matter that the detainees were freed so fast?

The quick release of the two men in Uzice is not merely a humanitarian footnote in the report. It is also a measure of how sensitive each episode of these blockades has become. Holding the detainees overnight would likely have prolonged the gathering outside the police station and turned a local incident into a longer blockade of the institution itself, so the decision to release them reads as an attempt to defuse the situation.

A similar pattern appeared in the courts the same day. Truck driver Milomir Jacimovic was released on bail after a Novi Sad court rejected prosecutors’ request to place him in detention. For part of the public this signals that institutions are keeping a sense of proportion, while others see it as confirmation that some arrests were premature.

What is clear on the seventh day is that the focus has shifted from a single large Belgrade junction to several cities at once, and that every police intervention carries its own political reading. Uzice showed this evening how easily a local blockade can turn into a test of the relationship between the authorities and the street.

Will this pattern, a push followed by a quick release, calm the tensions or carry them into a new week of blockades?