Truck Blocks Student Booth in Kupinovo
In Kupinovo near Pecinci, a truck bearing a ruling party slogan drove toward a student campaign booth and stopped only when a student stepped in front of the cab. A 192 emergency call went unanswered.
A truck carrying a ruling party slogan drove toward a student campaign booth in Kupinovo, in the Pecinci municipality, and stopped only when Jovan Milovac, a student at the Faculty of Technical Sciences, stepped in front of the cab with his arms spread out. It happened on the evening of Wednesday, August 12. The trailer carried the slogan “Serbia Wins,” used by the Serbian Progressive Party. Nobody was hurt.
Footage of the incident was posted on social media. It shows the vehicle moving toward the sidewalk before braking sharply, hard enough to make the cab rock. The truck was then parked right in front of the booth, its trailer blocking the students from the residents they had been talking to.
“When he floored it, he came straight at me like he was going to hit me with the truck. In that moment I was afraid for my own safety and for the safety of my colleagues who were behind me. We didn’t know whether he was going to drive the truck through our booth and through us, or what he was planning to do,” Milovac said.
By his account, the incident unfolded in two stages. The truck first simply stopped in front of the booth, with the driver saying nothing, and the students assumed he had pulled over briefly.
“We’d been talking with residents for about an hour, and then a man in a truck pulled up and parked right in front of our booth. We thought he’d just stopped briefly to run into a store, but after fifteen minutes we saw the ‘Serbia Wins’ sign on the trailer,” the student said.
Once they realized, after fifteen minutes, that the driver was not coming back, the students moved their booth across the street. There, Milovac says, residents gathered around them again. Then the man got into the truck.
Why didn’t a patrol respond?
The students called 192, the emergency number. According to Milovac, nobody picked up several times. They only got through when they called the police station in Pecinci, where they were promised a patrol. No patrol ever arrived at the scene.
“Nobody picked up on 192 the couple of times we called, and only when we called the police station in Pecinci did someone answer and tell us they would send a patrol. But we never saw a patrol arrive. It was getting dark, the man got out of the truck and made a few threats toward us, so for our own safety we decided to pack up the booth and go to the police station in Pecinci to report the case ourselves,” Milovac added.
The three students, then, packed up their own equipment and went to the station themselves to report the incident, after the driver, by their account, had threatened them.
What the local opposition says
Snezana Maksimovic, a councilwoman for the Party of Freedom and Justice in Pecinci, says the absence of a patrol does not surprise her, and that locally it is known who the driver of the truck is.
“The man is from Kupinovo, he’s a close associate of the SNS and, as far as I know, he’s been given some work to do for the municipality. He previously threatened polling monitors who were supposed to be present for the opposition during voting,” Maksimovic said.
No official source, municipal or police, has confirmed that claim so far.
Aleksandar Olenik, deputy chairman of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, described the incident as the result of an atmosphere he says the authorities have been fostering for years.
“This simply shows what kind of panic, what kind of disarray the regime is in, because they’re using methods like this, methods that amount to state terrorism against three students in Pecinci, and it shows the way they think they can stay in power,” Olenik said.
What remains unanswered
The Interior Ministry has not issued a statement on the incident in Kupinovo. It has not said whether any proceedings were opened following the students’ report, nor why a patrol was not dispatched at the time of the call, when the vehicle was still parked in front of the booth.
The Serbian Progressive Party, whose slogan was on the trailer, has not reacted. The driver has not spoken publicly, and his identity has not been officially confirmed.
The report was filed at the police station in Pecinci. What action police have taken on it, if any, is still not known.
