Students to Hold Protest in Backa Palanka Tonight

Students in blockade have called on citizens to join a protest in Backa Palanka tonight, Sunday, August 16, a year after the attacks on people gathered in the town. The rally, announced under the name “Serbia or Mafia?”, begins at 7 p.m. at the intersection of Kralja Petra Prvog and Svetozara Miletica streets.

The program is planned down to the minute. At 7:15 p.m., a moment of silence lasting 16 plus one minutes is scheduled, after which the protest march sets off through the town. Arrival at the main square and the start of the central part of the program are set for 8:30 p.m. The Novi Sad informal cycling group “Iron Cavalry” has also announced it will join, gathering in front of the Futoska Market at 3 p.m. and riding from there by bicycle to Backa Palanka.

What happened on August 11 and 12 last year

The occasion is a two-day series of incidents from a year ago. At a gathering on August 11, 2025, a clash broke out when, according to organizers, activists of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) began pelting the assembled citizens with eggs and water. The next day, August 12, 2025, fireworks, stones and bottles were thrown at citizens in both Backa Palanka and Vrbas. Several people were injured.

The August 12 gathering in Backa Palanka had been organized in support of a fellow townsman attacked the day before. At the same time, the municipality’s mayor called on his own party’s supporters to hold a rally of their own, so two gatherings ended up scheduled for the same evening in the same town.

In the statement announcing tonight’s protest, students recalled what has stayed on record from those days.

Recordings, testimonies and documented events from those days have become part of public memory and have raised serious questions about citizens’ safety, the rule of law and institutional accountability

The organizers add, in the same statement, that a year later, despite the recordings and testimonies, a clear institutional response showing that justice and accountability are equally available to everyone is still missing. That, they say, is exactly why the anniversary was chosen as a date for taking to the streets, rather than simply an occasion to look back.

Why the march passes the police, the prosecutor’s office and the municipality

The route is designed so the column passes three addresses: the police station, the prosecutor’s office and the Backa Palanka municipal building. That is not incidental, it is the message of the rally itself, since it is precisely from these three institutions that answers about the events of August 2025 are being demanded. Instead of a walk to the square, the march is conceived as a tour of the authorities.

Tension in the town has not eased even in the weeks before the anniversary. A week before this rally, a car drove into the protest column in Backa Palanka, slightly injuring several people. Dragan Petrovic, a Democratic Party (DS) councilor in the municipality, said at the time that it was not the first time the same driver had tried to drive a car into the column.

The last in a series of August anniversaries

Backa Palanka closes out the series of commemorations marking the August 2025 anniversary. Before it, similar gatherings were held in Vrbas, Novi Sad and Valjevo, towns where street clashes broke out during those same days. In Novi Sad, the column this August again passed through Strazilovska Street, the same spot where the attack took place a year earlier.

The demand at all these gatherings has been the same: that those who attacked citizens be identified and prosecuted. What sets Backa Palanka apart is the size of the community. In a town this size, people on both sides know each other by name, which makes the absence of any resolution even more visible than in a city.

Tonight, then, what is being measured is turnout. Everything else, above all whether any proceeding is launched after the anniversary, depends on the prosecutor’s office past whose building the column is passing.