Novi Sad Police Summon Bravo Activists Ahead of SNS Rally
Three days before the announced SNS rally with Vucic on Freedom Square, police in Novi Sad are summoning activists from the Bravo movement and the Citizens' Assemblies for interviews.
Police in Novi Sad began on Tuesday, September 1, summoning activists from the civic movement Bravo and the Novi Sad Citizens’ Assemblies for so-called informative talks. The summonses arrived three days before Friday, September 4, the date set for a Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) rally on Freedom Square, with President Aleksandar Vucic expected to attend.
Among those summoned are Brajan Brkovic, a member of Bravo’s Main Board, and Miran Pogacar, also a member of the movement’s Main Board and a city councilor in the Novi Sad City Assembly. The Novi Sad Citizens’ Assemblies said their activists had started receiving the same summonses.
What the Bravo Movement Is Saying
Bravo said it wasn’t avoiding a conversation with police, but questioned the point of this kind of pressure right before a rally called by those in power.
Our members are regularly targeted, but we have nothing to hide, and we’re asking the SNS regime: what are you afraid of?
The movement also linked the summonses to the fact that, even three days before its announced date, there’s still no official information about the rally itself.
A rally that’s being planned in secrecy, with neither the time nor the place known, is clearly a problem even for the regime itself, so it resorts to intimidating citizens.
The Novi Sad Citizens’ Assemblies left an open question on their own account, asking whether this was political pressure or, as they put it, “routine, everyday police work.”
Uzice as Backdrop
The police summonses come three days after an SNS rally in Uzice, held on August 29, where a physical confrontation with citizens broke out. Petar Holik of Bravo told the 021 news portal on August 31 that police had failed to respond adequately to that incident.
The police were there the whole time and let a man get lynched.
The same scenario, a clash at a ruling-party rally met with a weak police response, is one of the reasons Novi Sad activists now see the summonses for talks as a preview of what could happen again on September 4. Srpske.rs covered the Uzice rally and the competing accounts of what took place there in the article “Uzice After the SNS Rally: Two Versions of the Same Square.”
Why Now, Three Days Before the Rally
Vucic first announced large gatherings in Novi Sad and Uzice back on August 13, without setting exact dates, saying at the time that the Novi Sad rally would follow within less than a month. As of today, September 1, the SNS board in Novi Sad still hasn’t issued a formal call to the rally, nor has an exact starting time been announced. In that vacuum, the police summonses to activists are the first concrete piece of information to come out of state institutions regarding September 4, even though they concern not the ruling party’s own rally but those planning to oppose it.
The Novi Sad Citizens’ Assemblies, meanwhile, have already made their own plans public. They’ve called on citizens to gather starting at 4 p.m. on September 4 at several predetermined points around Freedom Square, with arrivals from other cities organized along four routes: northwest, northeast, southwest and southeast. They’ve also announced a second gathering on September 5, marking the anniversary of police violence in Novi Sad.
The Election Calendar in the Background
The police summonses and the announced Novi Sad rally are unfolding as the political scene is already positioning itself for parliamentary elections. SNS leader Milos Vucevic said earlier that elections should be called between September 3 and 10, while Vucic has floated October 18 and October 25 as possible voting dates. Neither date has been officially confirmed as of today.
Against that backdrop, the president’s arrival on Novi Sad’s central square, in a city that has marked 22 months since the collapse of the railway station canopy, carries political weight beyond a single local rally. Srpske.rs also wrote about how sensitive that date remains in the article “Walks in Belgrade and Novi Sad: 22 Months Since the Canopy.”
The question still open three days before September 4 isn’t just whether Vucic will come to Freedom Square, but whether, as in Uzice on August 29, supporters of the ruling party and citizens who’ve announced opposition to his arrival will end up in the same place at the same time.
