Novi Sad Marks One Year Since September 5 Raid
One year after the police raid on the University of Novi Sad campus, Students in Blockade and Free University Novi Sad organized a march from Banovina to the Faculty of Philosophy.
Students in Blockade and Free University Novi Sad brought residents together today, on September 5, to mark the anniversary of the police raid on the Novi Sad university campus and the Rectorate building. The gathering was announced under the slogan “We don’t forget the brutality,” with two stops: 3:30 p.m. at Banovina and 5 p.m. on the campus. The gathering at the Banovina intersection got underway around 4 p.m., and from there a protest march set off toward the university.
The column passed the Novi Sad City Assembly and the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) offices on Strazilovska Street, then continued along Kej Zrtava Racije to the campus in front of the Faculty of Philosophy. There, organizers set up an exhibition of photographs from last year’s police operation along with LED screens showing testimonies from victims of that day. According to reports from the scene, police presence today, both uniformed and plainclothes, was minimal.
What happened a year ago
The escalation that culminated on September 5, 2025, began on August 26, 2025, when police stormed the Faculty of Philosophy and forcibly broke up the blockade there. According to reports cited at the rally, police then moved against a column of residents in front of the Faculty of Sport and Physical Education on September 1, 2025, as people were returning from paying tribute to victims under the canopy in Novi Sad.
September 5 of last year itself, according to the same reports, brought the harshest crackdown. Police also entered the Rectorate building, where residents had taken shelter, and journalists were attacked as well, among them a reporter for the 021 news portal and a correspondent for the weekly Vreme. In the aftermath, an online database of testimonies from victims of police brutality was created at svedocanstva.labs.rs, meant to serve as a permanent record of such cases.
Testimony from the rally
Ivana Bajkin, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad (the Autonomija portal renders her surname as Bajkom, N1 as Bajkin), addressed the crowd.
“We came to a peaceful protest to defend the university’s autonomy. I was there to show where I stand and to be with my students.”
Bajkin added that as a doctor, she cannot stay silent about either the tear gas or the injuries many protesters sustained that evening.
“People were choking, they were disoriented, and they had burns on their skin.”
Nikola Stojic, a Faculty of Medicine student, described witnessing the arrest of a doctor he had been helping treat the injured alongside that night.
“I witnessed the arrest of the doctor I was helping people with, together with a colleague and her mother, while they held unarmed people down on the ground, on Kej Zrtava Racije.”
Stojic closed his remarks by saying that even after everything that happened, they failed to break the people who protested that night. Milica, a Faculty of Philosophy student, reminded the crowd that on September 5 last year, a large part of the city was blanketed in tear gas.
“That day they broke into the Rectorate too, and they wouldn’t let anyone leave, so no one could know what was happening inside the building.”
She also warned that in recent days, students from the GLAS list at the Faculty of Philosophy have been blocked from submitting their list of candidates for the student parliament elections, tying last year’s events to an ongoing dispute over student representation at that faculty.
The disputed list and a question without an answer
The obstacle to submitting the GLAS list has emerged just as rallies like today’s invoke university autonomy as the very reason for last year’s protests. If the dispute over the list’s submission is not resolved by the official deadline for the student parliament elections, it remains an open question whether the Faculty of Philosophy will have any representatives in the new assembly at all, or whether that seat will simply stay empty.
Upon arriving on campus, the crowd held two minutes of silence for Milos Lucic, a Faculty of Medicine professor who died recently, and for Vojislav Stankovic, a vendor of the Lice Ulice street magazine. At the close of the rally, attendees were invited to write their impressions of September 5 on a sheet of stretch film and to view the photo exhibition.
Coverage of today’s rally includes no response from the Interior Ministry (MUP) or the prosecution to the claims made from the podium, nor any information on the outcome of investigations into complaints filed after the events of September 2025. For now, the database at svedocanstva.labs.rs remains the only place where testimonies from that period have been systematically collected, while an official response from the institutions is still awaited.
