Actor: General Welfare More Important than Profiteering in the Present

A sixth Serbia Against Violence rally on June 9 (BETAPHOTO/MILOS MISKOV)

Actor Tihomir Tika Stanic said on June 22 that no government could do whatever it wanted if people from different walks of life, members of groups and on the level of the street or neighborhood they lived in understood that the common good was more important than small-scale profiteering in the moment.

Stanic told the Danas newspaper that over the past several weeks actors had demonstrated solidarity. Asked to comment on the "threats and attacks" on them by senior officials, Stanic called this "a self-destructive urge"  and added that if an actor had any kind of reputation or achievement behind them, these "threats" and "labels" would not be able to cast a shadow over them.

Milan Maric, another actor, who spoke at one of the Serbia against Violence rallies, said that his reason for partaking in the protest marches "is the rise of violence in society on all levels and a wish to send a plea to the authorities to do something about it."

He told the NIN weekly that "only people who do not want to see have not noticed the increase in violence. "A bigger problem, though, is that violence is, in a strange way, cultivated through a lack of reactions by institutions which slowly transforms it into a desirable method of communicating and functioning," Maric said.