Thousands Protest in Front of General Headquarters Building in Belgrade

Protest in Front of General Headquarters Building in Belgrade, March 24 2025 (BETAPHOTO/MILOS MISKOV)

Several thousand people, mostly university students, assembled in front of the General Headquarters in downtown Belgrade on March 25 to protest the building complex being stripped of cultural landmark status and its announced sale to an American investor.

During the protest, those present signed a people's initiative demanding a ruling on whether the Serbian government's decision lifting the status of cultural landmark from the building complex, partially destroyed during the NATO bombing of 1999, was constitutional.

As one of the speakers at the protest, the student Dunja Stanojkovic said the students would not allow "the last bastion and symbol of the ordeal of NATO's bombing of the [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] in 1999" to be taken away and that "the students refuse to remain silent and blind in the face of injustice."

"The international community may have stayed silent then [in 1999], but we won't stay silent now. We will not give up our fight. What they did not succeed in tearing down then was the spirit of our people, our unity in finding a light in the darkest of times," she stressed.

The cultural conservationist Estela Radonjic Zivkov said while addressing the crowd that the Headquarters building, though damaged in the bombing, had not lost the qualities that made it a landmark and still represented a masterpiece of domestic architecture, and that it was one of Belgrade's "gates," welcoming arrivals.

At 7:55 p.m. the protesters paid tribute to those killed in NATO's 1999 aerial attacks on FRY with a minute of silence.