Protesting Students File Criminal Complaint against Two Cabinet Ministers

Students protest (BETAPHOTO/MILOS MISKOV)

The protesting students of the Belgrade University Faculty of Law on April 14 said they had filed a criminal complaint against Information and Telecommunications Minister Boris Bratina and Public Investment Minister Darko Glisic.

Bratina has earlier said that students “are not aware that the police have the right to beat them and kill them.” “And we all thought it was good that young people could express themselves, and so on. However, the moment young people endorse something very seriously, when someone can sell an anarchist ideology to them, you know, they are not aware that the police have the right to beat them and kill them,” the minister said on that occasion.

Later, Bratina tried to justify his statement by saying that his words had been taken out of context and interpreted in a way which “does not reflect the point of what he wanted to say,” stressing that he would never support violence against anyone. Following his statement, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has also apologized to the students and citizens, describing his words as “an unforgivable statement, regardless of whether it was taken out of context or not.”

Earlier, Minister Glisic has publicly urged parents not to enroll their children at the protesting faculties, because their children could be returned “in a coffin,” alluding to a tragic death of a young woman from Sabac at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. 

“Imagine now the parents who are watching this. Should they enroll their child at the University of Belgrade or at a faculty headed by a protesting dean? To let their children be recruited into their infantry, to see them deployed to fight in towns across Serbia. To let their children store pyrotechnics, or store narcotics. To let their children be dragged into that protesting sect. And to let them lose their heads,” Glisic stated on the same occasion.