On Wednesday, April 16 at 7 AM, riot police escorted in RTS “employees who want to work,” pushing past the picket line and entering through side entrances. At 5 AM, police reportedly arrived to RTS’ downtown Belgrade location equipped with rubber-bullet rifles. However, this unit withdrew after half an hour when they were surrounded by protesters. Later, police officers brutalized students as they suppressed the protest.
Students had appealed to citizens to join them in large number to help maintain the blockade. Unfortunately, there were not enough people in the early morning hours to prevent the police forces and RTS workers from breaking through.
On Monday, April 14 when the blockade started, students called on RTS workers to stop working in solidarity. The same call was echoed by RTS’s workers’ collective naš pRoTeSt (“our pRoTeSt”).
“During an earlier blockade of RTS, many colleagues refused to enter the building through makeshift holes in the walls. No one was retaliated against because of that. Anyone who chose to enter through a makeshift opening did so following their own conscience, without any external threats or pressure. Do not enter this way!” said the naš pRoTeSt collective.
Police Escort RTS Workers
According to eyewitnesses, the police began to gather shortly after 5:30 AM and managed by around 7 AM to separate groups of students and citizens, escorting RTS employees—mostly with their hoods up—into the building via a nearby kebab shop. A similar event occurred during a previous blockade when some workers entered into RTS through a basement window after its protective metal bars were removed.
While some RTS workers supported the protests, others defied the student blockade. Why would these workers agree to come to work under such conditions? Mario Reljanović, a labor law expert from the Center for Dignified Work, told Mašina that “no one is obligated to work if their safety is at risk,” and being escorted to work by police certainly qualifies as such.
“Employees cannot be expected to expose themselves to risks that are not part of their job description, and this is definitely a risk,” Reljanović said. He explained that safety risks for workers are not only the protest itself or the presence of citizens but also the pathways that are created to reach the workplace—paths that are not part of the employer’s premises. “Taking hidden routes through a kebab shop certainly violates health and safety regulations at work.”
Beyond safety, such cases also raise concerns about the loss of dignity for workers. If it can be proven that the employees escorted to work by police and through side entrances were forced or blackmailed into doing so, this could lead to criminal charges against those who organized the escorts.
Belgrade Neighborhood Assemblies Helped Blockade RTS
As previously reported by Mašina, around 7 PM on April 15, citizens from neighborhood assemblies in Savski Venac, Stari Grad, and Vračar joined the RTS blockade in an organized manner. Before that, they had blocked traffic on the major streets of Kralja Milana and Kneza Miloša.
The larger citizen turnout came earlier that afternoon after a group of people dressed in black began to gather on the plateau in front of the parliament and in the white tents that had recently been set up. These individuals remain in front of the National Assembly, shouting insults at opposition members of parliament and applauding members of the Serbian Progressive Party. The plateau in front of the Assembly is currently fenced off with metal barriers and guarded by police, who yesterday detained one of the people dressed in black.
A large number of citizens remained in front of the RTS building until late into the night, as they had the night before. During the evening, a public viewing was held of the welcome ceremony for students who had biked 1,400 kilometers from Novi Sad, Serbia to Strasbourg, France, to the European Court of Human Rights at the Council of Europe. According to media reports, members of the European Parliament helped the cyclists arrange meetings today with representatives of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Parliament. Video footage shows that RTS employees were watching the cyclists’ welcome ceremony inside the building, although the public broadcaster itself did not report on it.
As we previously reported, the blockades of RTS began at 10 PM on April 14 when students, using Metallica’s song “Master of Puppets“, called for protests via social media with the slogan “Join in to shut them down.” According to the students, the blockades would continue until a new call for applications for the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM) is issued or until RTS is shut down.
In February, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade called for a boycott of the public broadcaster due to its inadequate coverage of student protests. Several protests have been held in front of RTS since the beginning of the student blockades.
A.M.
