A young man in a t-shirt with the image of Legija leads a group of students, although some of them have been identified as high schoolers, demanding the dismissal of professor Dinko Gruhonjić for hate speech. In the street named after Zoran Đinđić, at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, where Zoran Đinđić used to teach students. The sight would have been disturbing everywhere, but here, it had the symbolism that made it even more terrifying. In the case of Gruhonjić, faculty autonomy was razed to the ground, says one of the professors Mina Đikanović, “and the prosecutor’s office doesn’t see any misdemeanor or criminal offence.”
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“Look after your family, or move away as far as possible. Because the night is strange, anything can happen. We will break every bone in your body.” This is one of a series of threats directed at the journalist and professor of the Novi Sad Faculty of Philosophy Dinko Gruhonjić. In front of the entrance to his apartment, a group of policemen stand day and night.
“Dinko Gruhonjić is scum who lives on hatred for Serbia. I hope that there will be enough state in Serbia to make sure that Dinko becomes acquainted with the law and the security system,” former head of BIA Aleksandar Vulin said. It is no wonder then that the threats against Gruhonjić’s life, the life of his family members, and now also against the students and professors who support him in the defense of freedom of public speech, are becoming even more radical and gruesome. And – that they have been dictated “from above”.
Citing what was not said
Rector of the University of Novi Sad, professor Dejan Mandić said that he understood the anger of the students, without distancing himself from the man in the Legija t-shirt, also supporting their demand for dismissal, but putting it aside for when it would be necessary, and ending the blockade.
“Many renowned academics came from the RS: for Dinko, they are part of the “Serbization” project and “moving to the reserve position”, the rector said, citing an appalling statement. But Gruhonjić never said that. The other two professors who accompanied the rector to the Faculty of Philosophy did not say anything. All three are signatories to the letter of support to Aleksandar Vučić and the SNS.
Several days later, Mina Đikanović, one of the professors of the Faculty, held a public lecture on the freedom of speech. “The Faculty autonomy was not breached, but cancelled, destroyed and razed to the ground! The ones responsible for that are the “students and young men”, as the Novi Sad mayor calls them, but also the ones who gave the order for this unimaginable event and all those institutions who remained mute and deaf for days to the demands of the Faculty of Philosophy to return the Faculty to its employees and students. These are sad days, not only for our Faculty, but also for the idea of the University in general,” Đikanović told NIN.
What happened at the Faculty?
Professor Đikanović was not at the Faculty on the day when a group of young men, displaying the standard hooligan iconography, entered the building and chained the door from the inside. After that, the majority of students and employees left the premises. Around ten employees, including the Dean, remained in the building. The Dean’s office called the police. “The police officers knocked on the chained door, they were denied entry, so they spent some time in the parking lot, and at some point they managed to come in,” professor Đikanović recalls.
And very quickly, the police officers left. According to our interlocutor, the Dean fell ill so she was taken away in an ambulance. All the professors and employees left the building. Only the porter remained. “None of us had access to the building from that day. Only the porters who work in shifts, according to a certain schedule”, the professor told NIN.
PROMO / Medija centar Beograd / Ustupljena fotografija
The identities of the young men, as she claims, have not yet been reliably confirmed. “However, judging by the photos, they seem to be the admirers of the image and work of a certain citizen Legija, and aficionados of uneven couplets. And the prosecutor’s office is of the opinion that there are no grounds for either criminal or misdemeanor charges,” Đikanović says. About the alleged hate speech by Gruhonjić, she says: “I don’t know if those who laugh at the lowbrow humor of “Kursadžije” can be expected to understand “Monty Python”. Perhaps we are naïve to hold irony as an element of speech to be self-evident” she points out.
According to her, Gruhonjić continues to nurture the same spirit of anti-fascism, as any honest man would, to the credit of his anti-fascist ancestors. “It has never been easy or simple to fight against various forms of fascism, but imputing alleged fascist aspirations to anti-fascists is a completely new dimension of the problem,” she says.
How did the professor of this Faculty Nataša Miličević feel when she saw the young man in a t-shirt with the image of Legija leading the group of so-called students, even though some high schoolers were identified among them, demanding the dismissal of professor Gruhonjić for hate speech? “Horrible. The fact that we are in the Zoran Đinđić Street, at the Faculty where Zoran Đinđić was a professor… the scene itself would have been terrible everywhere, but it had the symbolism that affected me deeply. It represents our defeat, to which the rector, that is, the government, gives support,” our interlocutor says.
Counting blood cells
These groups, that connect quickly and easily on the social networks, are subject to constant incitement of emotions by the regime. They don’t stop until they reach the point where they say – we are all coming and we will eliminate him now. “Such ideas are formed under an immense emotional strain that someone is deliberately and systematically cultivating,” she says.
“My mom is Serbian. My grandmother was sent, with the rest of her family, to Gradiška, a part of Jasenovac, and it was a miracle she survived, unlike the rest of the family. My wife is Serbian. My children are half-Serbs..., my aunt is…” Gruhonjić recounted in an interview for NIN website last week, to our shame and embarrassment that he is forced to report the nationality of people whose blood runs in his veins.
How dangerous a starting point can this be? Let us remember what we have buried as the biggest secret about ourselves. Long before Šešelj, the evil heart of the extreme right in the 1990’s, what did the extreme right look like in the late 1930’s, at the dawn of World War II, the history that we would like to forget? That hidden story has been documented in numerous records preserved in the State Archives of Serbia. They are testimonies of the university professors who had previously fought in the Balkan Wars and the World War One. They were the backbone of the extreme right, advocating for the “blood index” of races, believing that Serbs were the superior race, much like the Aryans. Their initial concept was based on the heroic past, on the virtue of peasants, on honor, honesty and loyalty to the fatherland. But the final work, conceived in just two years, focused on the demand to create a pure race, through the persecution, elimination and sterilization of Jews. Who were the two professors of the Belgrade University? One was Branimir Maleš, anthropologist, doctor, at the time assistant professor at the University of Belgrade. The second was Svetislav Stefanović, doctor, founder of the Department of Pathology, president and founder of the Yugoslav Medical Association, and much more. They claimed that most Serbs had the blood type A, just like the Aryans, and that they were the superior race. Maleš wrote about the superiority of people from the Dinaric Mountains in the moral and biological sense. He considered them the descendants of the unconquered Serb noblemen who took refuge in the mountains to continue their fight against the Turks, after the fall of the Serbian medieval state. Living in the mountains for centuries, he claimed, they bred only with the members of their tribe, thus preserving the purity of their blood. From there, they reached the concept of race preservation through physical elimination of Jews.
They were shot by anti-fascists, partisans, for whom the right-wingers of today show nothing but contempt. In some cases, such as the case of Gruhonjić, much worse than that.
Nebojša Milenković, a writer, warns that the highest government officials are participating in the campaign against Gruhonjić, which means that his life is literally in danger.
PROMO / Medija centar Beograd / Ustupljena fotografija