Saša Ilić, columnist for Radar weekly, criticizes the events in Belgrade, highlighting that the actions of the authorities and their supporters against Dijana Hrka, the mother of the young man who died under a canopy in Novi Sad, are part of a deeper radical practice based on humiliation and symbolic violence.
Ilić describes how the illegitimate president of Serbia mobilized his followers to sing songs by Baja Mali Knindža and patriotic kitsch to demonstratively humiliate Hrka during her hunger strike, reproducing methods used in the war zones of former Yugoslavia, particularly in Eastern Bosnia and Srebrenica, where the humiliation of victims became ritualized.
The columnist emphasizes that Ćacilend – the gathering place of these supporters – functions as a symbol of a perverted radical mindset, where the absence of empathy and solidarity enables extreme forms of moral degeneration. In this machinery, the media and intellectual elite satellites of the former regime – through silence or opportunism – further legitimize the humiliation of Hrka and her suffering.
Ilić concludes that the radicalist practice is used for ritual humiliation and symbolic “re-killing” of the victim, while Dijana Hrka faces this system, supported by a rebellious segment of Serbian society and citizens advocating for justice.
