There was no sound cannon. We don’t even have that. We actually have, but we haven’t used it. No one used any supersonic weapons against peaceful demonstrators, this was confirmed by foreign services, even though a sound cannon was on the streets of Belgrade during the protests. Not only is there a sonic cannon, but students actually have one and they used it on March 15th or planned to simulate using it – that’s kind of how the sonic cannon story has gone for the past 15 months.
This case is perhaps the best example of what the current regime is all about. Expressed incompetence, manipulation of the truth, state authorities that do not react or only react when the authorities say so. There are several reasons why March 15th is now being talked about again. Apart from the great doubt that the Senjak case cast on the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the informal election campaign in which the ruling party is currently engaged, are a clear reason for such spins.
The authorities will tell you that it is much more logical that thousands of people coordinated and planned a disturbance, than that the police, who had violently treated the citizens for months before and after that, used a weapon they were not allowed to use.
Now the students are terrorists, there is talk of banning them from participating in the elections. The Prosecutor’s Office has been embarrassing itself for a long time with its (in)work, but the Senjak case and now the sound cannon again can be singled out as the two biggest recent humiliations for the judiciary in Serbia.
Discrediting the current biggest political opponent of the government is a logical step in the pre-election campaign. This manipulation of the electorate is clearly addressed to SNS voters and those who change their minds, and in this way the further discrediting of the student movement justifies police brutality at all previous and subsequent protests, because, as the regime says, this is a terrorist organization.
Democracy and party pluralism are further and further away from reality in Serbia, because today we don’t really have any democracy, and almost every party that entered into a coalition with the SNS drowned in it, not counting the SPS, which has a political identity that the progressives cannot assimilate into their own.
Allegations of the regime media and officials that the sound cannon on March 15, the consequences of which were felt by thousands of citizens, was actually an attack on the president and his family, fit in with their rhetoric and propaganda, and Jason Bourne is the only one who has escaped multiple assassination attempts since Vučić.
This has turned into a pure farce in which nothing makes sense anymore… They are now grasping at everything they can think of to discredit political opponents, because a campaign for that will not be enough after everything that has happened since the fall of the canopy. In popular terms, neither the Sava nor the Danube can wash them, so now they are taking out the sonic cannon from the prosecution’s drawer.
The main question is who is lying here, and I think the answer is more than obvious. It is easier to coordinate lying, than to panic thousands of people on the street.
PS. The sound cannon exists as it is Schrödinger’s cat in a popular science experiment.
The views of the authors in the Dialog column do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Danas.
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