Two Years Since the Novi Sad Canopy: Students Promise a Real Investigation, Stefan Hrka's Mother Demands Prison

On 1 November 2024, at 11:52, the concrete canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad fell. Sixteen people died, among them the little girls Valentina and Sara Firić with their grandfather, and Anđela Ruman, who was pregnant. Vučić said at the time that a citizen of Macedonia was also among the dead. The station had been ceremonially opened only a few months earlier, after a multi-year renovation carried out by Chinese consortiums.

Two years later, the student movement born of that disaster defeated Aleksandar Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party in the 25 October elections. The government fell at the ballot box. Dijana Hrka, whose son Stefan died under the canopy, is still waiting for a court outcome.

What the students promise

Radomir Saičić, a professor at the Faculty of Chemistry in Belgrade and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, set out the Student List's priorities in an interview with a Serbian weekly. In the first month: a stable dinar exchange rate, regular wages and pensions, secure energy supplies, talks with the US on the sanctions against Serbia's Petroleum Industry and with Russia on gas deliveries. In the first hundred days: a budget for 2027, an audit of large public projects and professional management of state enterprises.

The hardest sentences come after that. Publishing all contracts for major state investments, confiscating illegally acquired assets and complete freedom for prosecutors. Long-serving acting officials are to go, and management posts are to be filled through regular public competitions. The programme runs to over 1,200 pages and was prepared by about ten experts. Who in the Balkans hasn't heard a new government promise to audit someone else's contracts? The question is how much of this will survive the first uncomfortable page.

On the canopy, Saičić says the investigation so far has been obstructed and ineffective. "The investigation will be conducted much more efficiently, the facts will be established and proceedings will be launched against the accused," he said. The government will be formed after the results are confirmed and parliament is constituted, so for now these words are only words.

"Son, we won"

In two years Dijana Hrka has become one of the symbols of civil resistance in Serbia. She goes to the cemetery at least twice a week. "They say time heals everything, but they lie. Time heals nothing," she told a Serbian portal.

For her, the election victory means one thing. "I want to find out who killed my child and for those people to be convicted," she says. She demands prison for the political top, starting with Vučić and former construction minister Zorana Mihajlović, and then for all the firms, contractors and subcontractors. That is a mother's demand, not a verdict. But for two years the institutions haven't given an answer, and that's why she's the one asking.

She grants the students something few adults would say out loud: "They had the spine we didn't have." And to everyone else she leaves a sentence that holds far beyond Novi Sad: "We have to learn forever that corruption kills."

"We won, but the real fight is still ahead," says Hrka. Elections are won in a night. A 1,200-page programme will be measured by one court verdict. Will it come?