NGO: Dec. 22 Belgrade Rally Breaks Records with 100k Attendance

Protest Slavija (BETAPHOTO/MILOS MISKOV)

Aleksandar Gubas, the director of the non-governmental Public Gatherings Archive, said on Dec. 23 that, based on available overhead footage from circa 5 p.m. on Dec. 22, Belgrade’s latest rally attracted about 100,000 people.

“Having reached this psychological threshold, it has become the largest rally not only against the current regime but also ever held in Serbia. The Slavija [square] and connecting Belgrade thoroughfares held more people than surrounded Parliament at the most critical moments on Oct. 5, 2000,” Gubas stated in his press release, referencing the demonstrations that ultimately toppled Slobodan Milosevic from power.

The Dec. 22 rally, Gubas added, was twice as large as this summer’s protest against Rio Tinto – also held in downtown Belgrade – and twice as large as any gathering ever put together by the current ruling coalition. “Without a doubt, this was the greatest event in history organized by Serbia’s university students,” the NGO director concluded.

Gubas went on to say that the Dec. 22 Belgrade protest broke another record as well: for the first time since the Archive has been analyzing various public gatherings in the country, the average density of attendants was over two people per square meter. This is significantly above the 1.5 person per square meter average which the Archive, based on years’ worth of analyses, determined holds true for most gatherings.

Concurrently to the enormous Belgrade rally, Nis saw a large-scale protest of its own. “An extremely massive protest was organized by the university students of Nis,” Gubas wrote in his statement, adding that the demonstrations involved 7,000 people, “which compared to [the city’s] population is equivalent to 53,000 [people gathering] in Belgrade.”