
(ANSA) - BELGRADO, FEB 2 - In Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest city in the north of the country, where tens of thousands of people again demonstrated against the government and the president yesterday, the situation is calm today, although the popular mobilization led by students continues. One of the three Danube bridges blocked yesterday afternoon is still closed until 3 p.m., when protest organizers will decide whether to end the blockade or continue it indefinitely. The occasion for the new show of force by the student movement-despite the resignation in recent days of Serbian Prime Minister Milos Vucevic-was the three-month anniversary of the roof collapse at Novi Sad station, which killed 15 people on Nov. 1. A tragic incident that is linked by students to the neglect and lack of control by corrupt authorities and officials interested only in their own financial gain. In essence, the protest movement continues to claim that the government has not yet fulfilled its four demands to the authorities: full and complete publication of documentation on the station renovations, which were completed a few weeks before the collapse; punishment of those responsible for violence against students; release of all those arrested during the demonstrations; and a 20 percent increase in the budget for universities and colleges. All of which the leadership claims, to the contrary, to have fulfilled. The students have been given support by other categories of workers, starting with farmers, artists, intellectuals and lawyers. The latter, having already carried out a week-long protest by curtailing their professional activities, plan to decide whether to implement further abstentions from work in support of the protest movement. Although not explicitly, the protests are widely shared by opposition forces, whose main leaders were in Novi Sad yesterday to support the students' cause. And while President Aleksandar Vucic continues to evoke unspecified foreign forces as inspiring the protests with the aim of weakening and destabilizing Serbia, a decision will be made within the next week on whether to respond to the government crisis with a new executive resulting from a renewed majority agreement in parliament, or whether to go to new elections instead. (ANSA).