Kurir: Students organizing blockades use "codes for secure communication"

Photo: Telegraf.rs, Mateja Beljan

Kurir writes that some students organizing and participating in blockades have started holding meetings outside the university premises and using special codes in their communications.

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This media outlet reports that "a meeting of blockading students will be held today at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, the only topic of which will be the elaboration of the idea of creating a social front, and then an electoral list resulting from that front."

"On Wednesday, a meeting will be held exclusively for the purpose of elaborating on the idea of a program minimum, a social front and the creation of an electoral list that would be created from the social front. So, the meeting will serve exclusively for the elaboration of that idea and the planning the next steps, so that we can start thinking about something more concrete, and so that we have proposals/ideas by next week," it is stated in internal communications between these students, obtained by Kurir.

According to the article, they called on all faculties to "refrain from using faculty premises for political purposes and encourage their students and teaching staff to respect the law, as well as to preserve the faculty as a space for free and impartial thinking."

"Any expression of political views should be carried out outside the institutional framework of the faculty, in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Serbia and the principles of a democratic society," they write, and to this end suggest the use of a "language table", Kurir is reporting.

"In our context, we propose the implementation of a standardized table of linguistic pronouns that will serve as a dictionary for safe communication. This instrument does not represent censorship, but rather a strategic adaptation that allows the transmission of the same message while reducing legal risks. The table includes the mapping of standard political terms to neutral, formally acceptable expressions: 'government' becomes 'institutional actors', 'political party' is transformed into 'organized group', while 'protest' can be expressed as 'public gathering'," the students state in these internal instructions, and add:

"A practical application of this system can look like this: while in conversation you can hear a statement like, 'The government is ignoring student demands, we should go out to protest!', in the official minutes it should be recorded as, 'Institutional actors are not responding to our collective voice. We must organize a public gathering'."

(Telegraf.rs/Kurir)