Twenty-five years ago, on October 18, 1997, after fishing, basketball and family gatherings, the Saturday day of a fourteen-year-old elementary school student from Belgrade should have ended peqacefully. Instead, around nine in the evening, Dušan Jovanović was knocked to the ground in front of a store near Belgrade’s Slavija by attackers, where they kicked him in the head with a cobblestone, and then hit him with part of a torn gutter.

He was killed only because he was a Roma. The killers were only three years older than the boy and were sentenced to a decade in juvenile prison in Valjevo. Both were released from prison in April 2004.

“That was the event that drove us to the streets for the first time,” says Osman Balić, director of the Yurom Center from Niš and president of the presidency of the League of Roma – the permanent conference of Roma citizens’ associations, for the BBC in Serbian.

• Ubistvo Dušana Jovanovića 25 godina kasnije: Zločin koji je Rome u Srbiji izveo na ulice. In: BBC. 18.10.2022. https://www.bbc.com/serbian/lat/srbija-63289405

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