Students trek across Serbia to campaign for station collapse victims ahead of anniversary

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UB, Serbia (AP) — Nine students from southwestern Serbia who have been trekking across the country for nearly two weeks said Monday they're tired but determined to walk to the country's north to keep attention focused on a deadly railway station disaster a year ago.

They hope to reach Novi Sad on Nov. 1 when a major rally is planned to mark one year since a canopy collapsed in the northern city's train station, killing 16 people. They believe the victims died because government corruption led to sloppy renovations at the station.

The group, which has been joined by a handful of additional students since departing from the southwestern town of Novi Pazar on Oct. 16, headed out Monday from the central Serbian town of Ub after spending the night there.

“People have been honking their horns and coming out of their houses to greet us, which really means a lot,” chemistry student Emina Spahic told The Associated Press. “This is really something special.”

Students have been at the forefront of rallies over the past year that have protested the train station deaths, and shaken the populist government of President Aleksandar Vucic. They have called for early elections, which Vucic has rejected. Scores of students have been detained or threatened under a government crackdown.

Nonetheless, tens of thousands of people are expected to converge in Novi Sad on Nov. 1.

Students from Novi Pazar — a predominantly Bosniak-Muslim town — also aim to bridge a decades-old ethnic divide stemming from the wars of the 1990s. Spahic, 20, said student protests in Novi Pazar “have restored hope that things can change.”

Inas Hodzic, a 23-year-old from Novi Pazar who studies biochemistry in Novi Sad, said the student marches could change stereotypes fueling mistrust between predominantly Orthodox Christian Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks since the war in neighboring Bosnia in 1992-95.

“We have a chance to change things,” Hodzic said. “We now see we are all the same and should stand united.”