How a year of protests divided Serbia

When Vesna Senicic describes the division she feels after a year of protests in Serbia, she uses a grim metaphor for families desperately trying to avoid bitter political fights.

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“In the house of a hanged man, you don’t mention the rope,” said the 61-year-old grammar school teacher.

The collapse of a canopy at a newly renovated train station last November, which killed 16 people in Serbia’s second city, sent shock waves across the country - transforming students into protesters and exposing deep political fault lines.

As the anticorruption movement prepares to mark the anniversary of the Novi Sad tragedy with a major rally tomorrow, Serbians across the country told AFP that the past 12 months had changed the Balkan nation.

“We're divided - even more, even worse than before 1 November,” Senicic said in her home in the town of Kraljevo, some 250km south of where protests first began.