24 February 2019 - Protests in the Montenegrin city Bar, which started a few months ago due to the planned construction of a kindergarten near the Bar Gymnasium, continued with significantly fewer participants, reports News Agency Bar Info. After Prime Minister Duško Marković's decision to terminate the construction, representatives of the Civic Initiative are requesting for the government to find another location for the kindergarten, plant new cypresses and for those who ordered their cut to take responsibility.
"We won because we preserved a gymnasium yard and the park for future generations," said one of the organisers of the protest, Stefan Đukić, who stated the protestors’ new demands. He requested the authorities find another location for the kindergarten and to plant new cypresses.
"We did not manage to preserve the trees, and the one who ordered their cut now has to come out and say “I'm guilty”. We do not fight for plain interests, but for the common good. We stopped the construction of kindergartens at this place, where we would not just lose the park and the yard, but there would be a lot of traffic jams had the construction been completed. We also saved the kindergarten in Marshal Tito Street and the city of the so-called 'Budvanization' (the influence of the practice in Montenegrin city Budva), because as we have heard, the construction of an eight-story building was planned in its place," said Đukić.
Ilija Zeković stressed that the gathered people showed that their intentions were honest and that they had no hidden goals. "Our emotions, hugs and tears when we heard that the construction of kindergartens will be stopped clearly showed our intentions and denied the hidden goals and political motives that were attributed to us and which continue to be attributed to us. We were fighting for the interests of the citizens and for the general good, and that was suspicious to many. They do not believe that such people still exist," said Ilija Zeković, who emphasized that they are especially grateful to the professors who, as he said, "stood in front of the students and gave them the most important lesson of all".
Today, the professor who stood up for the common good was Gymnasium’s professor Jasna Šćekić who, among other things, said: "A memory is a stubborn thing – it simply refuses to die. Therefore, the city of Bar remembers".
After the usual gathering at the Bar Gymnasium, participants of the protest walked along the city streets to the Bar Municipal Building, where the attendees were addressed by Marija Pešić and Miloš Pečurica, and then returned to the courtyard of the Gymnasium, where, as they said, they celebrated the victory.
Source: Bar Info
