December 10 (SeeNews) - Thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Belgrade on Saturday to protest against political violence allegedly caused by the governing SNS party led by Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic.
The protest under the "Put a stop to bloody shirts" slogan was organised by opposition Alliance for Serbia, led by former Belgrade mayor Dragan Djilas, as a response to the assault on Borko Stefanovic, leader of the Serbian Left party.
Commenting on the protests, Vucic said they were political and not civil and that it was a democratically organised gathering in which the state acted responsibly. "Nobody prevented them from rallying, there were no bloody heads, as in some countries that often give us lectures on democracy."
Alliance for Serbia accuses SNS and Vucic of provoking the attack against Stefanovic. On November 23, Stefanovic was assaulted by a group of men in Krusevac, in southern Serbia, and suffered minor injuries from being beaten with an iron rod.
"Aleksandar Vucic, you are to blame for what happened last night in Krusevac, a much bigger culprit than those thugs. You called us traitors, wretch, scoundrels," Stefanovic said during a news conference after the assault in November.
Saturday's rally ended in front of the building of public broadcaster RTS where protesters shouted anti-government slogans and demanded media freedom.
Earlier this month, Serbian entrepreneur Srdjan Milovanovic, the brother of the SNS leader in the southern city of Nis, Zvezdan Milovanovic, acquired Serbian private TV broadcasters Prva TV and O2 TV, as well as news portals prva.rs, o2tv.rs and b92.net.
Alliance for Serbia was established before the local elections in Belgrade earlier this year. The alliance was later joined by the leading opposition parties in Serbia, namely the Democratic Party, Serbian movement Dveri and the People's Party. The Serbian Left party is a member of the alliance.
Djilas, a former chairman of the Democratic Party, was a mayor of Belgrade between August 2008 and November 2013, when he lost a motion of no confidence.