Home Politics Exit pageant pulls out of Serbia after backing scholar protests

Exit pageant pulls out of Serbia after backing scholar protests

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Exit pageant pulls out of Serbia after backing scholar protests


Man Delauney

BBC Balkans correspondent

Srdjan Stevanovic/Getty Pictures

Competition organisers say their help for scholar protests has led to funding being pulled

Considered one of Europe’s largest music festivals is pulling out of Serbia with organisers blaming “undemocratic pressures”.

Exit pageant will maintain its twenty fifth anniversary version within the nation between 10 and 13 July, however mentioned it “would be the final to happen” there.

Organisers say Serbian authorities have reduce off authorities funding for the occasion and a few sponsors have been “compelled to withdraw beneath state stress”.

They are saying this pertains to the pageant’s help for an ongoing student-led anti-corruption protest motion in Serbia.

Provincial officers on the tradition secretariat have rejected the allegations, blaming monetary pressures for being “unable to supply help”.

Held at Petrovaradin Fortress in Serbia’s second metropolis, Novi Unhappy, the pageant attracted 200,000 guests final yr.

Exit has its roots within the pro-democracy protest motion which ultimately led to the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia’s presidential elections in 2000.

That activist custom has continued, with annually given a theme, starting from “Cease Human Trafficking” to “Loud and Queer”.

Following final November’s catastrophe at Novi Unhappy railway station – the place 16 individuals died when a concrete cover collapsed – college students launched protests, and the pageant supplied its help to them.

This ranged from becoming a member of college students on protest marches to offering “meals, sleeping luggage, and different requirements” and publishing messages of help on social media and Exit’s web site.

Founder Dusan Kovacevic says this has now come at a heavy monetary value for the pageant, however that “freedom has no value”.

In a press release in regards to the determination to drag out of Serbia after 25 years, he requires individuals to recollect Exit “not for its finish, however for its unity. For love. For freedom”.

It’s unclear whether or not the pageant will search to relocate to a unique nation, and if that’s the case the place.

Srdjan Stevanovic/Getty Pictures

Audiences have topped 200,000 on the pageant in recent times

Headline acts through the years have included The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys and The Remedy.

Subsequent month, The Prodigy are returning for his or her sixth look on the pageant, alongside The Intercourse Pistols that includes Frank Carter and French DJ and producer DJ Snake.

Exit has received two European pageant of the yr awards and grown to develop into one of many continent’s largest multi-day music occasions.

Daryl Fidelak, who runs a Belgrade-based document label, says the pageant has had an immense influence on Serbia’s artistic scene.

“It is opened the eyes of the worldwide viewers, bringing numerous foreigners who may need had a damaging – and even no – impression of Serbia,” he says.

“Exit has helped Serbia get to an excellent place with dwell music and tradition, spawning plenty of different festivals, bookers and occasions.”



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