Bosnian students rally for justice, drawing inspiration from anti-graft struggle in Serbia

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Students in Bosnia and Montenegro rallied against corruption Monday, drawing inspiration from their fellow students in neighboring Serbia whose anti-graft protests have shaken the government and given rise to calls for political change across the region.

In the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, students demanded answers over the deaths of 29 people last October, when torrential floods triggered a landslide of rubble from a quarry that was reportedly built illegally.

In Montenegro, which borders both Bosnia and Serbia, students are seeking the removal of top security officials over two separate mass shootings in less than three years when gunmen killed 23 people, including children.

Student-led strikes and blockades of roads and bridges have paralyzed Serbia following the collapse on Nov. 1 of a railway station canopy that killed 15 people, which critics blamed on government corruption in awarding construction contracts.

Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro were once part of the former Yugoslavia, which broke apart in the 1990s in a devastating series of wars. The new wave of student solidarity illustrates shared grievances in the Balkan nations plagued by graft and complaints of incompetence and mismanagement.

All three countries are seeking European Union entry but have been slow to enact the required reforms.

“As we can see in Serbia, the protests there are effective because they are massive. Other people are joining the students and they are persistent,” said Sarajevo student Sumeja Durakovic.

Gatherings in two other former Yugoslav states, Croatia and Slovenia, have expressed support for the Serbian students. There have also been demonstrations in cities with large populations from the former Yugoslavia, including in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the European Union.

The Serbian protests that were ignited by the canopy collapse in the northern city of Novi Sad have swelled into rage and demands for change that have challenged populist President Aleksandar Vucic, who has ruled Serbia with a tight grip for more than a decade.

In Sarajevo, students held banners reading “Crime without punishment” and chanted “We won’t stop!” as they demanded that those who failed to prevent the disastrous landslide should be held criminally responsible.

“They weren’t killed by the rain or rocks, but by the negligence of the authorities and institutions, which had not acted preventively and with responsibility toward our lives, our homes, the nature,” the students said in a statement.

“Four months have passed and no one was held accountable for the deaths of 29 of our fellow-citizens,” they added.

In Montenegro, one of the protest organizers, Milo Perovic, said it was important to follow the “waves of boldness” coming from Serbia.

A mass shooting on New Year's Day left 13 people dead before the attacker killed himself. It left Montenegrins asking why no action was taken after the first fatal shooting in 2022, which claimed 10 lives, among them two children. The gunman was eventually killed by a passerby.

Protests in Montenegro include daily silent blockades lasting 23 minutes to commemorate the shooting victims, just as the Serbian students honor the 15 victims of the canopy fall with 15 minutes of silence each day.

In Sarajevo, Lamija Fuka said she believed that “we, the students, can get together and change the society and our corrupt system ... put an end to all of this.”

The time is right, she added, "to wake up and for young people to finally react to what (political leaders) have been doing to us for the past 30 years.”

Associated Press writers Jovana Gec in Serbia, and Predrag Milic in Montenegro contributed to this report.

Woman cries and shouts during a protest following flash floods and landslides that killed 19 people more than four months ago, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

A man blows a horn during a protest following flash floods and landslides that killed 19 people more than four months ago, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

People hold banners read: "One world one fight" and "We demand an investigation" during a protest following flash floods and landslides that killed 19 people more than four months ago, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

Woman holds a banner with names of cities and amount of people killed following flash floods and landslides, during a protest, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

An aerial view of people during a protest seeking answers after last year's devastating floods and landslides in the country, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

An aerial view of people during a protest seeking answers after last year's devastating floods and landslides in the country, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

An aerial view of people during a protest seeking answers after last year's devastating floods and landslides in the country, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

A woman wears a T -Shirt with the image of a man who died, during a protest seeking answers after last year's devastating floods and landslides in the country, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

People take part in a protest seeking answers after last year's devastating floods and landslides in the country, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

People take part in a protest seeking answers after last year's devastating floods and landslides in the country, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.

To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.

“The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I've never seen that before.”

Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.

Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.

The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.

Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.

Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world's premier public health agency.

But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.

“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.

The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.

The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.

As this was playing out, Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”

The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.

The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”

Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”

The CDC's acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.

The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.

But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.

In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.

The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.

Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC's lack of trying.

“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency's work now is delayed and subdued.

Instead of working with nearly all of the world's nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.

That's not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can't possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Passengers on the the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, watch epidemiologists board the boat in Praia, during their voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)

Workers set up temporary shelters in the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Crew members of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, wait their turns for a first interview with epidemiologists, during the voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

A Spanish Civil Guard officer inspects the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)