HE DROVE WITH STUDENTS ALL THE WAY TO STRASBOURG, AND NOW HE IS FIGHTING THE MOST IMPORTANT BATTLE: Radivoje (35) had a heavy illness return, let’s help him win! (PHOTO)

Radivoje Radivojević (35) from Valjevo spent the previous year and a half with students, offering them support at every step, especially in his hometown, which was the target of masked thugs last August. Unfortunately, he is currently facing a heavy illness — synovial sarcoma, which is why he is at the Belgrade Institute for Oncology. Now the roles have reversed — students are returning the support to him by collecting donations to help him, given that he has not been working for several months.

“Brave is the man who does not run away, but stays in his place and fights against the enemy,” reads the folk saying repeated by Radivoje Radivojević (35) from Valjevo, when he decided to offer full support to his young fellow citizens, the students, with whom, as he tells us, he went through thick and thin.

Radivoje was a witness to the unpleasant scenes that befell Valjevo on the night between August 14 and 15 last year, when the police acted brutally towards citizens, while masked thugs broke local shops in front of them.

Even then, this young man offered support to both students and citizens, and now he needs help.

Radivoje was diagnosed with synovial sarcoma, a rare and malignant soft tissue tumor that most commonly occurs around large joints, especially on arms and legs in young adults.

We caught up with him at the Institute for Oncology in Belgrade, and despite a difficult diagnosis, he answers us smiling and positive.

“Yes, I’ve always been like this, I always think positively because you know how they say: think positive, and it will return to you that way. Currently I am undergoing therapies, I hope to go home in a few days,” this young man tells us at the beginning of the conversation.

He tells us he is happy to have been alongside his Valjevo in the worst moments and alongside the students who have been fighting “on various fronts” for more than two years.

“I am always alongside my Valjevo, but I also gladly went to Belgrade, as support for Belgrade students. I went to every major protest and gathering, I was there during the blockade of the RTS building, I was also near the Assembly when Dijana Hrka was on strike. I support the people of Novi Sad as well, of course. All students are the same to me, meaning they are all students, wherever they are,” he continues.

Regular in bicycle tours

Although he likes walking, due to his health he could not engage in walks with students, but he regularly rode bicycle tours.

“I rode with the students, wherever they went, I was there too.”

He faced a difficult diagnosis four years ago. However, the disease returned, or rather, spread.

“Sarcoma was discovered in my case in 2022. In the meantime, I had 12 cycles of chemotherapy. I had my first surgery as well, everything went in the best possible order. Then the second surgery happened, and after nine months the third. And here I am, on therapies again because metastases appeared on the lungs.”

He emphasizes that he hopes for the best because he is a big fighter.

“And I am positive in spirit, so I don’t think about the worst. It has to be good,” says the smiling Radivoje.

The illness was, he adds, discovered completely by chance.

“Yes, it was something banal, a sprain. I wore a splint for a week, and when they removed it, a lump appeared on my arm. And then I went to an orthopedist, however, in my Valjevo doctors didn’t know what it was for several months. And in the end they sent me to Belgrade, to orthopedics at Banjica. And there, through the process of taking a sample, that is a biopsy, it was determined what kind of problem it was. Everything seemed impossible to me, but well, it happened to me,” he tells us.

He tolerates the therapies well, he emphasizes, and cannot wait to go home.

Due to the illness, he hasn’t been working for several months, and it is a question when he will start again.

Because of that, students and humane citizens of Valjevo “stepped in.”

“I live alone in a rented apartment, I have no one except a half-sister on my mother’s side. I live off my salary, and since all this has been happening, off donations and help from good people as well. Students collected funds for me twice. The first time was an action at the level of Valjevo. However, after that literally the whole Belgrade University got involved and the action really expanded.”

Donations are welcome to him at this moment too.

“Rent, utilities… Everything is very expensive, and the income I have from social security while on sick leave covers that part. I am not in any humanitarian foundation, thank God, because for now there is no need for that. Belgrade doctors are treating me successfully. So a dedicated account for donations was opened for me at Dijana Hrka’s Foundation. I offered her support during the strike, now she is with me,” Radivoje tells us.

He says that August 14 marks the anniversary of brutal violence in Valjevo, and that he will be at the gathering organized by students and citizens of Valjevo.

“I will definitely support my people, that is my city. I would just highlight that incidents in Valjevo did not start on the 14th, but on August 13th when a cafe of the father of a current student, then a high school student, was smashed by masked SNS thugs. The police let them pass and did not intervene. So those scenes were horrifying, a classic attempt at murder because how else to treat it when 50 people with clubs and axes attack one man.”

He adds that this must never and cannot be forgotten.

“For many, all this is lasting too long and people may have lost focus a bit, but I believe that on August 14 in Valjevo there will be several thousand people from all over Serbia and that we will remember everything that Valjevo went through and appeal, though I don’t know to whom, since nothing functions here, that this never happens again,” says this brave young man.

In this way you can help this guy: