This proved to be a turning point in her life. Today, Jakovljevic is director of the Krusevac-based women’s rights NGO Pescanik (Hourglass), which was established in 2000 and works to empower women and advocate for gender equality.

Coming from a working-class family in the city of Krusevac, she Jakovljevic studied journalism at university and then joined a local radio station.

“Somehow, when I started to work in radio, I started to become more interested in politics, in women’s rights and human rights,” she recalls. “I somehow felt that something was wrong with the position and status of women in society but couldn’t define what it was. I thought that there was something wrong with me, not with society.”

For about a decade, she lived in the small town of Kadovo, on the border with Romania, and there “felt somehow far from everything that was happening in Yugoslavia”.

She was already “against the regime [of Slobodan Milosevic] from the beginning” but only started to really feel the pull of activism   when mass protests by students erupted after the 1996 elections in Serbia, which the opposition claimed were rigged.

In 1999, as the war in Kosovo escalated, she learned about Serbia’s Women in Black peace movement from listening to Deutsche Welle and the Voice of America. She then realised that “there are some people who are against the war. I found out that I thought the same way they did.” It was time to act.

‘They thought villagers wouldn’t protest’

Yugoslav Army chief-of-staff General Nebojsa Pavkovic (right) and commander of the Third Army, General Vladimir Lazarevic, salute members of a special unit in Pirot, Serbia, September 2000. Photo: EPA/SRDJAN SUKI/SS/BW

Jakovljevic took part in her first protest in Krusevac in May 1999 – against the Milosevic regime, against mobilisation and against the war in general. For around 15 days in May 1999, some two months after NATO started its bombing campaign to stop the Serbian forces’ campaign in Kosovo, residents  of Krusevac, mainly women from surrounding villages, protested against their men being sent off to war – at some risk to themselves, as it was small city that hosted military facilities nearby.

“I remember that the protesters had a walk [across town, protesting] against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic,” Jakovljevic recalls. They shouted: “Give us back our children”, and “Why our sons?”

“Later, it started to become a real citizens’ protest to stop the war,” she comtinues, explaining that soon the chanting changed from “Why our sons?” to “Down with Milosevic” and “Bando Crvena [Red Gang]”. Bando Crvena was a slang term that had been used since the early 1990s to condemn the authoritarian Milosevic and his Socialist Party regime.

When the men who were deployed in Kosovo heard about their wives, mothers and sisters putting themselves at risk by demanding their return and the end of the war, many of them abandoned their posts in Kosovo to join the protest.

International media reported at the time that more than 400 Yugoslav Army reservists had mutinied, joined the protests and refused to return to Kosovo. “They came to Krusevac and joined the protest. They were with their mothers, sisters and their wives,” Jakovljevic recalls.

Initially, some of the protesters who were arrested were sentenced to 20 to 30 days’ imprisonment. Nebojsa Pavkovic, a Yugoslav Army general, “came to Krusevac and promised the protesters that he wouldn’t [mobilise men from the region] again and that the men who had escaped from Kosovo wouldn’t be punished. They wouldn’t be called deserters.”

Jakovljevic recalls that the mobilization had mainly been done in nearby villages. “People from the villages had been taken and sent to Kosovo because the government thought that they [villagers] wouldn’t protest against them [the government]” and would silently obey.

It initially appeared to be a crack in Milosevic’s war machine. But locals from the nearby Rasina region soon realised that Pavkovic’s promises were only “propaganda”, she says. “After a certain time, they immediately called up again the same people who had escaped, to go back to Kosovo.”

One of them was one of Jakovljevic’s distant relatives. “When I asked him why he did that [returned to Kosovo with the army], he said: ‘I didn’t know what to do, they just called me.’

“I know my relative is a very good man, actually. I’ve known him all my life. But when somebody told him that the government had said, ‘Go’, he just went. It’s a tragedy, actually.”

Pavkovic was eventually sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to 22 years in prison for committing war crimes in Kosovo, alongside three other high-profile Yugoslav military and police officials. He died in October 2025, not long after being released.

‘We don’t face the past in Serbia’

As an activist since the Kosovo war, Jakovljevic has championed justice and women’s rights.

“We should be persistent in punishing those who told [people] to go [to war], who organised the war and made a profit from the war, the commanders … and the political and military leaders,” she argues. “It’s really important to have transitional justice and to punish them for all that they did to all of the people of the former Yugoslavia.”

What has been done so far is “not enough,” Jakovljevic asserts. She believes that “Serbia is trying to avoid everything connected to transitional justice as much as possible… actually, we aren’t facing up to the past.”

The 1999 Krusevac protest against the Milosevic regime is commemorated by its participants each May as a significant moment in their lives and their city’s political history. But Jakovljevic says many locals now have little knowledge about it.

“Sometimes they ask us why we are here, or what happened in 1999. And when we have a discussion with them, for example, when we give them the leaflet, we ask: ‘Do you know what happened in 1999?’ Some of them say: ‘Yes, I know, I was there’. But the young people don’t know.”

On the bright side, Jakovljevic believes there is more space in Serbian society today to talk about women’s rights, because in the past gender-based violence was “considered something that is kept inside four walls”. However, she fears that many issues related to women’s bodies, like abortion, still are not discussed as a woman’s rightful choice.

Jakovljevic says both transitional justice and women rights in the region will improve if “citizens from the various countries in the region” work together across borders to push forward their demands for change.

“We should connect with each other and increase our understanding of each other, as know we have a lot of similarities and a lot of similar problems in the Western Balkans, because we all live here,” she urges. “We [must] make our voice louder.”