A Lack Of Trust

The Serbian state's suspicions regarding the loyalty of the Muslims living in Sandzak and the Sandzak Muslims' doubts as to the state's good intentions, started with multiparty pluralism, the war in Croatia and culminated with the war in Bosnia. Muslims express this mistrust by refusing to serve in the Yugoslav Army and in some places by arming. The state, which is stronger, retaliates with arms investigations. The search for hidden arms goes on in Sandzak villages. The success, just like the arming, is sporadic, and the methods are brutal.

Raw sheep hides are used to heal the bruises left after police interrogations.

Nuho Bihorac from the village of Zajacic locked up his shop before talking to us. His story about the police investigation procedure is the usual one. He got a call to show up at the local police station, and after failing to admit that he possessed arms, he was told to sign a paper which stated that he had received a call to report at the police station in Novi Pazar.

At the Novi Pazar police station he was first asked: ``Why have you come?'' Bihorac replied: ``I don't know.'' He was then asked who in the village was selling arms, and who had them. Then a truncheon was put on the table. ``You'll talk now.'' Bihorac said that he ``hadn't talked,'' and that he was cuffed twice on the temple, after which he felt dizzy; he was then ordered to hold his hands out in front of him (``I didn't dare move them''), and finally to take his shoes off (``They beat the soles of your feet'').

Elmaz Bazdar is too ashamed to talk. He is 66 years old and was beaten by men twice as young. He went to Novi Pazar after two calls to report to the Sjenica police. In between the calls he was told to think hard if he had a sniper. Bazdar said that until then he hadn't known that something ``like that existed.'' Then two policemen whom he describes as a bigger one and a smaller one, and who, considering their age could have been his children, ordered him to take off his jacket and shoes and kneel on a chair. ``When they were through with beating the soles of my feet, one of them told me, `I'll kill you with a knuckleduster'. He hit me in the chest and I fell on the floor. They slapped me and swore.'' Bazdar claims that of the 98 families living in Razdaginje only six have not received police calls.

Mulaz Brulic (20) is from the village of Razdaginje. He was told by the police that he was: ``Bright and would probably talk.'' Brulic said he had been accused of shooting at ``some houses,'' and of organizing barricades in the vicinity of Sjenicawhich had not happened, for the distribution of arms of which he knew nothing and for the organizing of paramilitary formations with the view to ``secession,'' a word he heard for the first time then. Four days later, on March 21, he went to Novi Pazar. His story is a long one. He was beaten with a truncheon, slapped, blackmailed, he fainted, was hit with a truncheon in the solar plexus, in the stomach, in the chest with the tip of the truncheon, dragged to the floor by his hair, his head was hit against the wall... All this was then repeated in a different order. There was no blood and he doesn't remember if he made any sounds. He was held captive in room 25 of the Novi Pazar police headquarters for six hours. He stopped talking when his mother Nurija entered the room. ``I don't want her to get upset.'' The only decoration in the Brulic's impoverished home is a photograph of Mulaz's father Hamid as a JNA soldier. Mulaz said he would not serve in the army of those who had beaten him, his mother added: ``How can he go, all bloody and broken? He never coughed before, he's started now.'' Mulaz could not get a doctor's attestation that he had been beaten up. He was told in Sjenica that the doctor was out.

The search for weapons continues and fear spreads. Elmaz Bazdar is too scared to drive a car. He thinks that ``someone'' will stop him, and that will ``set the ball rolling.'' His fears started after the arrival of reservists in Sjenica. ``They could kill us all, set us alight, butcher us. They swore at us, fired at the mosque and at a girl whose brother had died as a Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) officer in the besieged Marshal Tito garrison in Zagreb at the start of the war in Croatia... There is lack of trust. I am afraid that the police could come again. I believe that some kind of pressure is at hand, something to do with the state. For us to move out, or... I don't know. I ask myself why is it that we irritate the state,'' said Elmaz.

It seems as if the order has been withdrawn in Prijepolje. President of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) municipal committee Zevdzo Huric said that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had met with them in late January. During the talk Milosevic had said that arrests of one nationality were ``discrimination'' and described the methods of investigation as ``savage,'' he called the investigation of one's party affiliation ``Gestapo methods.'' A Serbian Police committee headed by Zoran Misic came to investigate the issue. Those who were to give evidence first had to go through two rooms where the policemen who had beaten them told them what they were supposed to say. Huric said that only an internal police committee had looked into the issue and that the results have not yet been made public, but that the situation is better. Better at any rate than in Sjenica, or the villages of the Pestar community region.

And finally, do the Muslims really have weapons? The answer is: yes, in parts, and such is the success of the police campaign aimed at confiscating them. The Muslims justify their arming with fear of paramilitary forces, of Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan and others. The kidnapping of Muslims in Strpci and Sjeverin, the terror in Priboj, refugees from the border with Bosnia... are all strong reasons for fear, and fear is an alibi for arms. Committees have been set up to look into the Strpci and Sjeverin cases, but they have not come up with any results. The second alibi is the ``traditional love for weapons'' felt by men of the Sandzak region, and is proved by ancient firearms buried and rotting away. (``I dug it up, but it won't fire anymore,'' said a peasant from Vid near Novi Pazar.)

``The process of 25'' is the name given to the trial of a group of Sandzak Muslims accused of illegally acquiring and possessing arms, ammunition and explosives, for associating with hostile intent and of trying, contrary to the Constitution, to secede a part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The trial seems to have worked itself into a corner. Judge Dragoje Tapuskovic was forced to withdraw after a traffic accident. Sava Teofilovic withdrew just before the trial was about to start. The reasons for his withdrawal are known only to himself and the President of the Supreme Court of Serbia. After this, five of the accused were let out of jail to defend themselves as free men. Zoran Janicijevic, a lawyer from Novi Pazar, said he would not defend two of the men because he had not been given access to investigation documents (contrary to procedure), and believes that the bill of indictment is too ambitious. Accusations of secession are hard to prove, even if it were proved that there had been organizing along military lines.

``It is a fact that they had arms, but this is a political process,'' said president of the Novi Pazar Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) committee Tihomir Petrovic. He recalled a statement by the Yugoslav Army Uzice Corps Commander who said that Muslims had 12,00015,000 rifles. ``If that is so, then the Serbian Ministry of the Interior should find out why weapons are being sold in Sandzak like candy.''

SPO main committee member Branislav Ivanovic believes that those arming the civilians should be found. ``They aren't being armed by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, Bosnia or the local community.'' Ivanovic recalled that SDA Sandzak branch leader Sulejman Ugljanin's bodyguards Rifat Kacar and Jusuf Beciragic had been arrested two years ago, and that the police had found a large amount of automatic rifles. ``Well, who was it that armed Serbs and Muslims, and who let those two go?'' asks Ivanovic.

Ivanovic and Petrovic believe that the authorities should protect the population of Sandzak by investing in the economy and that better communication links will resolve political issues, and not the police and army.