Police Brutality

There have been a lot of complaints with regard to police conduct in the Belgrade suburb of Lazarevac lately. A petition is being signed condemning the irresponsible behavior of Interior Minister Zoran Sokolovic's men, and the next session of the municipality assembly will deal with the ``question of police treatment of citizens.'' The following example illustrates why this is necessary. Just before midnight on June 29, Dusan Busic (48) was returning home after visiting relatives. He was in front of his house when his cousins Svetozar Spasic (62) and Milorad Spasic (64) arrived on their tractor to discuss what they would do tomorrow. They were approached by two policemen who asked to see Svetozar's papers. He said he had none. The policemen told him rather rudely to get off the tractor, which Svetozar did. Busic claims that the policeman hit Svetozar with his truncheon and pulled him off the tractor. ``I bent down to help my cousin and the policeman started hitting me in a fury. I didn't feel much until he hit me on the top of my head, then I stumbled and he kicked me in the head several times. The second policeman called for reinforcements `because they had been attacked'. Covered in blood and practically unconscious, I was handcuffed and taken to the police station along with my cousins. When they saw the state I was in, they took me to the Emergency Room and from there on to the Eye Clinic in Belgrade. The doctors did all they could to save my eye, but it was too late,'' said Busic after two weeks at the clinic.

Busic said that a police commission had visited him in hospital asking him to sign a statement which he refused to do without a lawyer. Busic has learned that the surname of the policeman who beat him up is Andjelkovic, and that this is not the first time that he has behaved with such brutality. The public prosecutor has promised Busic that criminal charges will be instituted. There is talk that the Lazarevac police chief has been dismissed. Busic said that he would engage a lawyer and that things like this hadn't happened even in Chile, at the time of the junta. We did not manage to learn anything at the police station. Public statements have to be approved by Police Minister Sokolovic. The police have not issued a statement of any kind on this case so far.

11,000 Too Many

Frustrated parents and their highschool graduates, curious journalists, and plainclothes policemen pretending to read the papers mixed in Belgrade's main street in front of the Serbian Assembly building, close to President Slobodan Milosevic's office. The reasonuniversity enrolment quotas. The gathering seems to have produced some results. Namely, after the entry exams at Belgrade University, it turned out that someone had made a mistake (this was later admitted by the Serbian Education Minister) so that nearly 11,000 highschool graduates didn't manage to enroll at the faculties they wished to.

They started to demonstrate, visited party leaders who first promised the wouldbe students and their parents the moon, and for want of a better solution started urging MPs and members of the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) to do something. In the end the Government sent a recommendation to the faculty deans, who in turn replied that their capacities were full (some threatened to resign if the Government started enrolling students above the agreed number). The Government ignored pleas that the University was overbooked and allowed another 1,895 students to be enrolled at those faculties which were most in demand, and 1,000 at other universities in Serbia (which have not filled their quotas) on condition that they paid for their studies.

The remainder of 8,000 potential students will have to wait until September and see if there any empty places at less popular schools.

``Crime Free'' Belgrade

Chief of the Belgrade Police Petar Zekovic is either uninformed or else he is joking with Belgraders when he says that ``there is no organized crime and that the Belgrade police control every corner in the city'' (they might control the corners but they don't control the criminals). Organized crime has been present for some time. This has been confirmed and written about by criminologists who are far more competent than Zekovic. The police will always claim otherwise, because organized crime cannot exist with the state's approval, i.e. that of the police, prosecution, courts...

Zekovic denies that gangs control parts of the city. Cynical, all the more so because of daily showdowns ending in dead and wounded mafiosi, and criminals who say openly who of them work for the police and advise children to start with crime early, because its too late at the age of twenty! Zekovic seems to be living in a different city.

Zekovic corroborates his claim on the drop in crime with the fact that 18 murders have been registered since the beginning of the year, even though eight people were killed in one week only. Asked why there are so few Belgraders in the police force, Zekovic replied: ``Probably because of the demands of the profession.'' It would have been more convincing if he had said that Belgraders, as policemen, would never agree to beat up their fellow citizens as brutally as the Serbs from across the Drina River did during opposition demonstrations on March 9, 1991 and the June 1, 1993 rally in front of the Federal Parliament building.