Slapping Down The Humble Citizen

Two policemen recently beat up a 91 year old man at night in front of his house in the village of Dren. They said the old man was dangerous and armed. A city bus overseer in a Belgrade suburb used an iron bar to beat up a passenger who had come to complain. The hospital report said the man had a concusion, broken left hand, bruises in the kidney area. The authorities in Prokuplje shouted break in and throw it out when they evicted a man who was in hospital at the time. The new name on the door belongs to the local mayor and the wife of the previous, legal, tenant, died of stress. The Children's hospital in Tirsova street recently refused to operate a child because it had been brought in outside working hours. A pensioner who wanted to attend his wife's funeral although his pension was too small to allow him to pay for it was told by a public services employee to wait at the grave until the hearse comes, when it comes. A woman preparing to leave on a trip hid her savings in a chicken and put the chicken into her freezer. The freezer broke down and her neighbors helped her out by throwing the chicken out. A teacher who disobeyed his headmaster in Pancevo was forced to stand at attention for a whole hour in front of his class.

What happened to the until recently relatively safe and protected citizen who could expect police protection from violence and robbery, legal protection from the courts, help in the hospitals, money in the banks, education in the schools?

His state fell apart, that's what. Not the state in the sense of the six former federal units but the state as a way of organizing collective life in a given society, the state whose functions include defence and the police, education, health care and social security, stimulating science, a financial system, judiciary... There are two possible interperations of the relationship between the state and human rights. According to one, the state is all powerful and can arbitrarily decide on the position of its citizens. Under the other, the state does not give rights to the people, just as it does not give them life. It just protects those rights. The state is not justified just by being the state. People do not listen to the state only because of the order it imposes but because of what they believe that order gives them. State compulsion cannot be unconditional. There have to be rules, the state has to meet the needs that its citizens consider fundamental.

What are the basic personal rights (not including economic and political) which man, in principle, has and that the state must protect?

He has the right to life. Here that has been made very cheap. Serbia and Montenegro are countries with the largest number of deaths at military training exercises and in barracks in general (the latest incident was just days ago at the July 4 barracks in Belgrade when a soldier killed an officer). The police beats up and kills people. Last year four policemen (born between 1969 and 1971) beat up a group of people with their fists, feet and pistols in Belgrade, then one of them shot a man in the head and killed him. In Nis two policemen hit a man ``a number of times'' with their nightsticks and fists. The man died of the beating. A 15 year old in Kikinda was beat up by a police inspector a few years ago and shot in the head. The boy died. During an interogation about the theft of a toilet seat, five policemen beat up a 24 year old man from Strizilo. He died just hours later...

The feeling of personal insecurity among FRY citizens is caused by the fact that conventional crime has recorded huge increases. Thefts and robberies rose by 27% a year, violent crimes by 40%, some other types by as much as 150%. Expert assessments say those percentages can be found perhaps in South America. At the same time, the number of policemen (five for every 1,000 citizens) is much higher than the optimum number in te West.

Citizens are also endangered by ethnic tension whih can be catastrophic in a multinational state like the FRY and the factual compulsion to participate in various forms of illegal or semilegal earning to survive (assessments are that some 70% of workers and 60% of pensioners cannot exceed the existential minimum with their incomes). Recently a Belgrade pensioner told the press that she has just 1.99 Dinars a day left after she pays all her bills.

Basic personal rights include equality before the law of which there is none if you can't use the services of an unbiased judge. A report in the Sociologija magazine said modern interpretations of the right to an independent judge are no longer satisfied with the conventional restrictive criteria on links between the law and conscience, freedom from outside influence, but insist on rigorous criteria for safety for every judge. There can be no mention of those criteria being met in the FRY, especially Serbia.

The 1991 law on courts includes provisions that every judge in Serbia has to be reelected by September 1992 and only those who are elected will be given permanent posts. When the members of a profession face elections in a few months and the fact that losing the elections means losing your job that profession is entirely dependent.

Lawyer Nikola Barovic adds: ``If judges don't get salaries and leave the courts, that means the regime has decided it does not need the courts.''

So, what has deteriorated in the legal system compared to the previous regime?

``No one has any experience with the legal state here,'' Barovic said. ``During the previous regime class enemies were exempt from the legal system. Today anyone who isn't in power or close to it is exempt. Dafina, Jezda, Arkan were at times much more powerful than any opposition leader.''

``In every state, especially auhtoritiarian states, the state rules of the game are something normal, something you draw moral orientation from,'' Dragan Popadic, a professor of social psychology said. ``Smuggling is something bad because it is banned by law. If someone thinks it's good he's badly adapted socially. The legal system confirms moral decisions. Since the legal system broke down morals broke down as well. Here we have a naked power which doesn't need justification. People see that the state can use the power whenever it wants. No one thinks that it could be different. So, conditions are correct and we should adapt. That's where the cult of violence comes from.''

Citizens usually don't report crimes, fearing something worse. A father of a 15 year old girl who was recently raped, beaten and otherwise abused by a suspended policeman told Borba daily this summer that his family had been threatened that he had been advised not to press charges. ``The Belgrade police didn't even want to take my statement. I was afraid someone would kidnap my daughter, arrest us, someone would get killed. And I'm still afraid. People simply have no trust in the state,'' the father said.

They are not asking the repressive apparatus to protect them, it's quite enough that they don't get attacked, sometimes they don't even demand that much.

A Moslem arrested during a raid to seize guns in Raska (near Sandzak) said: ``They did beat me but the police were fine to me otherwise.''

Popadic says ``the state is not seen as a mountain here, more as an unsuccesful company which lasts shorter than a single lifespan. In it everyone survives, waiting to see what tomorrow's going to bring. In a normal country everyone takes membership in the state for granted, there's a feeling of idnetifying which is stronger than national identity. Patriotic feelings include the longevity of the state. Sociologists call this a destructive society. Everything here is a facade, the substance has been destroyed. The state is the most important group people belong to. Citizens answer to the state first, then to all other groups. That does not exist here and other forms of community become more important. The collective at the level of nation, family ties, friendships still functions, perhaps even better than before. This is a strong defence mechanism which enables survival in a society whose institutions have been destroyed. Adaptation mechanisms are also visible, getting used to conditions, no surprises, seing life as it is now as something permanent, lifelong. And the visible insensitiveness to every horrifying event is the result of lower human functions. That adaptation mechanism is so far gone that Inspector Mladenovic's story, the fact that the police beat someone up every day, is met with the reactionwe know, so what!''

Barovic does not think every citizen is on the same level. ``Ordinary citizens are divided into the ordinary and the ethnically handicapped. It's not the same if your name is Franjo (Croatian), Sadik (Muslim) or Aleksa (Serbian). If someone does not belong to a `good' ethnic group they won't enter him in the public records. If Merima Hasanovic (a Muslim) and Radovan Kovacevic (a Serb) divorce, obviously state reasons are against one of them. Lawsuits are lost because of ethnic membership, people change their names to survive. If ordinary citizens belong to the `wrong' ethnic group they become unusual and are almost always abused, sometimes tortured. A third of the urban populations in BiH, Slavonia, Vojvodina are from ethnically mixed families. They suffer humiliation and a society where a third of the population is humiliated is much sicker than we think. Ordinary citizens can expect much from the authorities representatives if those representatives feel like ordinary citizens. If a representative of the authorities can do as he pleases with the citizen, there's no help. What else could a man hope for from an authority because of which the world organized an international war crimes tribunal.''

Experts believe that Serbs will not easily accept the idea that as a member of society and individual he has certain rights which he must and can demand from the state.

The current propaganda apparatus can claim succes because it links every mention of basic human rights with ``unprincipled international pressure'' and calls it an unpatriotic act.

Popadic says: ``People here have the experience that the state tortures fiercely. Goli Otok (Tito's Gulag, operating from 19481954) is an experience the British don't have. So, they shouldn't oppose the state when they don't know what it's prepared to do. Second, a civil rebellion is impossible since the citizens have been abolished. The terms civil and legal state are used by one percent of the population. A citizen can't transform the state in mechanisms which do not exist. It's man's experience that there is no money in the banks, no justice in the courts. Now, everything is flooded with social pathology. Why shouldn't a more logical system be accepted when it comes? People are more plastic than you think. Adapting to better things will be easier.''