The Devil's Business

The stable political, military, economic, security and especially demographic and ethnic situation in the Serb municipality of Bijeljina (as the board at the entrance to the region states) has been disturbed by an incident in the village of Zagoni. The brutal harassment of the local priest has caused a greater uproar among the inhabitants of Semberija (and other Serbs there), more than the expulsion of over 10,000 Muslims from nearby Janja.

The incident took place on December 31 at around 03:00 a.m. Members of the 4th special unit of the Sarajevo Ministry of the Interior (stationed along with all other special units in Janja) arrived in the morning to eject the local priest from the parish house. Familiar with the priest's earlier refusal to move out, the commandos charged the door and windows. They fired twenty cartridges of tear gas and smoke bombs. Even though he was half-asleep, Rade Markovic and his wife Cvijeta managed to throw most of the cartridges out of the window, and Rade returned fire from a M 72 machine gun. The commandos then went mad, and as Markovic put it, "started screaming as if they were exorcising the Devil himself", and brought up an anti-aircraft gun and pointed it at the front door. Seeing the gun and the state his wife was in, Markovic threw his machine gun out of the window. Mrs. Markovic had been clubbed on the head by a commando with a rifle butt while trying to pull the blinds down, "so that her skull was bashed into her brain," said Markovic. The commandos entered, tied up the priest and took two down to the Bijeljina police station. The priest was then put in jail while his wife was taken to the Belgrade Clinic Center where she was operated on. She is currently recuperating but has no sight in her right eye.

Markovic was in jail until January 5, when he was released after the locals protested. The District court said that Markovic had "prevented the carrying out of an eviction order from September 1991 to 24.11.1994, and that he hadn't been prosecuted because of this. Markovic had been provoked the Sarajevo police on 31.12.1994 when they tried to eject him without an official writ and the presence of an official person". In the meantime the priest's son Milorad was interrogated for 30 hours, and the villagers of Zagoni and surrounding villages arrived in Bijeljina on January 11 protesting the priest's brutal treatment. Since most of them were armed, they were heard and promised that "Karadzic or Krajisnik would personally come to solve the problem". The President of the municipality made no public statement. Bishop Vasilije who plays a key role in the event didn't show up either and didn't comment the incident. Markovic's neighbor said that attempts at ejecting the priest had been going on for some time. Bishop Vasilije defrocked him and brought in Petar Stefanovic, a refugee priest from Memic, but none of the locals accepted him. The villagers built the church and the parish house and they have the right to choose their priest. Over 1,300 villagers signed a petition in Markovic's favor. All this was confirmed by the Manojlovic brothers, Dobrinka Arsenovic and a member of the Church board who wished to remain anonymous. They all said that the commandos had come during the night while the village was asleep. There had been attempts at evicting the priest in December 1993. At the time a hundred odd policemen from Bijeljina blocked the village and fired tear gas. But then the father of Mauzer, the well-known commander of the Panther division threatened to call his son home from the front and the police left. The locals don't speak well of Bishop Vasilije; they claim that the people no longer give money for the army through church funds because of him.

We talked with Rade Markovic in Bijeljina after a hearing in court. Markovic was accused of "calling the people to resistance and rallying villagers in order to prevent measures by official persons".

Markovic said that his "differences" with the bishop date back to December 1988 when the Bishop suspended him under an article of the Church law for damaging the reputation of a priest and the Church. (The villagers say because Markovic wouldn't let his wife go to Tuzla and serve the Bishop as he had demanded). In the first degree sentence this is not mentioned as the reason for the defrocking, but the priest's signing of a contract for the leasing of a parish flat in Zagoni (the contract recognizes that Markovic pays 47% of the sum). The great Church court confirmed the defrocking on July 1989, without mentioning the previous reasons, but took as its reason the fact that the priest was carrying out his duties while under the Bishop's ban. Since then, the Bishop has been trying to evict Markovic with the help of the state. And since things weren't going smoothly, the commandos were called in.

When the top Church body confirmed that Markovic had no business being in the Church or the Zagoni, 97% of the villagers decided to found an Independent Church Community, independent of the competent eparchy and Bishop Vasilije. The new church community was registered as such with the competent organs.

The new authorities, however, did not want a rift in the church and tried to solve the problem according to the Bishop's "cannons" and "persuade" the errant priest that justice was not on his side. No one counted on the people. They should have known what Serbs are like when defending their hearths.