Ceko Dacevic Arrested

Belgrade police arrested Dacevic on Monday, January 15 and brought criminal charges against him.

Milika Dacevic Ceko, born in Niksic in 1957. His family comes from the village of Odzak near Pljevlja. In his interviews for the media, he never wanted to speak about his education, so it was probably not very successful. He worked in the kitchen of the Clinical Centre Zvezdara in Belgrade for some time. The people who knew him then say he "was not a bad guy." He admitted having taken part in the March 9, 1991 demonstrations and that, along with Djordje Bozovic Giska and Branislav Matic Beli, he was one of the founders of the Serbian Guard. Since Vuk Draskovic disappointed him, he joined the radicals. He took part as a volunteer in the war in Eastern Slavonia and Bosnia from the very beginning. His elder brother Luka was killed in a battle in Vukovar in October 1991. Ceko was wounded, according to one version six times, and according to another nine times. Radicals' leader Vojislav Seselj gave him the rank of "Chetnik major."

Dacevic emerged from anonymity in August 1992, thanks to the occupation of Pljevlja, a town in north-western Montenegro. Pljevlja was at the time the meeting place of suspicious, armed volunteers under Dacevic's command. They were transferred from Pljevlja, via Mataljka and Cajnice to the Gorazde front where they fought mostly against prisoners of war - mainly horror-stricken elderly Muslim women. When there was no chance to "clear the grounds" in Bosnia of money, cars, or stereos, TV's and videos, they returned to Pljevlja to harass local Muslims, ignoring the police.

The conflict broke out when the police confiscated a white Mercedes from one of Dacevic's subordinates. The next day "young major" Dacevic came to the Pljevlja police station and demanded that they return the car. His proof of ownership was a slip bearing the signature of Dusko Kornjaca, the former Herzegovina Defence Minister and the mayor of Cajnice. After the police detained Dacevic, his armed followers blocked the roads to the town. Dacevic was released and Montenegro President Momir Bulatovic and Commander of the Podgorica Corps of the Army of Yugoslavia Gen. Radomir Damnjanovic came to negotiate with him.

When the former Montenegro Police Minister Nikola Pejakovic decided that twenty policemen from Pljevlja were to be transferred to other posts or lose their jobs, the "population" and Dacevic's desperados offered their support, so Pljevlja was occupied for a second time. Helped by their "brothers-in-arms" from Bosnia and other towns in northern Montenegro, the paramilitary took hold of all vital points in town. They started looting, shooting, cruising the town in the cars and calling for a slaughter of Muslims. Gen. Damjanovic and chief of the National Security Service of Montenegro Bosko Bojovic saw what it was like to have someone threaten and shoot above their heads.

"Then, during those dramatic events, when we were literally seconds apart from madness and showdowns, I ordered that a Mr. Dacevic be temporarily released from prison. I was blackmailed to make such a decision, because cannons brought from the Bosnian front were directed toward the houses of Pljevlja Muslims," Momir Bulatovic explained two years later.

After the interventions of Momir Bulatovic and former Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic, the situation in Pljevlja calmed down and the Montenegro police gradually started taking control. In September 1992, Dacevic was arrested and, having spent five months in investigative detention, was released to become a Serbian Radical Party deputy in the Federal Parliament and member of the Parliament's Security Committee! The Higher Court in Bijelo Polje in early 1993 sentenced him to a year in prison for violent behaviour and participation in a group which prevented a police officer ..." but, thanks to the general political situation and Gen. Damjanovic's testimony, Dacevic was not charged with terrorism and attempt of taking power by force.

Dacevic (who in the meantime became a "chetnik duke") broke three ribs and had a pleura injury in June 1993, when after one of the many conflicts with the Montenegro police he "fell down and hurt himself," according to the official version. Because of this incident, even Vojislav Seselj turned his back on Dacevic. The "Duke of Pljevlja" lost his seat in the Parliament, the Security Committee and the Radical Party hierarchy. Only courts showed interest in him and the Supreme Court of Montenegro confirmed the Bijelo Polje Court verdict but added an extra year to it, while the Pljevlja Court charged him with hew crimes. Dacevic fled to Vukovar, where he lived with his wife and two sons, broke beer records (the latest score published in the media said he drank 70 bottles a day) and occasionally spoke for the press claiming that he was the commander of all volunteers in the Bosnian Serb Republic, that 11 thousand people were under his control, 423 of whom were killed, and that he "got as presents and distributed as presents" 11 thousand guns worth 48 million German marks. He attacked Vojislav Seselj, Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan and threatened to all the "enemies of the Serbian people."

It is still uncertain whether Milika Dacevic Ceko's reappearance will raise the topics which the Belgrade and Podgorica authorities would prefer to remain forgotten. There are still many unanswered questions on cooperation between regular and paramilitary troops on the border between Serbia, Montenegro and the Bosnian Serb Republic, on the fate of kidnapped passengers, on unsolved murders of Muslims in Bukovica near Pljevlja, on the role the authorities played in all of these, on appropriate and inappropriate paramilitary, etc.

Record 606 in Lazarevac

"At this moment" the Lazarevac branch of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) has 4,154 members and the number is increasing. Why? Because there are more unemployed people than new jobs. Head of the SPS MP group in the Serbian Parliament Gorica Gajovic said on TV yesterday that the number of socialists was increasing from half a million to a million. The forecast is quite correct, because public promotions of groups of 50 or 100 new party members are history. On January 17, new 606 people joined the Socialist Party in Lazarevac. President of the Lazarevac SPS Milovan Zunjic said: "That's the way it is when SPS has something to offer."

What do ordinary people say about this hunt for party membership cards? A Gypsy selling cigarettes has heard the news, but he would prefer not to comment on it. His colleague, a refugee from Bosnia, says it is not good, but that he understands the people if this will help them get jobs. Predrag Novicic, a peasant from the nearby village of Stubica, discussed the matter: "Promises ought to be fulfilled, instead of deceiving our children in this way. Where are they going to employ all these children? There are not so many jobs, there is not even enough work for the ones who are already employed." He has doubts because of what happened in his village. They promised people what they asked for, he said - they promised a new road to one village, telephones to another, reconstruction of the cemetery to a third -and when they did not manage to talk people into paying local voluntary tax, the promises failed.

The opposition, which officially exists, made statements which could not be heard because the local radio station refused to publish them. Bosko Nesovic, the president of the local branch of Seselj's Radicals, said they were against blackmailing the people the way the SPS did, but that they, too, advised the children to join the party if that was the way to get a job. He said things would become clear in the elections when the SPS ends up with fewer votes than members.

And the SPS is active. Although not a single investment has been made in Lazarevac since 1990, all local organizations are increasingly active. Each one of them got as a present the water-colour portrait of president Milosevic. The author - Art teacher Slobodan Bozovic. The number of local organizations - 40.

Entering the building, we see posters of president Milosevic and the Party. President Zunjic is away on a party assignment and so are his associates. There are many activists who are working busily. They are preparing invitations for party meetings. "We have just told ten kids to come some other time because we have run out of membership statements," says Ljiljana Bozovic. We enquire about the structure of number 606. "It's nothing," they say. "Another 100 joined in the next day and new ones are coming all the time. The number is 4,154 now." Of the number we enquired about, 370 are under the age of thirty, 26 engineers, three doctors, only seven farmers. We ask how come 606? That is the way it turned out. The list was completed at noon, many people went straight to the celebration. The list of presidential candidates has also been completed. An elderly activist asks who is on the list. They say -Zunjic.

In Zunjic's office - Milosevic's portrait one by two meters. An oil-painting by Art teacher Bozovic. Zunjic and Milosevic sitting face to face. We sit down between them. Zunjic does not consider the number 606 a record, but a normal result of the work in the past few years, and especially in the past few months, since he become the president. They shared the good and the bad with people, they cared for everyone, built a school-building, eight kilometres of a road, gave jobs to 1,500 people in four years and intend to employ as many this year. Over 70 percent of young workers at open-cast "Tamnava," where Zunjic is the director, are new party members. Why? Because young people want to be directly involved and to decide on everything that the party programme offers.

"Tamnava" produces five million tonnes of coal a year at present. It will be producing 18 million tonnes, says Zunjic, because the reserves are a billion tonnes. There are 6,000 unemployed people -a chance for new production and party records.

Music Market

"I received information that people in Belgrade are listening to my songs. I believe that for us, the Croatian singers, Belgrade is still far away. When Croatia establishes official contacts with Serbia, and if they establish them, people will probably start going there, and they will probably start coming here. If others go, so shall we." This is how Alen Vitasovic, the most popular Croatian singer at this moment, briefly expressed the reactions of his colleagues on the news that their music is popular in Serbia, as well as on the eventual opening up of a market between yesterday's warring countries. Reactions on the popularity which Croatian dance and rock music has had in Belgrade have been extremely scarce up till now. Musicians and managers unwillingly speak for any Serbian newspapers - independent or regime ones. A basketball representative Velimir Perasovic, as the first Croatian sportsman who had played in Belgrade following the collapse of Yugoslavia, was shocked when, after his Spanish club had defeated Partizan, the sound system in the sports-hall started blasting the sounds of the Zagreb band E.T. The shortage of information from the Serbian side is the consequence of the ever present "political correctness" which demands that no contacts should be maintained with any Serbs, as well as the non professional attitude of the so-called state (read: controlled media) which have failed to comprehend that a huge, even if hidden, hunger exists in people for any kind of information from the "other side". On the well-known interest which is apparent in Yugoslavia for the Croatian pop scene or for example, sporting events, people here usually look upon with derision, in the manner of: "Unbelievable, they started it and now they would like to live in a brotherhood again as if though nothing had ever happened."

The hit-song/folk singer from Dubrovnik, Milo Hrnic recently announced how he would break the head of the first Serb who decides to come to Dubrovnik for a swim, and Bosko Landeka, an alleged singer who proclaims himself as an authentic Ustasha, has accused the comic dancer Senna M (ex-Senad od Bosne) of spreading filthy backward Muslim peasant religion amongst Croatian girls. To make the irony even worse, the statement came as a reply to Senna's claim that he feels himself to be a pure ethnic Croat from the Konavala region! The noses of the nationally allergic were rubbed most by the feulleton "Croatian show-biz" of the well-known journalist Darko Hudelist in the Globus newspaper. Devoid of any complexes, the author had in two detailed sequences claimed that Croatian dance music whose authors swear by Western provenance is nothing other than a bad substitute for Serbian-Bosnian folk music. Further, he has sharply attacked, as he says, traditional Croatian hypocrisy or simulation which had, by forbidding all Eastern products, claimed how the Serbs and only the Serbs were to blame for everything. Pedantically, like a true experienced journalist, Hudelist has portrayed Zagreb's club scene in which members of the Croatian Army and the Herzegovinians fall into a trance upon hearing the famous Serbian contemporary folk songs which (for now) are being performed by local singers. Further, he correctly claims that folk songs should be legalized since then we could get better quality rock and dance music, i.e. Croatian show-biz would finally have a clear and democratic genre proliferation. "Following a war on these regions, trade always reappears. During Yugoslavia, the former Jugoton record company earned its money from folk singers. I'm not interceding in favor of folk music, but those are normal marketing relations." Claims Zeljko Milos, one of the owners of the Euroton record company, and Alen Vitasovic, whom some might adore because of his songs while others might despise due to the fact that he earned heaps of money by singing at the pre-election meetings of the Croatian Democratic Alliance (HDZ), relatively realistically concludes his recent interview for the newspaper Globus: "It's easy to talk of reconciliation for us who had lost nothing in this war. Ask those who have a family member missing or who had lost a hand." When you think of all the atrocities which had evolved during this war, then Vitasovic's statement isn't far from the truth.