Wedding Gown For Granny

A group of Belgrade robbers was arrested in January after managing to take people some 200,000 DEM in five robberies. They most often entered apartments posing as policemen. Their most spectacular robbery was last November when they busted into an apartment in blue jackets with Police written on them claiming they were after the men who tried to kill Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov.

The same tactics were used by a group charged with a number of robberies along the highway. One of them was in the police reserve and had a uniform. Drivers along the Belgrade-Novi Sad road obediently stopped when the policeman signaled and lost their money, documents and other valuables at gun point.

Drago Kocic (63) from Stricici near Banja Luka lost all his savings (over 133,000 DEM) from 30 years as a guest worker in Germany. Late last September, the Belgrade police arrested him as suspicious, found the money on him, counted it, gave it back and let him go. Kocic decided he didn't want to waste money on a hotel and didn't trust banks so he sat down to spend the night in the park across the road from the Moskva hotel. That evening, just seven hours after his release, two men approached him posing as policemen and waving some kind of ID. They put him in a car and took all his money at gun point before throwing him out of the car in Zemun.

Over the last few months, the impoverished Serbian population has been subjected to a growing horde of tricksters and robbers who most often invoke the authority of a state institution. The flood of fake ticket controllers in Belgrade city buses (most on lines 16, 23 and 25) who confiscated monthly tickets made the city transport company print new ID for its controllers. In the meantime, a fake customs officer offered Sony TV sets for 400-500 DEM, took the gullible to a building "where my boos lives" took their money ("the boss mustn't know about the re-sale") and disappeared through another exit.

Fake communal inspectors collected money owed for communal services, fake garbage collectors took donations, fake cemetery officials took money for the upkeep of new graves, and in Dimitrovgrad a delegation of the Bulgarian Democratic Alliance offered the perfect cove for a fake Sofia Metropolitan.

Belgrade radio 202 gave its "black grand prix" last August to fake Red Cross activists who tried to earn money during the Serb exodus from the Krajina.

"No one believes they can be tricked but there are suitable victims just waiting to be duped," VREME was told by Zivojin Aleksic a teacher of criminology at the university law school.

Tricksters are good actors as a rule, they get angry if you're suspicious and they make concession seemingly at their expense. A man buying a car, goes for a test drive with the owner, asks to test it alone, gets angry over the owners' mistrust, leaves a few thousand DEM as security and drives off with an incomparably more expensive car.

Aleksic said a fake police officer ran across a girl with an ID card and dragged her across Serbia for days, sexually abusing her until she escaped.

Dragan Popadic, a professor of social psychology at Belgrade university said uniforms are seen as the embodiment of the state here just as other things represent the embodiment of God: "Uniforms carry authority with them, jurisdiction and duty, but our people see them more as a warning of authority than duty. That is a consequence of the fact that all the regimes in this region imposed obedience but not under the law because in that case the regime members would have to stick to it. Servility developed. Later social repression produced a new quality: the authorities didn't ask for just obedience but complicity even love. A mood was created in which every criticism, or questioning are a sign of mistrust and rebellion. Whoever asks the authorities to identify themselves (for example, the prime minister to be held accountable to parliament) has automatically declared himself as an enemy. At a lower level that is true of uniforms. The demand for policemen or inspectors to identify themselves or requests to read a contract carefully before signing it are seen as insults or lack of good will. Few people are prepared to offend the authorities or insult policemen and tricksters are having an easy time."

Popadic added that people who live in false peace (Serbia wasn't at war) find it hard to recognize fake policemen or bankers and Aleksic recalled that Jezdimir Vasiljevic ran for president with an election poster that claimed he was an "Interpol investigator" although there is no such thing. The authorities didn't react and they also ignored false banking which ruined thousands of people. How could they react when the heads of state, from the late Sejdo Bajramovic to Zoran Lilic, are fake rulers, men who are defined as heads of state but never manage or try to convince anyone.

Here, every politically literate teenager knows there are fake parties and movements made up of several activists who surface only when the authorities need support and the state media need to fill their political programs.