At Night, in the Back of the Head

Three Belgrade taxi drivers have been killed in the last two months, and the death toll might rise with the murder of Predrag Mitkovic, 34, who was buried on February 3 with no official statement on his death. The previous three murders had conspicuous similarities: all victims were shot in the back of the head, probably from the back seat, at night, in dark or suburban parts of the city. It is unlikely that robbery was the motive for these murders because all three drivers had an insignificant amount of money with them when they were killed. The common detail is that police has released no official statement in any of the cases.

Such circumstances make perfect ground for the spreading of rumors. Some taxi drivers think they are dealing with a maniac, while others are astonished with the fact that robbery was not the motive. "The hell with business if we can lose our heads for 100 dinars, there are too many armed lunatics on the streets these days", said a taxi driver while cruising past a police cordon trying to normalize traffic by beating protesters in downtown Belgrade.

A homicide inspector said there has been no information on any of the cases because he didn't have enough manpower for a detailed investigation. The situation is very much different than three decades ago, when the murderer of Tiosav Jankovic, a taxi driver killed in 1967, was apprehended in no time and sentenced to death days later.

It seems that Belgrade taxi drivers are prepared to show some level of solidarity these days only when a colleague gets killed, which has become a frequent occurrence. Several hundred taxi drivers took less than two hours to block central Belgrade after Nikola Zivkovic’s body was found at 7.45 a.m. last Monday. They demanded an immediate meeting with police officials and the city authorities, which took hours and received delegations of various taxi associations. They later met with assistant interior minister Radovan Stojicic, who had just returned from a meeting with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to receive compliments and congratulations for "a successful anti-terrorist intervention" in the province of Kosovo. After the meeting, president of the "Yellow taxi" Zoran Ristic told his colleagues: "Belgrade police promised they would receive us within a week to discuss a new status for taxi drivers, which would enable the police to react more promptly when we are attacked".

More taxi drivers have been killed in Belgrade since 1992 than in the previous quarter of a century. Karanfil Manojlovic, Djurdje Markovic, Branko Topalovic and Nikola Zivkovic were all killed in the past four months. Predrag Mitkovic disappeared on January 14, and was burried on February 3. The war conditions around Serbia certainly played a significant part in the crime boom. However, a trigger-happy police force kept explaining that it was unable to prevent a flood of murders in Belgrade resulting from "gang wars" rather than trying to find the perpetrators and bring them to trial. Its petrifying inefficiency was accompanied by statements to the effect that "various forms of crime have been curbed" , which sound ridiculous even to those reading them on state television.

Taxi drivers said they would block the city center again if their demands for safety are ignored once again. Even so, many of them believe that little will change even if the promises are kept this time. "You know what, when I started as a taxi driver 20 years ago, I needed about 12 certificates apart from a driver’s license. I even needed a certificate saying I was never convicted or under investigation for a crime. Today, you’ve got people working as taxi drivers without a valid driver’s license", said a bitter taxi driver after learning of his colleague’s death. It is a fact that eight "telephone" taxi organizations exist in Belgrade. It is also a fact that the demand for determining conditions on which a taxi license is issued was never accepted, in spite of the flexible position of professional drivers. All this led to a rise in the number of taxi organizations, rather than an improvement in safety standards.

"I haven’t got a clue what to do. Look at the car I am driving, I don’t have enough money to pay tax, let alone buy a Mercedes. If I saw you tomorrow I wouldn’t recognize you, you could even kill me", said a taxi driver commenting on the tragic fate of his unfortunate colleagues.