Knives and Bombs

Belgrade street cleaners found piles of empty wallets, knives and a hand grenade in the bushes around Belgrade’s Palace of Justice. The find was reported to the police who ordered an end to the cleaning until they could get there to search the decorative shrubbery. No police showed up and three days later Palace of Justice security personnel decided to launch their own search. They found more empty wallets and a few more knives.

The recent hand grenade explosion in the district court in Pancevo caused public reactions about the lives of judges being in danger. On May 22, mechanic and taxi driver Aleksandar Tomic, 52, was standing trial for violence and threats against his neighbors when he activated a hand grenade in the courtroom. Judge Ksenija Ivkovic managed to throw it into an empty corner while Tomic tried to activate another grenade but was stopped by retired policeman Bozidar Maksimovic, 68. Two people were seriously injured and another eight lightly.

So judges seem to be in danger of being killed. The risk of the judicial profession is certainly greater today than it ever was. Eight days before the incident in Pancevo, Sabac judge Ljiljana Sofronic was punched by a dissatisfied plaintiff. Two years ago, a defendant in Nis cut a judge’s throat; an incident that was unimaginable up to then. "People come to court armed, one even managed to bring an automatic weapon into the courtroom," Belgrade Economic Court Chairman Radomir Lazarevic said earlier this year. His court shares a building with the misdemeanors court. "The whole building has only one security officer," he added. Sonja Brkic, a Novi Sad judge complained of the threats she and her colleagues were getting from both defendants and lawyers.

The Justice Ministry sees a solution to the problem in the forming of a judiciary police.

All violence is unacceptable, but the judges in the FRY are no more endangered than ordinary people although it would be natural to assume that they are given their profession, the growing crime rates, the number of court cases and the mental state of the population. Everywhere in the world, criminals attack anyone who endangers them. Here most of their ill intentions end up in the bushes outside the court building. Can the issue of their safety be answered without first going into the question of the quality of the job they’re doing and their contribution to overall security? Corruption and indifference among judges, who we know lean towards the strong and are strict towards the soft (with some exceptions), are almost never mentioned in public. Their salaries and working conditions are no different to those in other professions. That means they’re miserable. Do the judges and the population need more armed men who’ll be paid to beat us?