Para-legislation

That was the start of a customs war because it introduced a stipulation that any Serbian company wishing to sell goods from Slovenia and Croatia would be required to deposit half the value of those goods in a state bank account, where it would stay for six months. The introduction of that act did not affect its authors even though it wasn’t official under the former Yugoslavia’s and Serbia’s constitutions because it hadn’t been made public, and even though it committed the crime of upsetting the former Yugoslavia’s market. Over the next seven years, the regime which is still in place continued its practice of secret para-legislation which turned the legal position of the citizen into a military or state secret.

"My first contact with secret regulations was in 1995 when some ethnic Albanians from Kosovo were turned back from the border even though all their documents were in order," VREME was told by Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Right Fund. "By following one specific case we discovered that this was a secret order from the Federal Traffic and Communications Ministry which had not been published anywhere, yet state bodies were abiding by it. It said that "false asylum seekers" cannot go back without the agreement of our authorities. In practice that order was being implemented only in the case of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo."

The five ethnic Albanian Yugoslav citizens were not allowed into the country at Pristina airport on May 2, 1996 but were deported back to Stuttgart. The same thing had happened to a group of nine ethnic Albanians earlier. Biljana Kovacevic, secretary of the Helsinki Human Rights Committee, said she went through all the issues of the official state herald to see if that government regulation existed and she didn’t find it. But Max Brut Pedesen from Denmark sent them a copy of the instructions from the FRY ministry dated November 16, 1994 which he got through the UNHCR.

In its report on that regulation, the Humanitarian Right Fund concluded that it was an unconstitutional violation of the right of Yugoslav citizens to return to Yugoslavia. "The authorities can check the validity of travel documents or the identity of individuals at border crossing," the report said. "It is the indisputable right of the authorities to launch an investigation, interrogate or detain Yugoslav citizens when entering the country if the legal requirements are met. However, the authorities cannot take away a Yugoslav citizen’s right to enter the country."

That is well known to the authors of the regulation and that is exactly why they introduced it. At the time, western European countries announced the mass deportation of Yugoslav citizens who were in their countries illegally. Most of them were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

"The police have sub-legal acts to regulate their actions," said Branimir Plese from the Humanitarian Right Fund. "The public security service has a rulebook on public security operations dating back to 1974. The measures that are actually being implemented are disputable. Namely, in October 1995, a rulebook on the conditions and ways of implementing force was adopted. We discovered its existence thanks to the persistence of one of our associates who was investigating police brutality during the civil demonstrations in 1996/97. He checked the register of existing regulations but there was no indication that the new regulations had been adopted."

Plese said the newly discovered rulebook regulates only some of the things covered by the 1974 manual. It does not include detention, identification and all other aspects of public security enforcement.

If things as fundamental as those are covered in mist, what about less important acts?

Plese added: "There was talk of an order which I don’t think was published anywhere. I think information about it came from a retired police commander and it covers the implementation of court and other decisions when police assistance is needed. For example, when someone is evicted from an apartment or offices they have moved into illegally, the assistance of the local police is often needed. So far that has functioned normally. However, under the allegedly nonexistent order dated June last year, the local police are refusing to assist with those evictions until the Internal Affairs Ministry approves them. Practically, that means a court ruling is of no use since it can’t be implemented. In a way, that order, which is claimed not to exist even while in practice the police are refusing to respond to calls for assistance in implementing court rulings, introduces an illegal prevention of the implementation of court rulings."

"What you have to understand in today’s Serbia and FRY is that we’re leading a parallel life," Biljana Kovacevic told VREME. "There’s a life on paper under the regulations and an essentially different life which we all have to live to survive. That includes everything from double accounts to buying cigarettes on the street and changing foreign currency. The state also has that kind of parallel life. On one side it has declarative laws and on the other a secret system of sub-legal acts and who knows what kinds of measures under which the state operates."

There is hope that the illegal acts of the regime won’t remain a secret forever.

"There was a so-called mobilization which was actually the kidnapping of refugees who were then sent to the warfronts," Kovacevic said. "The state never did say that this was done under some regulation such as Article 2 of the Law on Refugees which states that refugees have working and military obligations. They said instead that they had nothing to do with the whole thing. Then Federal Internal Affairs Minister Vukasin Jovanovic said that this was just a normal attempt at keeping order on the streets. This was a typical action by the Serbian police under secret orders or instructions."

Seven refugees who were sent to the warfront by the police sued the republic of Serbia in Belgrade’s First District Court and won the suit. The judge ruled in their favor, which means that the Serbian police illegally arrested them as refugees in Serbia and handed them over to the police of another state (the former Republic of Serb Krajina) which then forced them into the military.