Bloody Letters

“It’s easier to take a bullet than to put up with the beastly way they treated me,” stated for VREME Soko Rugovac, a driver from Rozaje whose photograph with the carved name Milo (i.e. Djukanovic) circulated throughout the world.  He claims that masked policemen from the Pec Security Center had carved it on his chest using a soldering iron and a knife just because Rugovac had interfered with them, and especially because he accidentally told them that in the Montenegrin presidential elections he had voted for Milo Djukanovic.  At that point the “policemen” promised him that he will have an occasion to remember Milo Djukanovic for the rest of his life. Their torturing of him was stopped by 200 family members and friends of Soko Rugovac who had gathered in front of the police station.

“I drove the bus throughout Yugoslavia.  I drove through Kosovo and through Pec, which I know as well as my native Rozaje, and I never came into conflict with anyone, nor ever gave anyone reason to even point a finger at me.  Not even on that day did I imagine that anything could happen to me.  I came to Pec by bus with the intention of visiting my aunt on her deathbed in a neighboring village.  There were no buses.  I took a taxi; and after a few kilometers, we were stopped by police who checked the driver’s license and asked me for identification.

‘Get out’, the policeman told me rudely,” stated Rugovac, describing how he was shoved even more rudely into the police car.  “They took me to the Security Center building, but not through the main door, rather through a side door leading to the basement.  First they asked me if I came to Pec to demonstrate with Albanians who scheduled demonstrations for the following day.  After a short explanation, they asked whether I came to buy votes for Milo Djukanovic for the upcoming elections.  They immediately added that during the presidential elections, votes for Djukanovic were being purchased for as much as a thousand marks.  I answered that I didn’t know that, and that I think it was not necessary to buy votes.  ‘And who did you vote for?’ they asked.  ‘Like the majority of citizens of Montenegro, for Milo Djukanovic,’ Soko Rugovac answered.”

At that point his problems began.  They threw him on a table, threw a shirt over his head and with a hot soldering iron began writing the name Milo.  “At that point I already accepted the idea of dying and all that was going through my mind where they would throw me,” stated Rugovac for VREME.  “After several letters they stopped and asked me if I am still willing to support Milo.  If yes, they were going to cut me in half with a saw from the legs to the head.  At that point one of them took out a knife and asked me from which side I wanted them to take my heart out, because they also wanted to see if my heart was also for Milo.

Then, they began drawing lines across my body with a knife, stabbing me lightly and making circles.  After that,  I don’t know how much time had passed, because I lost all feel for it.  There was a commotion.  They ordered me to dress.  After I got dressed, they began threatening me that I won’t live if I dare tell anyone about what happened to me--that is, to say that I was arrested for an I.D. check.  When they took me outside the building, I saw about two hundred people.  Namely, the taxi driver had informed my family how and in what way I had been picked up by the police.  The news traveled quickly, and people gathered.  When they saw me, many of them went their way, while my closest family from Pec took me to a doctor, Ahmet Blakaj, who gave me some shots, ointment for burns and bandages.  I couldn’t go back to Rozanje the same day, but had to wait for tomorrow.”  This story of Soko Rugovac was taken by the media into virtually every household in Montenegro.  TV Montenegro made a special feature, doctors ascertained that burns ranging from first to third degree had been inflicted, including cuts as well as truncheon marks.

All this created bitterness and political reactions, while Vukasin Maras, the Minister of Police of Montenegro, demanded through a public letter that Serbian Minister of Police Vlajko Stojiljkovic order the incident to be investigated and to inform (Maras) about details and measures taken against the guilty in the name of good relations between the two police forces.

Soko Rugovac, who became a target for many journalists, stated for VREME that he is worried for the fate of his relatives in Pec, “because some people came to them in order to warn them about my case.  They also went to doctor Ahmet, so that I’ve been seized by fear that anything could happen to them because they helped me and were witness to everything.  I myself don’t feel safe here in Rozaje because I have been sharply threatened.”

Until last Tuesday, Minister Stojiljkovic did not make any statements, while the Pec Security Center issued a statement that nothing from Soko Rogovac’s story is true.  Everything was invented by Montenegrin police, they claim, with the intention of taking revenge against us for recently stopping their cigarette trafficking.  They still claim that there is no sign of Soko Rugovac’s arrest in their log book.

To the question of what he thinks about the response of the Pec police, Soko Rugovac stated that after what they did to him, he is not surprised by anything coming from them.  “There are many witnesses who saw when and where they took me, and how I came out of there,” says Rugovac.

The case of Soko Rugovac is not the first and probably not the last example of police abuse of citizens.  Still it is indicative, because it is probably the first time that due to a vote for president of one federal unit, a citizen can lose his life in another federal unit.

The virtually sensational find by the Pec police is the latest incident and is being tied with the one above--an incident that in contrast is being aggressively exploited in the Serbian state media.  Namely, the Pec police confiscated a cargo of cigarettes. The two smugglers supposedly stated that they had been escorted to the Serbian border by the Montenegrin State Security Service (SDB), and that they bought the cigarettes from Ph.D. Novak Kilibarda and Aca Djukanovic, Milo Djukanovic’s brother.  It is stated that Novak Kilibarda and Aca Djukanovic are “owners of public warehouses for the housing of smuggled cigarettes”, and that they get cigarettes from a factory in the island of Vis, and that precisely because of the smuggling of those cigarettes the Montenegrin Government is seeking the opening of the crossing on Debeli Brijeg.  Novak Kilibarda and Aca Djukanovic refuted those claims as “senseless accusations”.  The Rugovac case has raised many questions in Montenegro, one of which is what else could have come out had Soko Rugovac been more willing to cooperate, that is to say, had his family not gathered in front of the Pec Security Service building?  Would we have read that Soko Rugovac had been caught with a bag full of money and drugs, and how he is buying votes for Milo Djukanovic’s party in Kosovo?

In a country in which the police uses soldering irons and knives in interrogating people — everything is possible.  The Montenegrin police state that Soko Rugovac was lucky in many ways, one of them being that the Montenegrin President’s name has only four letters.