VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS

Police Torture in the Streets of Belgrade

AIM Belgrade, 4 February, 1997

After two and a half months of hesitation accompanied by occasional and whimsical outbursts of repression, regime of Slobodan Milosevic resolutely, uncompromisingly and unselectively used force against peaceful demonstrators in Belgrade. In the evening, on Sunday, 2 February, the already customary protest walks were organized during the central news program on state TV Serbia; it was planned, like on previous evenings, that groups of citizens from various parts of Belgrade would gather on the main city square where another rally of coalition Together was to take place.

The column of citizens fron New Belgarde and Zemun headed by President of the Serbian Revival Movement Vuk Draskovic arrived unhindered to the Branko Bridge which is the shortest link with downtown Belgrade, but there it was stopped by quadraple cordon of police. When the other two leaders of Together coalition parties, Zoran Djindjic and Vesna Pesic, learnt what was going on on the bridge, they directed "their" respective columns (which were coming from Slavija and Vuk's monument) towards the Branko Bridge, but on its other side. There they were also "welcomed" by police cordons. Although resentful because of such an irrational blockade, the citizens showed no wish to settle accounts with the police forces, and party leaders with their speeches added to pacification of the situation. Vuk Draskovic, in his epic style, even proposed that all the people leave and he remain alone in front of the cordon.

At the very moment when the citizens were peacefully withdrawing towards the Republic Square, the police simultaneously, on both sides of the bridge, started a brutal attack: they first pushed the citizens from the accesses to the bridge and then started driving them towards the centre of the city on one side, and towards the petrol station popularly called "Dayton"(!) on New Belgrade side, and then frantic beating up began along with spouting jets of water on citizens from police water guns. In this savege assault against the demonstrators, many women and elderly citizens were hurt, and not even the President of the Civic Alliance of Serbia, Ms. Vesna Pesic was spared, who received blows with a rubber baton on her arms and thighs, and then sought shelter in a flat near by. When the police managed to drive the mass towards the centre of the city, it started racing after the citizens with the intention to completely disperse the demonstrations by force.

With no exaggeration it can be said that in the few hours which followed, downtown Belgrade was ruled by total insecurity and lawlessness, and the main actors of such a state were the very men who had been trained and paid to keep law and order. A real hue and cry was organized against the citizens, and tens of demonstrants, but also many citizens whose only guilt was that they happened to be in the vicinity, for instance, waiting for the night buses, were heavily beaten up, sadistically sworn at, insulted with unconcealed hatred. There were elderly women and children under age among the injured. The Emergency Centre received twenty nine injured persons, there were also those who asked for medical help in other hospitals and the privately-owned clinic Anlave which from the beginning of the students' protest operates as students' emergency centre, and many did not even seek medical help fearing that they would be registered by the police if they had. Anybody could see that such fear was not unfounded, because policemen were present at the registration desk of the Emergency Centre.

Sources from the police revealed that patrols that night were ordered to take into custody everyone who had a badge or a whistle (!), but also those who wore tennis shoes! It is obviously safer to walk around Belgrade carrying unpermitted weapons or narcotics than a whistle. A reporter of Radio B 92 testifies that paid thugs in police uniforms beat up citizens right in front of his eyes furiously shouting: "Why aren't you whistling now, f... you mother". Apart from whistles, policemen seem to have been especially irritated by journalists' identity cards, so although they identified themselves in an orderly manner, reporters, news photographers and cameramen of BK Television, Beta news agency, daily Blic, CNN, Reuters and Associated Press were all beaten up. A bizarre detail which reveals a lot about the psychology of the forces of law and order: a policeman simple-mindedly declared for Dnevni telegraf that he beat up the crew of BK Television because he believed that they were from CNN...

It is interesting that on that very day, the students of Belgrade University without any problems went for their protest walk around the city, without meeting a single policeman. After complete success of the students' action they called "with a cordon against the cordon", it was undoubtedly assessed that it was less harmful for the regime to let the students walk than to provoke the eruption of sympathy and solidarity such as those caused by eight-day long standing in front of the cordon in Kolarceva street, where all "thinking" strata of the Serbian society expressed their support to the students' demands. By "giving preference" to the students, from the very beginning, the regime tried to isolate and satanize opposition manifestations as mere "partisanship". The students saw through this tactic and the day after the yet unseen repression against the citizens, clearly said that they refused to accept the double criteria of the regime.

The next day, students walked along the "blood-stained bridge" and went to the building of the former central committee of the communist party, which is now the seat of the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia and surrounded it in protest because of the repression seen the previous night. The students walked around the city without any problem again, saluted by the citizens more heartily than ever, and the gathering of the coalition Together on the Square of the Republic passed peacefully. However, the protest walk of the citizens was prevented by a police cordon again; the citizens who refused to go away after the speeches were subjected to police torture again, and "forces of law and order" even entered shops and restaurants and coffee shops catching demonstrators (or whoever could be that...) and brutally beat them up.

That is how Belgraders continued to be exposed to the conditions of an unproclaimed state of emeregency and high insecurity, so that it became customary when going out into the street to hear a warning "beware the police" as if you were an incorrigible criminal persecuted by Interpol. Since it has become irrational and impossible to pretend that nothing is happening and that the circumstances were at least to a certain extent normal, majority of members of the council of the Belgrade film festival, FEST, submitted resignations, and the festival was interrupted: distributers withdrew all the films for two days (for the time being) from Belgrade cinemas, theatres refused to play in protest. Mayor of Belgrade, Nebojsa Covic, called the police to stop with the unreasonable repression against Belgraders, and appealed to the citizens not to respond to force with force.

At the moment this text is being written, the beginning of another gathering of coalition Together is expected; whether streets of Belgrade will again start to resemble a battlefield, remains to be seen. The regime is playing a game which it cannot win in the long run, and in this way it is just speeding up its own fall and limiting its possibilities for an elegant withdrawal. The one who came to power carried by populistic hysteria on cheap nationalistic symbols and lies, will leave by his own choice, in the sign of blood. This is the final outcome of a policy which had for ten years produced destruction, lived off it, and will in the end be ruined by it.

(AIM) Teofil Pancic