Interviewed Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijević after he was beaten up and threatened with death in the center of Belgrade – with his “crime” being that he and some others wanted to publicly commemorate the victims of the 1995 genocide of Srebrenica. This is what he had to say:
“It was about a quarter past eight in the morning on Saturday. Arsenijević arrived by taxi at the place where the commemorative event was to be held at 11 am that same day. There were some last preparations to be made. Police was not there yet. Others were.
“I had barely got out of the car when they surrounded me,” Arsenijević says by phone. Who were “they”? In Arsenijevićs words they were young men in black shirts and black baseball caps, belonging to the far-right milieu. Thug types.
They were prepared. It began with aggressive body language and insults. Then they started beating me. As they left, they said this was only a warning: I was at the very top of the list and should prepare for the worst.”
What is notable: Vladimir Arsenijević explicitly praises the Serbian police for its work, saying they cannot be blamed for not yet being present at the scene almost three hours before the event was to begin.
“I have no beef with the Belgrade police. They do their work professionally and decently,” Arsenijević says. That was also the case on Saturday, he emphasizes, citing as an example an event on Republic Square, where candles were set up for the victims of Srebrenica.
Although the commemoration on Republic Square was disrupted by hecklers with megaphones, it nevertheless took place, protected by police, Arsenijević says, adding that in his own case, the police came immediately after he called them following the attack.
“The officers did what they could. They asked me to come to the police station, where a detailed statement was taken.”
“For me, the police are not the problem,” Arsenijević stresses. “The problem is the lack of political will at the level above them to clear up such cases.” He suspects that the judiciary receives political “messages” not to take action in cases like his.
He thinks the perpetrators know this, too: “They feel very relaxed about what they do.” The writer is certain that the perpetrators have political backing, leading all the way up.
“Everyone knows there is an invisible line connecting these thugs at the very bottom, through several layers of society, with the top of the pyramid. And we know who sits at the top of that pyramid.”
That is an allusion to Serbia’s president Vučić, though Arsenijević does not mention his name. In any case, he says, it is clear that at a certain level of the Serbian state, blockages exist that hinder genuine investigations into nationalist perpetrators of violence.
He describes the regular attacks on the cultural center “Krokodil”, which he runs and which is despied by Serbian nationalists. Even in cases where video footage was provided to the police clearly showing the perpetrators’ faces, no one has ever been prosecuted, Arsenijević says.
However, he is also critical of certain tendencies within the Serbian student movement, which has been demonstrating against Vučić for months. The students’ silence on the Srebrenica commemoration day was (again) deafening, in contrast to their habitual “Kosovo in Serbia” clamor.
“The students say Srebrenica was before their time, so they do not remember it. But NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 was also before their time – and they mention that all the time,” Arsenijević says.
For more background, see Frankfurter Allgemeine/FAZ.
Article
