Two members of choirs in Novi Sad will spend at least 30 days in custody because they are suspected of having spilled paint on the front door of a member of the Serbian Progressive Party. Whether they did that will be determined by the court.
It is clear that private property no one should be defiled with paint. But it is also sad that in a society that gave birth to the state with all its institutions, the word justice offends common sense.
The same member and official of the larger state apparatus, for example, was filmed this summer beating the people of Novi Sad. The police did not quickly find him like the two activists and he did not end up in custody.
In the prison on Klisa, activists of the choirs met a young man Ivan, who has been in custody for more than 11 months in total because he kicked the door of the City Hall during a protest. Clearly, yes, the door should not be kicked.
However, a 22-year-old young man is in a difficult financial situation, he grew up without parents, in a home, which is why he was brought to an unsolvable problem for our judiciary – he has no place of residence, so instead of house arrest, he rots in a cell.
It is easier for us to keep him locked up than to try to approach this story from the human side and from the side of common sense in general and let the man out.
Before the stupid question “why was he kicking the door”, let’s try to imagine ourselves, just one night on Klisa. If we are able. In a cell with a few people and hundreds of bed bugs. For which crime does one remain in custody for 11 months?
Let us remind you that more than two thousand people have been detained so far. Hundreds were beaten. Among them are those who did not reach the age of 16, as children in Valjevo. Six Novi Sad students are still exiled.
But those who were filmed from several angles beating students and journalists in Novi Sad in front of the SNP are still being sought. As well as for the attackers who beat the journalists on assignment, Ivan, Zorica and Lazar, who suffered a fractured skull. Or to those who set fire to Jaćimović’s bus.
Last week, two police officers were suspended in Novi Sad for removing the “blanket” from the roadblock. And deka is a SNS sympathizer and he could certainly have walked over the crossing, but he decided to try to steal the banner and insult the people who were silently remembering their fallen fellow citizens. But that’s why Ilija Kostić, who had a part of his body amputated, is still being searched for with the policemen who fought in the station.
Admittedly, there was one case when four SNS activists were arrested. They broke the jaw of student Anna with a bat. They ended up in court. But the president pardoned them, and SNS members declared them heroes on social networks.
We are approaching the moment when this amount of abuse by the police and the judiciary will no longer be possible. Either the regime will have to formalize new legal norms, an open autocracy and a party police state with thugs in black who can beat us as they wish, or this society in its current state will try to find a new government.
And the company approached its end, quietly, not recording those moments enough. Like the one when the high-ranking officials of Novi Sad were lined up in front of the party premises, they shouted “Ustasha” to the high school students who were passing by on the protest route, i.e. children because the majority of those gathered there were minors. Or when the assembled party infantry in Belgrade provoked Dijana Hrka, a mother who lost a child. After such moments, nothing can be the same.
The views of the authors in the Dialog column do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Danas.
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