Sunday, May 11, 2008
With Yugoslav election time approaching, Serbian activists face a new wave of repression as they try to fight the Milosevic regime from within.
Sep 6, 2000 | While NATO bombs were falling and Yugoslav army troops, Serbian police and paramilitaries were expelling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo last year, Natasa Kandic drove from the Serbian capital Belgrade into Kosovo in her organization's private car. She was on another mission, to get the ethnic Albanian staff of her human rights organization out to safety.
In a country where seemingly everything is deeply, illogically political -- from the soccer team one supports to whether one blames unusually hot weather on NATO -- nothing is more political than ethnic issues.
But Kandic rejects the hatreds that have accompanied the break-up and ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia. In 1992, when Serbs, Croats and Muslims were massacring each other in Bosnia and Croatia, Kandic co-founded a human rights organization in the Serbian capital to champion the idea of human rights for people of all ethnic groups, and the idea that the law should be above politics. Then, as now, that idea is unusual here.
Kandic (pronounced KAN-ditch) has faced Serbian police, ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, Yugoslav army commanders, NATO bombs and regime-controlled judges in her quest to document Yugoslavia's human rights situation. She provides legal defense for ethnic Albanian and Serbian political prisoners, and urges improvements in a country where most people have long been resigned to the rights abuses and war as a matter of course.
Kosovar Albanian villagers crowd around the petite Serbian activist when she visits Kosovo to tell her about rights abuses committed by both Serbs and Albanians. Lawyers from her group, the Humanitarian Law Foundation, have defended some of the more than 1,000 ethnic Albanian political prisoners held in Serbian jails.
Only a few months after NATO bombed Serbia in defense of Kosovar Albanians, Kandic dined at an outdoor Belgrade restaurant with Kosovar Albanian lawyers, which her group had hired to defend Albanian political prisoners in Serbian jails. The lunch would not be unusual were it nor for the fact that many Albanians now refuse to speak in the Serbian language anymore since the war in Kosovo, and most Serbs would not want to be seen speaking with a Kosovar Albanian, a group widely perceived here as responsible for the separatist uprising that triggered NATO bombing. Kandic acted as if the professional interaction were the most normal thing in the world, and the waiters took her lead (and they do again and again).
Serbia's persecuted pro-democracy activists rely on her as well. Their headquarters recently raided by Belgrade police, Serbia's student pro-democracy group Otpor (Serbian for "resistance") now crowd her organization's offices seeking legal advice.
Now, three weeks before the Yugoslav elections, Kandic is in need of legal protection herself. Last week the Yugoslav army announced it will sue her for statements she has made alleging it carried out crimes against civilians in Kosovo.
"Kandic has publicly attacked the Yugoslav army as an institution," Yugoslav Army spokesman Svetozar Radisic told a news conference last Friday. Radisic says Kandic's reports "denigrate the army and the state, the Yugoslav judicial system, and cover up the crimes of the Shiptar (a derogatory term for Albanians) terrorists and NATO criminals. Her allegations are so unfounded that no comment is necessary. We consider that Kandic has no arguments and that she should be sentenced for what she is doing."
What Kandic is doing that so annoys Belgrade's army brass is to talk about what she witnessed in Kosovo.
"I will not keep silent about the horror you generals arranged for young conscripts in Kosovo," Kandic wrote in the independent Belgrade newspaper "Danas" the day the army announced its suit against her. "I will also not keep silent about the atrocities committed against civilians, which I saw in Kosovo. I saw Albanian villages encircled by tanks with my own eyes. I heard grenades and saw thousands and thousands of people leaving their homes with plastic bags in their hands, escorted by the police or army, because they were told that Kosovo was not their homeland. I met columns of civilians on the roads."
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