Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A leaked document links Serbian secret police to the assassination of a journalist for the first time -- and threatens to blow apart Serbia's shaky peace.
Nov 2, 2000 | On the day he was assassinated, April 11, 1999, the bearded dissident Belgrade newspaper publisher Slavko Curuvija and his wife, Branka Prpa, went for a walk on Knez Mihailova street. They left at 1:53 p.m., spoke with an elderly couple in front of the Russian Tsar cafe, and then were joined by a balding, bearded man, 5-foot-9, wearing prescription eyeglasses, with whom they spoke for 15 minutes. Curuvija and his wife walked around Belgrade's Kalemegdan park until 3:53, and then entered the Kolarac restaurant for a late lunch at 3:56. They dined alone. At 4:27, the couple left the restaurant, and walked home to their apartment on Molerova street, No. 48.
At 4:58, the secret police who were tailing Curuvija -- and from whose files the above information was taken -- were urgently ordered to withdraw. Two minutes later, Curuvija was assassinated by three men with sub-automatic machine guns, who fled in a white Volkswagen Golf-3. He died in his wife's arms on the sidewalk in front of their apartment building. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday.
Until Wednesday, Curuvija's wife thought she was the only person who knew all the details of their last day together. Now, thanks to the first leaked secret police file, which ties Serbia's state security organization (the Sluzba Derzavnost Bezbednosti, or SDB) to the surveillance of Curuvija, all of Serbia knows.
The leak marks a watershed moment for Serbia: It is the first documented evidence linking the state to the political killings here, which many always believed were ordered by former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his secret police chief, Rade Markovic.
"I was very much shaken and shocked by what I read in this document," Prpa, a journalist, told her colleagues at an emotional press conference Wednesday where the document was released. "What only I could have known, what I didn't tell to anybody, was revealed here. Not only that. Seeing the mechanisms of an ugly state, seeing how the state security agency was turned into the political police, is so horrifying."
Despite the common belief here that the state security agency was behind Curuvija's assassination, the secret police file makes for shocking reading. Curuvija, a publisher and journalist, was once close to Milosevic and his wife, Mirjana Markovic, but became a staunch public critic of them.
The document reveals the degree to which the state security agency was consumed with hunting Milosevic's political enemies. Dated April 11, 1999, the file shows that secret police agents were in constant communication with the head of the Belgrade state security department, Milan Radonjic.
They tracked Curuvija and his wife's every step, minute by minute, until agents were ordered to hastily withdraw seconds before Curuvija was assassinated. It even reveals that the agents videotaped Curuvija and his wife having their final meal together, in the Kolarac restaurant, on that Easter Sunday afternoon.
Also shocking is the fact that this document is one of the first to provide a paper link -- fingerprints, if you will -- between Markovic, a sinister figure considered to be a member of Milosevic's inner circle, and his subordinates, going all the way down the chain of command to the field agents sent to monitor Curuvija's movements.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, says Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Foundation and a human rights activist well known in Serbia. She received the file by mail Monday, and released copies of it to the press Wednesday.
Kandic says the fact that sources within the secret police agency forwarded this file indicates there are people in the service who could eventually provide the paper trail that would link Serbia's state security agency, and possibly Milosevic himself, not just to dozens of political assassinations in Serbia, but also to war crimes in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia.
"The revelations in this document shed a new light on how the obscure, inaccessible state security agency we for years were all afraid of functioned: its chain of command, what kind of units were assigned to follow people in Serbia, how orders were issued from the chief of the Serbian state security to the Belgrade center for state security, how orders were carried out, how tasks were assigned to field officers," Kandic told a Belgrade press conference Wednesday.
"Now we have learned the state security agency's actions affected the destiny of many people. Orders issued from their offices include war crimes in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia. We have many reasons to expect that other documents will soon be forwarded."
But as Kandic revealed in her press conference, the leaked document raises as many questions as it answers. Most important, why has the new government of Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica kept state security chief Markovic in place?
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