Retired police chief says Serbia’s force politicised more than in the ‘90s

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The police have always been politicised, but "now more than in the 1990s" (during Slobodan Milosevic’s rule), a retired police chief has told the Belgrade NIN weekly published on Thursday.

Rodoljub Milovic, former head of Serbia’s Criminal Police Directorate, said he unsuccessfully tried to prevent the practice of political employment on the force, adding that in the ‘90s there were also such cases, but those who came in that way had respect for police job.

He said he confronted the current authorities about the political employment in the criminal police. “I told them some of those people could not even bear IDs let alone be bosses.”

Asked about the most notorious criminal gang known as ‘Zemunci’ named after Belgrade’s suburb Zemun, and Darko Saric, convicted drug trafficker, Milovic said the name of the current Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar “appears” in both cases.

He added that some of the mobsters who turned state’s evidence in the trial for the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, mentioned “famous doctor Loncar.”

Concerning the assassination, Milovic said he was one of the police officers who insisted that the head of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party Vojislav Seselj was on the list of suspects.

Milovic said he was “convinced Seselj (later convicted of war crimes in the 90s) was one of those who insisted on Djindjic’s murder.”

“He (Seselj) attacks me for professionally doing my job in establishing his involvement in the events related to Djindjic’s killing. I may say with full responsibility that Seselj is a very active member of the Zemun gang,” Milovic said.

Djindjic was assassinated on March 12, 2003, outside his office. Several members of the Zemun gang and former special police unit were sentenced to the maximum penalty of 40-year-imprisonment as the organisers and executioners. The mastermind was never discovered neither was the political background of the murder despite Djindjic’s family lawyers insistence and public outcry.

Seselj turned himself to The Hague Tribunal for war crimes committed in the 1991-1995 wars in former Yugoslavia on February 24, 2003, two weeks ahead of Djindjic’s assassination, announcing „the bloody spring in Serbia.“

The Tribunal indicted him of taking part “in a joint criminal enterprise whose purpose was the permanent forcible removal… of a majority of the Croat, Muslim and other non-Serb populations from approximately one-third of the territory of Croatia, large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and from parts of Vojvodina, in the Republic of Serbia, in order to make these areas part of a new Serb-dominated state.”

Seselj was acquitted in the first instance, but following the prosecutors’ appeal The Appeals Chamber of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), which replaced the Tribunal, convicted him to ten years in prison in April 2018 but he remained free since he spent 11,5 years in detention.