When, in 2006, the investigation regarding the war crime committed in 1999 in the area of Rožaj, in the town of Kaluđerski Laz, was reluctantly started, the then Supreme State Prosecutor spoke live on the TV show "Živa istina", to me, a man who devoted almost his entire working life to humanitarian issues and to the innocent suffering of all peoples living in Montenegro, sent a very indicative and one might say ugly message: "...here, let some lawyer from Rožaj hear, yesterday we submitted a request for an investigation against twelve suspects...". It was a direct attempt to devalue my efforts, because I was practically doing what the prosecutor's office and the Montenegrin judiciary were supposed to do until then, and which apparently they did not want to do. It was a signal that even a small democratic step forward on the way to confronting our recent past would be prevented or slowed down.
With that act, it was announced that those who dare to try to contribute to reconciliation and uncovering the truth about the murdered Albanian, Serb and Bosniak poor in Montenegro, can count on all obstacles and hope for blatant obstruction. At the time, I ignored that arrogance, now known to the public, for pragmatic reasons, hoping that modest moves in a positive direction were more important than my reputation. On the contrary, I even tried to support the Montenegrin judiciary with public statements, so that it would continue to move in a positive direction. But, unfortunately, my optimism was not confirmed. And not only that, it's time to ask ourselves what the real motives are. This is important for the sake of our entire society, because the position of the judiciary is one of the pillars of the modern state. What if those reasons are personal? For what other reason would an independent Montenegro, through the judiciary, continue to try to wash away the legacy of already condemned politics from the times that are behind us. What and from whom is it still being defended and hidden in this country?
What was then unwillingly prosecuted, today with full enthusiasm experiences a kind of legal blockade. It is inexcusable what happens through court decisions in the case of crimes in Bukovica, Morinj, deportation, Štrpci, Kaluđerski Laz, Murino. With accusations and trials of only the lower ranks of those responsible, as a rule due to superficially and haphazardly conducted investigations, the trials last unusually long and at the end the judgments are, as a rule, revoked. If there were crimes, and there were because the victims confirm it, every reasonable person is served by the epilogues of court proceedings which, with verdicts passed on behalf of the state, claim the opposite, due to wrong legal qualifications or wrong accusations. Likewise, the decisions of the Higher Court in Podgorica, related to cases of compensation for damages to injured families, which are practically serially intoned in the direction of devaluing what is justifiably demanded in lawsuits, are very worrying.
In this way, judges of lower instances, who do their best to judge fairly and according to the law, on the basis of bizarre explanations, without legal foundation, are led to a kind of disbelief. Waiting for more than 12 months for the second-instance court decision in the case of the Dacić family from Rožaj, due to the suffering of a family member from a cluster bomb dropped from the fighter planes of the Yugoslav Army, speaks volumes about the honesty of some justices. Instead of justice, we get a long-standing Kafkaesque laquerdia, which aims to make the victims waver, to give up the search for human dignity that was taken from them by crime and humiliation.
The biggest insult to human dignity came these days, when calls began to arrive (the case of Ahmeti Hadžija) for people to return the small amount of money that has been awarded to only a few people, such as victims of war crimes. In the absence of universal justice, due to very difficult life circumstances, people had to accept the quantification of their pain and trauma, which they did not even want to remember. And now the Montenegrin judiciary is trying to further humiliate them, asking them, in a market manner, to return what they got legally - (The Supreme Court canceled the first- and second-instance judgments, and after the execution had already been carried out, the protector of property-legal interests CG requests that what was charged as mental pain be returned to the state). If we recall the specific cases once again, then this treatment of the state looks even more shameful.
So, the situation is as follows: Montenegro is trying to deny the guilt of criminals who massacred civilians in our Rožaje, when, among other things, a child was shot in the head. Montenegro is trying to deny that there is guilt in the arrogant and disinterested refusal to warn the residents of our Murina about the imminent bombing and the possible suffering of innocent civilians. Our Bukovica from Pljevlja is trying to turn into a phantom crime, and for the Morinje torture center, the main culprits were the cooks and not the commanders, for the deportation the policemen and inspectors and not the government officials from that time who out of loyalty to Radovan Karadzic's deadly project in Bosnia issued a shameful criminal order. Not to mention how the Montenegrin "Schindlers" are treated who spoke about the crime, and who are suddenly attributed the entire responsibility. At the Basic Court in Podgorica, a large number of court proceedings are in progress on the claims of victims from the Kaluđerski Laz war crime case and the case of the suffering of the Murina victims. In those cases, the court imposed the position that, according to legal reasoning known only to it, in Montenegro, the state must be sued, and in particular (as if it were a state within the state) the Police Directorate. It is unnecessary to mention the harmful consequences that all this produced, especially for families who perceive themselves as victims of crime, as well as for the duration of court proceedings.
Finally, after a lot of wasted time, someone noticed the stupidity of such reasoning. But in practice, the "decree", obtained in the form of a legal position of the Supreme Court, ordered that all proceedings related to war crimes should be stopped, until it is seen whether the suspects will be convicted as perpetrators or will be acquitted because someone else did it. people. In this way, the Montenegrin judiciary becomes the only judiciary in the world, next to the terrible Stalinist regime of North Korea, which ignores the so-called the objective responsibility of the state for the harmful consequences embodied in the concrete victims of innocent people. As if it matters whether these people who are being tried are the perpetrators, or someone else. The essence of everything is the crime, not whether this or that fanatic is responsible and whether the real criminal managed to escape. The responsibility of the state has absolutely nothing to do with it, and to claim otherwise is tantamount to madness. The fact that this is set as a condition is another indicator that Montenegro, carried away by a grandiosity complex, is still doing the unfinished business of Milosevic's ethno-fascism, which still lives in the government and the top of the judiciary.
It remains only to wonder if this nightmarish time, characterized by chained justice that drags the victims' families through the mud while rewarding the perpetrators, will ever pass. Will the state find the strength to do the right thing and not hide behind one-way and senseless legal means and attitudes? Will she side with morality or the cowardly cover-up of crimes, just because the individuals in her set agree ideologically and experientially with the perpetrators of the crime? Every lost day is a stab in the heart of Montenegro.
Bonus video:
