It is not easy to be a minister.
Here, for example, they say that the former Minister of Agriculture, Petar Ivanović, drank some bacteria a few years ago and ended up being treated for several days at the Clinical Center. Just because he poured a glass of laboratory-untested water during the hasty commissioning of one of the village's waterworks in anticipation of the elections.
Poisoning by contaminated water can be very dangerous and painful. Maybe Petar then cursed the party, and his relatives who are engaged in consultancy and vineyard work, and Sarić, with whom he was allegedly filmed in Paris. And the mobile ones in Germany. All the way to Abu Dhabi.
Who is he probably cursing even now after the SDT requested that his parliamentary immunity be removed. It is human nature to always blame others. The main hero of this story is not Petar Ivanović, but the outgoing chief SDT Milivoje Katnić.
Deputies of the new majority recently proposed changes to prosecutorial laws according to which the SDT ceases to exist and turns into the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime and Corruption. With that, Katnić also remains without office.
The question is whether the changes in Montenegro on August 31, 2020 are revolution or evolution.
By definition, power won in elections should follow the laws of evolution. But Montenegro has become a captive society to such an extent that some institutions need revolutionary changes.
The Prosecutor's Office is certainly one of them.
Because it has been in an acting state for too long. Because it remained silent for too long or reacted reluctantly to numerous affairs, such as Telekom, Limenka, Petlja, Koverta... All those that lead to the top of the government.
The amendments to the prosecution laws proposed by the parliamentary majority are revolutionary - without consultation with the European Commission, the Venice Commission, without a public debate.
Just the fact that they proposed that the majority of prominent lawyers sit in the Prosecutor's Council, instead of prosecutors, elected by a simple majority in the Assembly, could mean that the same majority can replace the new special one overnight. If he does not act on their orders or if he arrests one of theirs.
On the other hand, supporters of these changes state that the new majority is quite heterogeneous and that the new special could not be replaced so easily. It is also a fact that there is no clear European standard for the selection of the first prosecutors. There are numerous examples of democratic countries where the Government or the Prime Minister appoints these persons, and what DPS just referred to in 2013/2014. when he did not like the opinion of the Supreme Court on constitutional amendments.
Katnić is just scrambling now.
First, he interrogated Ivanovic, former IRF director Zoran Vukčević and several other persons involved in the Abu Dhabi affair.
Katnić knows that now only representatives of the Western international community can provide him protection. And it does what it was supposed to do back in 2017.
In that scrambling, it gets tangled up well.
After the conversation with the Prime Minister, he comes out with a condition - I will retire, but everything else in the Prosecutor's Office and "his" police should remain the same.
In addition, he is pulling the Democrats and demanding the removal of Dragan Krapović's immunity for last year's events, while at the same time publishing "evidence" for something that allegedly happened in 2017, while it remains unclear what happened to that subject.
This essentially means nothing - there is a majority in the parliament to confirm Krapović's immunity and to adopt amendments to the prosecution laws.
The European Commission reacted rather harshly to the proposal of the representatives of the new government. For the first time, it mentions a regression to the rule of law, which means a direct threat to activate the mechanism of the balance clause.
Now the uproar of the DPS and propagandists of the former regime, who are dying for European standards, has a tragicomic effect. Those who, until yesterday, made caricatures of European norms. In recent times, through the collapse of the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, and then through the third mandate of Vesna Medenica and the president of six courts.
With this, they put Montenegro in a situation where they are packing with other Balkan countries on the way to the EU, which, time will confirm, will be one of the biggest sins of Milo Đukanović's government for future generations.
The EC's warning puts the Government in a rather uncomfortable position.
Diplomats will first pull the ears of Zdravko Krivokapić and Dritan Abazović. They take issue with the fact that the changes to prosecutorial laws are a proposal of deputies, as was previously done by DPS governments when the deputies of that party suddenly changed laws, say on free access to information or on expropriation, while the executive branch pretended and harmonized these laws with EC experts. They can also hope for the confirmed inertness and inconsistency of the EC towards Montenegro in the last six years.
But I can also count on the DF's firm decision to replace Katnić, even at the cost of the fall of the Government, if anyone from the ruling majority tries to dodge or prolong it. He who fights with the sword will die by the sword.
Katnić played with justice when he demanded the arrest of Milan Knežević and Andrija Mandić before the local elections in Nikšić in 2016, or when Nebojša Medojević was detained for not testifying as the SDT thought he should.
Now DF MPs and the authorities are playing with justice by changing the law and leaving Katnić without office.
The parliamentary session where the laws should be adopted is scheduled for February 18.
If there are no surprises, the new government will probably open a dialogue on further changes to these laws, both with the EC and with domestic actors.
In the meantime, they will choose a new special officer who could make progress in the fight against high-level corruption, whose absence is the main complaint of Brussels.
There will already be some packed cases waiting for him.
According to what was shown a few years ago in "Mechanism", which every normal public service would surely repeat these days, and what was announced by the Minister of Agriculture Aleksandar Stijović, Petar Ivanović and his closest collaborators, possibly Zoran Vukčević, Radoje Žugić and Milutin Simović - they could easily receive such fines that they would have time to dig the water pipe to Abu Dhabi.
You should never drink cloudy water.
Bonus video:
