On walks along Banovi brdo, rarely anyone, except for those with intentions, enters the cross streets that connect Požeška and Kirovljeva. I often greet this area only with a view from the tram at the Knez Višeslav stop. When I drive in the direction of the Hippodrome, that view is somewhat nostalgic. I miss the Mihajlovac tavern opposite the Faculty of Forestry. In its place is a distinctly modern building, with a multi-story structure that presses down on everything around it.
This time I get off the tram and after a few steps I enter Dobrinovićeva. Unlike the always busy and noisy Požeška, this Belgrade street is still unscathed by the construction frenzy. Canopies of trees under socialist high-rise buildings on one side and private two-story buildings with gardens on the other. Here you can still live according to human standards.
I made an agreement with Duško, an electrical engineer. He lives in one of the buildings and is a man who remembers three decades of struggle for the space I arrive at and which everyone eventually calls the Plateau.
The block of buildings was built in 1972, and the green area, children's, football and basketball courts, parking lot and luxurious row of white ash trees were created in 1979. The urban plans of the time as well as the authorities considered that the whole area was thus adequately urbanized. The government of that time left its signature - a pentagram - on one retaining wall.
Duško, with whom I am sitting on a bench in the middle of the Plateau, talks about how everything was fine until the nineties came. Where the previous authorities saw a rounded urban unit with a row of trees, the masters of the new decade saw an opportunity to put money into the account of state land. They adjusted the laws, then gave companies close to the authorities the "right to use". The nominal owner would remain the state, and the "holder of the right of use" would, if he built something on the allocated plot, become the owner of the building and the surrounding land. This formula seems familiar - and has been applied with varying intensity regardless of the ideological or political differences of the groups in power. In the last ten years, this has been the favorite formula of the current government, according to which the transfer of public goods into private ownership is carried out.
Chronicle of Dishonor
On Banovo brdo, as in most parts of Belgrade, the bad laws and criminal practices of the nineties are visible to this day as ugly construction scars on the fabric of the city. Back then, someone caught sight of Plato and the dirty game that Duško tells me about began.
First, at the beginning of the nineties, Plato was declared "undeveloped construction land". The very first step was an arrogant disregard for the interests of the surrounding residents and urban logic. The right to use is obtained by the company that soon goes to the drum. That right is transferred to the new holders of the right of use - Company Braća Karić. In 1996, she concluded a joint construction contract with the company "Caričin grad" whose owner is a certain Milentije from the Lebanon area.
There are political changes, the October 2002 government at the level of Belgrade in 2003 takes away the right of use from the BK Company on the allocated plots, but not on the plot that includes the Plateau. The company BK enters into additional provisions of the contract with Carica city. The problem, says Duško, is that in XNUMX, at the time of Annex II to the agreement from the XNUMXs, a law was in force stating that "the right to use undeveloped state-owned land is not in circulation" - it cannot be given away or sold.
In 2009, according to the tenants, Carica's city illegally tried to usurp public space and build. But the citizens prevented him from doing so. At the initiative of the citizens, the municipal attorney's office initiated proceedings before the city Secretariat for property and legal affairs for the cancellation of the right of use of the BK company on the plot. The secretariat then managed to pretend to be dead for a decade and a half.
Regardless of all this, the Cadastre formed the construction plot in 2011. Citizens say again - illegal.
A fatal second instance
In the same year, the Caričin grad company fell into difficulties, which will end with its liquidation in 2019. But Milentije from the vicinity of Lebanon, as its owner, will remain a debtor. His property also includes the rights to use construction land. He is fighting like a lion to be registered as a user right holder.
In February 2022, the Cadastre Real Estate Service of Čukarica rejected his request to change the right holder and the type of right on the plot. The service established that there are no newly built buildings on the plot, and under the contract from 2003, the company Caričin grad could become the owner of the buildings and the associated land - only if it built something. And she didn't build anything. Duško says that it is a common legal practice that the right to use state construction land is revoked, if the company to which it was granted fails to fulfill its contractual obligations after three years. Since the land "has not been used for its intended purpose", user rights are also extinguished.
Milentije appeals against the first-instance decision from February 2022 and - behold a miracle - the Republic Geodetic Institute as a higher instance says that he is right. With an explanation that consists of quoting Annex II of the contract from 2003 - which is disputed anyway according to the laws of the time - it cancels the first-instance decision and allows the aforementioned Milenti from Bačevina near Leban to register the right to use state property on that plot. The long and tedious explanation of the Republic Geodetic Institute boils down to the fact that Milentije from Bačevina does not have to show any documents that were asked of him, nor to prove that he built anything, in order to be the holder of the right of use.
Institutional violence against justice
The citizens folded the paper and in February 2022 submitted a request to enter a note with the plot according to which the procedure for canceling the right to use the plot is underway. That was not done. Why? It is not known. But it is assumed that these are the same reasons for which the proceedings before the City Secretariat for Property and Legal Affairs for the cancellation of the right of use of the BK Company on the plot were absurdly long.
Instead - Milentije was magically entered in the cadastre as the holder of the user right, and immediately after that a note was entered about the claim of the Novi Sad company AGNS Invest. The plot thus becomes Milenti's debt token.
In December of the same year, citizens submit a request to the State Attorney's Office to cancel the "illegal decision" of the competent municipal service on granting the right of use on the plot to the former owner of a failed construction company: "Citizens ask the State Attorney's Office of the Republic of Serbia to protect the interests of the state and citizens."
The answer of the Attorney General's Office, which was signed by Jasminka Bogićević as deputy state attorney, followed in July 2023. "There is no place to submit a request for annulment."
State gift to a private debtor
And then, at the beginning of this year, Milentije suddenly became the owner of the plot. The Government Spatial Planning and Urbanism Agency made this decision on January 13, 2024. Thus, the land worth around three million euros was registered as the property of the debtor of the Novi Sad company.
While Duško is telling me all this, children are slowly gathering with their parents on the playground, kids on the sports fields. Along the way, I learn a series of tricks that satisfy the paperwork despite a completely different reality. Thus, there are over 600 apartments in the block of buildings around the Plateau. City planners operated with a figure of three hundred and something. So that additional kindergartens would not have to be built. In order to lower the population density coefficient. So that it could be built. It was only after the intervention of the citizens that the planners introduced the actual situation.
After the unfavorable decisions of the institutions, the citizens planted the "Mourning Cherry" on the plateau. It reminds of the deplorable state in which the competent institutions find themselves.
In the neighboring Zrmanjska Street, the investors state that the children from their facility will go to kindergarten - which does not exist. And that passes. This is the construction fiction that the government believes in. However, the citizens of Dobrinović are not giving up after a decade-long struggle.
Duško shows me one document at a time, testimonies that a number of institutions of this country have been involved in mocking laws, regulations, public interest for decades. At the same time, even the peak of insolence - the conversion of the disputed right to use state land into de facto private property - is clearly not the end of the story.
I admit, the story is not only local. The whole of Serbia is reflected in Dobrinovićeva. It is an absurd Kafkaesque story that the municipality and the city and the state and the competent services and the judiciary claim is a fairy tale from the golden age.
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