The Montenegrin Police Department has initiated proceedings against me before the Minor Offences Court in Podgorica due to allegations from a column in which I criticize a public speech by University of Montenegro professor Aleksandar Stamatović.
The court informed me in writing that I must appear at the hearing on 16. 04. 2025. at 16.15, or it may issue an order for my arrest. Along with the court summons, I received a police Request for the initiation of misdemeanor proceedings, signed by officer Aleksa Rečević. The Request states that I violated the Law on Public Order and Peace of Montenegro, in Article 7, paragraph 1: "Whoever insults another person in a public place or behaves insolently shall be punished for a misdemeanor with a fine of 100 euros to 400 euros or imprisonment for up to 30 days."
Through a special note, in the same document, I was informed that the Basic State Prosecutor's Office assessed that my writing did not contain elements of a criminal offense that is prosecuted ex officio.
Column What we talk about when we talk about boobs was published on October 18, 2024 on the portal Normalizuj. It is written in a strongly satirical tone, using literary conventions such as parable and fictional plot. In the article, I criticize the Ethics Board of the University of Montenegro, after it justified Professor Stamatović's lascivious allusions in the Adria TV program, addressed to the editor of the show in which he was a guest.
The controversial part of the column was published on my author's FB page, which I have been using as an official journalistic tool for years. The post was accompanied by a prominent instruction (the link to the text is in the comment), as an obvious sign that the reader is reading a piece of newspaper prose, and not some kind of personal correspondence.
The disputed quote reads:
“…How lucky for a journalist to be the target or, in Greek, telos, not in Serbian telo, or rather the object of desire of an old goat who shows the youth that without him there is no kick or show without a tavern joke with which we will relax the atmosphere since we are still tense from the three-decade anti-Serbian persecution. If the tension dictates us further, we can also say that it is under the skirt that the goal is, not the object, and praise it also around the pants, and under the belt and around the waist, because that is how we interpret it in Pale according to Grigori Palamas, and in Nikšić according to Saint Nil Sorski.
In itself, the passage is poorly understandable, because it is a direct comment on the previously stated position of the Ethics Board that Stamatović did not view the journalist "as an object" but "as a goal", and on the views of Stamatović himself, who in his submission to the Board declared himself a Serbian dissident who wanted to relax the atmosphere in the studio.
If Mr. Stamatović had sued me for defamation in a civil case, I would have said that the quoted passage was part of a narrative strategy in which the fictional and the true were mixed, in order to emphasize the absurdity and unsustainability of a social situation. If Mr. Stamatović had objected to the phrase “old goat”, I could easily have proven to him that it was also given metaphorically in accordance with the broader semantic layers of the textual whole. From mythological satires, Dionysian festivals, to popular culture and “Žika’s dynasty”, the old goat is held up as a symbol of ritual fertility and excessive sexual connotation, which I ultimately object to Stamatović in the text, of course, solely in light of his university degree.
But no, I was not sued privately, but the state of Montenegro concluded in two steps, first through a police report, and then through a court summons for a hearing, that my author's letter probably disturbs public order and peace, or as the Law says, "offends morality." Here we come to a problem that has nothing to do with the outcome of this case, but has to do with the limits of freedom of expression in a profession that we once saw as the foundation of a free society.
If there is a possibility that police and court officials have not heard that I have been trying to do journalism for two decades, then they must at least have heard that Mr. Stamatović has been a public figure for much longer. par excellence, national tribune, politician, TV debater and agile professor. Accordingly, and to the numerous judgments from Strasbourg that all sparrows know, it should be added that public figures are more susceptible to criticism, that they must understand journalistic speech as part of creative expression that builds on social conscience. The fact that the Ethics Committee of the University of Montenegro failed to fulfill its duty and at least symbolically direct Mr. Stamatović to its own code, was my only motive for writing the text, not suspecting that I would thereby disrupt public order and peace.
It is important to point out, because it is not the first time that this has happened – the police have intervened in the interpretation of a newspaper article via social media, and the article was not treated as a public good and a stylized political text, but as a literal remark, an insult to a person and ultimately – a harm to the community. I hope this is a matter of ignorance, but I fear that this action by the state is an attempt to suppress free criticism to the extent of blasphemy prescribed by politicians, historians and other tormentors of our damaged public discourse.
I reluctantly enter into the legal process by addressing the public, but my duty to my colleagues is to report this unusual legal process in which I have found myself as a defendant. I believe that the Court will act in accordance with reasonable assumptions, but I repeat that even this form of state control and aggression towards me as a writer and journalist is unacceptable. I see the pressure from the police apparatus as a solid reason for a brisk rebuke that I am sending through this means. On the condition that I am allowed to say such a thing without violating the sanctity of public order and peace, which they so successfully preserve.
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