Freedom, what else!

July 13, 1941

Grandfather Ivo, grandmother's brother, was one of the partisans who started the July 13th Uprising. He and 77 comrades captured an Italian motorized battalion after an eight-hour battle at Košćeli.

In 41, it was one of the greatest victories over fascism in occupied Europe.

After the war, he became the director of Geneks, then Zdravlje Leskovac.

He lives in Belgrade, on 27 March Street, near the Parliament.

He lives with his wife.

She is also a partisan.

As a child, I remember her hand: wrinkled, thin, and with illegible numbers tattooed on it.

Those numbers are really important in our family.

"Sonja was in Auschwitz," they said under their breath. When you're a child, you don't know what that means. You just know that you should admire it.

I went to Poland when I was 18. Student exchange. They take us to see Auschwitz. As we tour it, we defend ourselves with laughter. Suddenly we see a wall and on it are black and white photographs. Portraits. I see a familiar face. She's bald, so I don't recognize her at first. It's Grandma Sonja...

Many years later, I watch "Landscapes of Resistance" (2021), where Sonja is the main character. She says that they raised a rebellion in the camp with forks and knives.

When the Soviets broke in, the goal was to slow down the camp guards with their bodies and lives... luckily, they were the first to escape.

In our family, there were no stories from the National Liberation War, but everyday anecdotes:

When someone sat on a birthday cake, how slingshots were made from leather shoe tongues, how our home was like a bus station where people rejoiced and mourned, but I had to dig through books and archives for Sutjeska and Neretva myself. That's how I understood the phrase "Freedom to the people."

That freedom did not fall from the sky, but was paid dearly - after the Soviets, Poles, and Germans, the Yugoslavs bled the most in World War II. Over a million people...

In the same Europe that, a few decades later, equated its allies and liberators with its oppressors.

Because of that sacrifice, because of their defiance and idealism, we got a great country and almost everything in it that can be called a country. And with their generation, the story of the freedom they won ends, and the story of the freedom we lost begins.

May 21, 2006

Grandpa Ivo, old, tall, and slow-moving, announces that he will come to the street where he was born. He invites the descendants of the Vujanović family to meet him in Cetinje, on Bajova Street. If they feel like it at that moment.

It comes from Belgrade, via Bogut, and arrives before dark.

Get out of the car. We, lined up like in an army. Music, beef on a spit, alcohol, sirens...

He approaches us. He falls to his aching knees.

Hard. Slow.

Kiss the earth...

He remained frozen in that act.

Then we all believe. In something.

That night, an eighteen-year-old boy, who had won the right to vote in April, couldn't sleep because he was waiting for the dawn of September to break. To be sure that it had broken...

That level of blissful ignorance is just one of the images of the national romanticism that enveloped those days and years.

To better understand naivety, I will quietly and cautiously mention the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro. And a collective shower in the rain when we were asked to close our umbrellas to see how many of us there were. Anyone who truly felt that rain, and that idea, will not justify to you today the Podgorica graffiti that was created a few years later, which read: "Sorry Slavko, but work is work."

This Slavko knew who Milo Đukanović was. In those years, he was the biggest opponent of the idea of ​​an independent Montenegro. That's why he said to vote NO in the referendum.

That free-thinking Montenegro had no infrastructure, no interests, no account. That freedom only offered persecution, stones thrown at windows, loss of job, estrangement from family...

That minority. Unrealized. Idealistic. Dreamed of. Honest. Naive. Unrealistic. That was my Montenegro.

The real one was different.

Stolen, with the help of former liberals, big media and all the levers of power of the then government. And whoever tells you that Slavko sold out - he does so because for a little charm, job, money or influence he betrayed the idea of ​​the Liberal Alliance.

Well, that very real Montenegro happened to me a few weeks before May 21, 2006.

My close friend at the time started buying ID cards for the referendum through his older brother. He had a list of names of our peers who would not vote YES.

I looked with my own eyes at the plus and minus next to the name.

The price was 50 euros. For the “harder” ones, 70.

It was "good" at around 30-50 euros per voice.

He offered me 100 euros even though he knows how I'll vote.

He'll do it for me. I just need to not vote.

I refused.

And he bought a motorcycle. He was the main character in the company.

Today he is successful. He works for the state. He has an ethnic village. He has managed.

And that's where the romance ends.

This is where reality begins. Freedom becomes the price of a vote, the state becomes a marketplace, and the citizen becomes a commodity. The system rewards the obedient. Morality is just a hindrance.

And if we had to explain 20 years of independence to a Martian, this story would be ideal. Both until August 30th and after August 30th.

May 24, 2018

Podgorica elections.

Then it was headquarters, today it is a kindergarten in Zabjelo.

Votes are bought there, about thirty meters from the polling station. The system's custodians: thugs, criminals, and usurers guard the headquarters.

I have a camera in my hand. Enough to set off an alarm. Triggered Kerberos are physically attacking me. In front of everyone. The goal is to take my camera and beat me up along the way. My goal is not to fall to the ground. When they finished their heroic feat, no one present saw anything. Not party, NGO, or EU observers.

Then, a young journalist I knew from before approached me. Concerned. She questioned me about everything. Then a few days later, on an obscure clan portal, I saw that, between the lines, she had written that I was attacked because I was Serb.

After her, an inspector appeared who was very uncomfortable. I asked for my hard-earned camera back. We entered the headquarters. A couple of them were sitting there as if nothing had happened. The Kerbers had escaped.

The headquarters area is something I will remember as long as I live. Walls plastered with life-size posters of Milo Đukanović. Windows covered with thin foil. Crates of juice and pickles. Stale sweat in a stuffy room. Wooden chairs and a table. Lists on it. Plus and minus next to the names...

When the inspector asked them to return the camera, they told him they didn't know what he was talking about. So they talked on the phone. Then they realized that they did know where the camera was, but it didn't have the card. Of course. I came to film the election theft without the card.

Later, hospitals, state prosecutors, and lawyers roared in, and I once again, firsthand, got to know the vision of democracy in my country.

A few days after yet another in a series of stolen elections, Đukanović said that all of us who were attacked that day were looking for the devil. And he hasn't been so right in a long time.

May 28, 2025

Vanja Ćalović is assembling a team to stand in the way of an economic practice that all Montenegrin rulers have been obsessed with since 1989 - selling the country's most valuable resources to foreign investors. This time from the UAE. The state should cede 12 kilometers of the most beautiful sandy beach to Mohamed Alabar and provide him with utilities. In return, he will get a new Belgrade on the water. Apartments for sale to worldly oligarchs and money launderers, and the prime minister with his entourage and coalition partners may buy another apartment.

A couple of us entered the Parliament to sabotage that plan. To stall for time. To expose dirty plans. To put pressure on the majority MPs. Everything that opposition politicians, who were so nice to us that it became uncomfortable, were supposed to do. On their behalf.

The majority MPs, accustomed to saying one thing in front of the cameras and another when the cameras were off, could not understand that we were there with a mission and a task. We chased them around the corridors. And they ran away from us. It was more uncomfortable for them than for the opposition MPs.

The goal was to get past midnight. To postpone the vote.

The last survey committee was scheduled for around 23:30 PM. We sat on the sidelines. Aleksandar Dragićević and me.

We came face to face with the "liberators", people who are ready to sell the blood and sweat of past generations for a handful of benefits. To anyone, anytime - whatever.

I witnessed firsthand how someone, once again, stole my idea of ​​a better Montenegro for the sake of their own interests. That hunger in their eyes and emptiness, that lack of awareness and primitivism awakened the ugliest emotions in me.

We provoked them, postponed the vote, and went outside... Velika Plaza was not sold. Alabar was demystified, and Prime Minister Spajić once again demonstrated his capacity for telling lies.

Later, Duke Mandić, in order to save the prime minister, spun with the chapel, then with the tricolor and the language.

Afterwards we had Chetnik games with a wandering monument, prizes for unwritten books, history revision, citizenship.

And everything that can divide society to forget about the sale of the most valuable resources.

If we were explaining their politics to that same poor Martian, we would tell him: "Everything we fight against in Montenegro, we support in Serbia. Milo is a dictator, and Vučić is a statesman."

They will never forgive him for betraying Serbdom...

And the honorable Democrats at the head of the parliament are appealing to the inspection services not to stop the work of the DPS tycoons. And that is the crowning proof of the continuity of the destruction of Montenegro, and the only logic of this system.

With the overthrow of socialism in that crucial year of 1989, "our" Danes from the political elite brought us gifts - the cruel logic of the market on the periphery of world capitalism and the bandit redistribution of social resources.

Everyone who was theirs got a piece of the cake. Then the new ones promised to do things differently. So they lied. So they continued the same. Only there were fewer cakes left, and there were more and more of them, so their tracks were easier to see.

The only task they have is to camouflage private interest as a fight for the common good.

Our grandfathers' generation, which brought us freedom, loved the land.

Our fathers' generation sold out the country and tore down the system that held it together. And lost its freedom.

Our generation needs to understand where the crack is and stop living in that crack.

A generation in which more than a hundred thousand people left the country.

But, it is up to us who remain to restore her freedom and not to sell her, for any reason, ever, to anyone.

Montenegro, than what!

The author is a director.