Serbia’s Childish Game of Tit-for-Tat

If you, dear citizens from the Balkans, want to travel through Serbia but somehow failed to notice that your officials (for reasons in no way related to your everyday life and travel plans), have angered Serbian officials, beware: you may be arrested out of pure spite and revenge.
 
Your small existence doesn’t count in the bigger game of political disputes. This is even more likely to happen if you are from Kosovo because Serbia - which just granted free travel to Kosovo Albanians - is on the eve of elections. You should know that the ruling parties need to muster patriotic votes here after four years of economic gloom, a corrupt judiciary, media censorship and … the list is long, exhausting and depressing.
 
Revenge is precisely the explanation given by Serbian Police Minister Ivica Dacic for why Hasan Abazi, a 65-year-old retired Kosovo Albanian, was arrested on the morning of March 28. Dacic said: “If someone wants to compete in arrests, we have the answer.”
 
He was referring to the Kosovo police move to arrest four Kosovo Serbs on the same night, when Abazi, blessed by ignorance, could not have expected that the following morning he would become a pawn in a higher political game of score-settling.
 
Abazi was embarking, after many years, on travel through Serbia as an old union activist and as head of the Metalworkers Union for a European Trade Union conference in Croatia.
 
But that night the Kosovo police arrested the mayor of the Kosovo municipality of Vitina, Srecko Spasic, two of his employees and a police officer from the Urosevac police, who were allegedly carrying material to be used for Serbian local elections on May 6 - elections that Pristina has vowed to prevent.
 
No need to say that neither Serbia nor the Serbs in the north of Kosovo recognize Kosovo as an independent country.
 
I am not planning now to deal with a topic that many people couldn’t solve for decades - which territory belongs to whom, who settled where first and in which century. There are enough patriots in Serbia, Kosovo and beyond to deal with that for years to come, unfortunately.
 
To me it is more about the old style of doing things, so common in the Balkans, in which human beings (in war and peace) constantly fall victim to hysterical ideas, and are abused and disregarded like used political toys.
 
As a Serbian citizien, I do, however, have a question for the Serbian government [leaving Kosovars do deal with their own], which is, how does this dispute between Serbia and Kosovo relate to Abazi and his trip through Serbia? Are we going to start arresting individuals when any regime in the world that Serbia is bothered with makes our officials angry?  Tit-for-tat is for immature democracies in which the law and human rights are easily circumvented. Didn’t Dacic learn any lessons from the Milosevic school that he eagerly attended in the Nineties?
 
Apparently, Dacic is now bothered that some Serbian NGOs have voiced outrage. He thinks they are worried about arrested Albanians but supposedly don’t care about arrested Serbs. It reminds me of the old Milosevic times when NGO activists were marked as non-patriots and as “foreign mercenaries” if  they didn’t support mass expulsions and the terror that the Milosevic regime spread across former Yugoslavia.
 
Coming back to Abazi, he is now suspected of espionage under clause 305 of the penal code, which deals with “crimes against constitution and security of Republic of Serbia”. He is still in detention in Vranje and is waiting to appear in front of an investigative judge.
 
The case appears, also, to be very “handy” way of showing dissatisfaction with the international community’s [lack of] reactions to the arrests of the Serbs in Kosovo.
 
Namely, Abazi is the father of Haki Abazi, who is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund program director for the Western Balkans. That’s why Dacic told the newspaper Politika:  “At least some decency should be demonstrated here. Yesterday when the Albanians were arrested, some international officials called me. They should not call me a anymore; whoever is undermining constitutional order in Serbia will be arrested in future.”
 
Bearing in mind that just about all Albanians in Kosovo are doing just that - insisting that they live in an independent Kosovo - does this mean that the recent agreement on free travel is now aborted?
 
Or, selective arrests will be put in place just until after elections, when patriotic votes will not matter anymore, so that the parties currently in power can turn again to empty slogans on joining EU. That is, if they win.
 
Gordana Igric is Regional Network Director of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication. Full disclosure: Rockefeller Brothers Fund supports BIRN's projects.