[ad_1]
The Serbian Interior Ministry has ignored an official request for documents to shed light on a politician’s claim that Russian diplomats attacked his teenage daughter at a McDonald’s in Belgrade two years ago before d ‘being taken away and the incident swept under the carpet by the police.
An opposition leader and Milosevic-era dissident targeted by assassins in the past, Liberal Democratic Party leader Cedomir Jovanovic announced last month that he was breaking his public silence on the incident after police Serbian told her that she was withdrawing protection from her family.
He has since filed a complaint accusing the Serbian police chief of dereliction of duty and had an altercation with the police after a late-night skirmish with “hooligans” blowing up nationalist songs near his Belgrade home on June 2, prompting prosecutors to order charges against him.
Jovanovic called the charges reprisal for his complaint against police chief Vladimir Rebic and vowed to tell the prosecutor everything he knows about the hooligans. But he also told B92 that “I will ask who is responsible for the assassination attempts against me, the attacks on my daughter, [and] for planting a bomb under my car. “
Outspoken Jovanovic, who has received police protection since a bomb raged through his car in 2001, said authorities asked him to remain silent after being called to respond to the summer confrontation and the fight involving his then 14-year-old daughter.
He accuses the Belgrade authorities of trying to “bury” the incident, in which he claims that three men with Russian diplomatic passports assaulted his daughter’s friend and a passerby, then forcibly mixed her up the hallucinogenic drink known as ecstasy.
His accusations come with high tensions between Moscow and Western governments over years of suspected poisonings of Russian military intelligence and other attacks on targets abroad, including in Britain, Bulgaria and the Republic. Czech.
The Serbian Interior Ministry and other officials have refused RFE / RL’s requests to comment on Jovanovic’s accusations regarding the alleged attack on his daughter, which he originally aired in an interview with the Blic media on the 14th. may.
Hours after their publication, Russian Ambassador to Belgrade Aleksandr Botsan-Harchenko called the allegations “malicious fabrications”.
Cedomir Jovanovic has been a staple in Serbian politics for decades.
Jovanovic said Serbian authorities verbally told him that they had closed the case without any charges and that they had recently come under Russian pressure to put the incident behind the two allies.
“[They told us] the case was closed because we, as parents, made our statements a few days after the event [at the McDonald’s], these people [named in the report] never responded, and in recent days, at the request of the Russian Embassy, the MUP (Serbian Interior Ministry) has been doing the documentation to try to bury everything somewhere in the past [and] in this way, end everything, ”said Jovanovic in the Balkan service of RFE / RL.
Outspoken centrist
Jovanovic, 50, has been part of Serbia’s changing political landscape since the organization of student protests against Slobodan Milosevic’s leadership in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
He was reportedly a key figure in the negotiations leading to the peaceful surrender of Milosevic after masked government troops stormed the villa of the ousted president in March 2001. After the surrender, Milosevic’s daughter, Marija, reportedly fired on Jovanovic, who years later said he refused to testify against her to avoid “making an already difficult situation for her even more difficult”.
But this early exposure did not translate into electoral victories.
Jovanovic joined, resigned or founded several centrist political parties over the following decades and made unsuccessful presidential candidacies in 2008 and 2012.
He has been a constant critic of Russia and has supported a pro-Western path for Serbia which, controversially among Serbs still bitter about Western intervention during the conflicts of the 1990s, would include eventual membership of the NATO.
Cedomir Jovanovic
Jovanovic is frequently the target of criticism from Serbian nationalists and other right-wing elements who oppose his recognition of the Serbian role in the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s, support for Kosovo’s independence and rights lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.
He spoke of receiving death threats against him and his family on a regular basis. He was assigned to police personal protection after narrowly escaping a car bomb in Belgrade in February 2001.
In this incident, Jovanovic’s SUV exploded shortly after a meeting with then-Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic and a senior Yugoslav state security official, during which Jovanovic and the minister questioned the official about past political assassinations.
More than a decade later, a former member of the Serbian State Guard was sentenced to prison for calling Jovanovic death threats in 2012.
In full view
As Jovanovic described it, his daughter Jana and a friend were approached by three strangers at a McDonald’s in the summer of 2019. The three men pushed the friend away before openly pouring a powdery substance into Jana and d ‘trying to force her to drink it, he said.
A passerby who intervened to ask if his daughter was okay was thrown to the ground by one of the three men, he added. The friend called Jovanovic’s wife, who called the police.
“When [the police] arrived, “said Jovanovic,” the three men took out Russian diplomatic passports, then someone from the Russian embassy picked them up and took them away.
Jovanovic further said that a test showed that Jana’s drink was fortified with MDMA, the recreational psychoactive drug commonly known as “ecstasy”. Jovanovic could not provide RFE / RL with any evidence of the discovery of MDMA.
Jovanovic told Blic and RFE / RL this month that he only went public after being unofficially told by police that they would soon be removing police protection from his children.
He had received no written confirmation of such a decision. But he said his response was to tell the police that if they weren’t protecting the rest of his family, he didn’t want police protection either.
His criminal complaint against the Serbian police chief alleges that Rebic’s actions endanger the life of Jovanovic and members of his family, and claims that Rebic’s statements to the media on the June 2 incident encourage hatred of the public towards them.
The Russian embassy declined to comment on RFE / RL’s Balkan service on Jovanovic’s accusations, beyond Botsan-Harchenko’s initial denial.
The Serbian Interior Ministry also declined to answer questions about the case, and ignored a 15-day deadline that expired earlier this month to respond to an RFE access to information request. / RL concerning the documents concerned.
Diplomatic flaws
Jovanovic alleges that he is being targeted by Moscow and its intelligence and diplomatic services for intimidation because he poses a threat to Russian policy in the Balkans.
“If all together think that they are indirectly making me sing in such a way, to prevent me from doing what I do in Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the whole region, then they will deceive, ”he added. he said.
Serbia, another Eastern Orthodox ally with important diplomatic and defense ties with Russia, is widely seen as Moscow’s closest ally in the Balkans.
Serbs and Russians have enjoyed generally close official relations for centuries, although Belgrade has spent decades diversifying diplomatic efforts as it seeks EU membership.
Serbian Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin was on an official visit to Moscow when Jovanovic raised his accusations this month.
Vulin, who was defense minister at the time of the alleged attack on Jovanovic’s daughter, has spent years strengthening Serbian-Russian security cooperation. These efforts included a new commitment to a Serbian-Russian humanitarian center in the town of Nis, in southern Serbia, which is seen by the United States and other Western officials as an outpost for Russian spies under diplomatic coverage.
Russia has come under increasing international scrutiny for its covert operations abroad after the fatal radiation poisoning – allegedly by former KGB agents – of the former KGB agent and the Federal Service of security (FSB) Aleksandr Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Sanctions and diplomatic pressure intensified after two Russian military intelligence officers from the GRU were accused of poisoning Russian intelligence defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in the UK town of Salisbury in 2018.
The Czech Republic’s statement in April that the same two GRU agents were likely behind a deadly 2014 attack on an ammunition depot in that country triggered the eviction of an alleged spy nest Russians under diplomatic cover in Prague.
This was followed by counter-expulsions by Moscow, then European “solidarity expulsions” in favor of the Czechs, as well as new evidence potentially linking the same men and their secret GRU unit to attempted poison assassinations in Bulgaria.
Belgrade suffered its own intelligence scandal with Moscow in 2019 after a video was released showing a Russian military attaché appearing to bribe a retired Serbian military officer for information a year earlier.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic finally confirmed the embarrassing episode but quickly added that it would not affect Belgrade’s “friendly and fraternal” policy towards Russia.
Written by Andy Heil in Prague based on reporting by Ljudmila Cvetkovic and Maja Zivanovic from RFE / RL’s Balkan Service in Belgrade
[ad_2]
picture credit