Serbia: Detainees Allege Torture

In the wake of the police sweep which followed the assassination of prime minister Zoran Djindjic, IWPR has gathered testimony which points to the use of torture and other forms of mistreatment against detained suspects.

The evidence indicates that ill-treatment of detainees was more widespread than statements from the Serbian government and from the United Nations and OSCE suggest.

An international expert on human rights in Belgrade who asked for his name not to be used said that about 30 per cent of those arrested had suffered some form of mistreatment.

Conducted during the state of emergency which was in force from March 12, the day Djindjic was killed, to April 22, the Serbian police's Operation Sabre led to the arrest of at least 10,000 people.

The focus of the investigation is to find the assassins and to break-up crime rings. Criminal charges have been laid against at least 3,400 of them. On April 29, the authorities charged 45 people, most of them members of the notorious Zemun gang, with plotting and carrying out Djindjic’s murder.

One thousand people remain in custody under controversial new rules which have meant that suspects can be held for two months or longer without access to lawyers and relatives, or being given a preliminary hearing in court. The rest have been released.

ACCOUNTS OF TORTURE

The main forms of ill-treatment reported were severe beatings and suffocation. Electric shocks were also reported. Some detainees were pressured to sign confessions under torture. The reported abuses took place at a number of sites.

Milan Vukovic, a restaurant owner in Belgrade, was arrested on March 13, the day after the state of emergency was imposed. Accused of belonging to the group thought to have killed the prime minister, he was detained for one month. He was released without charge.

Vukovic outlined the treatment he received from police at Makis, headquarters of the special interior ministry unit in charge of fighting organised crime, near Belgrade.

"A group of five or six masked policemen tied my hands to a chair that was fixed to the floor, and put a plastic bag over my head,” he told IWPR. “After a short while I used up all the air. The bag stuck to my face, and I started struggling for air. When it was obvious that I was suffocating, they punctured the bag. They played this game twice.”

"They demanded that I admit I was a drug dealer, a racketeer and a gun runner, and that I had traded illegally in oil, cigarettes and foreign currency. They did not beat me. But when I found myself in Belgrade's central prison, I saw dozens of beaten-up people in the hallways and corridors.”

Vukovic is one of the few who are not afraid to talk about the torture they were subjected to without withholding their real names.

One man who spoke to IWPR on condition of anonymity said he was arrested and spent 30 days in custody before being released without explanation. Concerned about himself and his family, he was reluctant to speak at first but in the end said that he had been beaten while in custody. “They were not locals, they were from somewhere else, and they were wearing balaclavas," he said.

A cluster of testimonies was gathered in regard to a group of people from the town of Krusevac, all of whom were accused of being involved in organised crime. Most are still in custody, so IWPR was able to talk only to lawyers and relatives of those who had been allowed outside contact. Some others have not had legal counsel since their arrest.

Sandra Petrovic’s husband Goran and her brother Igor Gajic were arrested in Krusevac on March 14. She told IWPR that both men disappeared without trace and the family was unable to get in touch with them for more than a month. She saw her husband on May 13, when he was brought before an investigating judge.

"I hardly recognised him. He had difficulty walking and had lost seven or eight kilograms," she told IWPR.

Her husband told her that the police had taken him to a forest after putting a bag over his head with a slit in it for breathing and then covered it with adhesive tape. They beat him, and he lost consciousness twice.

Speaking on May 26, lawyer Dejan Jovanovic said that Goran Petrovic told him the same story, and that he and other inmates said they had been "beaten in a very brutal manner". The lawyer said they had sustained "visible mental and physical consequences". He said Petrovic had suffered a spine injury.

When Sandra Petrovic saw her brother Igor, he had lost over 10 kilograms. She said he too had been taken to the forest after they had put a bag on his head and covered it with adhesive tape. Her brother told her they had poured water on him and gave him electric shocks with cables. He had asked that the investigating judge enter this into his report.

According to Sandra, after the beating the two of them were taken to the Krusevac police station, where statements were taken from both. They were then transferred from Cuprija prison to Belgrade on instructions from the special prosecutor for organised crime. They disappeared without trace, until the family eventually found them with the help of two lawyers.

Violeta Kojic, whose husband Vladan was also arrested in Krusevac on March 14, told IWPR that her husband had been severely beaten and now had difficulty walking. She said that his physical and mental condition was poor, that he had tried slashing his wrists twice, and that he had been taken to the Military Hospital in Belgrade.

Kojic’s lawyer, Momir Vuckovic, backed up her story. "I have never seen a man beaten up that badly in my entire life," he said in an interview with IWPR on May 25. "There is not a single spot on his body without haematomas."

He confirmed to IWPR that his client had attempted suicide, and that Kojic told him, "I'd rather kill myself than let them kill me."

After his 60-day detention, Kojic and others were transferred to Belgrade under orders from the special prosecutor dealing with organised crime. Lawyers were not informed.

A third man, Slavoljub Markovic, arrested at the same time as Kojic and Petrovic has been allowed to see his lawyer only once.

"My client no longer resembles the person I knew before his arrest. He is mentally disturbed and has attempted suicide," the lawyer, who asked not to be named, told IWPR on May 26.

"He told me they had been taken to a forest,” Markovic's wife Emina said. “He had a bag over his head. That's where they beat them."

"I saw my husband last Friday at the investigating prison in Krusevac," she continued. “I hardly recognised him. He had lost 12 kilos and his nose was broken. There are traces of blood on the clothes I brought back from prison. His trouser knees were torn, probably from kneeling.

"My husband told me they had beaten him four times - twice since the state of emergency was lifted. He says they tried to torture out an admission of things he had not done in order to frame him."

At least Markovic saw his lawyer. The latter told IWPR of the case of Zivorad Zivkovic, who has been in the Krusevac prison for three months without access to legal counsel. After spending 30 days in custody, he got another 60 days detention under the law passed by parliament in April.

Cases of abuse were also reported among the 45 people charged with complicity in the Djindjic murder. IWPR received information on two of these from an international human rights expert. One of them concerns a man from Belgrade who was sleeping in his apartment when the interior ministry’s Special Antiterrorist Unit, SAJ, came in.

Neither he nor two others who were there heard them break in. Police woke him and "began to kick me and beat me with truncheons. That lasted 15 of 20 minutes. They did the same to the other two – one of them wet his trousers because of the beating". The witness was then taken to a police station, and was later charged.

OTHER FORMS OF ILL-TREATMENT

Other testimonies collected by IWPR concerned forms of abuse and degrading treatment other than physical violence.

Sleep deprivation was reportedly applied to Svetlana Raznatovic, a popular singer and widow of the paramilitary leader Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic. Better known by the stage name Ceca, she told international experts that police kept her from sleeping for 35 hours by interrogating her in shifts round the clock. Slobodan Pazin, formerly the senior policeman handling violent crime cases in Belgrade, told the same source he was deprived of sleep for at least 40 hours in the same manner.

A prominent Belgrade lawyer speaking on condition of anonymity told IWPR that in his view the whole detention procedure amounted to deliberate ill-treatment.

"Is it not torture when a man is thrown into a basement and left without any contact with his family and the outside world for days? People were not allowed to have a bath or change their underwear for 30 days," he said.

"Many of them were released after spending weeks in custody without anyone asking them anything or questioning them during that time.

"The thing that they most often heard from the police as part of their psychological torture was, 'You're criminals, and you have no rights at all'."

He continued, "I have talked to a man who spent 22 days in the basement of the police station in Zemun. They did not give him any food during the first three days, and he had nothing to cover himself with while he slept on a bench in a cell with broken windows. He was released from custody without any hearing, and no charges were brought against him."

Many other people refused to talk to IWPR. In some of the cases on which IWPR gathered information, the alleged victim was still in jail. In these instances, statements were taken from lawyers and wives. Those who had already been released were reluctant to speak out for fear that they would be subject to re-arrest or other forms of victimisation. Most of those who did made anonymity a condition.

As well as collecting statements from witnesses, IWPR spoke to a number of local and international experts working within Serbia's legal system or involved in monitoring human rights abuses. Unlike the report published by the OSCE and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNHCHR, of which more below, these sources indicated that the problems were widespread.

POLICE POWERS OF ARREST AND CUSTODY

The alleged abuses have taken place in the context of a large number of arrests carried out under new rules that allow suspects to be held incommunicado for up to two months. Such practices mean that detainees have no means of redress in the crucial period before a criminal case is formulated.

Most of the abuse was reported at this early stage. Once suspects are charged and transferred from police detention to a prison, they may be seen by a doctor who’s required to document injuries.

In one case reported to IWPR, members of an international organisation were shown such a document when they inquired about a particular prisoner (whom they did not get to see). The document said the man had a black eye and haematoma on the soles of his feet suggesting that he had been beaten there.

Several sources in the judiciary, the legal profession and international organisations told IWPR that the bulk of the physical mistreatment took place during arrest or preliminary detention. These sources allege that the SAJ was one of the worst offenders.

"Nearly everyone who fell into the SAJ's hands underwent torture," said one of these sources.

The extended powers of detention granted to police came initially from an emergency order which the then acting Serbian president Natasa Micic signed when the state of emergency began. That gave police the right to detain anyone considered to "endanger the security of other citizens of the republic" and keep them in custody for 30 days. During that time suspects have no right to see a lawyer, to appear before a judge, or to contact their family

The order expired with the end of the state of emergency, but on April 11 Serbia's parliament amended the legislation on organised crime to give the police even more draconian powers. Now they can hold suspects incommunicado for up to 60 days, referring only to their superiors in the interior ministry for approval. The investigating judge can also order detention for a further 90 days in special cases.

In some cases, suspects were initially held under the state-of-emergency order but have remained in detention under the new law, so they may not see a lawyer for three months.

Human Rights Watch has said that holding suspects in prolonged isolation is in breach of international standards. "The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights has established that even an incommunicado detention significantly shorter than currently practised in Serbia violates the European Convention of Human Rights," a May 10 statement from the organisation said.

Suspects are allowed access to lawyers only when they are brought before an investigating judge. Those among the former to whom IWPR spoke reported getting only limited access to the latter and some said their clients were subsequently moved to different detention centres without notification. The authorities have pressured a number of lawyers to sign pledges to keep case materials confidential.

Indications that major gangsters were behind the killing means there is little sympathy for them in Serbia. This lack of interest is mirrored abroad, where shock at the assassination, approval for the clampdown on crime, and a desire to support a still fledgling democracy appear to have downplayed concerns about the fate of those arrested.

But the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bans torture and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”, draws no distinction between suspects who are eventually found guilty and those who are innocent.

The Yugoslav criminal code which now applies in Serbia and Montenegro does not explicitly prohibit torture. But Article 190 states that “officials who, in the line of duty, use force, threats or other banned means or method with the intention of extracting a confession or other statement from an accused person, witness, source other person, are to be punished with three months to five years imprisonment”. And Article 191 stipulates the same prison terms for officials who “cause someone serious physical or mental suffering, threaten or insult someone, or behave in any other way that demeans his or her human dignity”.

OFFICIAL DENIAL

The Serbian authorities have steadfastly maintained that there have been no significant breaches of human rights.

Rasim Ljajic, minister for human and minority rights for Serbia and Montenegro, told IWPR that in some cases people had been beaten during arrest – but that this was not on a massive scale, nor did it constitute systematic violation of human rights.

He rejected allegations that torture had been used. Even though some people had been beaten at the time of arrest, no one had been beaten while in custody, he said.

In a reference to the OSCE-UNHCHR visit to a prison in April, Ljajic said, "If we had been guilty, we wouldn't have allowed them to visit in the first place."

Ljajic said his ministry had opened a hot line so that people could call in to report human rights violations.

When IWPR called the Serbian interior ministry on June 3 after receiving no reply to its faxed questions about the allegations, spokesman Colonel Vladan Colic said, "International organisations who have visited the detainees have given their assessment. The ministry has nothing to add."

Although the first reports of mistreatment of detainees seeped out only days after March 12, the authorities only responded to the claims following an April 7 letter from the US-based Human Rights Watch to the Serbian government urging it to stop keeping suspects in isolation.

Justice Minister Vladan Batic responded with a simple denial. "No measures such as force, coercion or acts contrary to law were applied against those in custody," he said.

The day after Human Rights Watch's letter was made public, Deputy Prime |Minister Cedomir Jovanovic told journalists that there was "no cause for concern" and that "the police, prosecutors and courts are working in line with their authority".

To underline his assertion that Human Rights Watch's concerns were unfounded, Jovanovic made a curious statement, "Over the past week representatives of the OSCE, Council of Europe and EU have visited the central prison in Belgrade and seen first hand to what degree human rights are protected there."

This claim turned out to be entirely untrue. At that time, no representative of foreign organisations had been allowed to visit any prison. At least one prominent organisation had in fact requested permission to do so, but received no reply in the three weeks since the state of emergency began.

"I was surprised that deputy prime minister Jovanovic had this information. We checked and found out that no international organisation had made any visits," said an official from the organisation.

"Even two or three days after Jovanovic's statement, we received an official statement saying they could not allow us to visit on the terms we wanted," he said, adding that his organisation had free access to Serbian prisons when Slobodan Milosevic was still in charge.

INTERNATIONAL TEAM VISITS JAILS

In the face of strong external pressure, the authorities had to relent. On April 14 and 15, more than a month after the state of emergency was imposed, representatives of UNHCHR, the OSCE mission in Belgrade and the OSCE’s for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, ODIHR, visited the central prison and the main police station in Belgrade. In a joint report on their preliminary findings, published on May 13, these organisations reported two cases of possible torture and a number of other problems.

"During the visit the delegation heard allegations and saw indications of torture and ill-treatment of at least two detainees. It was impossible to fully check the truth of these allegations, but the delegation believes it is important for detainees to be able to lodge such complaints and expect their complaints to be taken into consideration as soon as possible," the report said.

The team also said that "extended periods of detention coupled with substandard conditions of detention for many detainees amounts to degrading punishment or treatment”.

Public statements made by the OSCE indicated a desire to limit criticism of the Serbian government. On April 17, immediately following the prison visit, the OSCE's head of mission in Serbia and Montenegro, Maurizio Massari, told Serbian media that OSCE experts had not registered a single "significant violation of rights" or "particularly unfavourable" facts concerning the condition of prisoners. Massari did not take part in the visit.

OSCE spokesperson Rory Keane told IWPR that that his organisation had had unlimited access to detainees and that they had not received direct individual complaints either during or after the state of emergency.

WAS REPORT WATERED DOWN?

The joint UNCHR-OSCE report was damning of the detention procedures, but its evidence did not amount to systematic physical abuse. However, one delegation member told IWPR that the report represented a compromise reached by UNHCHR, OSCE and ODIHR, and that it had toned down the real conditions that they had found.

"What we saw was really horrible. No one should be allowed to beat you,” the source said. “The conditions in solitary confinement were so disastrous that they were torture in their own right. We were unable to breathe in these rooms so that we talked to the detainees at another location."

The same source confirmed findings of physical torture of detainees and said that they could barely recognise some of the people.

"One of the detainees, with signs of physical ill-treatment that were visible 20 days after his arrest, told the delegation that he had looked like the 'elephant man' after the first beating," the source said.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH DENIED ACCESS

Prison doors, however, were opened only to the OSCE and UN. The non-government Humanitarian Law Centre and Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia have not been allowed in. Nor has Human Rights Watch. A May 14 statement from the latter organisation says, "After one month of promising Human Rights Watch unhindered access to detainees, the authorities now appear to have actually been doing their best to prevent such a visit from taking place."

Bogdan Ivanisevic, a Human Rights Watch representative in Belgrade, told IWPR that his organisation had not been allowed to enter the central prison to talk to detainees, even though it had been given permission to do so by the ministry of justice.

"It is conceivable that the Serbian government is preventing Human Rights Watch from interviewing detainees, especially in light of a (UNHCHR-OSCE) report which cites limited access to detainees and voices serious criticism concerning poor prison conditions and the injuries inflicted on detainees," said Ivanisevic.

POLICE IMPUNITY AND THE COURTS

Although it has admitted that isolated incidents of beatings took place in the earliest stages of detention procedures, the government has taken no action that IWPR is aware of to investigate the actions of its regular and specialised police forces. According to Article 2 of the Convention against Torture, signatory countries are obliged to " take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture".

Defendants in future trials are likely to cite the use of torture, and a number of cases may be overturned at first hearing or on appeal. That will embarrass the government both in its efforts to stamp out organised crime, and as it tries to convince the European institutions that it is bringing its legal framework and practice into line with EU standards ahead of accession.

"Many things have yet to come to light. Sooner or later, what happened to those detained during the state of emergency will end up before the court in Strasbourg. This country will be paying lots of compensation," said IWPR's source in the international team which visited Belgrade prison.

One man arrested during Operation Sabre, Mihajlo Colovic, is already planning to press charges against Dejan Joksimovic, chief of police in the central Serbian town of Arandjelovac. Court records include Colovic's statement that Joksimovic whipped him with a telephone cable, punched him, kicked him and hit him with a baseball bat, in an attempt to get him to make an acccusation against another man. Colovic told IWPR that his eardrum was ruptured in the beating and he had to seek medical attention.

Belgrade is also likely to face pressure to revise laws which give too much power to the police.

"Because of the provision for 60 days’ detention, our country may run into trouble with the international institutions,” said Professor Momcilo Grubac, an authority on criminal law. “Since we are members of the Council of Europe, any citizen subjected to this kind of thing can turn to the court in Strasbourg."

Dragana Nikolic-Solomon is Assistant Editor and Gordana Igric is Balkans Project Manager with IWPR in London.