It was Sunday, market day, and I was planning a day of rest. We have had five months of student-led civil unrest here in Serbia, and the intensity of life here for everyone, including journalists, has pushed us all to breaking point.
Protests, blockades, new revelations about the ruling party’s criminal affairs – there’s not much time for stress relief.
That Sunday, March 23, was no different. That day the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) sent its activists to put up promotional stands in many Belgrade markets. But the country has changed. The people are so upset with the government that they will not put up with the SNS any more, especially in the capital, Belgrade. People gathered in front of SNS stands shouting at them, telling them to leave.
I was in the market at Djeram, where things were escalating. The situation was familiar. Regular citizens of all kinds – old, young, middle-aged – were protesting. On the opposite side, there are not many real supporters of Serbia’s current leader, Aleksandar Vučić, and his party. Most of them are paid activists and, in many cases, hired thugs.
That was why I came: to report on all the hooligans and known criminal groups I follow in my work as an investigative journalist. At 3pm, a fight broke out. I immediately turned on the camera on my phone and began filming. Two hostile guys started walking towards me, asking me what I was doing. With the big guy on my left and the tattooed, aggressive guy on my right, I told them that I was a journalist.
But that did not go down well. The guy on the right became angry, coming at me and swinging his fists. Luckily, his chubby partner and policemen stopped him. The fact that I was a journalist seemed to enrage him. Despite the five police officers who were just a few meters away, he had felt free to attack. But the police did nothing other than stop the attack. They were not interested in me pointing out the attacker, and they made no effort to arrest him.
The police chief on the scene simply ignored me. Other bystanders who saw the incident and filmed it also asked the police to react, but without success. The attacker remained there, smiling at his own impunity. The police were protecting the ruling party’s violent foot soldiers.
My colleagues and I quickly identified the attacker – a former boxer from a family involved in crime. I went to the prosecutor’s office two days later to give an official statement. I also reported threats of violence made against me on social media.
Any thought that the state would do anything about my case was shattered a day later, when news broke that an attack on another journalist – even more brutal – had been dismissed, because “the public around was not disturbed by the event”. The prosecutor who delivered that judgment was the same one overseeing my case. The theatre of judicial absurdity in Serbia has become the norm.
The ruling regime in Serbia has entered its final stages. All they have left to defend them are paid hooligans, wealthy organised crime figures who have taken over business in the country, and a corrupt police force and judiciary.
In the same week, my colleagues and I reported on a story of how two of my fellow journalists were targets of a failed attempt to install the powerful Israeli spyware Pegasus on their phones.
Things are getting increasingly heated. Vučić has international support, including from the EU, and the hypocrisy of western officials is more and more obvious.
“The European values” mantra has lost all relevance now, with business interests and geopolitics taking precedence.
But we will not stop. We cannot. Our mission is more important than ever. As one of my colleagues targeted by Pegasus said, investigative journalism is real patriotism: “We don’t get badges and weapons, we don’t carry repressive power, but we expose what needs to be exposed for Serbia to be better, by uncovering what is wrong.”
Saša Dragojlo is a Serbian investigative journalist
