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Serbia terrorizes 5 Croatian girls / They arrest them in Belgrade and deport them on the pretext that they "violated national security"

2025-01-22 19:16:57Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Serbia terrorizes 5 Croatian girls / They arrest them in Belgrade and deport
Belgrade

Five Croatian citizens, representatives of non-governmental organizations who participated in the event organized by the "Erste Stiftung" in Belgrade, spent a good part of the night with the Belgrade police, who ultimately expelled them from Serbia this morning and banned them from entering the country for a year.

The decision issued to them as the reason for deportation states "reasons for protecting the security of the Republic of Serbia and its citizens." The Croatian government and Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been informed of everything and a reaction is expected.

As art historian Ana Kovačić from Zagreb, who represented the curatorial collective “What, How & for Who/WHW”, recounted, the events lasted two days, Monday and Tuesday, and were attended by around 15 people from Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia.

After finishing the "workshop" yesterday, the participants went for a drink and then returned to the hotel around 11:30 PM.

“We were met in the lobby by men in civilian clothes, who approached us, showed us their badges for a second and said that they were “foreign police” and that we would have to go with them to the station. They did not answer any questions, they said that they were not obliged to do such a thing. Nothing was clear to us, they took our documents and ordered us to wait in the lobby,” said Kovačić.

After about an hour, the people returned and, two by two, took the seminar participants to the police station.

“They took me with two other colleagues. We really didn’t care, the men without uniforms took us two streets further and asked us to get into an unmarked car. We didn’t know who they were, they didn’t answer any questions, we didn’t know where we were going. I don’t know what I would do if I was alone,” said Kovačić. In the car, she says, one of them told them they had an arrest warrant and implied that one of the associations whose representatives attended the “workshop” was “suspicious.”

"They brought us to the station, most of our colleagues from the "workshops" were already there. They interrogated them for an hour. Later, they told me that they were interrogated about which high school they graduated from, which faculty, which organizations they work for, who financed them, what the seminar was about, what they did specifically, whether they met with anyone in Belgrade and why. etc.," says Kovačić.

When it was her turn and that of two other colleagues from Croatia, she continues, it was already 4 a.m. They called them to their room but, she says, didn't ask them anything because their shift was ending.

"They gave us a document written in Cyrillic and asked us to sign. I said I don't understand Cyrillic well and asked them to translate it for us. They read us a few sentences and said that the document said that we "threaten the security of the Republic of Serbia", that we must leave the country within 24 hours and that we are banned from entering Serbia for a year," says Kovačić.

Erste has been running a programme of such workshops for the former Yugoslavia and Central and Eastern Europe since 2015, as part of the Erste NGO Academy, and Kovačić attends 4-5 of them a year. This is not the first time they have been held in Belgrade.

This attack on non-governmental organizations in Serbia does not seem accidental, and comes at a time when Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has publicly attacked them, accusing them of seeking to overthrow him. Vučić is facing mounting pressure to resign from months of protests by Serbian students in the country.


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