Approaching the anniversary of the murder of Oliver Ivanovic, an opposition politician from the north of Kosovo, a long-time leader of the Kosovo Serbs and formerly a minister in the Government of Serbia, raises the political temperature in Serbia so much that some are starting to rave. In 2019 alone, we had two new "moments" that should tell us something more about what happened in the early morning of January 16, 2018, when, for now, unknown perpetrators killed Ivanovic in front of the headquarters of his Freedom, Democracy party , justice.
First, the "news" spread from some portal in the Albanian language from Kosovo that the prosecutor's office in Prishtina, which is officially leading the investigation, has a special report with the names of certain people suspected of having committed the crime. In addition, it was described how and where they hid, who provided them in the north of Kosovo and settled them, and how they fled in different directions after the murder. As in the case of the recent arrest of those who are alleged to have set fire to the house of journalist Milan Jovanović from Vrčin, persons unknown to the "general public" were also mentioned here; certainly, this does not mean that they really could not have been involved in the most serious political crime in Serbia since the murder of Zoran Djindjic in March 2003. However, a denial quickly arrived from Pristina. It said that there was no specific report, that what was stated as a result of the investigation "doesn't add up" and that there was no truth in what was claimed.
It is understood that Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić reacted to the "news from Kosovo", who since January 2018 has been playing the role of truth teller when it comes to this case. In another "address to the media", he said that what is claimed from Kosovo is an indication of Pristina's great nervousness due to Vučić's earlier announcements that Serbia is "a step or two away" from revealing the names of Ivanović's killers. Exposed to pressure from the streets of Belgrade in recent weeks - one of the demands of the citizens at the Saturday protests is the discovery of the killer and those who ordered the murder of Oliver Ivanovic - Vučić is thus trying to keep the whole case under control and to minimize the consequences of that act on his rating as much as possible.
The weeks and months ahead will hardly lead to this murder being solved. There are several reasons: some murders that preceded this one and took place in Kosovska Mitrovica were never solved and long ago fell into oblivion; Pristina and Belgrade cooperate very well in all fields so that on this topic someone would side with the truth and not the interests of those in power; and finally - if someone is arrested, it will probably be an unknown and irrelevant person who will hardly be able to be linked to the perpetrators of this brutal murder.
WE KNOW WHO IS NOT: While we wait for Vučić, in his never-ending game, to disclose the alleged discovery of the Serbian police and various dubs (in a statement dated January 5, 2019, he says that "they know that I don't even play with the media by inventing empty stories, but also with real data and facts "), we found out who was certainly not involved in the murder of Oliver Ivanovic. This is Milan Radoičić, a man who became known in Serbia only after the murder took place, and even before that, hardly any journalist knew about him. For years, he appeared as the "right hand" of his godfather Zvonko Veselinović in the murky affairs of Serbian companies based in the north of Kosovo. Namely, for him, Vučić personally guaranteed that he was not involved in the crime and publicly condemned all those who could even think of such a thing. On the other hand, Radoičić is allegedly being chased by the Kosovo police precisely because of the well-founded suspicion that he could be involved in the murder of Ivanovic, but he remains out of their reach even though he is officially the vice-president of the Serbian List - the branch of the SNS in Kosovo. By the way, for Christmas 2019, he also appeared as a patron (founder) of a concert in the village of Gornje Kusce near Gnjilan.
Radoičić, after numerous articles - primarily on social networks - and the subsequent publication of the testimony of the late Ivanovic, in which he told BIRN that he was the person of whom both he and the Serbs in Kosovo fear the most, it was Vučić who took a polygraph in Belgrade and determined that he is innocent. The President of Serbia has been saying all kinds of things about this case for the past year: that the footage from the security cameras is being hidden, that he does not believe that nothing was seen from the satellite because it was cloudy, that Serbia did not receive the shell casings and that then it cannot conduct an investigation as should... But he knows for sure that Radoičić is not involved and who is - he is just waiting for the right moment to reveal it to the public.
In the first days after Ivanovic's murder, Vučić claimed that he did not know Milan Radoičić and that he did not know who he was, forgetting that he himself had mentioned him months earlier as one of the people who defend Serbian children in Kosovo. However, when all the lights came on and were suddenly pointed at the northern part of Kosovo, it was immediately clear that he was leading the charge there. Radoicic's recognizability was contributed to by the statement of Ramuš Haradinaj, Prime Minister of Kosovo, in which he marked him as a man with whom he agrees on everything when it comes to Serbian-Albanian relations.
HE COULD KNOW: Milan Radoičić, according to everything that is said about him and according to the fact that he is a better connoisseur of Kosovo's circumstances than Milovan Drecun, SNS MP and "expert on security issues and Kosovo", if he knew some details about the murder of Ivanovic, he would be able to he told the prosecutor's office in Pristina or Belgrade, which are allegedly conducting parallel investigations. Namely, in the interviews he gave to the media during the local elections in the north of Kosovo in the early fall of 2017, Ivanovic spoke about the fear among the Serbs, about the fact that the local population is more afraid of "their own" than the Albanians, and in the aforementioned interview for BIRN he said journalist Milan Radonjic to remember the name of Milan Radoicic because he is a kind of "new leader" and a man that people fear. This journalist from "Vremena" can testify to that; in conversations from December 2017 with some residents of Kosovska Mitrovica, I heard about Milan Radoičić, I realized that that name is pronounced with fear and with the avoidance of loud mention in society.
From the man who opened champagne and looked like Marko Đurić's waiter in the evening when Srpska lista celebrated an absolute victory in the local elections in Kosovo with the inclusion of "via mobile" (like when Vojislav Šešelj called Vučić and Nikolic from The Hague and held sessions in SRS- in over the phone) Aleksandar Vučić with chants of "Aco Srbina, Aco Srbina", Radoičić became the man who "governs the Serbs in Kosovo" and, along with his godfather Veselinović, a special kind of new Serbian tycoon considering the amount of work performed by their construction companies. And that he is part of the Serbian establishment, it was also seen from joint pictures with Nikola Petrović, the godfather of Aleksandar Vučić and formerly the director of the public company Elektromreža Srbije. Otherwise, looking at his criminal record, one might think that he has always been in the world of crime...
WHAT IS PRISTINA DOING?, WHERE IS THE WEST: During all that time, the authorities in Pristina did nothing or minimally to shed light on the murder of Ivanovic. Only after the failure of the attempt to enter Interpol in November 2018, they made a demonstration of force in the north of Kosovo, allegedly in an attempt to arrest Milan Radoičić with a large group of special forces; they later announced that they were looking for him because of his involvement in the murder of Oliver Ivanovic.
The "attempted arrest" of Radoičić - presented immediately to Belgrade as a template by which Pristina will deal with all Serbs individually, and whose footage from the security cameras installed around and in the building where the Radoičićs live in Mitrovica was immediately available to the media in Belgrade - shows that it was a synchronized action that corresponded to both Thaci in Pristina and Vučić in Belgrade.
Pristina has shown that it can send special forces, the so-called, to the north whenever it wants. unit of the ROSU, and Belgrade could complain that the Serbs are therefore threatened and that the goal is to kill the leaders of the Serbs, because when "you cut the head off the body, the members die in torture", as they say in Mountain wreath.
On the other hand, Vučić spent the whole year not to find the killers - unless he waits for exactly January 16, 2019, when a special civil protest is scheduled, to "reveal the truth" - but from the person who is the most suspicious and who has no political pedigree makes the leader of the Serbs in Kosovo. In this, Pristina wholeheartedly helped him with the support of the "international community". She was obviously unable to exert any pressure to find the killers and, even worse, no one clearly placed the event in the context of political events in both Serbia and Kosovo. There were even indications that this murder should be put in the basket with some other unsolved murders in Kosovska Mitrovica, which could be said to have as a motive the fact that someone took someone's job or that someone wanted to take someone's job.
By its inaction, Pristina showed in some way that it recognizes the Serbian administration in the north of Kosovo, and there were no other voices of Kosovo Albanians who would have more strongly demanded that Pristina enforce the law on the "entire territory" and apprehend murderers and masterminds. On the other hand, Vučić's government made Oliver Ivanović, who was its political opponent with whom it was allowed to deal with in the most standard radical ways, a "meritorious citizen" by burying him in the Alley at the New Cemetery in Belgrade. The relationship with his second wife Milena is a separate story and shows the face of this government in the cruelest possible way.
THE TEARS OF RASIM LJAJIĆ AND THE SUBSEQUENT WISDOM OF BELGRADE: The morning when it was reported that Oliver Ivanovic was killed in Mitrovica became somewhat mythical, like when it was reported that Zoran Djindjic was killed or that Marshal Tito died. People can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard about it.
The image of the Minister of Trade and Telecommunications in the Government of Serbia, Rasim Ljajić, who learned about the crime when he was a guest in the morning news on RTS, remained in the public eye. His human, heartfelt reaction when he cried on the live program will remain one of the most memorable television events in years.
However, the government machinery, which tries to serve information so as not to damage the rating of Aleksandar Vučić, minimized that event. Also, it is not known that under any circumstances Minister Ljalić gave a statement to the prosecution because his first reaction after the tears could indicate that he was "warning" Ivanovic about something. Since Belgrade doesn't believe in tears, that terrible murder was taken lightly even then, and the opposition didn't know how to react to what came from the north of Kosovo: whether out of pure decency, or because they didn't know how to take advantage of that event, just no one rebelled more strongly, nor was much talked about. Belgrade was preparing for the elections, where Vučić would once again beat the disunited and poorly organized opposition, and there was more talk about the ancestors and the real name of Aja Jung than about the political consequences of the crime from Kosovska Mitrovica.
A year later, something has changed. The fear of Serbs from Kosovo has also been felt in other parts of Serbia and is becoming unbearable day by day. At the civil protests in Belgrade, which are starting timidly in other cities in Serbia, the citizens are looking for an answer to the question of who killed Oliver. Maybe his death was not in vain and maybe it will cause resistance to violence against dissenters.
