It's been a long week in which nobody had it easy. However, one man, and not the first man of the state of Serbia, seems particularly depressed. Minister of Internal Affairs Ivica Dacic seemed cold and moody at the press conference held on the night between Saturday and Sunday.
It was tense that day: for the third night in a row, rebellious citizens did not give peace to hordes of thugs and police throughout Serbia. Unprecedented amounts of tear gas were thrown in Belgrade, rioters and citizens threw fireworks and pyrotechnics at each other. In New Belgrade, a plainclothes policeman also pulled out a gun, which is a repeat of the events in Novi Sad, a few days earlier. The Gendarmerie and the Intervention Police thrashed everything in front of them, raided, hunted in the haustors and entrances and arrested them. In Valjevo, an even more gruesome picture: the beating and arrest of 15-16-year-old children, beatings of "unsuitable" bars, raids on the workshops of blockaded students' parents... And in Novi Sad, Valjevo and several places in Belgrade, citizens demolished the premises of the Serbian Progressive Party (in Zemun and Novi Sad, the premises of the Serbian Radical Party and the Socialist Movement were also damaged).
Ivica Dacic, during that time, around midnight, is holding a press conference. From evening to evening, he looks more and more sad and tired. The jacket is always the same, dark blue, with a low button. The shirt is black, the words are empty: he only counts injured policemen and suffers over the fate of the police. Those police who were filmed handcuffing a boy who could not be more than twelve years old, the police who grabbed and hit a girl in Slavija who had been standing quietly until then...
PICTURES FROM LIFE
It's hard to recount the whole past week in pictures, because there were a lot of them and they're all awful. However, a few of them will remain engraved in the collective memory. For example, young men and women kneeling on the floor of a gym in Novi Sad while police officers stand above them. Or the boy in Valjevo who was knocked to the ground by three gendarmes, beat him with a baton, and then ten more policemen rush in and beat him savagely. Finally, student Nikolina Sinđelić, who testifies in the media that she was arrested in Belgrade and taken, along with about twenty other people, to some kind of garage near the Government of Serbia. There, Marko Krichak, the commander of the Unit for the Protection of Certain Persons and Objects, beat and threatened her. In the end, Kricak threatened to rape her: "He said that everyone would see it, I was visibly furious, he said 'you should ask me to stop beating you'. I answered him, I didn't want to be silent, he was more and more violent. We spent three hours in that garage, then they took us to the station in Mike Evrosime. When they put everyone in the van, they told me to stay outside, I was afraid that I was left alone with Krička, I begged the police officer, he helped me, I would like to thank him, I really think he saved me".
Well, that's where the main character of this text, Minister of Police Ivica Dačić, enters the scene. Four days after Nikolina Sinđelić told what happened to her, Dacic held the first press conference in daylight. On Tuesday, August 19, Ivica Dacic stood in front of the cameras and dared to say that the MUP had not received any complaints about the behavior of Marko Kričko.
That, of course, is not true. Just a day earlier, on Monday, Nikolina Sinđelić told the media that she was gathering medical documentation in order to file a criminal complaint against Marko Kričko, as well as the former secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Dijana Hrkalović, who shared Nikolina's intimate videos on social networks, taken when she was a minor.
Also on Monday, the Serbia Center party (SRCE) submitted criminal charges to the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime against the commander of the Police Unit for the Protection of Certain Persons and Objects (JZO) Marko Kričko and seven of his associates due to the well-founded suspicion that, as officials, they violated the rights of students Nikolina Sinđelić, Stevan Zdravković and Dušan Cvetković by illegally depriving them of their freedom on the street, taking them to the garage of the Government of Serbia building, where they were forced to kneeling, stomped on them, hit them, slapped them, took away and broke their mobile phones, threatened to shoot them in the head.
In addition to Kriček, the criminal complaint includes his deputy Vujadin Lukić, the head of the Department for other persons in the JZO Jovan Opačić, the head of the department in that department Bojan Janjić, the head of the department Dragan Vein, as well as members of the Unit Nenad Dumić, Nebojša Filipović and Zoran Vukajlović.
Police Minister Dacic does not mention this, moreover, he says that there are no complaints, simply that they have not arrived, neither from internal control nor, he added, from citizens. The official government, of which Dacic is an integral part, knows nothing of everything that the citizens saw, experienced, recorded and documented. He knows that the windows of the SNS premises were broken and that there was fire in some of those premises. Empty rooms, where there was no one, have more rights than citizens whose heads were shot and who were burning with fear before the maniacal threats of police officers.
If he doesn't believe Nikolina and those who witnessed Krička's brutality, maybe he would believe the video from Monday evening from Cvijićeva Street, where the members of the Gendarmerie start suppressing the citizens and shout to the girls who are running away: "Come and fuck your mother", "Come and fuck you"... We believe our ears, so we also believe Nikolina. Dacic's sad face is hard to believe, although he is certainly tired. But he himself was "biting" to be where he is, in power, and that is not mandatory.
HOW DID HE GET HERE?
Ivica Dačić's political career began long before today's students in the blockade (who are being arrested even as this text is being written, on Tuesday afternoon) were even born. Now, if he were everything he is not, a political career that includes positions such as prime minister, minister of the interior, minister of foreign affairs, president of the Assembly, deputy prime minister, could be interpreted as great and important. As if it were about some kind of significant historical figure, and not about the tired and gloomy Ivica Dačić.
Dacic actually performed all these functions, after the historic Fifth of October and the overthrow of the regime of Slobodan Milošević, his political father. Dačić's skill of political survival was never disputed. However, after 35 years of political career, any normal person would ask: what will I leave for this country? In Dacic's case, it is very little, almost nothing.
Ivica Dačić's greatest political success happened when he and the Socialist Party of Serbia survived after they left power through a citizen's revolt. They came back relatively quickly and since then they have been the "tip in the balance" that decides who they will join as a minor coalition partner and thus decide who forms the government. And that's all Dacic's political skill: to keep a sufficient percentage of votes, just enough to remain relevant, and then grab positions for himself and his own. But then Dacic ran into Vucic.
BONES AND PORCELAIN
If someone had come and told Vučić in the summer of 2000 that in less than 15 years he would be more powerful than Dacić, he would hardly have believed it, but he would have already planned how to humiliate him when that time came.
So, for example, the signature of Ivica Dačić is on the Brussels Agreement, that cancer-wound of Serbian nationalists, certain circles of the Serbian Orthodox Church and many Russophiles. He was the Prime Minister of Serbia in April 2013 when the most powerful man in the country, then only the Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, decided to sign the agreement. Shortly after that, in 2014, Dacic was "reassigned" to the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs, where he remained, even though governments changed, until 2022.
What will he be remembered for after eight years at the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Singing Miljacka while foreign officials put a tip on his forehead, self-deprecation, leaning towards Russia and the proverbial quarrel with almost all countries in the neighborhood, tense status quo in the relations between Belgrade and Pristina... All in all, a solid nothing.
SOUND CANNON, DECEPTION AND LIE
photo: iva tanacković...
The fact that he has no results as Minister of Foreign Affairs is not as dangerous for the heads of the citizens of Serbia as the fact that Dacic has no control over the police even though he is the Minister of Interior. That it was so, it was clear on March 12 this year, during the first student blockade of RTS.
A member of the Gendarmerie mistakenly hit and injured his colleague, plainclothes policeman Lazar Baćić. That night, a story was spread, an attempt at an official version, that Baćić was attacked by students with a boxer, even though the incident was recorded by cameras from multiple angles. That evening, Vučić and Dacić, the president of the state and the minister of police, stood together in front of the cameras. Dacic took a breath to explain something to the journalists. Vučić took a fighting stance, said: "I'm sorry, I can't listen to excuses" and left the frame. Dacic remained, as if wet, and said something, their standard, "terrorists", "blockades", "the state will retaliate"...
Just three days later, at a protest in Belgrade, on March 15 at 19 hours and 12 minutes, someone used a sound weapon. Dacic stated that Serbia does not have him. Then it turned out that he had one. "We have it, but we don't use it," said the Minister of Police. He then demonstrated to the journalists how the long-range acoustic device (LRAD) works, and stated that it is, well, a slightly louder loudspeaker, which can be bought on eBay, one of the largest global platforms for retail trade. The last news from Dacic's mouth is that Serbia will sell LRAD devices.
The general impression regarding both events is that Ivica Dacic honestly did not know what the MUP had, nor in what quantity. Similarly, for months now he has given the impression of a man who has no control even over the people in the MUP. After all, the most brutal and conspicuous people in the police, such as Marko Kričko from JZO or Radoslav Repac, the commander of the police brigade, are much closer in profile to the SNS than to the SPS. That in itself doesn't have to be a problem. But when we get to the point where the Minister of Police is no authority for the commanders of individual departments or units, we have a serious problem, because the powerlessness that reigns in the MUP spills over into the streets. Such a situation has been particularly noticeable since the beginning of July, that is, the civil blockades of the streets after the "See you on Vidovdan" protest on June 28.
OLD LIONS
Parallel to the disintegration of control over the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Dacic's roses are not blooming in the Socialist Party of Serbia either. First, Branko Ružić rebelled against him, who was dismissed from all positions in the party due to his statements that he would go out for a walk on March 15, and was also seen at a protest in Belgrade. Now Goran Trivan, former Minister of Environmental Protection and member of the SPS Presidency, is also advertising.
Last week, Trivan committed a "mortal sin" from the perspective of the ruling coalition: he was a guest in an independent media, i.e. on Television Nova S, where he said that the SPS will try to be a factor that will bring the "warring parties in society" to the table. He added that this party must reform its program and deal with the people it represents, and it is clear that he is referring to the SNS.
So, Ivica Dacic, apart from not being able to control who does what in the Ministry of Interior, now has chaos in his party as well and really has nothing left to do. Hence the expression on the face of the man whose world is collapsing from the midnight press conferences, after the evening beatings of citizens and students this week. That facial expression shows a man who is questioning how he got here and what would have happened if he had stayed in Žitoraža and never enrolled in the Faculty of Political Sciences.
Dacic's path from 2012 to the present day cannot be viewed without Vucic's path. It's not that they didn't collide before, those two careers ran parallel, then in the same course, then created a delta and finally arrived at the same confluence. They are no longer young lions, neither one nor the other. Both are in the second half of their fifties, when they should and can settle some life accounts. If they were the kind of people they are not, both of them, especially Dacic, would wonder how the people on the streets, mass demonstrations and deep division of society happened to them for the second time in their careers. If they were like they weren't, they would wonder if maybe it wasn't up to them. There is only one difference: everything he is doing now, Vučić is doing to preserve his organized group, that is, his party. Dacic doesn't even try to do that, and the question is whether he has anything to protect.
