BIRN Team A local Belgrade drug dealer who worked the streets of the capi- tal for more than sev- en years told BIRN he has been forced to “sell less for more” because the supply of marijuana is so limited. “It is harder for me to get a good amount and I can easily get caught. The police are brutal,” he said. “I lost some customers, but every time I text them, saying new ‘movies’ are in town, so they come back,” he added. Serbian dealers are far from alone in having problems with supplies. Weed sellers and users across the region re- main shaken by a major marijuana bust in southern Albania in June 2014, which has reduced the supply on the black market and increased prices. asked Music to take part in the play, which he refused to do at first because he had no prior acting experience. Af- ter a week, Rau called him again and Musić agreed to take part by telling his life story. Four other actors tell their personal stories in the play as well - stories of sur- viving the siege of Sarajevo, the NATO bombardment of Belgrade in 1999, the destruction and liberation of the Ger- man city of Bremen in 1945, and of im- migrants from Soviet Russia who came to live in Germany. +381 11 4030 306 [email protected]BELGRADE INSIGHT IS PUBLISHED BY 9 7 7 1 8 2 0 8 3 3 0 0 0 0 1 ORDER DELIVERY TO YOUR DOOR +381 11 4030 303 [email protected]Continued on page 8 Continued on page 7 Users say that prices have more than doubled, turning marijuana from an affordable daily habit into a luxury item. Photo: Atdhe Mulla Ever since Al- banian police cracked down on the marijuana den of Lazarat, sup- plies have grown shorter and prices have soared. Continued on page 2 Sven MILEKIĆ “M y father was killed immedi- ately and thrown into a well. I sur- vived because the driver of my school bus and a friend of my father recognised me. Then they deported me to a concentration camp in a school bus,” Sudbin Musić recalls in his native language on stage at the National Theatre in Munich, shocking the audi- ence with its authentic power. In the play ‘The Dark Ages’, Musić, a 41-year-old Bosniak from Prijedor in north-western Bosnia and Herzego- vina, tells the story of how he survived the massive crimes committed in his hometown in 1992, when Serb paramili- taries and police killed, imprisoned and expelled local Bosniaks and Croats. He said he met the play’s German director, Milo Rau, when he came to Prijedor to look at some of the sites of mass graves and former concentration camps. “He got in touch with my cousin liv- ing in Germany and my cousin called me to show him around Prijedor, al- though he had no intention of taking me as an actor,” Musić told BIRN. Aſter visiting Tomasica, the biggest mass grave from the 1990s war, Rau ‘The Dark Ages’ turns Bosnian War into drama Real-life testimonies from people who lived through recent conflicts in Europe have been transformed into a gripping theatre play - acted out by the people whose stories it highlights. Issue No. 194 Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 Balkan pot shortage costs addicts dear Economic crisis and red tape vex business world Despite a higher ranking on the World Bank’s Doing Business report, experts say Serbia urgently needs more regulation reform. Katarina MARKOVIĆ S ince October 2014, Serbia has climbed from 91 st to 59 th position in the World Bank’s Doing Business re- port, which measures how business-friendly regula- tions and policies are in 189 countries. However, many Serbian entrepre- neurs say this improvement has not made life much easier, as most busi- nesses are still struggling. One entrepreneur who does not buy into stories of huge progress in the Ser- bian business environment is Milan Knežević, co-owner of Modus, a fash- ion-clothes manufacturer. “It is clear that we improved our ranking thanks to improvements in construction permits, but things are not that simple”, Knežević told BIRN. “It takes less than a month to get a construction permit, but the adminis- tration makes your life very difficult during the previous step, when getting the location permit.” He says that the Serbian business environment remains difficult for most companies, not least because they are faced with paying 147 para-fiscal fees (ad- ditional charges levied on businesses). The latest report by the Serbian Busi- ness Registers Agency, APR, on com- mercial operations in Serbia during 2014, highlights many negative trends. Aggregate losses for Serbian com- panies in 2014 reached 1.1 billion euros (131.7 billion RSD), four times larger than the previous year, according to the APR report. Shakespeare reconnects Serbian and Kosovar theatregoers Page 10 Focus on Refugees Pages 4 - 5 Gnezdo Organic: food with a conscience Page 11
Transcript
BIRN Team
A local Belgrade drug dealer who worked the streets of the capi-tal for more than sev-en years told BIRN he has been forced to
“sell less for more” because the supply of marijuana is so limited.
“It is harder for me to get a good amount and I can easily get caught. The police are brutal,” he said.
“I lost some customers, but every time I text them, saying new ‘movies’ are in town, so they come back,” he added.
Serbian dealers are far from alone in having problems with supplies. Weed sellers and users across the region re-main shaken by a major marijuana bust in southern Albania in June 2014, which has reduced the supply on the black market and increased prices.
asked Music to take part in the play, which he refused to do at first because he had no prior acting experience. Af-ter a week, Rau called him again and Musić agreed to take part by telling his life story.
Four other actors tell their personal stories in the play as well - stories of sur-viving the siege of Sarajevo, the NATO bombardment of Belgrade in 1999, the destruction and liberation of the Ger-man city of Bremen in 1945, and of im-migrants from Soviet Russia who came to live in Germany.
Users say that prices have more than doubled, turning marijuana from an affordable daily habit into a luxury item. Photo: Atdhe Mulla
Ever since Al-banian police cracked down on the marijuana den of Lazarat, sup-plies have grown shorter and prices have soared.
Continued on page 2
Sven MILEKIĆ
“My father was killed immedi-ately and thrown into a well. I sur-vived because
the driver of my school bus and a friend of my father recognised me. Then they
deported me to a concentration camp in a school bus,” Sudbin Musić recalls in his native language on stage at the National Theatre in Munich, shocking the audi-ence with its authentic power.
In the play ‘The Dark Ages’, Musić, a 41-year-old Bosniak from Prijedor in north-western Bosnia and Herzego-vina, tells the story of how he survived
the massive crimes committed in his hometown in 1992, when Serb paramili-taries and police killed, imprisoned and expelled local Bosniaks and Croats.
He said he met the play’s German director, Milo Rau, when he came to Prijedor to look at some of the sites of mass graves and former concentration camps.
“He got in touch with my cousin liv-ing in Germany and my cousin called me to show him around Prijedor, al-though he had no intention of taking me as an actor,” Musić told BIRN.
After visiting Tomasica, the biggest mass grave from the 1990s war, Rau
‘The Dark Ages’ turns Bosnian War into dramaReal-life testimonies from people who lived through recent conflicts in Europe have been transformed into a gripping theatre play - acted out by the people whose stories it highlights.
Issue No. 194 Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
Balkan pot shortage costs addicts dear
Economic crisis and red tape vex business worldDespite a higher ranking on the World Bank’s Doing Business report, experts say Serbia urgently needs more regulation reform.
Katarina MARKOVIĆ
Since October 2014, Serbia has climbed from 91st to 59th position in the World Bank’s Doing Business re-port, which measures how business-friendly regula-
tions and policies are in 189 countries.However, many Serbian entrepre-
neurs say this improvement has not made life much easier, as most busi-nesses are still struggling.
One entrepreneur who does not buy into stories of huge progress in the Ser-bian business environment is Milan Knežević, co-owner of Modus, a fash-ion-clothes manufacturer.
“It is clear that we improved our ranking thanks to improvements in construction permits, but things are not that simple”, Knežević told BIRN.
“It takes less than a month to get a construction permit, but the adminis-tration makes your life very difficult during the previous step, when getting the location permit.”
He says that the Serbian business environment remains difficult for most companies, not least because they are faced with paying 147 para-fiscal fees (ad-ditional charges levied on businesses).
The latest report by the Serbian Busi-ness Registers Agency, APR, on com-mercial operations in Serbia during 2014, highlights many negative trends.
Aggregate losses for Serbian com-panies in 2014 reached 1.1 billion euros (131.7 billion RSD), four times larger than the previous year, according to the APR report.
Shakespeare reconnects
Serbian and Kosovar
theatregoersPage 10
Focus on Refugees
Pages 4 - 5
Gnezdo Organic: food
with a conscience
Page 11
2 3BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
SERBIA SERBIA
PRESS REVIEWCOMMENT
“When the government is feeling threatened they always create this type of ‘arrest warrant’ to discredit our investi-gative findings,” he added.
In August 2014, Informer published a series of allegations about BIRN following its investigation into a secret Serbian gov-ernment contract with the United Arab
Emirates carrier Etihad Airways.Informer also alleged at the time that
journalists from BIRN and CINS had been ‘stalking’ Serbian Prime Minister Alek-sandar Vučić, causing him to cancel his summer holiday.
Stevan Dojčinović, a journalist from KRIK, told BIRN that the new Informer al-
legations are directly connected with a re-cent series of KRIK investigative reports about property allegedly owned by Bel-grade mayor Siniša Mali.
“It is clear that this is directly connect-ed with the Siniša Mali stories. The City of Belgrade is injecting a lot of money into Informer in various ways and this attack is nothing new. They will probably publish old recycled articles about our fi-nances, that’s all,” Dojčinović said.
KRIK has published several stories about the Belgrade mayor over the past two weeks.
On October 20th, KRIK claimed that Mali bought 24 apartments on the Bulgar-ian coast in 2012 and 2013 as the legal rep-resentative of two offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands.
KRIK also published stories about Ma-li’s role in controversial privatisations of state-owned enterprises.
Mali has denied all the allegations and said he will sue KRIK for defamation.
BIRN tried to contact Informer editor Dragan Vučićević for a comment, but he did not respond.
Informer has often been accused of be-ing the ‘official’ newspaper of Serbian PM Aleksandar Vučić, because of its attacks on the premier’s opponents and critics.
Editor Vučićević has his own talk show on pro-government Pink TV which has hosted Vučić as a guest in more than 50 per cent of the broadcasts.
A report issued on October 29th enti-tled “Media Reform Stalled in the Slow Lane: Soft Censorship in Serbia” said that the Serbian government continues to put informal pressure on the country’s media.
BIRN Serbia was a research partner in the report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the Centre for International Media Assis-tance.
Independent media were regularly ac-cused of being 'foreign mercenaries' by the regime of Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s, when current PM Vučić served as information minister.
Pro-government tabloid Informer promised to expose three independent media organisations including BIRN as “foreign mercenaries” trying to bring down the government.Saša DRAGOJLO
Informer announced that, as of Monday, it will start publishing a series of articles revealing who is financing three Serbian “anti-gov-ernment” media organisations.
Informer accused KRIK - Network for Investigating Crime and Corruption, CINS - Serbia’s Centre for Investigative Jour-nalism, and the Balkan Investigative Re-porting Network (BIRN) of taking foreign money “to bring down our government”.
“They are asking for 10 euro donations from citizens, although they are getting millions from the West,” Informer said in its announcement.
Slobodan Georgiev, a BIRN journalist whose photo was used in the illustration for the announcement, said it was just another episode in a tabloid campaign against BIRN and other independent media.
“This is just a continuation of the cam-paign that Informer is leading against all journalists who are taking their job seri-ously,” Georgiev said.
Serbian tabloid calls independent media ‘foreign mercenaries’
Informer article illustrated with pictures of journalists from KRIK, CINS and BIRN. Photo: Facebook
“I was smoking five to 10 grams a day. It was cheap. Now I probably smoke one joint, or none at all, dur-ing the week,” Agron, a user from Pristina, said. “Now it’s such a hassle. It costs a lot to be a pothead, unless you’re selling.”
Some weed dealers justify the price hike, saying they have to take more risks to get hold of supplies. This is because since the Lazaret crack-down, police raids in other countries have intensified, too.
“Prices are going to stay high as long as it's this difficult to get supplies, so 1,200 dinars [10 euros] is a realistic
“Once you could get four joints for 500 or 600 dinars [around €10]. Today you
can only get one for that price,” a user from the Macedonian capital, Skopje, told BIRN. “And the quality? Well, no one guarantees it anymore,” he add-ed.
In June 2014, the Albanian govern-ment finally cracked down on mari-juana farmers who had turned the outlaw southern village of Lazarat into a major drugs hub.
More than 1,000 police officers, including interior ministry special forces, laid siege to armed villagers, exchanging fire with drug traffickers as they took control of the terrain. Dozens of suspects were arrested, in-cluding a notorious local drug baron, Rezip Mahmutaj. In his three-storey villa overlooking the village, police discovered a drugs laboratory that was used to process marijuana.
More than 130,000 cannabis plants were destroyed and 80 tons of mari-juana seized.
The street value of the drugs pro-duced in Lazarat has been estimated to be worth 4.5 billion a year, equiva-lent to nearly half of Albania’s GDP.
COSTS MORE TO BE A POTHEAD
A so-called “marijuana capital,” La-zarat was one of the main weed sup-pliers to the rest of the region.
Last year’s crackdown has influ-enced weed prices all over the region with both dealers and users saying that prices have more than doubled, turning marijuana from an affordable daily habit into a luxury item.
Before the raid on Lazarat, users in Kosovo say three of four joints, total-ling around 1.5 grams or more, cost around five euros.
These days, five euros might get a single, small joint containing less than half a gram.
price for the risks that I take and the gas I spend driving around town. I'm al-ways on guard,” a Belgrade dealer said.
It is the same in Albania, where before the Lazarat raid a kilogram of marijuana was sold for around €200. Now the average price for the some quantity is €1,000, five times more.
Consumers and dealers in Macedo-nia have been faced with a constant price hike for several year, which is linked to the rise to power of the so-cially conservative VMRO DPMNE party in 2006.
Users say the Macedonian authori-ties have focused on busting marijua-
na dealers and users, turning a blind eye to dealers in other drugs, result-ing in marijuana price hikes and its scarcity on the market.
Macedonian police dispute this claim, insisting that they are waging war equally against all kinds of drugs.
FORCED TO SMOKE INCENSE
A shortage of marijuana and high prices are not the only consequences of the 2014 bust in Albania.
The crackdown on weed farmers and sellers has forced some consum-ers either to smoke less, or turn to syn-thetics and questionable substitutes.
Dardan, a shop owner in Mitrovica, Kosovo, told BIRN he used to smoke four joints a day but had stopped entirely.
Apart from the price hike, he had become frustrated with the number of calls he had to make to locate a dealer. Instead, he goes to his phar-macy and buys an anti-anxiety drug called bromazepam, which he can get without a prescription.
“I know the risk of addiction but I hope I will get through this period without problems,” he said. “A lot of young people are doing the same thing – using different kinds of pills that are harmful.”
Other passionate weed users told BIRN that they have started inhaling smoke from burning incense, which is also referred to as “synthetic marijuana”.
Nikola, aged 25, from Belgrade, is one of them. He has sampled smok-ing incense, but argues that nothing can beat weed.
“I was forced into buying that crap. A friend of mine recommended this to me and told me this was like mari-juana,” he told BIRN.
“But it wasn’t. I didn’t feel very good, my vision became blurry and I be-came disorientated,” he recalled.
Siniša Jakov Marušić, Nate Tabak, Filip Avramović, Fatjona
Mejdini and Ivana Nikolić con-tributed to this text.
Balkan pot shortage costs addicts dear
Continued from page 1
The crackdown on weed farmers and sellers has forced some consumers either to smoke less, or turn to synthetics and questionable substitutes.
Photo: Atdhe Mulla
NO MAN’S LAND
Despite the raid in La-zarat, weed is still sold across Albania. On Octo-ber 17th, Albanian police discovered a laboratory in the port of Durres for marijuana processing and packing and 700 kilograms of marijuana. Seven people were ar-rested, most of them owners of clubs and bars in Tirana.
Police have also seized more than 1,000kg since the end of September.
Besides, marijuana is still cultivated in some parts of Albania, which are barely accessible. Some of these “marijuana zones” are in difficult ter-rain, in deserted moun-tain areas that no one owns.
Dealers risk nothing by cultivating week in these lands because no one possesses the land, so no one is likely to be charged if marijuana is found and destroyed there.
Besides, marijuana seeds are very cheap to find in Albania, costing only a few euros each, depend-ing on the quality.
SUPERMARKET CONCEPT STORE Address: Višnjićeva 10
MONUMENT Address: Čika Ljubina 9
HOTEL MOSKVAAddress: Balkanska 1
HOTEL SQUARE NINE Address: Studentski trg 9
CAFE SNEŽANAAddress: Knez Mihailova 50
HOTEL TOWN HOUSE Address: Maršala Birjuzova 56
KOLARAC Address: Studentski trg 5
HOTEL EXCELSIOR Address: Kneza Miloša 5
HOTEL PRAG Address: Kraljice Natalije 27
HOTEL HYATT Address: Milentija Popovića 5
HOTEL CROWN PLAZA Address: Vladimira Popovića 10
HOTEL IN Address: Bulevar Arsenija Čarnojevića 56
HOTEL VOZAREV Address: Pop Stojanova 16
HOTEL 88 ROOMS Address: Takovska 49
HOTEL METROPOLAddress: Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 69
HOTEL LE PETIT PIAFF Restaurant Mali vrabac Address: Skadarska 34
INTERGALACTIC DINNER Address: Internacionalnih brigada 22Address: Hotel Jugoslavija, BulevarMihajla Pupina 85A
RESTAURANT ZAVIČAJ Address: Gavrila Principa 77
MIXER HOUSE Address: Karađorđeva 46
TOURIST ORGANISATION OF SERBIAAddress: Čika Ljubina 8
GYM DR FEELGOOD Address: Kolarčeva 3
RESTAURANT BIZU Address: Andre Nikolića 1-3
CAFE CAFFELOUNGE Address: Vase Pelagića 48
RADISSON BLU OLD MILL HOTEL, BELGRADEAddress: Bulevar Vojvode Misica 15www.radissonblu.com/hotel-belgrade
INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BELGRADE Address: Temišvarska 19
THE BRITISH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BELGRADE Address: Smetanina 12
Address: Kolarčeva 7
Find your copy of Belgrade Insight here: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/
4 5BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
FOCUS ON REFUGEES FOCUS ON REFUGEES
“This is a critical human question which has to be reacted to and we want to tell the people what it means and what it actually looks like,” Risović explains.
The exhibition will also include pho-tos taken several years ago, when refu-gees from the Middle East first started coming to Europe.
“I feel a duty to document what is hap-pening as I am a photographer living at the time when it [the refugee crisis] is taking place,” he says.
Risović has won many awards in Ser-bia over the years, most notably perhaps the Press Photo Serbia Award in 2012 for his photo story “Istočno od raja” (East of Eden). In East of Eden, he documented the lives of the younger generation in Serbia outside of “fertile Vojvodina [Ser-bia’s northern province] and the Serbian capital Belgrade.”
Mainly interested in covering social is-sues such as unemployment, politicians’
“Boko Haram took my right arm, so I had to flee,” he explained.
He said he had been treated well at Krnjača, and has been promised help in contacting relatives in South Africa who could wire him money.
“I have been here for two days, but I think I will spend a couple of months here and then return to Nigeria. I real-ly don’t know what will happen with me,” he said.
M’Pak’s neighbour Dragan Radojević, a 70 year-old Serb who fled Kosovo after the war in 1999, said he has been waiting for years for a chance to move out of Krnjača and is still hoping that the authori-
broken promises and younger genera-tions’ perspectives, Risović says his next projects will include work juxtaposing Serbia as it really is with how the country is commonly presented by mainstream channels.
“I will play with that idea – how it is presented by some people and [those at the] centre of power and how it actually looks like when you peek into the inner Serbia,” he says.
PAST CENSORSHIP
Before turning freelance some seven years ago, Risović worked for several media outlets in Serbia. But he admits he prefers his current choice, even though freelancing is usually hard because of the irregular income.
He recalls being censored several times in the past and being told “what to do and what way to do it”.
ties will give him an apartment in Belgrade.
Although thousands of ‘new’ refu-gees from the Middle East and Africa have passed through Krnjača on their way to Western Europe in the past few months, Radojević said that they have not caused any disruption.
“We didn’t have any problems with them. They don’t come in large num-bers now and they don’t stay for long,” he explained.
“Of course, there is some friction sometimes, but that isn’t anything out of the ordinary when you have peo-ple fleeing war and poverty and being put in a camp like this,” he added.
The photographer worked for the now de-funct Belgrade-based newspaper Borba at the time when it served as a political tool for the ruling socialist regime during the 1990s.
“From this distance, I would never now accept to work at Borba. Now I feel that when you are part of a system… you implicitly approve of all their content,” Risović says.
He now also contributes to the Serbi-an edition of National Geographic, some-thing he describes as a childhood dream come true.
Even though it is hard being freelance, as there is no such thing as a steady job, the photographer doesn’t seem to repent the decision he made several years ago.
“The difference is in freedom. As a freelancer you have the freedom to ex-press your attitude and opinions, and to me this is very important because it's something that I’ve always been fighting for,” he concludes.
As Radojević said, most refugees fleeing foreign conflicts and pover-ty only use Serbia as a transit point and do not stay in the country for long.
One exception could be Fehim Muday, a 19-year-old Somalian who was heading for Western Europe but changed his mind when he got to Bel-grade.
“I came here and made some friends. I have started learning Ser-bian and am very good at it,” he said in almost-fluent Serbian.
“I like the people here and the life-style, so I would like to stay and go to a university.”
Belgrade photojournalist Marko Risović, whose images of refugees’ shoes went viral online, explains why covering the crisis is a moral duty.
Refugees from the 1990s Balkan wars are now sharing their rundown temporary accommodation in Belgrade with people fleeing more recent conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.Ivana NIKOLIĆ
“At one moment, I simply put my head down and I saw the guy’s shoes. They looked apoca-
lyptic. Those were nice shoes, but dirty with mud. And I just asked him if I could take a photo,” says Marko Risović, a free-lance photographer, during an interview for BIRN.
“The guy only smiled and said yes, but didn’t understand why I would [want to] do that.”
Risović, who has covered the refu-gee crisis in the Balkans since Febru-ary, took several dozen photographs of shoes worn by refugees on the Serbia-Croatia border at the end of October. Many didn’t even have shoes and had been reduced to wearing makeshift footwear fashioned from plastic bags and the like.
Many of the images went viral after CNN, who originally commissioned him to photograph the crisis, published them on their official Instagram profile.
As well as documenting refugees passing through the Berkasovo-Bapska border crossing, Risović explains he wanted to find a fresh way of telling their stories.
Filip AVRAMOVIĆ
Half an hour’s drive from the centre of the Ser-bian capital Belgrade, a dilapidated set of bar-racks-like huts in the
Krnjača district has been home since 1993 to refugees who fled the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
The authorities promised to shut down the refugee centre by the end of 2016 and rehouse 36 Serb families in state-owned apartments across Bel-grade - but since the massive migrant influx began, the remaining Balkan refugees have now been joined by new neighbours from overseas.
Krnjača has been enlisted to serve as one of five of Serbia’s temporary accommodation centres for asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Af-rica, and according to the country’s Commissariat for Refugees, some 100 newcomers arrive at the camp each day.
Most of the Middle Eastern refu-gees go to the main railway station in Belgrade where their compatriots gather during the day, only returning in the evening to eat and sleep, leav-ing the Krnjača centre looking desert-ed in daytime.
But one of them, Nur Nurri, a 33-year-old who fled Afghanistan,
“I tried to promote a story I thought would be effective and that would tell what is actually happening in a proper way,” Risović explains, adding the idea of telling refugees’ stories by photograph-ing their shoes came to him spontane-ously.
“Honestly, I didn’t go there [to the bor-der] with the idea of doing that,” Risović says.
Seeing some of the refugees’ footwear – or lack thereof – reminded him of the work of a photographer who had done something similar when covering Afri-can refugees who were crossing the Sa-hara desert several years ago.
“With a simple detail - such as shoes – which is constantly repeated [in the photographs], you are showing a wider picture,” he observes.
‘A CRITICAL HUMAN QUESTION’
Risović is also a member of the Kam-erades photo collective – a group of five documentary photographers from Serbia whose aim is to raise awareness about social issues in the Balkans.
As each one of them has been en-gaged with the refugee crisis, they have decided to put all their work on display in December at the Parobrod cultural in-stitution in Belgrade.
was still in his hut because he had fall-en ill, and recounted a familiar story of fear, desperation and uncertainty about the loved ones he left behind when he fled.
“Afghanistan is devastated,” Nurri told BIRN. “I lived near the conflict zones, so I had to flee. My family has decided to stay in Afghanistan. I don’t know what is going on with them, or how they are.”
M’Pak, a 25 year-old Nigerian, fled his home country amid a brutal in-surgency led by Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which killed thousands of people in the country’s north-east.
Refugees' shoes: Snapshots of human tragedy
Middle East and Balkan war refugees share camp
Risović has covered the refugee crisis in the Balkans since February.
A dilapidated set of barracks-like huts in the Krnjača district.
Dragan Radojević fled Kosovo after the war in 1999. A 33-year-old Nur Nurri fled Afghanistan.
Photo: BIRN/Ivana Nikolić
Photo: BIRN/Filip Avramović
Photo: BIRN/Filip Avramović
Photos: Marko Risović for CNN
Photo: BIRN/Filip Avramović
6 7BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
BUSINESSBELGRADE
lists as important for their decision to invest in Serbia,” he says.
Rajić explains that companies looking to invest will first collect data from partners already working in the target market, then approach busi-ness chambers and embassies, and also engage independent experts and agencies to further research the mar-ket.
“All this is much more important than the Doing Business list, and this is especially true for investors from EU countries who can check the situ-ation from several reliable sources,” he notes.
“The Doing Business list in Serbia has become a number one topic in the media, but in practice we need more changes if we really want to attract se-rious investors.”
Knežević stresses that 24,500 companies out of 120,852 record-ed as active in 2014 didn’t submit their financial reports,
while those that did employed 18,839 fewer workers compared to the year before.
“Losses increased fourfold and it is a sign of several negative trends, not just exchange rate losses… The dete-rioration in financial performance last year was affected by a decline in aggregate demand, slowing down of investment and lending activities, and drop in exports as well,” Knežević wrote in an article for Danas daily.
“The economy is in total collapse and [APR] report clearly shows it,” says Knežević.
REFORMS DELIVER MIXED RESULTS
After several years of stagnation, Serbia has managed to climb higher up the World Bank Doing Business rankings but the overall picture is not all positive.
The drivers behind the higher ranking were largely based on the ease of applying for construction permits and on this measure, Serbia climbed from 178th to 139th place. In terms of paying taxes, Serbia reached 143rd position, 22 places higher than the year before.
The government passed new legis-lation on planning and construction that reduced the cost of applying for construction permits and introduced electronic payment of taxes.
In eight other areas, Serbia’s posi-tion is weaker or the same as the pre-vious year.
For example, Serbia dropped three places in the category of starting a business, and seven places in getting credits, while enforcing contracts and trading across borders remained the same.
Taking into consideration recent changes in methodology, which im-proved Serbia’s position in the previ-ous year, the World Bank deems that Serbia has actually progressed nine places from 68 to 59.
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić confirmed last month that the government aims to ensure Serbia is ranked among the top 40 performers on the Doing Business list, something he says will allow Serbia to attract more investment and so create more jobs.
However, while experts acknowl-edge that the country’s ranking in the Doing Business report is important, they say it is not a decisive factor for investors deciding whether to locate production or other business activi-ties in the region.
Dragoljub Rajić, a partner at the Business Support Network consultan-cy, warns that the government often overestimates the importance of the Doing Business list for investors.
“Last year’s research on a sample of 74 German, Austrian, Swiss and Slo-venian companies located in Serbia showed only 4 of the 74 companies had rated data from Doing Business
MORE REFORMS NEEDED
Business organisations in Serbia have supported reform activities that have influenced Serbia’s ranking and expect further improvements.
The National Alliance for Local Eco-nomic Development, NALED, point out that this year’s result is the biggest improvement in the last nine years.
Ana Brnabić, vice-president of the NALED’s board of directors, believes Serbia will improve its ranking fur-ther with the introduction of unified procedures in issuing permits and the introduction of electronic building permit application forms since Janu-ary 1st, 2015.
On the other hand, she says that during the last five years there has been a sharp fall in the categories
of registering property and getting credit, while Serbia’s position is un-changed in the category of establish-ing of new companies.
Serbia’s struggling economy has cast a shadow over positive results, as the overall business environment remains challenging.
Rajić says even if Serbia is ranked highly, domestic companies are suf-fering from the six-year economic crisis and a chronic lack of budget funding.
“If all of these changes on paper are felt in practice, it will still take years for the half-bankrupt Serbian economy to feel an improvement,” he says.
He also stresses that Serbian com-panies are operating in an environ-ment where purchasing power has decreased since 2009. In the first half
of 2015, this led to a drop of purchas-ing power in some sectors of more than 40 per cent compared to 2008.
“At the same time, apart from abol-ishing part of the para-fiscal charges in the second half of 2012, the econ-omy did not feel significant relief through the tax system,” Rajić says.
“On the contrary, operating costs in-creased with the amendments to the law on taxation of property, amend-ments to the law on corporate income tax, and changes of various other lev-ies that business pay.”
He says that although some minis-tries work more actively in improv-ing the business environment and certain results have been achieved, there are 144 laws and more than 250 by-laws relating to business which creates huge bureaucratic costs and many complications in practice.
“We need a general shift from the policy of development based solely on offering more and more privileges to foreign investors, to the perfor-mance development policy stimulat-
ing the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises,” Rajić says.
Changes should, he believes, in-clude the reduction and simplifica-tion of the legal framework, smaller, cheaper and more efficient state ad-ministration, and reforms in the social insurance and the pension system.
“The state would help more if it stopped bothering and sucking the money from businesses that would use it more efficiently to increase the volume of economic activity, to purchase new machinery and equipment, and invest in employee education and job creation,” he ex-plains.
“Only investments in development and turning to the markets with high purchasing power can pull the econo-my out of crisis.”
Economic crisis and red tape vex business world
Continued from page 1
Vučić confirmed the government aims to ensure Serbia is ranked among the top 40 performers on the Doing Business list. Photo: Beta
Photo: Flickr/Adam Olszanski
The Doing Business list in Serbia has become a number one topic in the media, but in practice we need more changes if we really want to attract serious investors.”
” Dragoljub Rajić, Business Support Network consultancy
Hid
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This memorial pillar – dedicated to the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine – was erected back in 1933 in a park in Zemun, one of Belgrade’s biggest municipalities located north of the city centre across the Sava River. The pillar was built by Serbia’s Association of Friends of France on
the 100th anniversary of de Lamartine’s 1833 visit to Zemun. Lamartine, who was born in 1790 and died in 1869, was quarantined in the park. At the time, Zemun was part of the Habsburg Empire and thus separated from the rest of Serbia. All passengers coming to Zemun, and therefore the empire, from across the Sava River had to stay in quarantine for some time.
Green light for monument honouring Serbian writer
Municipal helpline to speed up response times
Filip AVRAMOVIĆ
Board members of the City of Belgrade have approved an application to erect a monument on Flower Square
honouring one of Serbia’s most famous writers, Borislav Pekić.
Nikola Nikodijević, president of the city parliament, said it was a “great decision for Flower Square to belong to Pekić, since he lived in that part of the city (Vračar)”.
“It is a continuation of our strategy to repay all deserving citizens,” Nikodijević told Belgrade-based newspaper Blic.
The decision to build a statue of Pekić was made following a request by his family. The monument will be financed by the Borislav Pekić Foun-dation, and will not require funds from the City of Belgrade budget.
Pekić was a Serbian political activist and writer. He was born in 1930 to
Filip AVRAMOVIĆ
Belgrade mayor Siniša Mali told the media on November 4th that the newly-installed soft-ware will “enable the service
to be three to five times more efficient”. The software will allow every call
about problems with municipal ser-vices such as heating, water, sewage systems or parking to be recorded in the system and then followed up by Beokom staff who will then refer it on-wards.
The system later monitors whether the problem has been resolved or not.
“If employees do not react to the re-ported problem, we can then see why they have not done what they were
a prominent family in Montenegro, which was at that time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He lived in Belgrade from 1945 until 1971, when he immigrated to London and was one of the founding members of the Demo-cratic Party in Serbia.
Following Pekić's immigration to London in 1971, the Yugoslav authori-ties considered him persona non gra-ta and for several years they prevented his books from being published in the former Yugoslavia.
Pekić distinguished himself in the 1970s as one of the best Serbian contemporary dramatists. He regularly wrote radio plays for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, as well as Sud-deutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart. Of 27 plays written and performed in Serbia, 17 were first produced in Germany. Many of them were transformed into theatre and TV plays and received a number of awards.
supposed to do. If work has been done, we will be able to see that the problem has been resolved,” Mali said.
Beokom receives about 120,000 calls each year and the new system will make its work “more transparent”, he added.
“Also, we have internal control which monitors who is or is not doing their job, who is working faster than others… We can then reward or punish certain secretariats and services, all in order to serve the citizens better,” he said.
He also promised that there would be investments in the IT systems of oth-er municipal companies in the future to make them more efficient.
Pekić was a member of the PEN Association in London and Belgrade, and was Vice-President of the Serbian PEN Association between 1990 and 1992. He was elected to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1985, and was made a member of the Advisory Committee to The Royal Crown in 1992.
Active both as an author and a pub-lic figure until his last day, Pekic died of lung cancer at his home in London on July 2nd, 1992.
The Pekić statue is just a part of the planned 300,000-euro reconstruc-tion of Flower Square. The value of works on the Flower Square is about €300,000, and half of the value of works funded by the city and the other half by Belgian food retail company Delhaize.
The reconstruction was said to be finished on October 10th, but work still continues on day-to-day basis.
BELGRADE THROUGH THE EYES OF A GEN Y
City of Belgrade backs proposal to erect statue of political activist and playwright Borislav Pekić on Vračar’s Flower Square.
The Beokom municipal helpline has installed new software that it says will ensure Belgraders’ problems with heating, water and other services are dealt with more efficiently.
In an international game of Chinese whis-pers, Belgrade’s reputa-tion as a party capital is spreading among Generation Y, but the city’s other appealing traits seem to get lost along the way.
Emma KRSTIĆ
Belgrade is still a relatively mysterious capital for Gen Y coming from the West. In fact, some people, it seems, are still unsure where it even is. I kid you not, when I said I was relocating here one friend exclaimed: “I love Ireland!” Perhaps they just confused it with BelFAST (an easy mistake?), or Serbia just isn’t on their radar, which is a real shame. Of course, sports fans are well aware of Serbia because of Novak Djokovic, and in recent times, the refugee crisis has brought the country’s name out of the shadows on a broader scale. But little is known about the capital’s personality and culture. Slowly word is getting out though; this week I even read somewhere that Belgrade is the new Brooklyn, New York. That’s quite the hype. Among young, ‘intrepid’ travellers, there are still many who view the Balkans - and Serbia, being smack bang in the middle of it - as a somewhat undiscovered frontier; a part of the world not yet firmly on the tourist trail, where prices are considered cheap by western standards and people assume they may still face an element of ‘culture shock’. In backpacking circles, Belgrade is known for three things - its wild nightlife, almost-lethal alcohol and its attractive women. All of which can be found at the boat-based nightclubs docked on the Sava river, which too are heading towards legendary status – namely 20/44 where renowned international DJs often feature on the bill. But beyond the city’s party reputation, many people still don’t know quite what to expect from the Serbian capital.
Based on my first impressions, Belgrade has an individual and diverse list of traits.
Well, here’s what my initial observations have been. The people are unmatched in friendliness, the sandwiches are some of the best I’ve ever tried (go to Fitbar, Nusiceva 4 and Vladimir Popovic 44), a haze of smoke will greet you in every café, bar, nightclub and kafana you enter (of which I’d recommend Pub ‘Jedno Mesto,’ Cetinjska 15) and the amount of succulent meat devoured in one dinner is enough to give you the sweats. Locals bend over backwards to be helpful, and are all too happy to have a conversation with a stranger on public transport - something that I haven’t experienced in many other cities. The vibe is what I imagine Berlin would have been like before it became achingly cool and all the hipsters moved in. And then there’s the Serbian sense of humour, which is fantastically black and down-on-your-luck. No one takes themselves too seriously here and no one is trying to impress. What you see is what you get. Now when people ask with surprise “why did you move there?” I can’t help but think: you don’t know what you’re missing out on. Share your impressions of Belgrade on Facebook or Twitter using #MeetBelgrade.
8 9BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
OUT AND ABOUTREGION
“We put the public into a state of con-fusion; are our stories
true or fictional? In other words, each of us asks a question, where does our reality start from?” he explained.At one point, after telling the story of how he exhumed his father, Musić transforms himself into a contempo-rary figure of Hamlet, also playing his father’s ghost.
Musić says that by acting in the play, he is honouring those who lost their lives during the war.“ I erected some kind of monument to all the people I lost during the 1990s,” he said.
All the actors had doubts that what they were doing was a “striptease,” revealing their personal traumas on the stage, he continued. He also said that he worried about his family see-ing the play, fearing it would be over-whelming for them.
“Nevertheless, I can't wait for us to perform in the former Yugoslavia,” he added.
‘DON’T BURN SHOES AS FUEL’
Another actor in the play, 39-year-old Vedrana Seksan, from Sarajevo, said she is looking forward to per-
forming it in the Bosnian capital de-spite being n e r v o u s about her mother and other relatives watching her.
“At one general rehearsal, my 16-year-old daughter was in the au-dience. At one moment I heard her weeping and it was a very hard mo-ment for me,” she said.
She explained that her daughter was hearing some of her stories from the siege for the first time because she did had not wanted to “burden” her with them before.
Her mother also offered some ad-vice when they talked about the play, telling Seksan “to inform people in Germany never to use footwear for heating, because it ignites too fast and creates no heat,” referring to mo-ments when people in besieged Sara-jevo burned their shoes in attempts to keep warm.
“I told my mother: ‘But mum, they live in Europe, they have central gas heating.’ She just responded: ‘I had also lived in Europe with central heat-ing [before the war].’”
During the process of creating the text for the show, the actors recount-
ed their stories and thoughts on three topics – ‘mother’, ‘evil’ and ‘art’ – de-scribing what each means for each of them. Their testimonies were tran-scribed for editing; Seksan’s alone was around 14 hours long.
“In the end, with a lot of alteration, my testimony is in the final version cut to some 15 minutes, which falls into a bigger story line along with the testimonies of the other actors,” she said.
“I never did this type of theatre be-fore and I know I wouldn’t do it again, because it’s an experience which is beautiful, but also painful,” she add-ed.
THE PROBLEMWITH FORGETTING
Rau, the director of the play, said that ‘The Dark Ages’ is the second part of his ‘Europe Trilogy’. The first part was called ‘Civil Wars’ and fo-cused on the conflict in Syria. The third, which will be staged next year, will be called ‘Empire’ and will focus on contemporary Europe.
“What I’ve tried to do is to tell the story of what happens when one age is turning into another age - for exam-ple, the end of Soviet bloc, the end of Yugoslavia, the end of Nazi Germany, and what comes after,” he said.
FIVE STORIES, FOUR COUNTRIES
As well as the stories of Musić and Seksan, ‘The Dark Ages’ features Sanja Mitrović from the town of Zrenjanin in Serbia, who recalls her life during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.
Valery Tscheplanowa, 35, originally from Kazan in Russia, who emigrated with her mother to Ger-many in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union was fall-ing apart, tells her story of migration and integration into German society.
Manfred Zapatka, 73, from Germany, talks about the liberation and destruction of his hometown Bremen, as well as his personal story of early death of his father and mother.
Slovenian avant-garde band Laibach contributed the music for the show. The song they provided for the trailer of the play is a cover version of Jeanne Moreau’s ‘Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves’, with lyrics by Oscar Wilde.
The Residence Theatre in Munich co-produced the play with film production company the Interna-tional Institute for Political Murder.
“There is one rule in this play and that is that everything said is true. Of course I don’t know if it is, for exam-ple, the truth of Sudbin Musić, or if it’s the objective truth,” he said.
Rau said that the play, which was first staged in April this year, has gen-erated powerful emotional respons-es.
“This play is extremely touching for a lot of people. You have people cry-ing in the audience... We were quite surprised and, in a way, happy that such emotions surfaced, since we thought, ‘who would be interested in stories from Sarajevo or Russia?’” he said.
Rau believes the play is important because it tackles the European habit of forgetting the past for the sake of the future – something that is hard to do in the Balkans, where recent con-flicts still shape everyday realities.
“It’s very problematic, especially for Vedrana and Sudbin, to try to forget what happened in the 1990s,” he said.
“In the end, as Sigmund Freud used to say, ‘What you bury alive will come back as a zombie.’”
Continued from page 1
‘The Dark Ages’ turns Bosnian War into drama
Sudbin Musić (right). Photo: Thomas Ashuber/Residenztheatre
In July, the Belgrade authorities im-proved the lighting in an attempt “to make it safer for citizens,” as Belgrade Mayor Siniša Mali said at the time. Since then, no new incidents have been reported, but I would advise you not to stroll around late in the evening – just to be on the safe side.
Long before World War I, the wood was deforested and various vegetables were planted there instead. Following the end of the war, the Yugoslav Army built a vehicle repair workshop on the site. It was not until the end of World War II that it became a forest again. From 1948 to 1950, Yugoslav youth re-
forested the area in a so-called volun-tarily work action.
No matter the season, you will always see people jogging or working out. If you cannot find a place at some of several ex-ercise areas, you can always use benches for crunches or stretching. While exercis-ing, taking long walks or having a picnic is more than pleasant, I wouldn’t actually recommend jogging – unless you are a pro.
The main path through the wood is 2.5 km long, and while there are many smaller ones, all the paths are of clay so jogging at Banjička šuma when it rains or snows is not the best idea. In addi-tion, jogging here is not a good idea if
you find it hard to run up and down as the majority of paths here are quite steep. There are no proper running tracks so be careful not to twist your an-kle or fall over stones.
For some, there may be more disad-vantages than advantages to jogging at Banjička šuma, but you can still give it a shot if you think you are up to it.
And proving there’s pretty much something for everyone, if you like the area but dislike the jogging paths, you can always go to the nearby Banjica Sporting Centre and enjoy the swim-ming pool, tennis courts and other sporting facilities instead.
Minutes from the city centre, Banjička šuma is popular with joggers, picnickers and birdwatchers alike – just be sure to exercise caution after dark.
Ivana NIKOLIĆ
Banjička šuma, located in the Voždovac munici-pality in the upper part of the city, is a favour-ite spot for Belgraders seeking sports activities,
peaceful walks, picnics or even a bit of open-air studying. You can reach the wood quite easily on public transport, with buses 47, 48, and 78 leaving from Slavija Square. But you can also walk there, especially if the weather is nice which can be the case even in Novem-ber.
Besides sports and rambling, Banjička šuma is most famous as a so-called birds’ haven – it is home to sever-al dozen bird and plant species, which is why it was proclaimed a natural mon-ument back in 2000. Here you will find more than 60 bird species, 35 of which are nesting birds, such as the kestrel, pheasant, white wagtail, chiffchaff and many others. You might not see them but you will definitely hear them sing-ing all around.
Many other species have also made Banjička šuma home, including spar-rows, hawks, owls, nightingales, and woodpeckers.
And no story about Banjička šuma is complete without mentioning the man who helped its preservation by securing state protection for the woods, Timothy John Byford, a British television director and scriptwriter.
Besides making some of the most pop-ular Yugoslav children’s shows of the 1970s and 1980s, Byford – who died in Belgrade in 2014 – was also a passion-ate birdwatcher. For more than three years he intensively studied birds and managed to persuade the local authorities to put the area under its auspices.
In a bid to honour him, the City of Bel-grade in September decided to change the name of the wood to Byford’s Wood. The proposal was submitted by By-ford’s wife and several other grateful citizens and was more than welcomed by the city’s assembly.
Walking around the forest – which is quite deep – you will find some paths lead to a small stream which is especial-ly nice to explore during the autumn when the leaves are falling and every-thing is turning yellow around you. If you are keen on picnics, there are sev-eral wooden benches with tables avail-able for public use.
SAFETY CONCERNS
However, even though it might sound like a perfect and peaceful loca-tion for all sorts of activities, you will be well advised to exercise caution after dark. Banjička šuma is not the safest place in the evening or at night. In re-cent months, this patch of woodland has been in the media spotlight due to several rape cases and other incidents, including robberies.
Banjička šuma: Belgraders favourite woodland
Banjička šuma is most famous as a so-called birds’ haven – it is home to several dozen bird and plant species. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NenaK
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What I’ve tried to do is to tell the story of what happens when one age is turning into another age - for example, the end of Soviet bloc, the end of Yugoslavia, the end of Nazi Germany, and what comes after.”
Milo Rau, the director
of the play
10 11BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
ARTS
Miki Manojlović, the director of the play. Photo: Courtesy of Radionica Integracije
Hungarian Gypsy Orchestra’s New Year concert
The Hungarian National Gypsy Orchestra will be performing their New Year gala concert on December 16th at the Sava Centre. Led by “king of the violin” Ferenc Santa, the orches-tra has toured the world showcasing their wizardry on strings and incredible musicianship. Tickets for the event cost between €15 and €22, depending on seating. More information on www.savacentar.net.
Finnish cuisine at KC Grad
If you're looking to try some exotic food from the north this week, check out KC Grad on November 11th. Seura, the Serbian-Finnish society, will be preparing food that's perfect for the cold weather. Entrance is free and food will be dished up on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.
Havana D’ Primera announce Salsa festival gig
The Havana En Belgrado Salsa festival has already kicked off, but the best is yet to come. On November 7th, legendary Alexander Abreu and Havana D’ Primera will be gracing the stage. The event takes place at the Stu-dent Cultural Centre (SKC) at 11pm. If you want to attend all of the workshops over the course of the day and catch the performance, tickets cost €60. Tickets for the show and after party cost €20. For more informa-tion, visit www.havanaen-belgrado.com.
Swedish piano star with Belgrade Philharmonic
Ingrid Fuzjko Hemming is a Swedish classical piano star who was born in Berlin in 1932 to a Japanese mother and Swedish-Russian father and was educated in Japan. She will be performing on November 18th with the Belgrade Philharmonic.
Photographer focuses on childhood in Blue Diary show
Serbian photographer Alek-sandar Šiljković analyses images from his childhood, like carousels, toys and parks, in his new Blue Diary exhibit. The exhibition runs until November 14th at the Bartcelona Gallery in the Belgrade Design District. Entrance is free of charge.
Art
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With a Kosovo Albanian playing Romeo and a Serb playing Juliet, Predrag Miki Manojlović’s production of the Shakespeare classic is intended to bring Belgrade and Pristina closer together.Ivana NIKOLIĆ
Manojlović’s pro-duction of ‘Ro-meo and Juliet’ returns for a sec-ond run at Bel-grade’s National
Theatre from November 13th-15th, and the director believes it has already made a difference.
“I am sure we built a bridge between you [in Belgrade] who saw the play and liked it, and someone in Pristina who
also saw it and liked it,” Manojlović, who is also a well-known Serbian actor, told BIRN.
The play features Kosovo Albanian actors playing Romeo and the Mon-tagues and Serbian actors playing Ju-liet and the Capulets.
It is also performed in both Serbian and Albanian, with brief parts in Eng-lish, but there is no translation.
This is to show that the actors and members of both communities “can understand each other very well” de-spite the language barrier, Manojlović explained.
A joint production by Belgrade-based Radionica Integracije and Pris-tina’s Qendra Multimedia, it premiered at the Serbian and Kosovo national theatres in April and May respectively.
It was also important that well-known actors from both communities worked together, Manojlović argued.
“I can’t remember the last time the Albanian language was heard on the stage of the bigger theatres in Belgrade,” he observed.
Sixteen years after the war, relations between the two countries remain troubled with Belgrade refusing to ac-cept Pristina’s independence, declared in 2008.
But there have been several attempts to restore cultural links between Koso-vo and Serbia.
One of them is the annual ‘Miredita, Dobar Dan’ (meaning ‘good day’ in Al-banian and Serbian) which brings Ko-sovo Albanian films, exhibitions and concerts to Belgrade.
However, Manojlović admitted he
was a bit anxious about how the pre-miere would go in both Belgrade and Pristina.
He said he feared that right-wing groups could attempt to stage disrup-tions, but in the end it all went well.
The only minor incident happened in front of the Pristina theatre, where someone put up a banner saying that Serbian actors were not welcome there, but it was removed shortly afterwards.
“There are people who constantly make bridges, they really do. Then some moron comes and a war erupts and they destroy everything,” Manojlović said.
But the play did manage to bring the divided communities together, even if briefly, he insisted.
“My opinion is that for that one hour and 52 minutes, which is how long it lasts until the applause, it definitely erases the borders. What is happening after the play, I don’t know,” he said.
In the coming months, Manojlović’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ will also play in the-atres in Pristina, Sarajevo, Tirana and Zagreb.
“It will also be [staged] in places in Kosovo where Serbs live but also in the places where there are no Serbs,” the di-rector added.
A documentary about the process of staging ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Serbian and Kosovo Albanian actors is also un-derway, which will be offered to televi-sion companies across the region.
“We will make it and offer it to every-one,” Manojlović said. “Whoever likes it will play it. Whoever doesn’t like it, doesn’t have to play it.”
Shakespeare reconnects Serbian
and Kosovar theatregoers
Opera, Ballet and Classical
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 6th
Tamara Hadži-Đorđević, piano, Guarnerius, Džordža Vašingtona 12, 8pmBelgrade Philharmonic Orchestra with Zsolt Hamar – conductor, Andreas Boyde – piano and Aleksandar Solunac - trumpet, Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 8pm
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 7th
Opera: Carmen, The National Theatre, Francuska 1, 7pmKrzystof Szumanski and Bojana Dimković, AKUD Lola, Resavska 11, 9pm
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 8th
Taurunum Ensemble, Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 11am
MONDAY NOVEMBER 9th
Nicolai Demidenko, piano, Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 8pmAleksandra Radenković and Milica Tanasković, piano, Belgrade Cultural Centre, Trg Republike 5, 8pm
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 12th
Ballet: Who’s That Singing Over There? The National Theatre, Francuska 1, 6pmNikola Aleksić – violin, Nemanja Marjanović – viola, Tea Dimitrijević – harpsichord, Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 6pm
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 13th
Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra with Daniel Raiskin – conductor and Dušica Bijelić - soprano, Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 8pm
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 17th
Opera: Lucia de Lamermoor, The National Theatre, Francuska 1, 7pm
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 18th
Sandra Jakopović – piano, Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 6pmAnton Eberl Chamber Music, Belgrade Cultural Centre, Trg Republike 5, 8pm
Exhibitions and Events
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 6th
Exhibition: Milica Vučković, Parobrod, Kapetan Mišina 6, 7pmExhibition: Marko Salapura, Kolektiv Gallery, Karađorđeva 53, 8pm
Baby Artish – concert for babies, Belgrade Cultural Centre, Trg Republike 5, 10amExhibition: Biljana Cincarević, O3one Gallery, Uzun Mirkova 10, 12pm
MONDAY NOVEMBER 9th
Exhibition: Kramberger and the Krapina Neanderthal, Gallery of the Museum of Nature Science, Kalemegdan Park, 1pmExhibition: Sakari Viika, Grad Cultural Centre, Braće Krsmanović 4, 8pm
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 11th
Film: Lady Grey (Fra/Bel/RSA, 2015), Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 8:30pm
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 12th
Exhibition: Jelena Vitorović, Gallery 73, Požeška 83, 7pm
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 13th
Film: Blue Room (Fra, 2014), Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment, Studentski Trg 5, 6:30pm
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 14th
Exhibition: The Border is Closed, Museum of African Art, Andre Nikolića 14, 1pm
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 15th
Best Beard Competition and Beard Event, Mikser House, Karađorđeva 46, 12pmNorwegian Film Cycle: Victoria, Grad Cultural Centre, Braće Krsmanović 4, 7pm
Photo: Anna Squires, FacebookThe café’s kitchen uses solely organic ingredients, delivered fresh from the farm to the table.
ONCE KOVAČ, ALWAYS KOVAČONCE ”KAFANA”, ALWAYS ”KAFANA”
This organic café, using locally sourced ingredients, is a feast for the eyes as well for the stomach.
Anna SQUIRES
Gnezdo Organic is prob-ably the only restaurant in Belgrade whose Wi-Fi password, translated from Serbian, means “rolled zucchini”.
It only follows suit that the café’s kitchen uses solely organic ingredients, delivered fresh from the farm to the table. Head chef Biljana Matić chooses provisioners based on their proximity to the café – farms are typically located within a hundred kilo-metres of Belgrade – and on their commit-ment to a responsible, chemical-free har-vest.
Even before the first bite, the café is a feast for the eyes, for Gnezdo’s owners in-tended the Karađorđeva Street café to feel like the “nest” it is named after.
Visitors follow electric-blue bird graf-fiti up a spiralling tower before they reach the nest itself: a warm, sun-washed white space with a high thatched-wood ceiling. Solid wooden tables and benches add a rustic coziness to the airy restaurant. Eagle-eyed patrons will spot birdcages and tiny wicker nests perched around the room. And then comes the meal.
There is nothing inherently different about a Serbian café that sources local produce. The country’s GMO ban and vi-brant agriculture ensure an abundance of organic vegetables. Yet as one Belgrader, Marija Pajković, admits: “Serbian vegeta-ble culture isn’t very creative.” Enter Gnez-do, whose genius lies in punctuating rich Slavic dishes with freshness and verve.
Case in point: the café’s updated risotto. The risotto traditionally served in Serbian restaurants is outrageously oozy, cooked in butter and wine. Gnezdo’s fresh twist on the dish is an earthy risotto folded with seasonal vegetables, like Indian-summer beets and crisp carrots.
Chef Matić’s autumn take on the dish slips in sweet winter pumpkin. The re-sult? Light fare that packs a punch. The pumpkin imbues the dish with huge, ro-bust flavour and a glorious sunset-orange hue. And it is topped, of course, with Gn-ezdo’s famed rolled and grilled zucchini, wrapped around slabs of goat cheese. When the cheese melts into chewy rice kernels, the risotto becomes pure, classic decadence with modern mannerisms.
Gnezdo’s vegan vibe leaves room for the carnivore. While the café prides it-self on meat- and dairy-free options, the menu isn’t short on organic, grass-fed beef. Matić cooks a winter goulash as homey as Grandma’s, but elevates the beefy shep-herd’s stew with shredded cilantro, stewed prunes, and buttered spinach and walnuts to the side.
Athena Bender’s eyes light up as she chows down on a vegetarian shish kebab – another Serbian staple – made with cara-melized tofu and zucchini and nested on a bed of millet, cinnamon, and mint. She follows the dish with dark chocolate truf-fles roosting on juicy orange slices and feather-dusted with downy white choco-late shavings.
“In a perfect world there’s one of these places on every corner,” the American
study abroad student says, and gives a thumbs-up to Gnezdo’s best recipe: taking well-known Slavic dishes and adding a dash of modernity, a hint of tradition, and a heaping spoonful of mindful consump-tion.
Gnezdo OrganicAddress: Male stepenice 1a
Contact: +381 60 740 7408Working hours: 12pm-12am every day
except Mondays
Anna Squires is student of the SIT Study Abroad Program Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo:
Peace and Conflict Studies in the Balkans. This story was written as an assignment for
Program's Journalism Track.
SOFAKarađorđeva 2-4
Sofa is the latest addition to the stretch of trendy restau-rants and bars on the Beton Hala riverside dining strip. With an Italian chef, Sofa focuses on Mediterranean-inspired international cui-sine. Alongside a number of homemade salads, pasta and fish dishes you’ll find ‘Sweet Sofa’ desserts as well. When it comes to wine, here you will find some 30 labels with domestic and foreign wines equally represented.
amBarKarađorđeva 2-4
amBar is also on the Beton Hala strip in the Port of Belgrade, offering a modern interpretation of Serbian and Balkan cuisine. The accent is on meat dishes, as expected, but vegetarian and seafood dishes are present and interesting as well. In terms of wine, there are around 70 labels covering a wide range of grape varieties. Here you can enjoy cocktails and more than 40 local rakijas. Still, one drawback could be that there is not a single local house wine as one might expect for this kind of restaurant promoting local cuisine.
BerlinerBraće Krsmanović 6-8
This pub is located in the famed Savamala district, al-most directly under Branko’s Bridge. Opened last year, it began a wave of beer and German-style pubs in the capital. It actually is more a pub than a restaurant, but if you wish to try German-style sausages, this is just the place for you. Apart from sausages, you can also enjoy chicken wings but keep in mind that Bavarian rolls and pretzels are also served here. As a des-sert, you might try handmade plum noodles. Last but not least, Berliner offers lots of beer varieties, so you should definitely pay it a visit if you are in the neighbourhood!
Tranzit BarBraće Krsmanović 8
As it is called by its patrons, this place truly is a ‘late night restaurant’ – it is open every day, except Mondays, from the late afternoon. On the menu you will find a broad combination of French, Greek and Italian cuisine specialties. Here you can also sample a so-called ‘open kitchen,’ meaning you can actually watch chefs prepare dishes and have a sneak peek into Tranzit’s food menu. When it comes to drinks, you can have whatever you like but cocktails – prepared by five barmen - are said to be a must. This is a nice place if you feel like partying after dinner.
Bestdining spots in the areaWhile you’re downtown near Karađorđeva Street, you might well want to try these other restaurants, most of which are located in the Savamala district.
DINING OUT
12 13BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
Music Gallery, 6pmNikola Aleksić, violinNemanja Marjanović, violaTea Dimitrijević, harpsichordCycle: Encounter with an ArtistProgramme: Handel, BachProduction: Music Centre Admission free
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14th
Concert Hall, 8pm35th Jubilee of the Drugstore of Classical MusicSymphony Orchestra & RTS ChoirSoloists: Marija Čuposki, soprano Dragana Popović, mezzo-soprano Biljana Kovač, alt Dejan Vrbančić, tenor Atila Mokuš, bassConductor: Bojan SuđićProgramme: Handel, BachLeaders: Dejan Djurović and Ivana LjubinkovićProduction: RTS Music Centre, Kolarac Endowment
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6th
Concert Hall, 8pmBelgrade Philharmonic OrchestraCycle: For Adventurers Conductor: Zsolt Hamar Soloists: Andreas Boyde, piano and Aleksandar Solunac, trumpetProgramme: Е. Rautavaara: Cantus Arcticus D. Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 1 I. Stravinsky: FirebirdProduction: Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7th
Concert Hall, 8pmSoloist: Karolina Gočeva
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8th
Concert Hall, 11amTaurunim EnsembleProgramme: Tchaikovsky, ShostakovichProduction: Music CentreAdmission free
The 31st Belgrade Jazz Festival opened on October 28th at Dom Omladine, attracting several hundred jazz lov-
ers keen to see their favourite local and international bands perform. Among others, contrabass player Miloš Čolović, who at 17 years old is the event’s youngest performer, addressed the opening-night audi-ence. Special guests included Davide Scalmani, director of the Italian Insti-tute of Culture in Belgrade.
The Belgrade Philharmonic String Quartet performed the United Arab Emirates capital, Abu Dhabi, and Qasr Al Sarab
Desert resort in the country’s south on October 28th and 19th respectively. Musi-cians Jelena Dragnić, Vladan Lončar, Boris Brezovac and Aleksandar Latković played Beethoven and Ravel. Clarinettist Ognjen Popović was a special guest at the concerts.
The exhibition “Film is Great,“ which show-cases acclaimed work of Serbian film set photog-
rapher Aleksanar Letić, arrived at Belgrade’s Parobrod Cultural Centre on November 2nd. During his two-decade film career, Letić worked with an array of domestic and international stars, including Salma Hayek and Pierce Brosnan. Many famed Serbian actors – such as Nikola Kojo - attended the opening night.
Davide ScalmaniMiloš Čolović
Actor Nikola Kojo. Photo: Facebook Photo of Salma Hayek. Photo: Facebook
Photo: FacebookPhoto: Facebook
String quartet with Ognjen Popović. Photo: Courtesy of Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority Photo: Courtesy of Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority
14 15BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
GOING OUT SPORT
Dutch blues rockers back in Belgrade
After a successful show in Belgrade last year, blues rock band My Baby, hailing from The Netherlands, will be performing once again, this time in Dom Omladine. The show is scheduled for November 25th and tickets cost five euros at the door or three euros if you book in advance via the Dom Om-ladine box office.
Left Lane Cruiser promoting new album
Seven years after playing Belgrade for the first time, American blues/punk trio Left Lane Cruiser are back promoting their seventh album Dirty Spliff Blues. If you like loud, energetic and dirty blues rock with an edge, their show is a must-see. They play at KC Grad on November 10th. Tickets cost €12 at the door.
Whitesnake back in town
Hard rock heroes Whitesnake have become regulars in Belgrade, so it's no surprise they are back again, promoting their latest music. This year's tour will be a bit different, with lead singer David Coverdale also paying tribute to his work with seminal British rockers Deep Purple. And while there will be a Deep Purple theme to the show, 'Snake fans can expect to hear all of the bands classic material as well. They play at the Kombank Arena on November 22nd, tickets costs €32 for the fan pit and between €22 and €25 for seats located farther from the stage. Book now if you want fan pit tickets though as they are limited to 1,000.
US alternative rock stars’ Belgrade debut
Thirty years after releasing their critically-acclaimed first album Valley of Rain, Arizona-based alternative rock legends Giant Sand will be performing in Belgrade for the first time. They will take to the stage at Dom Omladine's Americana hall on November 29th. Tick-ets cost ten euros at the door but can be bought in advance for seven euros.
Florida sludge at Božidarac
One of the most interesting and original bands to come out of the American stoner/sludge metal scene in recent memory, Torche will be promoting their latest album Restarter on November 27th. It will be their first time in Serbia. Known for combining slow and crush-ing sludge metal with melodic vocals and pop-influenced hooks, the band is considered to be one of the brightest and most unique talents in a scene rid-dled with copycat bands. The show is on November 27th at the Božidarac cul-tural centre in Belgrade and tickets cost €12.
Sava Centre hosts Beijing Olympics drum troupe
Manao is a group of 14 Chinese drummers and anyone who watched the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olym-pics will probably remember them well. Their incredible performances include more than stellar drum work and hot rhythms. Manao's Return of the Flying Dragon perfor-
mance is extraordinary both sonically and visually, with an out-of-this-world light show and acrobatics complementing the music.
The show features eight different traditional Chinese percussive instruments and a variety of ancient string instruments that work brilliantly with the beats. The show will take place on November 15th at the Sava Centre. Tickets for the event cost between €21 and €32 depending on seating.
Photo: Facebook Another cool thing about Idiott is that it seems to be open all of the time.
Relaxed, a mixed clientele and well-priced drinks - Idiott has the key ingredients needed to survive Belgrade’s competitive nightlife scene.
David GALIĆ
The location of Club Idiott isn't exactly perfect, but it's close enough to several key Belgrade clubbing ar-eas to be on most clubbers’
radar. It’s on Dalmatinska Street, very close to Belgrade’s Botanical Gardens. In the summertime, you can enjoy its very pretty outdoor area, from which the Botanical Gardens are actually vis-ible, but it’s pretty much your standard basement club for most of the year.
Nothing really stands out about Idi-ott, especially when you compare it to other medium-sized Belgrade bars located underground. But one huge advantage Idiott has over most simi-lar clubs is that its opening hours are pretty flexible. Since the area isn't very residential, the club doesn't have a mid-night curfew like many others. Because of this, you will find people hanging out in Idiott at all times of the night, espe-cially during the weekends.
Another cool thing about Idiott is that it seems to be open all of the time. Over the summer, it's open all day and the
courtyard of the club is a fantastic place to have an iced coffee in the shade.
But the fact that no one is telling you to order your last round at midnight is why the club remains popular during the winter, when people are looking for a place to continue hanging out, but can't do so outside because of the cold.
It's also a place that has a pretty unde-finable clientele. There really is no specif-ic type of person at Idiott. You'll see peo-ple dressed to the nines, probably hitting the bar before heading over to a nearby club, sitting right next to guys who live in the neighbourhood and are hanging out in sweatpants, having a relaxed beer.
Another cool thing about the space itself is that it's a bit more interesting than most other basement bars. It is a bit like a labyrinth. There are three larger rooms with a few smaller ones connecting them, and if you're walking around it seems as if you are constantly entering new rooms but always ending up in the same one.
The main room is where the bar is (obviously), along with a small DJ area. Sometimes there will be bands play-ing, but this happens rarely as live mu-
sic isn't really practical in such a small space. The entire club is dimly lit and doesn't at first seem all that interesting, but if you stop and take a look, you'll see plenty of cool posters and design details all over the walls that have accumulat-ed over time and give the club its charm.
Just looking at all of the pop culture relics that have been collected around the club over the years gives you a sense of its history.
As to the sounds, don't come here if you want to hear house music or Ser-bian pop, Idiott doesn't cater to those
tastes. You'll hear all types of rock, punk and pop from several decades. Of course, the music is almost always for-eign and very eclectic.
And if the main ingredient for a Bel-grade club to be successful is flexible opening hours, the second most impor-tant is probably drinks pricing. And Idiott delivers in that regard as well. Beer and liquor prices are very down to earth, and the rakija is usually from a homemade source and better than you'll find at most other bars in the area that usually only sell commercial spirits.
So, on closer inspection, it really is no mystery as to how Idiott has managed to prosper for well over five years in Bel-grade's cut-throat nightlife scene - and five years really is an eternity for clubs of this kind. The club is very down to earth, inviting for all types of people, open all the time and the drink prices are reasonable. And that's a perfectly good formula for success.
Club IdiottAddress: Dalmatinska 13
Club Idiott’s recipe for success
CITY GUIDETourist Organisation of Belgrade
Knez Mihailova 5, +381 (11) 2635 622Central Train Station, +381 (11) 3612 732Nikola Tesla Airport, +381 (11) 2097 828
TOP SIGHTSEEING LOCATIONSPUBLIC TRANSPORT MAPGUIDED TOURS THROUGH BELGRADE
WIDE SELECTION OF CLUBS, HOTELS, RESTAURANTS, SHOPS AND ENTERTAINMENT VALUE
Gramophonedzie assembles live band
Serbian super-producer Gram-ophonedzie has decided to take his music to a new level by incorporating a full live band to bring his music to
life. One of the most successful elec-tronic producers in the country, Marko Milićević, aka Gramophonedzie, has put together a live band of seven mem-bers, including vocals, drums, guitar, keyboards, saxophone and percussion, to add a new dimension to his sound.
The first live show will take place at the Bitefartcafe on November 12th. The performance will showcase new music that will be featured on his forthcoming Live Experience album, which is currently being put together in the studio. Tickets for the concert cost €3 at the door.
Slobodan GEORGIEV
Milorad Vučelić had almost been forgotten by the Serbian public, until he was re-cently appointed
president of the Partizan Yugoslav Sport Club – the country’s biggest multi-sports association.
It seems that some people are des-tined to hold senior public roles in this country, as some might argue the ap-pointment of Vučelić, the 67-year-old former lawyer, publisher and party chairman under Milošević, shows.
Back in the 1980s, Vučelić was appar-ently part of a progressive youth move-ment in the socialist-era former Yugo-slavia. As a member of the Communist Party, he was a leader at Belgrade’s Stu-dent Cultural Centre where the local punk, new wave and pop culture scene was born.
He managed the centre – the hub of the most important developments on the Yugoslav arts scene – for some time after the death of former Yugoslav lead-er Josip Tito in 1980.
Almost 40 years later, however, his progressive background is still widely interpreted as nothing but a cover. Many believe he was sent to monitor and control progressive youths by the Yugoslav secret service, something that was not unusual in the former Yu-goslavia.
His time with the student centre paved the way for his appointment as editor of an influential literary criticism magazine, where he began to publish articles that articulated a new political direction in Serbia that was personified by the late former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević.
And so, Vučelić played a not insignifi-cant role in priming Serbia’s intelligent-
sia for the nationalist policies and wars that would mark the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. Put bluntly, Vučelić helped secure support among the ma-jority of intellectuals for Milošević’s policies that would lead to war.
During the 1990s, the Milošević regime duly rewarded Vučelić by ap-pointing him CEO of Serbia’s national broadcaster RTS. As all journalists working at the time remember, all re-porters who wanted to work to pro-fessional standards were sacked and Vučelić was the only person permitted to interview Milošević.
Those interviews are still remem-bered as failing to meet even the most rudimentary standards of journalism and are used to illustrate the very worst of news interviewing. “It is worse that Vučelić’s interviews with Milošević,” you will hear people say.
At this time, his reputation worsened considerable and he was widely regard-ed as a master manipulator, the living embodiment of bad journalism and the man Milošević trusted most.
And yet, he has survived.
MILOŠEVIĆ VOLTE-FACE
After the fall of Milošević, Vučelić took every opportunity he could to speak to Belgrade media and inform journalists that he was, in fact, a dissi-dent of the Milošević regime.
He insisted he had been the first to speak out against Milošević, while ad-miring Zoran Đinđić, leader of the Demo-cratic Opposition of Serbia reform alli-ance that mobilised millions of people to topple Milošević in October 2000, and pledging his support for democracy in Serbia. Đinđić was assassinated in 2003.
During the 1990s, Vučelić amassed a personal fortune by combining run-ning his own business with public en-gagements as a politician in the Social-
ist Party. While making a lot of money Vučelić continued to present himself as a “real leftist”, and appeared to con-sciously pose as a Che Guevara type, complete with cigar.
After the fall of Milošević, it was wide-ly expected that close associates of the former Serbian leader would either be prosecuted in connection to alleged war crimes or subject to lustration for the events of the 1990s. When it be-came clear Vučelić wouldn’t be subject to either, he decided to launch his politi-cal career anew, all the while advocat-ing for Milošević during his trial at The Hague Tribunal.
Vučelić was defeated within the So-cialist Party by the current party leader Ivica Dačić, and his political ambitions were put to rest once and for all. In-stead, he returned to what he described as his “profound love”: journalism.
Founding the weekly Pečat (The Seal), Vučelić’s written work continu-ously advocated for Serbia to be part of a Russia-Belorussia federation. He also used the magazine to rewrite the his-tory of Serbia since 2000 and the fall of the Milošević regime.
He accused Đinđić and his associates of being part of a criminal organisation that sought to overthrow Milošević in
order to rob the Serbian economy and bring down the state. In Vučelić’s world view as presented in Pečat, Milošević is the Serbian hero and martyr and Đinđić the traitor/foreign spy sent to de-stroy Serbia.
And so, just as in the 1980s, Vučelić was preparing the ideological ground for another new government, elected in 2012, represented by the Serbian Pro-gressive party and led by Prime Minis-ter Aleksandar Vučić.
Perhaps that’s why Serbs old enough to have seen it first time round are not surprised that Vučelić is once again ac-tive in Serbian public life, close to gov-ernment and poised to leap into the fire again, albeit after having dropped the ‘Che’ cigars.
To be chief of the Partizan football and sports club is a perfect niche for someone looking for a few years of power, and a place in the public spot-light, before a secure retirement.
He seems undaunted that the public and Partizan fans are unlikely to forget his past. Perhaps proximity to power in itself is enough for some.
Milorad Vučelić, one-time supporter of Slobodan Milošević, returns to public life as president of Serbia’s Partizan Yugoslav Sports Club.
The return of ‘Milošević’s spin-doctor’
Milorad Vučelić. Photo: Branislav Božić
BIRN contacted the JSD Partizan for a comment con-cerning the choice of Vučelič as the head of the sports club and Zoran Stojanović replied on November 4th:
“I think it is not at all neces-sary to ask this kind of question because everything is pretty clear here. It's clear who brought him to Partisan Football Club. It's clear what his task is. It is clear why [basketball coach] Duško Vujošević was sacked as the president of JSD Partizan as well. Anyway, if it is still unclear to you, contact [email protected].”
BIRN sent an enquiry to this email address, but received no answer by the time of publication.
BIRN contacted MiloradVučelić, but didn't receive the answer.
16 BELGRADE INSIGHT, Friday, November 06 - Thursday, November 19, 2015
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