An untold (secret) story

Almost 24 years ago, I was invited by a TV station from Banja Luka to be a guest on the TV show “Yugoslavia today”. I replied that I won’t go to Banjaluka so I was offered to join in from a studio in Bijeljina. I accepted for sentimental reasons: my son had served in the army there and every week for six months I had travelled there with my friends whose son had also been stationed in Bijeljina. I was told that a white car would come to pick me up.

When I arrived, before entering the studio, I found myself in a room with a man who told me that he and his wife were once my students, but never finished their studies. Next time I come, he said, he’d take me to dinner. The show lasted for an hour and when I left I saw the same man who was actually waiting for me; it seemed that that was the reason he came. He asked me if I knew Elizabeth Wren, who was then the UN special envoy for human rights in the former Yugoslavia. I told him that I had only met her twice at some gatherings or in embassies, nothing more. Then he told me how she had threatened him: beware, Mauser, we know that you used to rip the teeth out of Muslims’ mouths. This horrified me. He said that during the war he led the Panthers paramilitary organization (I think that was the name). There were a lot of similar organizations, I had not heard of this one before. He thought that if I knew Elizabeth Wren, I could help him. I understood why he was waiting for me.

Believing that he would somehow “oblige” me to mention his name in the right place at the right moment (something that was, of course, completely out of the question), he began telling me a grand tale. He told me that after the three-month demonstrations in mid-February 1997 and the elections of the same year, which Đinđić, Koštunica and I boycotted (more on that on another occasion), Milošević’s state security was led by Jovica Stanišić, until 1998. According to Mauser (Ljubiša), Stanišić was then replaced by Mira Marković with her “family policeman” Radomir Marković, and that after that she ran the service through him. They called him the “family policeman” because for several years he was in charge of their son Marko, whom he taught to shoot and, I suppose, other similar skills, or rather vices.

I went back in time in my head and remembered that indeed everything changed in 1998. SPO formed an alliance with SPS and removed Đinđić as Belgrade mayor (he was appointed after Milošević admitted election theft). Đinđić was not particularly upset about that, he complained that he was bored because there was no real work there, and he liked to work. The architect Spasoje Krunić from SPO took the position. When Zoran was dismissed, an opposite situation arose: all opposition parties organized a protest against Vuk Drašković and SPO. We gave speeches and headed towards Terazije. There, the police, armed to the teeth, awaited us, Đinđić tried to break through the cordon, but his bodyguards took him out, and it was impossible to move forward. Then the police chased the protesters, I don’t remember ever running so much in my life, the next day I couldn’t stand on my feet. When I finally reached the Civic Alliance, our premises were packed with people hiding wherever they could from the crazed police. All the buildings in the city center were full of people. And that was the end. If only that was all. Everything changed. A law on higher education was passed that required all university teachers to sign a declaration of loyalty to the authorities, they dismissed the professors of the Faculty of Law and replaced them with Professor Šešelj. All this was done by the SPS and SRS coalition government, in which Vučić was the Minister of Information, and Šešelj was a member of the Federal Assembly.

I will stop here and go back to Bijeljina 24 years ago, where Mauser was telling me about the dismissal of Stanišić and the arrival of Rade Marković and his boss Mira Marković at the head of state security. He told me that she, through Rade Marković, ordered the murder of Slavko Ćuruvija in April 1999, and that it was carried out by state security officers and Marković himself, all acquitted by the Court of Appeals 20 years later. The same scenario, with different executors (the Special Operations Unit) took place on October 3, 1999 with the assassination of SPO members on the Ibar highway. Although dazed and a little scared, I remembered that Pavle Bulatović, then Minister of Defense in the federal government, had also been killed, so I asked who killed him. Mauser told me it was not done by her and her team; to his knowledge Bulatović had traded arms with the Russians who probably killed him for unpaid debts.

I went outside thinking: wow, I’m now the only one who knows who killed whom! The driver was waiting for me and told me: You don’t even know who you were talking to, Ljubiša Mauser is very high up in state security. After a month, I read in the newspaper that he was, himself, killed. Maybe he knew someone was coming for him, so he told me exactly who killed whom in the big season of unsolved murders.

I arrived home and never told anyone about any of this. I am telling it all publicly now, while we still don’t know who killed Slavko Ćuruvija. Well, now we know: Ljubiša Mauser told me before he himself was killed.

And why was it hidden? Because despite everything, such a long and terrible shadow was never allowed to be cast on Slobodan Milošević and Mira Marković. We knew about the wars and who led them; Milan Lukić, who was known to have killed 19 Muslims taken off the train in Štrpci, was hiding in Serbia, and even this we only found out at the trial in The Hague.

However, we were not allowed to know about the crimes of the couple in power, particularly Mira Marković whom we intuitively called Lady Macbeth. The family of Slavko Ćuruvija correctly commented on the shameful release of the four suspects from state security, stating that we never left the nineties. And indeed we haven’t, because the same people are still in power.

Translated by Marijana Simić

Peščanik.net, 09.02.2024.