New York Times: Crime-related Vucinac, Controls Everything in Serbia

American newspaper article It begins with a description of the media conference that Vuciq had held in 2021 and where he had unveiled the arrest of a crime gang in Serbia, which in fact turned out that this gang was linked to President Vuciq and his son Danilo Vucic and was organized precisely for the needs and by the order of the Serbian president.

It's about the head of the gang who was a cocaine smuggler named Veljko Belivuk, already a prominent figure in Belgrade. He had previously been charged with murder and a host of other serious crimes, but he never spent much time in prison.

Following the gang leader's arrest, Bellivuk described some of the back work the gang claimed to have done for the government, such as fearing political rivals and stopping fans from singing against Vuciqi in football matches, a valuable service in a country where the stadium could or disrupt a president. Belivuk warned that if Vucic “continues his procedures against me”, he would have much more to say, said further in research.

These charges of gang leader, according to the NYT, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic angrily rejected them.

According to the prestigious newspaper Belivuk, the case has opened a window towards a possible grim future in which Vucic undermines the European project from within, building a state where democracy is a facade and criminal gangs are used to spread fears. According to the same tactic newspaper, it was used by people who brought the Balkans into a catastrophic war three decades ago.

The leader of the gang before the court had spoken of a meeting he claimed had had with Vuciqi at a private house in Belgrade, giving the street address and the house number and the owner's name. They only met there once, he added, “because, as the chief said, if someone saw us or filmed us, it wouldn't be good for him”.

“Vucciq now exercises almost total control over almost every aspect of public life. From Parliament, courts, police and business. In fact, the arrest of Bellivuk and his gang may be one of the few key decisions in recent years that Vucic did not control”, said further in the New York Times research.

In research by the American newspaper, Vuciq was an enthusiastic supporter of SESH's party, and he soon became the youngest member of Serbia's Parliament. In 1995, a few days after the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims around Srebrenica, Vucic gave a speech in which he declared: “If you bomb us, if you kill a Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims”. In the decades since then, Vucic has never fully apologized for crimes committed in the name of Serbia or for his rhetoric. He has treated as heroes some convicted war criminals in their release from prisons abroad.

NYT further portrays President Vuciq as the person who led a group of protesters in support of Ratko Mladic, the military commander sometimes called the Balkan Kasap. A year later, when wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested, Vucic returned to the street, being violated by police.

The American newspaper's research also speaks of the assessment of Freedom House in 2019, which brought Serbia down in the annual assessment of democracies from free to in part free, citing the politicisation of judiciary and other institutions and elections filled with harassment and bribery. However, Serbia's application for EU membership. It is quietly turned around, as if the bureaucratics in Brussels have not noticed that Vucic is moving in the wrong direction, said further in research.

According to this research, an important tool of power for Vuciqi is the media. He has used the state-owned telecommunications company to buy local television stations, and his allies run a three-count of media organisations that shamelessly follow the Progressive Party line and give abundant time to broadcast Vuciqi herself. These include a television network called Pink.

In the two years since the arrest of the Beilvuk gang, Vucic has repeatedly said the case marked a decisive break with the past. “We will clear state institutions from all their collaborators”, he said at the first press conference after the arrests. He later told a group of journalists: “This is important to us but also to ordinary citizens. The owners of restaurants and bars won't have to worry if someone comes and attacks them and then they're afraid to report it to the police because they don't know if anyone in the police is well connected to these killers.

The U.S. newspaper also speaks of the help that American scholar and analyst named Daniel Cerwer helped organize Vuciki's first public appearance in Washington, D.C. Serwer worked in the Balkans in the 1990s and he knew everything about Vuciqi's nationalist roots. But he was disappointed with the data of other Serbian political leaders.

“Serwer found Vucic intelligent and serious. There were some expectations, he told me, that Vucic could be a figure of “Nixon in China”, capable of bringing his party's conservative base into fuller reconciliation with Serbia's neighbours.

Serwer told me his attitude towards Vuciqi has changed radically. “Vucciq is now very serious about the Serbian world,” he said. Those words, often called by Serbian nationalists, convey the idea that Serbia has the right to dominate lands where ethnic Serbs live, including some neighbouring countries. “He had the opportunity to move to a pro-EU. direction, and he chose not to.