Sandulovic reports about the “The Guardian”, BIA tortures against him: I was forced to kiss pictures of dead agents in Kosovo

The arrest of pro-Western politician Nikola Sandulovic, who dared to apologise for crimes in Kosovo, speaks of tensions that are still tense in the Balkans.

Sandulovic relates the attack that, he says, left him paralyzed on the right side and unable to walk.

It was January 3rd 15:20 when three vehicles carrying Serbia's BIA secret service agents stopped outside his home in the Belgrade Senjak area. With a black van, masked persons as soon as they got out of the car showed Sandulovic why they had come: the former entrepreneur and opposition politician had dared to apologise for crimes committed by Serbs when the interethnic conflict shook Kosovo in 1998/99 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

It was unimaginable. One day after I posted the video on the social network, you'll excuse me as I placed flowers at the tomb of a child killed in Prekaz”.

Then I was hit so hard that I lost my senses. When I was put in the van, I was hit in the head, punched in the face, and kicked. In the lobby of BIA headquarters, they took my shirt off and forced me to kneel and kiss pictures on the wall of agents who had died in Kosovo. They kept asking who was behind my decision to visit the burial site, who was bribing me to do such things. ”

Sandulovic, confesss The Guardian that was badly tortured about six hours.

And they put me on my knees and they pulled my arms back, and they called on me while they were shouting, ” said 60-year-old, showing an arm still bruised.

I finally said: “I won't answer any more questions. Kill me or call a doctor”

I admitted that evening to a military hospital, 24 hours would pass before being allowed to return home.

The next 12 days, except one night at a state clinic, would be passed to the medical arm of Belgrade's central prison, banned by a prosecutor on suspicion of “inciting racial, national and religious hatred”.

For Aleksandar Vulin, former head of the Serbian BIA, who admitted he had ordered the arrest, Sandulovic's actions in favour of Kosovo deserved a much greater sentence.

BIA's agents, he told the Novosti newspaper, had indeed taken it, but had not used any physical force tactics that other secret services would undoubtedly have used.

If Sandulovic had laid a wreath on Himmler's grave, Mossad would have killed... I apologize to Serbia for not doing more.” A close ally of Aleksandar Vuciq, Serbia's right-wing populist president, the pro-rus vulin, resigned in November after being sanctioned by the US for misuse of public office and involvement in illegal arms smuggling.

With rhetoric at such levels, the vulin is the only official to have spoken publicly about the incident, observers say it is an indication of the mood in general, one that is increasingly compared to the Serbs with the climate that prevailed under Slobodan Milosevic, the former strong man still called the Balkan butcher.

The last time Sandulovic competed in the national elections was in 2016, when his small Republican Serb party won less than 1% of the vote.

“Censura is crazy. Vuchy controls everything. Steal votes and it is impossible to hear”, Sandulovic said.

Western envoys who sought the release of Sandulovici are among those who have also made the trip to the villa to hold talks near the bed with him.

They agreed that they should search deep into their archives to find out who he was...

But amid escalating regional tensions, exacerbated by the open Russian intervention across the Balkan peninsula, the effort to present the politician as a fifth columnist has exposed fears over Serbia's democratic fall at a time when the EU candidate state has been plagued by protests on charges that Vuciq manipulated Serbia's recent elections.

In a speech Friday, Vucic accused Kosovo Albanian leaders of aiming to ethnically clean “the territory of the Serb minority following the decision to prevent the use of the Serbian dinar and to implement the euro as the only currency of the previous province.

Vuciq pledged he would seek an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, saying Serbs in Kosovo “are afraid, they are waiting in line” for fear they could not receive pensions and salaries in dinars.

Throughout Belgrade, placed on communist-era bridges and buildings, the inscriptions urge viewers never to forget “Kosovo is Serbia”.

In a polarized society, the former province is the plague that has continued to deteriorate. Its fate was sealed when 1999 NATO intervened with a 78-day air campaign to end ethnic cleansing that had caused the removal of more than 300,000 Kosovars.

For opposition leaders, Kosovo is also the reason the West is mild towards Vuciqi, a politician whose provocative views are turbulent because he is perceived to be able to ensure regional stability.

No politician in this country will ever accept Kosovo's independence,” noted Dragan Dilias, a former Belgrade mayor who heads the Freedom and Justice Party, part of Serbia's coalition Against Violence that has organised street protests condemning Vuciqi's false election victory, broadcaster Telegrafi.

But Vuciq uses it. Every day he isolates Serbia slightly more from its allies. Geographically, culturally, historically we belong to Europe. We don't want to be part of a Russian or Chinese world, which he wants. It makes us very sad that we are the only opposition to the EU wherever we don't have Western support. I tell you, the atmosphere here is just as bad, if not worse than it was in Milosevic's time. ”

Last week, Cedomir Stojkovic, the prominent human rights lawyer representing Sandulovich, described him as one of the few figures in Serbia who would ever publicly support Kosovo independence.

He was attacked this way because he said things no one wants to hear,” he said.

“For me Nicolai is more a political activist and sometimes makes provocative statements, but under which law, in which place of this planet, setting flowers on the grave of a seven-year-old girl is illegal?”, Stojkov asks.

On Thursday, Michael Polack, a British lawyer, along with Stojkovqi, filed charges for Nikola Sandulovic at the Belgrade Justice Palace. This criminal complaint against “was filed against Sandulovici's <x0rs and illegal detention.

The “is extraordinary in a European country in 2024 that one can be kidnapped from their home by state agents and subject to this kind of treatment,” he said.

There should be no punishment for torture at any time. According to the European Convention on Human Rights, Serbia is obliged to investigate the allegations and seek responsibility from authors”.

Later, as he was about to leave the country, Polish was stopped at Belgrade Airport by police seeking to know why “was breaking into Serbian internal affairs”.

When he was finally allowed to board the plane, he was told that he would not be welcome back.