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Investigation: Montenegrin Police Claims Lift Lid on Political Abuse of the Force

16 05 2007  Two policemen have spoken openly of how the ruling party pressured them to solicit votes if they wanted to keep their jobs.

By Sead Sadikovic in Bijelo Polje

Two policemen from the northern town of Bijelo Polje, Suad Muratbasic and Vlatko Vlaovic, have told Balkan Insight that officials of the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, told them to lobby neighbours and friends to vote for the party in the last May referendum and September's parliamentary elections.

Several neighbours of the men have confirmed the claims, adding weight to opposition and NGO accusations that the government has routinely abused state agencies for years, especially the police.

Another 16 policemen who were laid off in February - ten of whom Balkan Insight interviewed - have also said they were forced to lobby among voters for the ruling party.

These men are not ready to go public with the story out of fears that it may affect their chances of getting valuable severance pay.

The two ex-policemen who have agreed to be named, Muratbasic and Vlaovic, worked for the police on the basis of contracts, renewed every couple of months, so they have less to lose.

Muratbasic lost his job on May 7, being blamed by the police forces for "pressurising voters", the task that Muratbasic insists he got from the ruling DPS. Additionally, he is blamed for talking to media against internal police rules.

Many NGO activists see this outcome as an attempt by the political establishment to silence the other policemen.

Some of them police insiders told Balkan Insight that their families are under political pressure.

Muratbasic broke the story to the media on February 22, claiming that for nine years he had been pressurised to "work" his neighbours for the benefit of the DPS if he wanted to gain permanent employment.

He went public after he was transferred from his hometown to Berane, 30 kilometres away, without notice, and after it was announced that he was among 1,500 surplus policemen about to be laid off.

After going public, he was suspended in February, and the police started a disciplinary procedure against him on account of his activities in "pressuring voters", and on May 7 he was fired. The police told him his contract had expired and his services were no longer required.

Muratbasic claimed that he was threatened with losing his job if he didn't do the ruling party's bidding on the eve of last September’s elections.

He said a DPS deputy, Mevludin Nuhodzic, gave him a list of 34 fellow citizens who - according to Nuhodzic - were against the DPS and needed to be induced to vote for the party.

Mevludin Nuhodzic has, meanwhile, denied handing any list of names to Muratbasic. "It's not my style to force my opinions onto others in such a way," he said.

Muratbasic insists he did as he was told, going from door to door and pleading with locals to vote for the DPS, so that he could keep his job. The people on the list were mostly cousins, friends and neighbours.

"I voted for the DPS so Muratbasic could keep his job," Ramiz Sabanovic, one of the men he visited, told Balkan Insight. "He asked me, and I agreed to help him."

"All the men on the list are neighbours or cousins. He is the only man in this area who works in a state agency and we all agreed to help him,” said Becir Music, another man from the list.

Muratbasic told Balkan Insight he now regretted his actions but felt he had had no choice, "If you decide to tell the truth in this country, you are bound to ruin yourself."

Ten days after making his initial confession, 17 other policemen from Bijelo Polje who had been fired on March 1 sent a message via the Podgorica weekly, Monitor. "Each one of us is a Muratbasic," they said, declining to give their names.

However, all bar one then ceased contacts with media ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister Zeljko Sturanovic, Interior Minister Jusuf Kalamperovic and police chief Veselin Veljovic, at which they hoped to win a severance payment worth 6,500 euro each. So far, the police have paid them just under half this amount.

One of the men, Vlatko Vlaovic, agreed to speak to Balkan Insight in spite of warnings from colleagues that this could affect their chances of a pay-off.

He said Veljovic had met him and about 20 colleagues from Bijelo Polje on May 17 last year, four days before the country's referendum on independence from Serbia.

"Don't worry about employment if we get a state of our own, " Veljovic told them, according to Vlaovic.

"Those were Veljovic's exact words," Vlaovic went on. "We believed him and have been put to shame. We were dedicated to the idea of an independent Montenegro, and now it seems as if we supported independence for our own interest, which is not true."

Veljovic denies the men's claims but has refused to debate in public with his former employees.

Vlaovic and his colleagues have now decided to go to court to claim what they believe they are entitled to.

"I would never accept to work in the police again as I have been used and abused," said Vlaovic.

One of the policeman who has declined to go public told Balkan Insight he spent almost ten years in the force and was in a difficult position, trying to find a good job in his mid-40s.

He said most of his colleagues were keeping silent not only because they hope to come to an agreement with the management on pay but because of political pressures.

"They are putting pressure on me and my family from all sides to stop me from telling the truth about how they forced us to 'work' the electorate before the elections and the referendum," he said.

"I am not allowed to speak out because my cousins in business have been threatened by the financial police, and I'm out of work and depend on these cousins for support."

Since Muratbasic went public with his claims, NGOs and opposition parties have urged Veljovic and Kalamperovic to put a stop to official pressure.

In the legal process against Muratbasic, another charge that has been made against him has been his public appearance. The police say this violates the police chief's decision that no officer may talk to the media without his approval.

Nikola Martinovic, a lawyer and a member of the Council for Civilian Control of the Police, says this violates the right to free speech.

"The police director can forbid anyone from talking to the media without his approval, but only if those statements are related to official matters," he said. "Like any other citizen, Muratbasic has the right to express his dissatisfaction with certain officials' attitude towards him, or make political assessments of events."

Aleksandar Zekovic, of the Council for Civilian Control of the Police, said it would be wrong to concentrate on the offence that Muratbasic had undoubtedly committed, when the real public interest lay in tackling the abuse of the police by the DPS.

"We demand that the interior ministry and police management... devote their full attention to Muratbasic's claims and the events which he has talked about," said Zekovic.

Montenegro's rights ombudsman, Sefko Crnovrsanin, has not commented on the case but has said his office was investigating it.

Crnovrsanin told Balkan Insight that because of the public's interest in the matter and the controversy surrounding the alleged violations of human rights and free speech, the rights office had asked the interior ministry to hand over the reports and documents on the basis of which the policeman was subjected to disciplinary action after his sacking.

In the meantime, the opposition parties have reacted sharply; all of them agree that they had made similar claims to Muratbasic's prior to his own public confession.

The Serbian People's Party said that the police chief himself was a vivid example of the politicisation of the force; a daily newspaper had published a photograph of him standing in DPS election headquarters in his native Mojkovac on the day of the last elections on September 10.

"Veljovic most certainly won't suspend himself for this," said the party spokesman, Dobrilo Dedeic.

Dejan Vucicevic, of the Serbian People's Party, said Muratbasic was being punished for having confessed to acts he had been forced to commit as a policeman.

"Obtaining votes through threats and blackmail is still going on," he said. "Muratbasic is only a confirmation of that."

The ruling coalition has issued no statements on the Muratbasic case. However, Dzavit Sabovic, a deputy from the Social Democrats, the junior partners of the DPS, told the Bijelo Polje paper Polje on March 1 that he considered the policeman's public appearance courageous.

"I was impressed by the civic and human courage shown by policeman Muratbasic when telling the truth; that a young man did not make anything up but told it as it is," said Sabovic.

Natasa Novovic, a former editor of state television, said she feared the public in Montenegro was not yet mature enough to react properly to cases of insiders spilling the beans.

"Instead of people expecting an investigation and wanting to find out the truth so that the culprits can be punished, the only thing that happens in Montenegro is something bad to the insider himself," Novovic told Balkan Insight.

Novovic says the State Prosecutor should have reacted at once over the Muratbasic case and investigated who gave the orders for his political activities and why. Instead, the state body had failed to act, just as it had so many times before, he said.

"An objective probe would have led to the core issues behind the long-standing survival of the current authorities, which is not an angle the State Prosecutor would have liked," said Novovic.

Vanja Calovic, coordinator of the Network for Affirmation of Non-Government, told Balkan Insight that the Muratbasic case was a wake-up call for civil society.

"We need an action plan for the fight against corruption and organised crime including the adoption of a Protection of Insiders Act," said Calovic. "But the government has not even started drafting it."

Calovic added, "There is an overall impression that the state is still seen as party property and as a lever for party power."

Stevo Muk, head of the Centre for Development of Non-Government Organisations, said the case deserved special attention because it shed light on long-standing speculation about electoral fraud and the police's role in influencing the electorate.

"What happened to Muratbasic and his subsequent sacking is a terrible warning to all those who pluck up the courage to speak openly about abuse in Montenegrin state institutions," said Muk.

Branislav Tomkovic, Professor at the Podgorica Law School, agreed - the law offered no protection to insiders, and those who followed in Muratbasic's footsteps faced the same dangers.

"It is an ugly truth that whenever someone is 'abused' by a political option and 'betrays' what he has done, he then finds himself under the pressure of non-existent charges so that the authorities can get rid of him more easily and painlessly," said Professor Tomkovic.

But Muratbasic's lawyer, Labud Sljukic, said his client represented only the tip of an iceberg of political corruption involving the police.

"Half the Montenegrin police could end up in jail," he said, "as since the minimum sentence for the act that Muratbasic confessed to is six months."

Some of the ex-policeman's neighbours also voiced surprise that no one had questioned them before about the pressures they were put under to vote for the DPS.

"No one ever questioned us about Muratbasic approaching us to vote for the DPS," said Muratbasic's neighbour, Abid Sijaric, another name from the list of 34.

Sead Sadikovic is a Balkan Insight contributor. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.

This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade and National Endowment for Democracy - NED, as part of BIRN's Minority Media Training and Reporting Project