Amnesty without discrimination

Amnesty is almost always the first ray of hope that firmly announces the dawn of a new society, a society slowly freeing itself from darkness and fears: the fear of words; the fear of losing jobs or the fear of never finding a job again; the fear of arrests, tor­ture or persecution, just because of opin­ions different from the official authorities. That is how it was in Spain in 1975. That is how it started in Morocco after the death of King Hassan II. That is how it is in Yugoslavia today, where new winds are blowing following the social movements of October 2000. In this part of the Balkans as well, immediately after the toppling of Milosevic, The Yugoslav Committee of Lawyers for Human Rights (YUCOM) proposed a legal framework for amnesty­seeking attempts made by the civilian society in fighting for democratic freedoms.

This committee (YUCOM) proposed a Draft Law on Amnesty, which can never and by any means be applied to war crim­inals, as Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco pointed out during the public session held on November 4, 2000 in the renowned Center for Cultural Decontamination, the alternative venue for cultural, artistic and political activities.

This Amnesty Law will represent a political break with the dictatorship, according to Dusan Janjic, an attorney that helped prepare this law. YUCOM expects that the Draft Law will be discussed and voted on in the Federal Parliament in the near future. This Draft embodies the integral concept of human rights and resents a response to the oppression conducted during the 13 years of the Milosevic regime. It is very difficult to illustrate this problem numerically, particularly the numbers of war deserters among Kosovo Albanians. However, it is well understood how brutal the oppression was and how much it was directed, recently, against the Serbian people them selves. As for deserters, attorney Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco pointed out a that majority of them did not declare them selves to be deserters, but were simply either forced into various forms of exile - often illegal - and lived under constant fear of routine police check-ups, which were sometimes conducted at every corner and on public transportation. Those are the deserters in the wars against Croatia (1991-92) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1996), whose numbers are estimated at around 300,000; then deserters from the open armed conflict against Kosovo (1999) and from force d conscriptions during NATO air strikes (1999), which was the only war Milosevic acknowledged. For ten years, the deserters were exposed to violence and threats. YUCOM seeks amnesty for them, although they are aware that their opinion will not be met by general consent in the present-day Yugoslavia. Nationalist indoctrination left deep roots. This particularly refers that part of the Serbian people who been contaminated by an expansion-nationalist indoctrination, nourished by the idea of Serbs being threatened in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and theories about an existing international plot against the Serbian people. Therefore, it is to be expected that a lot of people will object to the idea of this law being applied to deserters from the war in Kosovo and NATO intervention against Yugoslavia. "Those are traitors of their fatherland", said one woman present at session, who thought that the law had been proposed prematurely. There is no doubt that bold attitudes will contribute to a decontamination of minds imbued in militaristic values.

Such an example was given by Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco, who cited the case of a mother whose son (a soldier at the time) was killed during the NATO bombing. This mother was ready to publicly support the amnesty law for deserters. That woman did not think that it is an act of patriotism or heroism that would differ from an act of desertion.

It is clear that the success of the Amnesty Law Draft will also depend on the ability of the civilian society to trans­form from opposition forces into an alternative movement for human rights, political pluralism, and solidarity among peoples without discrimination.

According to data provided by The Humanitarian Law Fund from Belgrade, there are about 820 Albanians in the prisons of Serbia. Most of them are civil­ian who were banished from their hous­es or collected there and taken away by the Federal Army as part of the spoils when it was retreating from Kosovo. In the beginning, there were about 3,000 of them. Not a word was mentioned of them in the Kumanovo agreement, signed in 1999 by the NATO Alliance and the Serbian forces.

Owing to an outstanding campaign of solidarity for liberating Flora Brovina, the well-known pediatrician, poet, and human rights activist, the international public was made aware of the issue of war prisoners. It was just recently that Teki Bokshi, an Albanian lawyer, denounced how Albanian prisoners were living in unbearable conditions. Many of them do not even have a bed and are deprived of basic human rights. For example, the use of their mother tongue when talking to their lawyers or during trial. The families of those prisoners do not dare to come and visit them in the prisons in Serbia, out of fear that they, too, could be arrest­ed. In that respect, Teki Bokshi empha­sized that the Albanian lawyers hope that the newly elected president, Mr. Kostunica, will undertake timely measures and that, irrespective of his nationalism, they consider him to be a democrat who should be ready to cooperate with the international community and contribute to a democratic transition of his country.

Djordje Mamula, an attorney and an author of the Draft Law, expressed con­cern during the session that part of the Serbian public will lobby for excluding Albanian prisoners from amnesty. He pointed out that the oppressive propa­ganda machinery of the Milosevic regime fostered the belief that every Albanian is a terrorist. A systematic incrimination of the Albanian people paved the way to the most atrocious human rights violations ever conducted in the region, so that the trials of Albanians had been prejudged. However, that was only in those cases that were brought to trial, because many prisoners did not stand any trial at all.

Now, at the dawn of a democratic transition, there is hope that in the Serbian civilian society, a discussion will be opened regarding the causes and con­sequences of the crimes committed in the name of the defense of "Yugoslav unity", which had, actually, been only an excuse for Serbian nationalism. This discussion will be a "detoxification," through which it will be possible to regain dignity and basic values of life and respect for individuals and peoples, despite differences in opinion. In that spirit, YUCOM prepared a Draft Law on Amnesty, which applies to the Milosevic regime's criminal acts that were an assault on the constitutional order and the state until July 6, 2000. Exactly on that date the former President ought to be declared guilty of violating the Constitution. According to the reputed attorney Djordje Ma, any person who stood trial or was convicted for criminal acts against the constitutional order cannot be treated other wise than as an enemy of the regime, and therefore ought to be amnesty, so as to secure political discontinuity with the Milosevic dictatorship.

Mireja Forel, International Network of Women in Black, Seville (Spain), abundant assistance of translator and activist Jelena Markovic.
Belgrade, November 7