Bed-bound in the gargantuan brick and marble villa that is his home, Nikola Sandulović recounts the attack that has, he says, left him paralysed on his right side and unable to walk.
It was 3 January at 3.20pm when three vehicles carrying agents from Serbia’s BIA secret service screeched to a halt outside his home in Belgrade’s plush Senjak area. Bundled into a black van – its tinted windows shielding what would happen next – the masked men soon told him why they had come: the former entrepreneur and opposition politician had dared to apologise for crimes committed by Serbs when inter-ethnic conflict convulsed Kosovo in the late 1990s after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia.
“It was unimaginable,” he told the Observer, recalling the ordeal in his first interview with a British newspaper since the alleged assault. “The day after I posted the video on social media saying ‘sorry’ as I laid flowers at the grave of the young girl who, yes, was related to a founder of the Kosovo Liberation Army [which led the revolt against Serbian rule] I got threats.
“Then when the beatings started they hit me so hard I lost consciousness. In the van I was hit on my head, punched in my face and kicked. In the [lobby of] BIA’s headquarters, they removed my shirt and forced me to kneel and kiss the 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.”
The torture, Sandulović claimed, lasted six hours. “They sat on both my legs, pulled my arms and yanked back my head while they videoed [the scenes] and shouted ‘traitor’,” said the 60-year-old, displaying a still visibly bruised forearm. “In the end I said, ‘I won’t answer any more questions. Kill me or call a doctor.’”
Admitted that evening to a military hospital, it would be 24 hours before the self-described pacifist was allowed back home where police, armed with an arrest warrant, wasted no time in seizing him again. The next 12 days – bar an overnight stay at a state clinic – would be spent in the medical wing of Belgrade Central prison, detained by a prosecutor on suspicion of “inciting racial, national and religious hatred”. The KLA has been branded a terrorist organisation by Serbia.
For Aleksandar Vulin, the country’s former intelligence chief who admitted ordering the arrest, Sandulović’s actions in support of Kosovo were deserving of much greater punishment. The BIA agents, he told the Novosti news outlet, had indeed picked him up but refrained from using any physical force – tactics other secret services would undoubtedly have employed. “If Sandulović had laid a wreath on Himmler’s grave, Mossad would have killed him … I apologise to Serbia for not being able to do more.” A close ally of Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s rightwing populist president, the unabashedly pro-Russian Vulin resigned in November after being sanctioned by the US for misuse of public office and involvement in illegal arms smuggling.
With the rhetoric at such levels – Vulin is the only official to have spoken publicly about the incident – observers say it is indicative of the mood at large, one likened increasingly by Serbs to the climate that prevailed under Slobodan Milošević, the erstwhile strongman still dubbed the Butcher of the Balkans.
Before the alleged assault catapulted the avowedly pro-western Sandulović on to the pages of the international press – for his plight has been given little coverage locally – he was a controversial figure on the margins of the political firmament of a country dominated by the autocratic rule of Vučić.
The last time he contested national elections was in 2016 when his small Serbian Republican party won less than 1% of the vote. “The censorship is insane. Vučić controls everything. He steals votes and it’s impossible to be heard,” he lamented.
Western envoys who weighed in urging Sandulovic’s release – US diplomats are among those who have also made the trip to the villa to hold bedside talks with him – admitted having to delve deep into their archives to find out who he was, and not liking everything they discovered.
But amid escalating regional tensions, exacerbated by overt Russian meddling across the Balkan peninsula, the attempt to present the politician as a fifth columnist has highlighted fears over Serbia’s democratic decline at a time when the EU candidate state has been gripped by protests over allegations that Vučić’s recent re-election was rigged.
“For the authorities it’s not a good look,” said one diplomat. “Reconciliation in these parts is never a bad thing and in this case it cannot be denied.”
In an address on Friday, Vučić accused Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders of intending to “ethnically cleanse” the territory of its Serb minority following its decision to ban the use of the Serbian dinar and enforce the euro as the former province’s sole currency. Vowing to ignore the measure, he pledged to seek an urgent UN security council meeting tomorrow, saying local Serbs “are scared, they are waiting in line” for fear of being unable to receive dinar-denominated pensions and wages.
Belgrade has vehemently refused to recognise Kosovo – home to some of Serbia’s most revered religious sites and regarded by Serbs as a “holy land” if also predominantly Albanian – in the 16 years since it unilaterally declared independence.
Across Belgrade, daubed on bridges and communist-era buildings, graffiti exhorts onlookers to never forget “Kosovo is Serbia”.
In a polarised society the former province is the wound that has continued to fester. Its fate was sealed when in 1999 Nato intervened with a 78-day air campaign to end ethnic cleansing that had seen more than 300,000 Kosovars flee. To this day it remains the one issue that unites Serbs.
For opposition leaders Kosovo is also the reason the west is soft on Vučić, a politician whose provocative views are stomached because he is perceived as being able to guarantee regional stability. “No politician in this country will ever accept the independence of Kosovo,” observed Dragan Dilas, a former mayor of Belgrade who heads the party of Freedom and Justice, part of the Serbia Against Violence coalition that has staged street protests deploring Vučić’s fraudulent electoral victory.
“But Vučić exploits that. Every day he isolates Serbia a little more from its natural allies. Geographically, culturally, historically we belong to Europe. We don’t want to be part of a Russian or Chinese world, which is what he wants. It saddens us greatly that we are the only pro-EU opposition anywhere that doesn’t have the support of the west. I tell you, the atmosphere here is as bad, if not worse, than it was under Milosevic.”
Last week Ĉedomir Stojković, the prominent human rights lawyer representing Sandulović, described him as one of the few figures in Serbia who would ever publicly endorse Kosovo’s independence.
“He was attacked in this way because he says things nobody wants to hear,” he averred. “For me Nikola is more of a political activist and sometimes he makes provocative statements, but under what law, in what country on this planet, is placing flowers on the grave of a seven-year-old girl illegal?”
On Thursday Michael Polak, a British barrister, walked into Belgrade’s Palace of Justice in brogues and a finely cut suit with Stojkovic to file a criminal complaint against “Sandulović’s torturers” and illegal detention. “It’s remarkable in a European country in 2024 that someone can be abducted from their home by state agents and subjected to this type of treatment,” he said. “At no time should there be impunity for torture. Under the European convention of human rights Serbia has a duty to investigate the allegations and hold the perpetrators to account.”
Later as he was about to leave the country, Polak was detained at Belgrade airport by police demanding to know why he was “interfering in internal Serbian affairs”. When finally allowed to board the plane he was told he would not be welcome back.
