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TITLE: SERBIA-MONTENEGRO HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES, 1994
AUTHOR: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
DATE: FEBRUARY 1995

                       SERBIA-MONTENEGRO


The United States and the international community do not
recognize Serbia-Montenegro as the successor state to the
former Yugoslavia and have suspended the "Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia" ("FRY") from participation in the United Nations,
the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE),
and other international organizations.

Serbia-Montenegro is dominated by Slobodan Milosevic, who is
serving his second 5-year term as President of Serbia.  He
controls the country through his Socialist Party of Serbia
(SPS), which lacks majorities in both the "Federal" and Serbian
Parliaments but holds the key administrative positions.  The
SPS abolished the political autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina in
1990, and all significant decisionmaking since that time has
been centralized under Milosevic in Belgrade.

As a key element of his hold on power, Milosevic wields strong
control over the Serbian police, a heavily armed force of
perhaps 100,000 which is guilty of extensive, brutal, and
systematic human rights abuses, including extrajudicial
killings.  Another important factor in Milosevic's rise to
power and almost total domination of the Government is his
control and manipulation of the media.  Freedom of the press is
greatly circumscribed.  The Government discouraged independent
media and resorted to surveillance, harassment, and eventual
suppression to inhibit the media from reporting its repressive
and violent acts.  At year's end, the Government's legal moves
against a major independent newspaper threatened to still its
voice.  Police elements routinely monitor opposition leaders,
human rights workers, and political dissidents.

In addition to the absolute power which Milosevic wields over
Serbia-Montenegro, until August his Government actively
fostered violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina by providing
military, economic, political, and moral support to ethnic
Serbs responsible for massive human rights abuses including
"ethnic cleansing."  The Government of Serbia-Montenegro
announced at that time that it would stop the flow of all
nonhumanitarian aid across its boundaries into Bosnia and
Herzegovina; in September, it allowed the deployment of a
mission sponsored by the International Conference on the Former
Yugoslavia (ICFY) to observe adherence to border controls.  In
return, the United Nations Security Council voted to suspend
temporarily some of the sanctions previously imposed on
Serbia-Montenegro so long as ICFY observers continue to verify
that the border remains closed.

U.N. economic sanctions continued to impact the economy for the
third successive year.  An economic stabilization program
introduced in January succeeded in bringing hyperinflation
under control, but by year's end the program was beginning to
show serious cracks.  The hard currency black market had
reappeared, consumers struggled under the double burden of high
prices and a shortage of local currency, unemployment continued
at levels in excess of 50 percent, and independent labor unions
tried unsuccessfully to mobilize labor protests.  The net
results were the reduction of a once thriving middle class to
near subsistence levels and concomitant increases in crime,
including organized drug trafficking.

The Government continued to inflict egregious abuses on the
one-third of the population who are not ethnic Serbs, and
repressed voices of opposition in the ethnic Serb community as
well.  Government officials carried out sanctioned extrajudicial
killings, torture, brutal beatings, arbitrary arrest, and a
general campaign to keep the non-Serb populations repressed.
While an atmosphere of fear and violence pervades all of
Serbia-Montenegro, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo and the
Muslims of Sandzak suffer the heaviest abuses.  Repressive acts
against these minorities increased dramatically after the
Government refused to extend the mandate of the CSCE monitoring
missions in 1993.

RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Section 1  Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including
           Freedom from:

     a.  Political and Other Extrajudicial Killing

Political violence in Serbia-Montenegro, including killings by
police, resulted mostly from direct and indirect efforts by
Serbian authorities to suppress and intimidate ethnic majority
groups.  Leaders of minority communities in Kosovo and Sandzak,
and to a lesser extent Vojvodina, reported numerous acts of
violence and intimidation aimed at repressing non-Serbs and
Muslims.  The level of violence was most severe in the Albanian-
populated region of Kosovo, where police repressed expressions
of political and community life, and in the Muslim-populated
region of Sandzak, where "ethnic cleansing" continued, with
homes inhabited by Muslims being turned over to Serbs.

According to the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and
Freedoms (CDHRF), a monitoring organization based in Pristina,
Kosovo, 17 ethnic Albanians were killed by police during the
year; 11 of them were shot by police, and the others died while
in police custody, reportedly due to mistreatment or beatings.
In most cases, the authorities claimed that those killed were
shot while fleeing or resisting arrest.  Police, however,
appear to have resorted to deadly force with little or no
attempt to apprehend the alleged suspects by other means.  A
Serbian police officer in July shot and killed a 6-year-old
ethnic Albanian boy, Fidan Brestovci, while he was riding in
his parents' car.  The officer later claimed he had mistaken
the car for one driven by a wanted felon.

In March, following an argument in a Kosovo Polje restaurant, a
Serbian police officer shot and killed Faik Maloku and
seriously wounded Xhevat Bejzaku.  Maloku evidently failed to
produce a personal identity card on demand.  The officer was
detained for investigation, but no formal charges were filed
against him.  In early August, a large Serbian police
contingent killed Hasan Ramadani, a former political prisoner,
while searching his house in Podujevo for illegal weapons.  In
September, when violence broke out in the town of Decani during
a police raid on market day, Serbian police fired
indiscriminately, according to eyewitnesses, and killed a young
Albanian mother of two while she was watching from a window.

     b.  Disappearance

The reduced level of paramilitary activity in Serbia-Montenegro
led to a sharp drop in the number of kidnapings and
disappearances.  Human rights agencies reported no new cases of
disappearance or officially sanctioned kidnaping.

In May Serbian authorities "extradited" the notorious
paramilitary figure Milan Lukic to Bosnian Serb authorities in
the "Serbian Republic" (RS) where he is believed to have been
set free.  Lukic was scheduled to stand trial for his role in
the Strpci kidnapings in February 1993 when 17 ethnic Muslims
and 2 Croats were taken from the Belgrade-Bar train as it
crossed a narrow strip of Bosnian territory.  None of those who
disappeared have been heard from.  Paramilitary forces are
presumed to have murdered them, but their families continued to
petition the Government for information on their fate.

     c.  Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading
         Treatment or Punishment

While the law prohibits torture, police in Serbia routinely
beat people severely when holding them under detention or
stopping them at police checkpoints, especially targeting
ethnic Albanians.  According to human rights agencies, police
beat thousands of Kosovar Albanians and Sandzak Muslims during
searches for illegal weapons, and extracted "confessions"
during interrogations that routinely included beating the
suspects' feet, hands, and genital areas with fists and
nightsticks, use of electric shocks, and verbal intimidation.
In late November, Ismail Raka, an ethnic Albanian from Kaganik
in southeast Kosovo, died while in police custody.  His family
was told he had committed suicide by jumping from a fifth-floor
window; photographs of his body show evidence of torture and
severe beatings.  Sabit Vllahia died in Podujevo in early
December, and Hasan Cubolli, age 81, died in Podujevo on
December 27 while being held by the Serbian police.

The use of excessive force in Kosovo and Sandzak was both
routine and capricious.  Police allegedly beat Sylejman Bytuqi
when they raided his home in Malisheva and found an
unregistered gun.  Four days later, local police severely beat
Mustafe Rukovci in Gnjilane after failing to uncover any
weapons in a search of his home.  Serbian police beat and
harassed the family members of suspected political activists or
those they believed to be in possession of illegal weapons.

Apparently confident there would be no reprisals, police often
beat their victims in public view or in front of their
families.  On February 21, police reportedly searched the house
of Ibrahim Havoli, an ethnic Albanian, and, because Havoli was
not at home, beat his brother.  Amnesty International reported
that 2 days later, 40 police officers searched the home of
Shemsi Gashi in Pristina, brutally beating him, his 2 sons, and
2 guests in front of the rest of the family.  In Pec, police
took an ethnic Albanian secondary student off a school bus in
April, beat him, and carved Serbian nationalist symbols into
his chest.

Police allegedly told one beaten man that they would drop
criminal charges against him if he signed a statement saying he
had not been beaten.  They warned another one that he would
have trouble with notorious paramilitary leaders Zeljko "Arkan"
Raznjatovic and Vojislav Seselj if he talked.  In May police in
Kosovo stopped two men for no apparent reason as they drove
their children to school and beat them so severely they were
hospitalized for 3 days.  When it turned out that the men were
ethnic Serbs, officials at all levels demanded that proceedings
be started against the police.

Prior to 1994, the Government of Montenegro had generally
displayed more tolerance toward its ethnic minorities than had
its Serbian counterpart.  In February and March, however,
Montenegrin police beat and tortured 25 Sandzak Muslims active
in the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) whom they had arrested
on a variety of weapons charges.  According to defense lawyers,
Harun Hadzic was beaten for 48 hours without a break, given
electric shocks, and forced to wear a painfully hot asbestos
cap.  Police beat Hadzic and the other victims with truncheons,
making them count the number of blows out loud, tied them to
radiators, deprived them of food, water, and sleep, and
threatened to kill them.  Police allegedly forced a truncheon
first into Avdea Ciguljin's anus and then into his mouth.
Sandzak Muslim political leaders and human rights activists
believed the beatings were aimed at creating a climate of fear
in the Muslim community to destroy the SDA and ultimately alter
the demographic balance in the region by causing Muslims to
flee.

In the Sandzak region, Serbian authorities were similarly
abusive.  The Humanitarian Law Fund (HLF), a Belgrade-based
human rights organization, documented numerous instances in
which local authorities used torture and physical abuse during
a series of massive house-to-house searches carried out in
Prijepolje between January 27 and February 17.  Many of those
beaten singled out district chief Mileta Novakovic as having
been particularly brutal.  Some beatings were clearly
politically motivated.  One victim told an HLF representative
that his interrogation began with a berating for his political
activities followed by a severe beating.  Fadil Osmanovic, a
teacher and vice president of the SDA in Berane, committed
suicide after being tortured at a police station and ordered to
report to the police again.  In May police beat Mustafa Dzigal
in a Novi Pazar prison after questioning him about his contacts
with CSCE representatives.

Nearly 100 Kosovar Albanians and Sandzak Muslims have been
convicted over the past 2 years and are serving prison terms on
the unsubstantiated grounds of conspiring to undermine the
integrity of the State.  Insofar as the real grounds for these
charges appear to have been that these persons were active in
ethnic Albanian and Sandzak Muslim political parties, they may
be said to have been prosecuted for their political associations
rather than for criminal activity.

     d.  Arbitrary Arrest, Detention, or Exile

Federal law permits police to detain suspects without a warrant
and hold them incommunicado for up to 3 days without charging
them or granting them access to an attorney.  After this
period, police must turn a suspect over to an investigative
judge, who may order a 30-day extension and, under certain
legal procedures, subsequent extensions of investigative
detention up to 6 months.  Police routinely held suspects well
beyond the 3-day statutory period.  It is generally during this
initial period that detainees experience the worst treatment
and abuse.  During investigative detention, detainees
theoretically have access to legal counsel, although in
practice access is only occasionally granted.

Defense lawyers in Kosovo and Sandzak have filed numerous
complaints about flagrant breaches of standard procedure which
they believed undermined their clients' rights.  The courts
ignored those complaints.  In November and December, police
began a massive roundup of some 200 ethnic Albanian former
members of police and security forces in Kosovo.  Lawyers
reported that most of those detained were subjected to harsh
beatings and electric shock torture, held longer than the law
permits before charges were brought, and subjected to more
beatings after appearing in court.

A group of 25 Montenegrin Sandzak Muslims arrested between
January 26 and March 20, most of them active in the SDA, were
held without charge for longer than the law allows.  They were
not allowed to contact defense lawyers until February 8, when
the high court in Bijelo Polje, Montenegro, overturned a ruling
by the investigative judge that suspended their right to
counsel.  In the interim, police interrogated the defendants in
the absence of their lawyers and, after subjecting them to
brutal physical torture including the use of cattle prods,
obtained incriminating statements from them.  In June the
Montenegrin investigative judge widened the scope of the
investigation to include another 12 suspects, further delaying
the trial date.  On December 28, 21 defendants were sentenced
to prison terms ranging from 2 to 7 years for "attempting to
undermine the territorial integrity of the State."  The head of
the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) in Montenegro, Hajrun
Hadzic, received the stiffest sentence of 7 years, to begin
immediately rather than after the appeals process.

Defense lawyers and human rights workers have also complained
of excessive delays in filing formal charges and opening
investigations.  The ability of the defense to challenge the
legal basis of their clients' detention was further hampered by
the difficulty they encountered in gaining access to copies of
the official indictment and the decision to remand the defendant
into custody.  In some cases, prosecutors have failed to share
material evidence with the defense in a timely fashion, and
judges have prevented defense attorneys from reading the court
file.  The investigative judges, formally responsible for every
aspect of the investigation, often delegate most or all
responsibility to the police or state security service.
Although this is allowed under law, the free hand given to the
police often reduced the role of the investigative judge to one
of pure formalism.  Defense lawyers frequently complained of
difficulty in gaining access to their clients, even during
questioning by the investigative judge, a restriction rarely
placed on public prosecutors.

In a country where the majority of ethnic Serbs are armed,
police selectively enforce the laws regulating the possession
and registration of firearms so as to harass and intimidate
ethnic minorities.  Serbs are rarely, if ever, charged with
similar crimes although they are equally well armed, generally
with illegal or unregistered weapons.  An exception occurred in
September when Serbian President Milosevic moved against
members of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS).
One SRS parliamentary deputy, Vakic, was stripped of his
parliamentary immunity for illegal possession of explosives and
automatic weapons.

Often, police in Sandzak and Kosovo simply order a member of an
ethnic minority to turn in a certain weapon and a specified
number of bullets within a set time, on threat of detention or
torture.  The victim, if not in possession of a weapon, is
generally forced to purchase one on the black market in order
to turn it in to the police.  Police do not similarly harass
ethnic Serbs, and despite high crime rates arrests of Serbs for
possession of illegal weapons are rare.

In January Serbian police arrested Rivzat Halilovic, leader of
a faction of the Macedonian Party of Democratic Action while he
was in Serbia, on highly suspect charges of espionage.  The
"secret maps" that he was accused of handing over to Pakistani
agents could be purchased at any Belgrade book store.

In Kosovo, Serbian police continued a policy of frequent,
arbitrary detention of political activists.  Following a
concert in Urosevac commemorating the death of 5 ethnic
Albanians in violent clashes with police, Serbian authorities
ordered the arrest of some 40 of those present, including
prominent members of several local branches of the Democratic
League of Kosovo (LDK).  The police allegedly beat them in the
course of interrogation.  The arrests were designed strictly to
intimidate and were not connected to the concert in any way.

On February 4, three unidentified men kidnaped Veljko Dzakula,
a former "vice president" in the self-proclaimed "Republic of
Serbian Krajina" (RSK), from a busy street in downtown
Belgrade.  The night before his disappearance, he gave an
interview to independent television Studio B highly critical of
the Yugoslav army.  Five days after he disappeared,
representatives of the RSK "interior ministry" admitted to
holding Dzakula in Glina prison on charges of espionage.  A
Belgrade-based human rights lawyer claimed that Serbian police,
working closely with the RSK state security service, kidnaped
Dzakula and "extradited" him to the "RSK" without allowing him
to defend himself.  Although the territory of the "RSK" is
internationally recognized as a part of Croatia, Dzakula was
charged with a crime under the "FRY" Criminal Code.

Exile is neither legally permitted nor routinely practiced.  No
specific instances of the imposition of exile as a form of
judicial punishment are known to have occurred.

     e.  Denial of Fair Public Trial

The authorities frequently deny this right to non-Serbs and to
persons they believe oppose the regime (see below).

The court system comprises local, district, and supreme courts
at the republic level, and a Federal Supreme Court to which
republic Supreme Court decisions may be appealed.  There is
also a military court system.  According to the Federal
Constitution, the Federal Constitutional Court rules on the
constitutionality of laws and regulations, relying on the
republic authorities to enforce its rulings.  The Federal
Criminal Code of the former Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia still applies.

Under federal law, defendants have the right to be present at
their trials and to have an attorney, at public expense if
needed.  Both the defendant and the prosecutor may appeal the
verdict.

Article 116 of the Yugoslav Criminal Code, which allows for
sentences of up to 10 years for "undermining the territorial
integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," is often used
selectively to convict Kosovar Albanians and Sandzak Muslims on
flimsy or circumstantial evidence.  In February Kosovo district
courts sentenced more than 30 ethnic Albanians to terms ranging
from 1 to 10 years under Article 116 for allegedly organizing
"illegal defense forces" under an independent Republic of
Kosovo.  According to Amnesty International, defense lawyers
complained that statements taken during interrogation--and
subsequently used in prosecuting the Kosovar Albanians--were
solicited under severe physical and psychological pressures.

Delays and seemingly arbitrary changes in the charges similarly
marred the ongoing trial of another group of 25 Muslim
political activists on weapons charges in Novi Pazar, Serbia.
Defense lawyers did not deny that their clients were in
possession of illegal arms but maintained that the laws were
being selectively enforced and used as a means of intimidating
the Sandzak Muslim community.  The trial ended in a conviction,
but the original weapons charges were suddenly changed to the
more serious criminal charge of attempting to undermine the
territorial integrity of the State.

     f.  Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or
         Correspondence

Federal law gives republic ministries of the interior sole
control over the decision to monitor potential criminal
activities, a power routinely abused.  Authorities regularly
monitored opposition and dissident activity, eavesdropped on
conversations, read mail, and tapped telephones.  In December
human rights advocates objected to an announcement by the
Federal post office that it had been registering all mail from
abroad, ostensibly to protect mail carriers from charges of
theft.

Although the law includes restrictions on searches, officials
often ignored such restrictions.  In Kosovo and Sandzak, police
systematically subjected ethnic Albanians to random searches of
their homes, vehicles, and offices, asserting they were
searching for weapons.  The CDHRF reported that in the first 3
months of 1994 police searched over 1,000 Kosovar Albanian
homes, often physically abusing the inhabitants.

As an example of such methods, on a typical day in Kosovo (July
22), police raided Hetmen and Nezir Makolli's Pristina home and
seized a licensed hunting rifle, searched the home of Hysen
Hasani and his sons in Lipljan, and raided the home of Hasan
Fetaj in Suva Reka, threatening to draft him into the Yugoslav
army.  Similar scenes were repeated thousands of times in
Kosovo and Sandzak.

In January and February, police conducted a series of massive
house-to-house searches in Prijepolje (Sandzak).  Police also
routinely stopped private vehicles in Kosovo and Sandzak and
searched them and the passengers without probable cause.
Authorities often confiscated foreign currency from drivers and
passengers, although it is not illegal to possess foreign
currency.

     g.  Use of Excessive Force and Violations of Humanitarian
         Law in Internal Conflicts

The Government's decision to close the border with Bosnia in
August, exempting only food, clothing, and medicine, was an
implicit acknowledgement of the support it has provided to the
Bosnian Serbs and their policy of ethnic cleansing since the
beginning of the Bosnian war.  (See the report on Bosnia and
Herzegovina for an account of excessive force and violations of
humanitarian law which the Milosevic regime consistently aided
and abetted.)  There were numerous credible reports of Yugoslav
army units operating in eastern Bosnia as "volunteers."
Following the downing of four Galeb-type planes by NATO forces
in February, an obituary of one of the pilots appeared in the
major Serbian daily Politika.  Although Serbian authorities
officially denied any involvement in the incident, the obituary
announced that the pilot, a Montenegrin citizen, died fighting
for his country--"Greater Serbia."

In Serbia itself, authorities frequently subjected members of
ethnic minorities to intimidation, with the goal of provoking
their emigration.  Ethnic Albanians and Muslims were severely
punished for even the slightest violation of laws that were
selectively enforced by Serbian police and judicial
authorities.  Harassment and intimidation of ethnic Croats in
the multiethnic province of Vojvodina continued.  Documented
incidents of harassment and intimidation of ethnic minorities
in Vojvodina were at lower levels compared with previous years,
but the official statistics provided little comfort to those
who still retain bitter memories of forced conscription and
physical abuse from the recent past.  While overt forms of
harassment were down, ethnic Croats and Hungarians complained
about more subtle forms of abuse, including alleged plans by
the Serbian government to alter the ethnic composition of
communities by forcibly resettling Bosnian and Croatian Serb
refugees.  In February a self-described "Chetnik" held Sinisa
Vidakovic at gunpoint and threatened to kill him if he and his
family did not move out of town.  In Sremska Kamenica on May 7,
an unknown person threw several crude, home-made bombs at the
residences of local Croats.  A similar bomb exploded in front
of the Franciscan church in Subotica in June.  Local
authorities did little to investigate the incidents.

Although Serbian authorities prosecuted one former paramilitary
leader for crimes committed in Bosnia and claimed to be about
to charge others, many other known and suspected war criminals
were never the targets of a formal investigation.  Some
individuals suspected of criminal activity connected to the
conflict in Bosnia and the earlier war with Croatia hold
prominent positions in the Serbian, Montenegrin, or "FRY"
governments.  Other suspected war criminals serve as members of
Parliament.