Marko Kricak Arrest: Vucic Criticizes Police Handling
On the show Hit Tvit, Vucic said police leadership was not told about the arrest of Marko Kricak and that the new government cannot revisit his pardons.
Aleksandar Vucic spoke about the arrest of Marko Kricak on the show “Hit Tvit” on the evening of Sunday, November 1. He said he takes no pleasure in the situation Kricak is in, and that it bothers him that the country’s top police officials were not even informed of the arrest. The same conversation covered other subjects: the pardons he signed, criminal clans and the first moves of the new government. It aired on the day of the repeat snap parliamentary elections.
In the statements that have been published, Vucic does not say when Kricak was arrested or on whose orders. This is therefore, above all, a summary of what he said himself, with a few facts about the earlier course of the story.
What did Vucic say about the arrest of Marko Kricak?
He began with his attitude toward Kricak’s position:
“I am not at all happy about the situation Marko Kricak finds himself in. Just as, and I did not want to say it even then, it was visible in me, I was not happy about this other case either.”
He then returned to the earlier case in Senjak and said he had warned the police at the time:
“I tried, back when that case in Senjak happened, to warn them not to wage a personal battle, but to do everything professionally.”
He added: “Luckily, we found that body then, if you remember.” Which body and which case that sentence refers to, he does not explain in the part of the conversation that has been quoted.
The sharpest part concerned the way the arrest was carried out, in his telling. Vucic said: “I am not sure it is wise that the highest police officials were not even informed about the arrest of Marko Kricak.” In his assessment, that failure says “what kind of state our country is in at this moment”.
He also criticized arrests carried out at night. “I am waiting to see whether they will again, under the cover of night, arrest someone new,” he said, adding that now “anyone who has his own policeman” can arrest whomever he wants.
At one point in the conversation, in a part that Novosti reports as a response to criticism aimed at him, he also said this:
“You know, it is easy to persecute someone and it is easy to say all sorts of things. I like it, and I ask you to give everyone the idea in the future to go after me for something instead of someone else, because I enjoy that. It is stupid, but I enjoy it.”
Can the new government revisit the pardons?
The host reminded him that political opponents are announcing a review of the list of pardoned people. We reported on this earlier: the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime asked for documentation on the pardons, and Vucic has not commented on that so far. On the show he replied:
“What are they going to review, a decision of the President of the Republic? Well, you can see they are not normal. I have heard all kinds of nonsense, and now this too.”
He argued that pardon decisions cannot be annulled after the fact by the political will of a new government. “They cannot change that. There is no possibility for them to change the decision or to say: ‘This decision does not apply now, and our decision will apply retroactively,’ or whatever. That is nonsense,” he said. He did not say which legal provision he relies on.
Which clans does he mention and what does he claim?
Vucic said that groups tied to the “Kavac” and “Vracar” clans and other Montenegrin clans are running wild across Serbia, mainly in Belgrade but also in Arandjelovac and Novi Sad. He described them like this:
“A gang of those tied to the ‘Kavac,’ ‘Vracar’ and those other Montenegrin clans. They racketeer people, they harass people, they force them to sign over their companies. And all of this is done in agreement with the new authorities, who pretend not to see or notice it, and allow it to happen.”
Racketeering, by his account, runs “from Arandjelovac to Subotica.” He claims that at one company in Arandjelovac they demanded to be signed over 50 percent of ownership, but he names neither the firm nor the suspects. Asked who is behind it, he answered: “Criminals are doing this now. Old criminals appear, new criminals, mostly drug dealers.” For what is happening in towns and cities he uses the term “civilian arrests.”
In his view, the new government is careless. He said:
“They are very careless, heedless. I would ask them, when they speak to regional media, to watch what they say, not to harm their own country, not to talk nonsense the way Soskic did for ‘Pobjeda,’ the paper of Milo Djukanovic, and the way Srdjanovic does every day.”
Separately, he predicted the outcome at the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM): “They will push it through in REM, it was four to four, it will be eight to nothing for them.”
Do announcements of arrests scare him?
At the end he rejected the idea that announced arrests would make him change his behavior:
“The only thing they can do is threaten and supposedly keep someone in fear. Keep me in fear by telling me that you will arrest me? A stupid story, as the kids would say today.”
The claims about clans, about the authorities’ complicity and about the pardons are Vucic’s assessments, not established facts. We did not have a response from representatives of the new government to them by the time this text was published.
