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Between February 13th and 21st 2012,
the dramaturges Milan Marković and Maja Pelević
enrolled in the seven largest Serbian parties:
the Democratic Party of Serbia, the United Regions of Serbia,
the Social Democratic Party, the Democratic Party,
the Liberal Democratic Party, the Serbian Progressive Party
and the Socialist Party of Serbia.
Soon afterwards, they were made members of cultural councils
in most of the parties, and in some parties
they even made it onto the personnel list.
Milan Marković and Maja Pelević presented to their party colleagues
a text entitled Idea – Strategy – Movement, in which they outlined
their views on the subject of
each of the respective party’s marketing strategy.
This text - which was, with negligible changes, actually
Joseph Goebbels’ speech Knowledge and Propaganda from 1928 -
was much commended by all the parties.
The performance has already taken place.
Before the prologue - Picture of a Mayor
First photograph: Dragomir Dragi Jovanovic,
Governor of the City of Belgrade 1941-44
April 22nd 1941
German occupation authorities appoint Dragomir Dragi Jovanović
as Extraordinary commissioner for the City of Belgrade.
This is the first appointing
by the occupation authorities in occupied Belgrade.
Soon, Dragi Jovanović, as an old collaborator of Germans,
becomes President of the Belgrade municipality
and Governor of the City of Belgrade, and by that
one of the most significant figures of the quisling governing machinery.
The Special police, under government of Dragi Jovanović,
participated in the arrests of Romas in Belgrade and surrounding villages,
taking them to the imprisonment in Topovske šupe camp.
This kind of behavior towards Romas was not characteristic
for the whole territory of Serbia. in 1941, the most drastic
repressions towards Romas in Serbia were documented in Belgrade
and its surroundings, for which Dragi Jovanović was hugely responsible.
Second photograph: Serbian flag design proposal,
from “Expose” by Dragi Jovanović
May 1941
Dragi Jovanović submits an “Expose on organization of the state
and sovereign state government” to German Reich in which
he introduced his views on future organization of Serbian state.
In his opinion the state should be a German protectorate,
organized according to National Socialism principles,
recognized by Serbian tricolor flag with a swastika.
Being particularly diligent in revelation, arrest and torture of communists,
Dragi Jovanović performed a simultaneous arrest of all suspected
communists in the occupied Serbia on June 22nd 1941
(the same day Hitler’s Germany attacked SSSR),
and made an agreement with Germans on establishing concentration camps.
Third photograph: Banjica Camp
July 5th 1941
German Reich adopts formal decision to establish Banjica camp in
occupied Belgrade. Decision is put into effect by Dragi Jovanović.
Banjica camp became the biggest concentration camp in the territory of
occupied Serbia. It was in operation from July 1941 until October 1944.
30.000 people were imprisoned there and more than 4000 prisoners were killed.
According to Jovanović’s orders and approvals many Serbs, Romas, Jews,
Muslims and people of other nationalities were tortured and
executed in the camp, among them elderly, women and children.
Fourth photograph: Svetislav Milin, Belgrade shoemaker
August 17th 1941
For the citizens of Belgrade, the morning begins with a horrifying scene.
Five men are hanging in the center of the city, in torn clothes,
and with deformed faces. They are hanged on lampposts
next to the peaceful banners inviting to horse races,
one banner saying: „Kraft durch Freude“ (Power through joy).
The initiator and leading organizer of the hangings was SS-major Karl Krauss,
chief of Belgrade Gestapo, and his main associate was
Chief of Government of the City of Belgrade, Dragi Jovanović.
The execution was approved by general Heinrich Dankelmann,
military commander of Serbia, and it was entrusted to Einsatzkommand
and Jovanović’s Special police.
The only one who publicly protested against the hanging
of the communists was painter Savo Popović.
Afterwards he was taken into investigatory prison, where he was tortured.
He died on August 10th 1943. from effects of police torture.
In 1942. Dragi Jovanović, soon after being appointed Governor of Belgrade
and municipality President, was also appointed Chief of Serbian state Security.
With that position Jovanović got the assignment to organize more arrests,
tortures and executions of communists, Romas, Jews and other enemies
of the Reich, in the Special police prisons and concentration camps.
Fifth photograph: Dragomir Dragi Jovanović and
Dragoljub Draža Mihailović in court
Year 1944
Dragomir Jovanović flees the country.
In 1946 he is arrested and prosecuted as war criminal and collaborator of the occupier.
He was convicted for the mass liquidations of the National Liberation Movement
sympathizers; arrests, torture and execution of innocent citizens,
women, children and elderly; for governing of the Banjica concentration camp;
for torture and beatings in the prisons of the Special police;
and for collaborating with the Germans and negotiating with the Chetnik movement
lead by Draža Mihajlović.
He was sentenced to death by execution on July 17th 1946. in Belgrade.
Milan Markovic and Maja Pelevic - They Live
After the epilogue - Picture of a Mayor
First photograph: The beginning of the eviction
from the Roma settlement near Belvil
April 3rd 2009
Around 6am, residents of the Roma settlement near Belvil
are surrounded by the police. Trucks and bulldozers approach.
More than 45 families with total of 126 family members were left homeless,
without previously being provided with
necessary accommodation by city authorities.
After the destruction of the settlement, the residents, mostly refugees
with little kids and sick and elderly people,
had to spend a couple of nights without shelter.
Second photograph: Roma settlement next to Bellville,
hidden by a wall of billboards
June 2009
City authorities put up a fence around a nearby Roma settlement,
under the pretence of security measures during the Universiade.
Police supervision was introduced that, together with this wall of billboards
(hiding from foreign guests and public the shame,
misery and poverty in which the Roma live),
confined the residents of the settlement to limited areas
and made them unable to work or reach water supplies.
EUR 75 million was spent on the organization of the Universiade in Belgrade.
Third photograph: Forced evictions of Roma settlements near Bellville
2010. The city withdraws funds from a loan approved by the European
Investment Bank for the construction of access roads to Ada Bridge
with a clause that they are to provide the Roma with adequate accommodation.
The European Commission provides EUR 3.5 million for a permanent solution
to the housing problems of the Roma that are not located
in the range of the access roads.
April 2012. The eviction of the Roma near the Belvil estate is coming to an end.
Instead of 40 families as announced, the city authorities suddenly evict
250 families located in the range of the access roads. City employees,
equipped with hygienic gloves, help the Roma to pack their belongings
and enter buses, each of which have one of the five locations written on it.
Most of the locations are far away from the places where the residents work,
exercise social and health care rights or send their children to school.
On top of that, the newly established settlements become targets of attacks
by masked Nazis and unmasked neighbours. In the new Jabučki Rit settlement,
only a week after the eviction, Roma are attacked by a group of Nazis
with baseball bats shouting: “Serbia to the Serbs” and “Get out”.
Regarding the attacks in Resnik, the Mayor of Belgrade declares:
“We are aware that citizens are afraid of the arrival of those
who used to steal water, electricity and other things…”
Fourth photograph: 'House Rules' prescribed by Social Security Department
2012. Most of the Roma are provided with accommodation –
one 15-square-meter metal container per family –
after signing an agreement defining the conditions
under which they are allowed to stay in these “mobile units”.
Sometimes, families of six are supposed to share one container.
Article 11 entitles the Social Security Department to unilaterally terminate
the agreement without any particular explanation and proscribes for the
Beneficiary to behave in accordance to “rules of decent manners towards
representatives of the Department and other competent bodies.”
Fifth photograph: The boy from the nearby Roma settlement,
at the theme park ‘Terazije from 30s’ construction site
May 2012. Theme park “Terazije from the 30s” opens near the Belvil Roma
settlement in New Belgrade, during the action “Belgradization of Belgrade”.
“Terazije from the 30s” is a unique tourist cultural park located on
4,500 square meters of business space and space for artists
to create in an authentic ambient from the past century.
Visitors can enjoy authentic costumes from that period and get to know old
crafts, refresh themselves in the “By the Golden Cross” tavern, eat boiled
bagels as well as take rides in an old tram and the first Serbian bus from 1939.
Within the theme park, there is no mention of the student Milorad Pokrajac,
the tailor Jovan Janković, the shoemaker Svetislav Milin, the peasant from Sopot,
Velimir Jovanović, and the Kosmaj Squad partisan Ratko Jević.
These men were hanged on Terazije Square on August 17th, 1941 on the orders
of Dragi Jovanović, quisling governor of Belgrade and the chief of the Special Police.
Sixth photograph: Dragi Jovanović, the Governor of the
City of Belgrade during German occupation
Today. A photograph of Dragi Jovanović, the killer of Belgrade, is hanging in
a place of honor, a couple of tens of meters from the hall we are sitting in tonight.
Zoran Alimpić, the former president of the parliament of the City of Belgrade
from the Democratic party, said that “if that picture were taken down,
there would be a time gap between previous and the following ones. (...)
This is simply a historical fact and it is a wall of pictures from the period of Karađorđe.
That’s not any kind of honor or award or ideological issue. That is simply a list.”
On September 3rd, in an addendum to the Belgrade newspapers, the media machinery
of the present mayor of Belgrade Dragan Đilas, describes Dragi Jovanović as a
“controversial personality” and puts his crimes under suspicion:
“The biography of this man suggests that his secret service arrested around
1,500 communists, and then executed 600 sympathizers of the Communist Party
However, there are indications that things were actually different.”
Seventh photograph: Dragan Đilas, Mayor of Belgrade
2008–2016. Dragan Đilas is the co-owner of the company Multicom Group,
no. 28th on the list of most successful companies in Serbia in 2010.
His company is one of the leading companies in the field of media business
in the former Yugoslavia. That company, along with two other companies of Đilas’s,
donated 14 million dinars to the Democratic party in 2009. Multicom Group
and affiliated companies made a profit of 498 million dinars in 2008,
563 million dinars in 2009 and 790 million dinars in 2010,
i.e. over three years, somewhere around 18.5 million euros in total.
Dragan Đilas was one of the founders of “Radio B92” in 1989,
where he worked for a while as editor of the news program.
Dragan Đilas became a member of the Democratic Party in 2004, and later a
member of the Executive and General Board of the Party.
In the second mandate of the government of Vojislav Koštunica, from May 2007
until July 2008, he was minister without portfolio in charge of the
implementation of the National Investment Plan.
At the assembly of the Democratic Party on February 18th, 2006,
he was elected member of the Presidency of the Democratic Party
for the region of Belgrade, and in June 2006, he was elected President
of the Democratic Party Board of the City of Belgrade.
Dragan Đilas was elected Mayor of Belgrade on August 19th,
2008 and re-elected on June 13th, 2012.
Dragan Đilas is a typical representative of the trans-party politics of oblivion,
rehabilitation and new class racism that has no alternative in parliamentary politics.
There are many things he is criticized for, but this is not one of them.
For he was elected not in spite of the revisionist politics of his party,
not in spite of his accusing homosexuals for the homophobic destruction of Belgrade
nor in spite of his actions towards the Roma,
but exactly because of all these things.
Dragan Đilas, your Mayor.
complete project documentation and more about "They live" at:
www.theylive.wordpress.com www.onizive.wordpress.com