A man for all times

The position of adviser to the president is reason enough for prof. Oliver Antic should not be a victim of media blockade. These days, the media mainly dealt with him as a member and functionary of SNS who left the party. Immediately before that, he was more or less written about as a baton bearer who ran to the Faculty of Law and there, as a good student of the late professor Kurdulija, he recognized "negative phenomena" and introduced order back in the seventies. That, by the way, and by no means only at the Faculty of Law, was the time of bringing order to the already somewhat disorganized and broken self-governing socialism after 1968, and especially after the Constitution of 1974. And if it weren't for that Domagoj Margetić, and that whole political thriller about the events inside the SNS, where it is difficult for the uninitiated to figure out who were the thieves and who were the gendarmes, maybe no one would have even remembered the Legal Adviser. And that professor, as a kind of paradigm of "extra-institutional processes" and "extra-institutional justice" (T. Skrozza) deserves to be remembered in view of his long-term contribution to the establishment of order and respect for the law, and his humanism, which as the president of the Commission for Pardons of the President of the State shows towards a man who was sentenced to 40 years for aggravated murder.

Tamara Skrozza collected and meticulously listed various of his statements, attitudes and actions from the unforgettable nineties. I would like to supplement her list with a few more data and one correction: in addition to the mentioned professors, Vladimir Vodinelić, Vesna Rakić-Vodinelić, Vojin Dimitrijević and Dragor Hiber, but not Kosta Čavoški, Dean Oliver Antić also rushed Prof. Dragoljub Popović, who five or six years later was appointed as a judge of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. That appointment happened in 2004, an omission that would be unthinkable today. The adviser to the president would surely prevent that with his undisputed authority. It seems that after the expiration of Popović's mandate in 2014, we will be left without a judge from our country in that court, because both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice have declared themselves incompetent to nominate his successor, even though Serbia is at the top of the top list of cases in proportion to the number of inhabitants which are before that court. It will be that there are no suitable personnel, at least not among the politically suitable, and for political suitability, sometimes class and then national, prof. Antic is an exceptional expert with decades of experience.

Further, from the Faculty of Law under the management of Oliver Antić at that time, in 1998, Prof. Mirjana Stefanovski, assistants Dr. Milica Delević and Dr. Goran Svilanović. Disgusted, Prof. also left the Faculty of their own free will. Gaša Knežević and Dr. Vladimir Đerić. Their later professional successes, for which the president's advisor is certainly not responsible, are known and fortunately his long arm of extra-institutional processes can no longer reach them.

Another secret was mentioned on the public stage by Tamara Skrozza. And there, unfortunately, I don't have any completely verified information to complement her text. In the "Index" affair, Professor Antić was among the professors suspected of paying for exams. In 2010, that affair was swept under that huge carpet, which warms and protects from political and weather disasters many actors of our permanent so-called fight against corruption. We know who killed Liberty Valance (but it's still just a movie, fiction), but we'll never know who killed John Kennedy, who was the instigator of the murder of Zoran Djindjic, Slavko Ćuruvija, Judge Simeunović... I'm stopping here, this gloomy story is too long shameful list. But I'm afraid we'll never, compared to all those murders, find out even one such small thing - who and why covered up the "Index" affair and the role of legal counsel in it. It was, I remind you, in 2010. Are there any journalist-researchers who could determine who the prosecutors were, what they were threatened with, what the price was? Losing a job or passing a political fitness test?

Tamara Skrozza says at the end of her text that it seems to her that Oliver Antic's time is yet to come. And I don't think it ever passed. Such as the advisor to the president are people for everyone's time. I deliberately do not say "for all" so as not to offend those who are people for all time - unlike Oliver Antic.