The silence of a policeman: "Lalet is better"

Two months have passed since the first, shorter blockade of Radio and Television of Serbia and the incident in which he received serious injuries plainclothes policeman Lazar Baćić. Then it is his left eye was damaged and it was feared whether he would save it.

Now, after the operation, as some residents of Novi Selo, where Baćić is from, say, they see him and he is doing well.

"Lale looks completely normal. He had two or three surgeries, they saved his eye. I don't know how much he can see, how damaged it is, because it's not over yet, he should probably have three more operations, from what I hear from the stories. He wears a little cap or glasses to protect his eye from infections, because it's very sensitive now, but physically he looks like nothing happened to him, thank God," says one of the locals.

The policeman spent the past holidays in his hometown, and it is not known when he will return to work.

Because Baćić is silent. And to the questions of "Vremen" - how is he recovering, how does he feel two months after the incident, does he know when he will return to duty and does he have anything to say about the fact that he was actually hit by a fellow policeman. There was no answer.

What happened in March?

The whole of Serbia rose to its feet after Baćić's injury, because the eyes saw one thing, and the official information was different. In the video circulating on the networks, it was clearly seen that during the unrest in front of RTS, a plainclothes policeman was hit in the head by a colleague from the Gendarmerie.

The President of Serbia then wrote on Instagram with a photo of the injured Baćić that "Bolshevik plenums" were to blame for the incident, and thus the blame was placed on the students.

Baćić first apparently told the truth in a secretly recorded telephone conversation with an acquaintance. He soon addressed the public explaining how the incident happened.

"Last night, when I was engaged with my unit, I had the task of non-violently entering the building of the Radio and Television of Serbia and securing it from the inside, whereupon my unit was stopped and attacked, and I received several blows in the body and head area. I lost consciousness from the force of one blow, which I thought was a metal object, i.e. a 'boxer.'

He also distanced himself from the leaked phone conversation. "I'm sorry if I misled anyone with my statement," the gendarme concluded.

Who can see better?

Therefore, Baćić saved his sight after the intervention of the doctor, but he never admitted to the citizens that they also have eyes, so they clearly saw on the video that Baćić was shot, probably by mistake, by a colleague.

Some would say that Baćić sees, but is blindly obedient.

Lale, as he is called in Novi Selo near Loznica, is a father, husband, neighbor, friend. At the time of the incident, the assistant commander of the Belgrade detachment of the Gendarmerie. The Serbian flag flies on his house. He has his beliefs and he sticks to them.

The family used to have large vineyards and other fruits, many sheep. Even Tito's politicians came to his grandfathers, says an acquaintance of Baćić.

They say this and that about their fellow countryman who became a national topic in the village. According to one resident of Novosibirsk, that village is a mirror of the country.

Eternal divisions

One interlocutor claims that "everyone is against the fact that Baćić took a picture with him... His friends who are in the opposition no longer have a good opinion of him, only those who are for SNS praise him. He is a bad man."

On the other hand, there are people who say that Lazar Lale Baćić is a good man with whom they had no problems and that he helped them more than once. Some believe that he was protecting his children with his statements and actions after the incident, but there are claims that these children are also consciously on the same side.

There are always those who are for the government and those who are against it. It is the same in Novi Selo. It is a small place at the end of the municipality of Loznica, near the Drina. There are no more than a thousand souls, they live mostly from agriculture.

The elections in this village were previously convincingly won by the Serbian Progressive Party. Now the grumbling is louder and the question is how it will be in the next elections. And will the injury of his neighbor Laleta, who decided to take a picture with the president and then shut up, have an effect on that?