The death of individual responsibility

"In various fields in my life I can measure my success. But when it comes to this matter, which is, of course, one of the most important in my life, I very often feel that I have not moved literally a single step in the search for justice and truth." These are the words of Jelena Ćuruvija Đurica, the daughter of the murdered journalist Slavko Ćuruvija, uttered at the panel "Murder Slavka Ćuruvije, state crime without responsibility and judicially established confusion" held on March 11 in Belgrade.

Jelena Ćuruvija added that she is turning 50 this year, and she was 23 when her father was killed.

Actions without responsibility and crimes without guilt have become part of the local folklore. The public perception of these events is often reduced to a few sighs, shaking the head, while in private space, out of the public eye, the consequences and how they live in the traumas and destinies of those whose lives remain permanently marked by the fact that they were left without a father, a child, several family members at once, without being swept away by some elemental disaster that could not be prevented, but by very human actions. Most often, these are the actions of the government, the actions of the great and powerful, those who take credit only for the good, and never bear the consequences for the bad, nor do they think they should.

Only sometimes, very rarely, do these private destinies show their face in public. Then their names are Jelena Ćuruvija, Dijana Hrka, Milovan Milivojević, Žanka Stojanović...

Who is Žanka, the reader will ask, with a slight sense of guilt, unaware that it is not about him, but about "too much history per capita".

Žanka Stojanović is the mother of one of the employees of Radio and Television of Serbia who died on April 23, 1999 in the NATO bombing of the RTS building in Aberdareva Street in Belgrade. Like Diana Hrka, she is the only one of all the family members of the victims who did not allow herself to be silenced.

IMPUNITY AS DESTINY

How many Jelena, Žanki, Diana are among us? How many of those who lost their loved ones because of the government's fault, and no one was held accountable for it? The death of Slavko Ćuruvija shows that the impunity of crimes goes back a long way in our history (you can go even further than that 1999...), but this government, which in two months will mark a full 14 years of rule, will, among other things, be remembered for perhaps the largest number of victims in peacetime.

With the full awareness that the readers know very well what happened, it is our moral duty to repeat everything once again and to keep repeating it.

The floods of May 2014 were one of the biggest natural disasters in the recent history of Serbia. The hardest hit was Obrenovac, where there was sudden flooding due to overflowing rivers and, you guessed it, insufficient protection. Officially, 57 people died, and tens of thousands were evacuated. Although there were warnings of extreme rainfall, the response of the system was slow and uneven. Despite the scale of the tragedy and public promises that responsibility would be determined, no one from the top of the state or local self-government was held politically or criminally responsible. Moreover, Miroslav Čučković, then president of Obrenovac Municipality, is today the chief city manager of Belgrade.

photo: vesna lalić / nova

A little less than a year after the floods, on March 13, 2015, near the "Nikola Tesla" Airport, during an attempt to land in bad weather conditions, a Serbian Army helicopter carrying a baby from Novi Pazar crashed. All seven people on the plane were killed, including the crew, medical personnel and the baby. The investigation pointed to a series of lapses in the chain of command and decision-making, including pressure to carry out the flight despite the risks. It will be remembered that some media that night published the news about the "great feat" of the Government of Serbia, with the help of which the helicopter landed successfully and the baby was saved. The news was sent to the media while pilot Omer Mehić was still trying to land.

"I don't see the runway", was Mehić's last sentence heard by flight control, while the then Minister of Defense Bratislav Gašić and Minister of Health Zlatibor Lončar were allegedly sitting in the VIP lounge of the airport. Both of them are still in office today: Lončar is still in charge of healthcare, and Gasić is once again the Minister of Defense. It was as if nothing had happened and as if not even a day had passed since this accident, not 12 years.

In the night between April 24 and 25, 2016, a group of masked persons demolished several buildings in Belgrade's Savamala, in the area planned for the Belgrade on the Water project. Citizens reported that the police did not respond to calls during the night, and masked persons tied some of them with plastic handcuffs and took away their mobile phones. Slobodan Tanasković (1958), a guard of buildings in Herzegovina who witnessed the night demolition and who was tied up by masked attackers, took away his mobile phone and personal documents, died a month later.

On that April night, the constitutional order was clearly and obviously suspended in part of the territory of Belgrade and Serbia for the first time. The prime minister at the time, Aleksandar Vučić, declared that "the demolition was ordered by a complete idiot", but also that those shantytowns should have been demolished. The wife of Finance Minister Siniša Malog, who was the main man for the construction of Belgrade on the water, Marija Mali, during the divorce case and custody battle, repeatedly told the media that her husband admitted to her that he organized the demolition in Savamala.

"Milovane, it's hard to look at you", is a sentence uttered by Vučić during his visit to Lucani. That's how the general public learned about Milovan Milivojević, whose son Milomir died in July 2017 in an explosion in the factory of the dedicated industry "Milan Blagojević" Namenska in Lučani. His death, together with another worker, opened the issue of safety at work and the responsibility of the management, as well as the responsibility of Radoš Milovanović, the man who was the director of this factory for more than 30 years. The family has been waging a legal battle for years pointing out systemic failures and inadequate working conditions. Radoš Milovanović died during the trial, and the trial against the other two, Vladimir Lončarević and Toma Stojić, lasted six years. It ended in May 2025 with an acquittal for Lončarević and a two-year sentence for Stojić. Court proceedings took a long time, and the case became a symbol of the fight against institutional slowness and evasion of responsibility.

"Your son did not work on the runway", is the second brutal sentence that Vučić sent to Milovan Milivojević. The whole case is also remembered for the incomprehensible cruelty of the residents of Lucan towards the Milivojević family: a large number of them work at the "Milan Blagojević" factory, but even today it is completely incomprehensible how a huge number of them decided to come to rallies in support of Director Milovanović and to whistle at the Milivojević family. Maybe it's something we should get used to - that's what the supporters of the Serbian Progressive Party sang in November 2025 to Dijana Hrka, the mother of Stefan who died in canopy collapse "The mother of her son went to look for him". Evil is there, with us and among us.

photo: a. kostic / southern news

If there is a case in which the government tried to feign responsibility, it is the death of Stanika Gligorijević. She died on January 31, 2019 at the Doljevac toll plaza when the vehicle carrying Zoran Babić, then the director of the Corridor of Serbia, hit the car she was in. The accident attracted a lot of attention due to the fact that it was not immediately clear who was driving the official vehicle. Babić resigned, and the driver was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Two minutes of footage from the toll plaza, and crucial two minutes at that, simply disappeared. Vučić, of course, claimed that he saw them and that "the video is creepy".

Finally, on November 1, 2024, the canopy at the Railway Station in Novi Sad collapsed. 16 people died. The accident opened up questions about the quality of infrastructure reconstruction, the supervision of works and the responsibility of contractors and institutions. The public pointed to possible failures in control and political connections in the realization of the project. An investigation was launched, but it became clear at an early stage that establishing full responsibility would be a lengthy and uncertain process. The case is divided into several indictments, part of the proceedings are conducted in Novi Sad, and part in Belgrade. In December 2025, the indictment against the Minister of Construction, Goran Vesić, his assistant, Anita Dimoski, and Jelena Tanasković, the former director of Infrastructure of Railways of Serbia, was dropped. They were charged with a serious crime against causing public danger.

METASTASIS OF IMPUNITY

President Aleksandar Vučić caused strong reactions from the public after the decision to pardon four suspects in the beginning of July 2025 for a brutal attack on students in Novi Sad, in which one student's jaw was broken with a baseball bat. The incident, which happened at the end of January of the same year, was one of the most severe forms of violence recorded during the wave of student protests. Proceedings were initiated against the attackers for serious crimes, including violent behavior and inflicting serious physical injuries, but the presidential pardon practically stopped the proceedings before the court verdict was passed.

The pardon decision opened up the question of the limits of presidential powers, but also of the state's attitude towards violence against protest participants. While representatives of the government justified this move by the institutional right of the president, part of the legal and general public assessed it as a politically motivated act that undermines trust in the judiciary. It is particularly problematic, according to critics, that the court was not given the opportunity to make a final decision on the guilt of the accused.

Parallel to that case, the public's attention was drawn to the incident of January 24, 2025 in New Belgrade, when Milica S. drove her car into a column of demonstrators and seriously injured a student orderly. Although she was initially suspected of attempted aggravated murder, the prosecution later reduced the qualification of the crime to a serious crime against general security. This change significantly affected the further course of the proceedings and the potential sentence, and additional controversy was caused by the decision to release the suspect from custody.

Unlike the Novi Sad case, there was no pardon here, but the legal steps - from the mitigation of the indictment to the transfer of the case to a lower court - raised questions about the uniformity of the institutions' actions. Taken together, these cases became emblematic of the broader debate about responsibility for violence during protests and the role of the state in ensuring equality before the law.

IMPERATIVE OF IRRESPONSIBILITY

All that we live can be explained through social sciences and disciplines, primarily social psychology and ethics. But since it's about responsibility, we'll stick to ethics. In his book Principle of responsibility, the German-American philosopher Hans Jonas puts political power in the context of the consequences of today's decisions on future generations. In short, man today has so much power that he is obliged to think about the consequences of his actions in the distant future, not only in the present. Jonas starts from the fact that classical ethics arose at a time when people could not seriously threaten the planet or the survival of humanity. Moral rules were therefore focused on direct relationships between people: don't lie, don't kill, be just. However, with the development of technology, industry and politics, man has gained the power to permanently change nature, society and even the living conditions of future generations. This is why, argues Jonas, the old ethics are no longer sufficient.

He introduces a new principle: act so that the consequences of your actions are consistent with the survival of authentic human life on Earth.

In other words, the responsibility is no longer only towards contemporaries, but also towards those who do not yet exist. This includes caution, foresight, and even a kind of "fear as a moral virtue," the idea that one should take seriously the worst possible consequences of one's decisions. Unlike ethics that look at intentions or short-term benefits, Jonas insists on long-term consequences and the limits of power. He is particularly critical of politics and technology that operate without sufficient regard for the future. His point, translated to the modern context, is: if you have power, you also have greater responsibility, even when no one formally calls you to account. In a world where the consequences of decisions last for decades, irresponsibility is no longer a mistake but a danger.

In our context, from the floods of 2014 to the collapse of the canopy in Novi Sad in 2024 and the pardoning of thugs, the pattern is the same: disasters affect citizens, the damage is measured in human lives and billions, and those responsible from the top of the state remain untouched. Helicopters are falling., factories explode, urban projects collapse, and deaths like Stanika Gligorijević and Milomir Milivojević become statistics while the system shifts the blame to lower levels, to the crew, workers or random individuals.

The demolition in Savamala, when the police did not react to illegal actions, became a symbol not only of institutional weakness, but also of an obvious mechanism of power protection. This phenomenon, known as the principle of impunity, is not just a technical or legal weakness; it is the moral fault of the system at the root that confirms what Hans Jonas warned four decades ago: power that does not take responsibility is not neutral but dangerous. When a government ignores the consequences of its decisions, it not only ignores current victims, it creates a culture in which any future disaster becomes legitimate, because the rules of accountability simply do not apply. A system that does not punish mistakes no longer serves the citizens, but serves itself by producing a chain of irresponsibility that erodes trust and destabilizes the moral foundation of society.

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