Valjevo marks 11 months, prosecutors only now hear victims

Residents of Valjevo took to the streets on Tuesday evening, July 14, for the eleventh monthly Valjevo Remembers gathering, exactly 11 months after the night police in the town used force against the people assembled there. The column set off from the Valjevo grammar school and ended in front of the police headquarters, the same spot where the same question has been asked since last August. The organisers’ message was short: police brutality must not become something people accept as normal.

What happened on August 14, 2025 is remembered in Valjevo not for the size of the crowd but for what came afterwards. The protest followed an attack by masked men on a cafe whose owner had backed the students. The night between August 14 and 15 produced scenes that later surfaced on video, including footage showing 15 officers beating a 15-year-old boy. Interior Minister Ivica Dacic denied the brutality claims that same night and said the police had been protecting public order, a reading the government has not abandoned since.

Why did it take 11 months to take a single statement?

The criminal complaint against 28 officers, for torture and abuse, was filed by 27 injured citizens. The file first sat with the Basic Prosecutor’s Office in Valjevo, where by all appearances it simply sat. Only after eight months without movement was it transferred to the Organised Crime Prosecutor’s Office, and only that transfer shook the case loose.

In early July the organised crime prosecutors started taking statements from the injured parties. According to Nikola Mirkovic of the victims’ legal team, at least 16 people have been heard so far, hearings are scheduled through July 24, and medical documentation is being collected in parallel. Formally, this is a live case. Substantively, it is the first time an institution has systematically listened to people who say state employees beat them, nearly a year after they reported it.

The gap between those two sentences is the whole Valjevo story. Nobody in authority claims the case has been closed or dismissed. Yet in 11 months, as far as the public knows, not one officer has been questioned as a suspect and not a single indictment has been filed.

What is being measured when time is measured

The accounts that reached the public over the past year are not abstract. Luka Subotic, then 20, said the officers were not looking where they struck and hit them in the head. Milan Ilic, then 26, was pulled out of a taxi and beaten with batons. Dusan Radovic, then 25, said he was kicked in the head and along his entire left side. The mother of the 15-year-old said it was horrifying. Those accounts are only now, 11 months on, going into the record.

Time in a criminal case is not a neutral category. Bruises fade, footage degrades, witnesses move away, memory softens. Every month that passes works for the person defending himself, not for the person who filed the report. That is why the monthly gatherings in Valjevo are not theatre. They are a reminder that a clock exists and that somebody is counting.

“Valjevo remembers. It remembers every blow, every injustice and everyone who stood by their town,” ran the message from Tuesday’s gathering. The organisers stress that they have not kept quiet for 11 months and do not intend to start.

The next date that means anything is July 24, when the hearings of the injured parties are due to wrap up. After that the ball sits entirely with the prosecutors. Will the name of even one suspected officer be known by the twelfth gathering on August 14?