Prosecutors Investigate Attack on Director Stevan Filipovic

Director and Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) professor Stevan Filipovic was attacked on the night between August 5 and 6 at the corner of Makedonska and Nusiceva streets in Belgrade, after he used his phone to film a group of people who, he says, were damaging a protected building on that corner. According to his own account, the attack happened in front of roughly 15 people who were waiting in line outside a shop called “Halo Leskovac” on Makedonska Street.

The First Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade responded the same day. The on-duty prosecutor was notified overnight, after which the collection of evidence was ordered.

“The on-duty prosecutor of the First Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade was informed that an attack by unknown perpetrators took place during the night, and therefore ordered that the identity of those involved be established, that all circumstances of the event be determined, and that available evidence be collected, including security camera footage,” the prosecutor’s office said.

The attackers have not yet been identified and are, at this stage, being treated as unknown persons.

How Filipovic described the attack

The FDU professor recounted the incident in a video posted on Instagram, and his account was also carried by the N1 television network.

“Hired men of the ruling party have, for the hundredth time, or I don’t even know which time anymore, vandalized the protected building, a cultural and historical monument on the corner of Makedonska and Nusiceva,” Filipovic said.

He was first attacked, he says, by a man he described as roughly 100 kilograms in a grey T-shirt, who grabbed his phone. When he went after the man who had taken it, five men knocked him down, and what followed, in his account, were kicks and blows from a metal chair taken from a terrace. He lost consciousness, and people standing in line came to his aid.

The injuries he listed:

• a clasp injury to his leg
• a hematoma on his hip
• a concussion
• a split lip

Doctors, he said, advised him not to move for the next 14 days. He also said he would insist that the attackers be identified and found, no matter how long that takes.

What prosecutors must now determine

The on-duty prosecutor’s order comes down to three tasks: the identity of the attackers, the circumstances of the incident, and securing footage from surveillance cameras at the intersection. The evidentiary situation here is unusually favorable, since the attack did not happen in the dark without witnesses, but on a busy corner in the heart of the city, in front of a line of people outside a shop and within reach of cameras. If identification still fails to happen, the question will not be whether evidence existed, but why it was not used.

The Academic Plenum has asked police and prosecutors to secure camera footage, identify all the attackers, locate the stolen phone, and examine the motive, level of organization and possible political links among those involved.

“When a university professor is attacked for trying to document possible unlawful conduct, that is not an ordinary incident,” the Academic Plenum said in a statement.

Reactions from the faculty, the academic network and the president

The Faculty of Dramatic Arts said the attack was the result of a months long campaign targeting members of the academic community.

Slobodan univerzitet, the Novi Sad based academic network, said the attack stems from a social climate that the authorities have spent years creating and sustaining, adding that “political opponents are targeted daily in the tabloids” while attackers often face no accountability.

President Aleksandar Vucic condemned the attack and said he expects the perpetrators to be found. That reaction from the top of the government is the political side of the story, but on its own it does not resolve what remains an operational matter for police and prosecutors: how quickly the footage will be secured, and whether anyone will be arrested.

Why this keeps coming back to FDU

The address where the attack took place is not politically incidental. Attacks on Faculty of Dramatic Arts students and staff were the immediate trigger for the start of the student blockades, the Academic Plenum notes, so the same institution has once again ended up at the center of a dispute over who has the final say on the street. The building on the corner of Makedonska and Nusiceva, described by Filipovic as a protected cultural and historical monument, was, by his account, not damaged for the first time, which also raises a question for the agencies responsible for protecting cultural monuments, separate from the criminal case.

The clock now running is a concrete one: security camera footage is kept for a limited time, and how quickly it gets secured will decide whether this case ends up with names and surnames attached to it, or stays at the description of a man in a grey T-shirt.