Sombor Footballer Arrested in Croatia Over Mladic Photo
Footballer B. J. (37) from Sombor was arrested on the bench in Bolman, Croatia, over a Facebook photo of Ratko Mladic; fined 1,500 euros and barred from the EU for three months.
Footballer B. J. (37) from Sombor, who has spent eight years playing for Croatian lower league clubs without ever holding Croatian citizenship, was arrested on Sunday, September 20, in the middle of the first half of a match in Bolman, near Beli Manastir, over a photo of Ratko Mladic he had posted on Facebook sixteen days earlier. The case was laid out today in a chronology published by the Veritas Documentation and Information Center, and it matters for Belgrade because it shows Croatian authorities prosecuting Serbian citizens even over a post that stayed online for only a single day.
B. J. plays this season for NK Jovan Lazic from Bolman, in the Jagodnjak municipality in Baranja, traveling from Serbia for training sessions and matches since he never obtained Croatian citizenship. According to Veritas, on September 4 he posted a photo of General Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska who was convicted in The Hague of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to his Facebook story with no caption. Given the nature of that format, the post was visible for only 24 hours.
Accounts differ on what happened next. The Croatian outlet Dnevno.hr reports that Croatian border police issued the footballer a one day entry ban on September 13, along with a warning to be careful what he posts on social media. The Serbian outlet SNM, citing a Veritas statement, writes that he had already been denied entry twice before his arrest. Both sources agree that on September 20 he entered Croatia via Hungary to play the match, and that police arrested him at the stadium while he was sitting on the substitutes’ bench, in front of his teammates and the crowd.
The Veritas Documentation and Information Center calls the case a precedent.
The chronology of events unequivocally proves that the sole and direct trigger for the entire prosecution was a single social media post.
The organization added that the Serbian Consulate in Vukovar had not been notified in advance of the arrest of a Serbian citizen.
The Municipal Court in Osijek convicted B. J. the very next day, Monday, September 21, on a misdemeanor charge of disturbing public peace and order under Article 5 of Croatia’s Law on Misdemeanors against Public Peace and Order. According to Veritas, the Facebook photo was the only evidence presented at the trial. He was fined 1,500 euros, and his family was given two hours to pay it, under the threat that he would otherwise remain in custody. The same day he was also served a decision barring him from entering the European Union for three months, until December, and he returned to Sombor that evening.
Veritas notes that recent amendments to Croatian law raised misdemeanor fines for similar offenses to as much as 4,000 euros, and argues that Croatia is using this mechanism to further intimidate Serbs. The Bolman case is not an isolated one: our newsroom recently reported on a 49 year old Serbian man from Makarska who received a 14 day jail sentence for the same kind of post.
