SOCIETY-BALKANS: Night Curfew Unlikely to Contain Serbian Youth

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 4 2005 (IPS) - A series of violent crimes by minors has led Serbian authorities to call for a curfew of sorts upon youths in Serbia.

"Minors should not be alone in the streets after midnight," Serbian education minister Slobodan Vuksanovic said at a recent press conference. "This is the least we can do to prevent further violence among minors."

Interior minister Dragan Jocic said at the same press conference that more police officers should be posted at schools because there is a "significant rise in delinquency by minors."

Some 50 schools in capital Belgrade, with a population of about two million, agreed back in 2001 to have police officers in and around the premises. Hundreds of others should follow suit, the minister said.

The ministers proposed such measures after a series of crimes in a matter of days.

A 16-year-old boy named only as N.K. died Mar. 16 after he was severely beaten up by two other boys following a quarrel. Two boys aged 17 were stabbed with knives by three 16-years-olds Mar. 19 after a basketball match. They barely survived.

N.B. (16) survived after he was stabbed by two minors in downtown Belgrade after attending the memorial service for N.K. Mar. 21. The two wanted his cell phone.

Earlier, a group of three minors threw a 14-year-old boy from Belgrade bridge into the icy Sava river after a fight. Horrified commuters caught the perpetrators, but the 14-year-old died in the freezing water.

But in the face of such incidents the proposal for a curfew drew mixed reactions. "Curfew can’t help…we’ll find ways to skip it," Sandra Kovacevic (17) told IPS.

For one thing cafes and other places where the young gather rarely respect the law that demands closure by midnight. Media efforts to show that neither neighbouring Croatia nor much of the West has such late nightlife have failed to dissuade Serb youngsters from staying out late.

Some experts think the curfew could be a positive move, but others point out that the most gruesome crimes in the past weeks did not happen at night.

"Generally, having a curfew would be okay, but what happens to the youth has nothing to do with the time of day," president of the Serbian Pedagogy Society Sonja Jankovic told IPS. "It’s about the destruction of normal values and about the culture of violence that prevails here."

Serbia went through three wars in the 1990s, and then economic devastation through strict international sanctions.

The wars produced "national Serb heroes" as role models for the young, despite the fact that most of them committed war crimes in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia, and became rich through smuggling that breached sanctions.

Sympathy for the sufferings of war victims, including civilians, women and children, was shunned. The wars took the lives of some 250,000 people, most of them non-Serbs.

Almost none of the wartime heroes have faced justice since 2000 when the regime of their patron Slobodan Milosevic fell from power.

On the other hand, the road towards market economy since then has been slow and painful. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs, besides the hundreds of thousands who remain idle since the 1990s.

"Social climate stimulates violence," psychiatrist Dragan Pajic told IPS. "Young people have no one to turn to…old values have crashed, parents are confused, and the message to the young is not clear."

Pajic says Serbian minors and adolescents have little access to expert help; there is on average just one child psychiatrist for 55,000 children.

"Juvenile delinquency is on the rise and perpetrators are younger, starting for example, with a first burglary at the age of nine," Vlastimir Vulikic, head of a prevention centre for juvenile delinquency told media representatives.

Juvenile crime is rising at the rate of ten percent year, Belgrade police say. No statistics are available for the rest of Serbia. In 2004, minors committed 1,890 crimes in Belgrade.

"Our experience shows that in 80 percent of cases the cause can be found in a devastated or dysfunctional families," Vukilic said.

Experts, parents and the young agree there should be a broader strategy to help and educate the youth.

"Repressive measures like curfew, hastily proposed by politicians as an answer to violent incidents, are not the long-term measure to improve the lives of the young," said Milos Antic, head of the Youth Programme for Southeastern Europe, an association of seven non-governmental organisations.

"It’s only an overall strategy that should help, with all the segments of society being included," Antic told IPS. "Serbia is the only country in the region that does not have such a national plan."