June 17, 2024
A former head of the Belgrade Centre of the State Security Service, Milan Radonjić – one of the four individuals charged with the murder of Slavko Ćuruvija and acquitted in February by a decision of the Court of Appeal – has sued the Slavko Ćuruvija Foundation over a press release in which the SĆF expressed its disagreement with the verdict.
The Slavko Ćuruvija Foundation responded by releasing a statement in which it notes that “twenty-five years after the Ćuruvija murder, after nine years of court proceedings, two first-instance judgements finding the defendants guilty and the final acquittal of the defendants due to a lack of evidence, the crime against this journalist and owner of Dnevni telegraf and Evropljanin remains unpunished and unresolved.
“We are now witnessing an attempt to eradicate any memory of Ćuruvija and silence the voices that will not consent to impunity and allow things to be forgotten.
“I cannot accept that the judicial truth, which asserts only that there is no truth to be known, should be my truth as well. I cannot cleanse my mind and heart of everything I have learned, heard and seen over these long 25 years and pretend that I have not arrived at an “extrajudicial” truth. The same truth that the judiciary would have reached – in another country, in another time,” says Jelena Ćuruvija, daughter of Slavko Ćuruvija, speaking with regard to the lawsuit filed by former State Security Service official Milan Radonjić against the foundation which she founded.
“Such a truth is unspeakable for our courts. For our political reality, such a truth is unnecessary, even harmful. It is too burdensome. It is easier to forbid me from knowing the truth; to threaten me into forgetting it. Or at least to silence me. It is presumably expected that I will allow my father to rest in peace in a manner that will not disturb his killers,” says Jelena Ćuruvija.
