BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - A 21-year-old student protester who was arrested for carrying a styrofoam effigy of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in prison garb was severely beaten while in police custody, his mother said yesterday, in the first alleged instance of police brutality in 21 straight days of protests against Milosevic's regime.
Ljiljana Bulatovic met her son, Dejan, for 30 minutes yesterday and said he had a broken nose and a bad back after police allegedly beat the him on Friday. She quoted her son as saying police shoved a billy club up his anus, forced him to stand naked for several hours in a freezing room and clobbered his head and back while they held him in custody at Belgrade's central police station.
On Saturday, Bulatovic was sentenced to 25 days in jail for carrying the effigy of Milosevic, she said, and assigned a cell with no bed and a permanently open window. "My boy has asthma," she added. "He looks bad, his face is bloody. I don't know why they did this to him. They called him an enemy of the state."
The alleged beating of Dejan Bulatovic last week came a day after Milosevic gave in to Western demands to allow Belgrade's last two independent radio stations to resume broadcasting less than 24 hours after he shut them down. Serbian officials said the beating, while not necessarily ordered by the president, could not have occurred without his tacit support.
The maneuvers - one conciliatory, the other tough - are vintage Milosevic as he confronts the largest and most sustained challenge to his nine year rule. On the day Bulatovic was sentenced, for example, Milosevic met with Kati Marton, the president of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and wife of Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton peace plan for Bosnia. During that meeting he told Marton he would not order violence to be used against the demonstrators and signed a document promising to respect independent media in Serbia.
The document summed up Milosevic's tendency, as one diplomat put it, to "confuse us all on purpose." Marton scribbled out a statement that committed Milosevic to supporting "a free press in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the right to publish and broadcast without censorship freely here." Milosevic crossed out "without censorship," signed the document and handed it back.
Demonstrations erupted in Belgrade and other cities in Serbia on Nov. 18 after Together, a coalition of five opposition political parties, accused the president of using court orders and ballot-box stuffing to steal opposition victories in 14 of Serbia's 19 largest cities.
Western officials say Milosevic's tactics are designed to confuse his opponents and send mixed signals to the West, which has been increasingly critical of the Serbian president. They say he is trying to transform his image from the cause of this tumult into its solution. In the end, they say, his aim is to emerge as the only figure capable of ending the crisis.