After the death of a little girl, popular anger in Serbia became so great that the president is already talking about bringing back the death penalty

Bor’s name could already sound ominous to the Hungarian reader, including the poet Miklós Radnóti, who was imprisoned in the labor camp of the copper mining town during World War II. The small town in Serbia and its surroundings have been in the news in recent weeks due to the horrific death of a small child. Despite the arrest of the suspected perpetrators and the confession of one of them, the body of the two-year-old girl has not been found for weeks, while because of the incident, politicians are already calling for the death penalty at the highest levels, and for the constitutional amendment that embeds it.

Two men were taken into custody, but the body was not where they said it was

Two-year-old Danka Ilić went missing on March 26. At the beginning, there were also speculations that the little girl had been kidnapped or that her parents had sold her. The case quickly crossed borders: after a rumor spread that a little girl who looked a lot like Danka appeared in Vienna, Interpol sounded the alarm. However, these turned out to be a dead end.

According to the BBC, a week and a half after the disappearance, two men working at the local water works were arrested on suspicion of having killed the little girl. One of them admitted their crime after traces of blood were found in their service car. According to this, it was not an intentional homicide, the two men in their 50s accidentally ran over the little girl who was playing near her grandfather’s house in Banjsko Polje near Bor. Based on the first reports, it seemed that they were not going fast with their Fiat Panda (about 20 km/h) when they ran over the child, although there were also reports that they were not going at a speed appropriate for the road conditions.

It seems that the two men stopped to urinate in the street, and after leaving, they ran over the child, who was left alone by his mother for a few moments while she went into the house. The two men did not call for help, but instead put the little girl’s body in the trunk of the car among the tools. Before they drove away, the father appeared and asked them if they had seen his daughter, but they denied knowing anything about her.

After their preliminary arrest, one of the men claimed that the body had been taken to a garbage dump, but the police, firefighters and mountain rescuers had searched for it in vain. Meanwhile, the father and brother of one of the suspects were detained on suspicion of helping to remove the body from the dump.

There is another development in the story, the circumstances of which are being investigated: the detained brother died in police custody.

According to the authorities, the man died of natural causes, however, according to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, there were signs of beating on his body.

In mid-April, the search team combed through a nearby canyon, looked into a 70-meter-deep pit, and searched with thermal cameras and drones, all to no avail. The fact that initially – for the first time in the history of Serbia – the service called Pronađi me (Find me!) was activated, which sent notifications to phones and with the help of which radio and TV stations interrupted their broadcasts, did not lead to success either.

According to Szabad Magyar Szó, the search for the body of the missing Danka will continue, even if with less intensity, and the suspects may be convicted without the body being found, even on the basis of DNA data.

Where are the monsters?

The incident quickly became a political projection beyond the fact that the head of Bor Waterworks and Sewerage Public Company resigned from his position because of the case. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić called Danka’s killers “monsters” and, instead of his usual divisive rhetoric, said that the national unity over the little girl showed “that we have not lost our souls, that people have heart and strength.”

In comparison, according to the Balkan Insight article, social media discussed what happened in stomach-turning detail, with the help of the tabloids as well. Even in a case of this weight, disinformation has spread, and the family members of the suspected perpetrators have received threats, so that even the Serbian Ministry of the Interior has warned: spreading false information can lead to prison. A police officer from Bor who leaked information about the investigation has already been detained.

It was typical that the editor of the Informer tabloid listed unverified theories about the little girl’s killing in a video, while the Kurir also published a photo of one of the men they believed to be the perpetrator, and was then forced to apologize after it turned out that the person had nothing to do with the case. In the first few days, the mother of the missing girl was picked up on social media with the fabricated story that she herself sold the child (in fact, she only went into the house to fetch water for her other child, and when she returned, she no longer found her daughter in the yard).

The whole phenomenon also spread across the border, the Bosnian police previously detained three tiktokers who – falsely, for the sake of sensationalism – claimed that Danka was being held in their basement.

It’s no wonder that human rights activists started the hashtags neucestvujem (#I don’t buy) and neklikcem (#I don’t click), which were quickly adopted by many well-known Serbian people. They are trying to draw attention to the fact that you should not click on the many articles, news, and videos that are click hunters and spread false information.

Vučić raised the issue of the death penalty

According to Balkan Insight, after the arrest of the two men, several Serbian newspapers began to demand the reinstatement of the death penalty. This quickly reached the threshold of irritation of President Vučić, who at the beginning of April spoke about the reinstatement of the death penalty in the most serious crimes. Regarding the idea, Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić said that it requires a constitutional amendment and a referendum, and stated as an argument: “such monsters must be judged […]average people could certainly suffocate them with their bare hands”.

In addition to the case around Bor, Vučić also referred to the school shooting in Belgrade last May, in which the 13-year-old perpetrator killed 10 people, mostly students, with his father’s gun.

The death penalty has not been included in the Serbian penal code since 2002, the last one was carried out on February 14, 1992 in Zombor, Vojvodina. A man from Vojvodina named Johan Drozdek was sentenced to death, who raped and killed an acquaintance’s daughter out of rage because she did not give him his bicycle. The death penalty was last imposed in 2001, but this was later changed to 40 years in prison, as in the case of all convicts on death row since 1991.

According to Novosti, nearly 4,500 executions took place in Serbia and its predecessor states during the approximately 200 years of legalization of the death penalty. The last convicts were executed for murder and, in one case, war crimes.

Serbia’s N1 spoke to anthropologist Svetlana Slapšak, one of the human rights activists of the Yugoslav era, who collected signatures for the abolition of the death penalty (there is also a website dedicated to the struggle). He recalled that at that time he first started collecting signatures against the most serious form of punishment in the member republic of Slovenia, where more than four thousand people signed the petitions. According to him, execution is nothing but “cruelty, primitiveness, hatred of humanity”. According to him, it is part of the human psyche to reduce tensions after the terrible case, that many of the people would now turn to this again.

According to Slapšak, the abolition of the death penalty in Europe is part of the public consensus, a kind of civilizational milestone that should not be debated.

In addition, some American research shows that it has no deterrent effect: in the American member states where the death penalty exists, the number of serious crimes has not decreased.

According to Branislav Tapušković, a lawyer who was also interviewed, the abolition of the death penalty in 2002 was a “civilizational achievement” and before that it humiliated the state to execute people. Tapušković also brought in the idea that suspected criminals were often executed too quickly in Yugoslavian times, even though their guilt was not 100 percent certain. Public opinion often calls for immediate death, as was evident from the recent case of two-year-old Danka, even for people who had nothing to do with the case.

According to Vreme’s commentary, Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party was initially opposed to the death penalty, but over the years it has also turned around. According to the article, the president surrendered to popular anger over Danka’s death. However, one of the conditions for membership of the Council of Europe – which operates independently of the EU – is that the death penalty is not in force in the member states.

In addition, Vučić raised the issue of the death penalty on Informer TV, writes Vreme, where the details of Danka’s killing were discussed in the most disgusting detail, with many leaks, and a lot of information was released to the police. Meanwhile, the media and the state do nothing to ensure that less violence appears on the screens and that children are psychologically supported. The article also refers to an article from last year, in which it was mentioned that approx. Until 2014, the opinions of Serbian residents were split between supporters and opponents of the death penalty, but since then the number of supporters has risen to over 70 percent. Vreme’s writing summarizes the situation as

Vučić threw in the topic for votes and out of populist calculation, knowing that Serbia will not bring back the death penalty anyway (which would also jeopardize the country’s accession to the European Union).

According to Dnevnik, Vučić is asking the new Serbian government that will be formed soon after the December elections to see if the death penalty is compatible with Serbia’s membership in the Council of Europe. According to the Danas article, the government cannot change this, and amending the constitution requires a two-thirds legislative majority and/or a referendum. Vučić also said that the arguments of the opponents are also important: “If you make a mistake once and it is established after 10 or 30 years that you made a mistake, that is a much greater crime than giving someone a lighter sentence,” he argued in favor of caution.

According to Danas, the Serbian head of state was able to express caution because he knows very well that due to (international) legal obligations, nothing will come of the idea. In the meantime, however, he can point to the Western legal norms that bind the hands of the Serbian state. Deputy Prime Minister Miloš Vučević, future Prime Minister, also indicated that, as a lawyer, he would be moderate in this case, according to him, the penal code adequately regulates the penalties for serious crimes.

In Europe, the death penalty is currently only used in Belarus, it is legal in Russia, but a moratorium has been in place since the end of the nineties, and there are no executions.

In Hungary, since a decision of the Constitutional Court in 1990, there has been no death penalty, which, by the way, is not allowed by EU membership and several international conventions, despite this, it is brought back after every serious crime. The last time it came up more seriously was in 2015, when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán talked about it for weeks, addressing public opinion and eliciting condemnatory statements from European leaders. According to analysts, at that time the government tried to divert attention from the mandatory window covering in connection with a brutal murder committed in a traffic light, but there was also the possibility of the attrition of one of the main themes of the then-popular Jobbik.