Opposition Official Claims BIA Attempting to Break Farmers’ Protest

Vladimir Orlic (BetaPhoto/Milos Miskov)

The head of the Subotica chapter of the Freedom and Justice Party and of its caucus in the Assembly of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, Robert Sebek, accused on Oct. 2 the director of the Security and Information Agency (BIA), Vladimir Orlic, of “bringing in (for questioning) the organizers of farmers’ protests, for weeks now and against his legal authority, in order to intimidate the agricultural producers and prevent them from protesting.”

Every citizen has the constitutional right of free assembly, Sebek stated. The Subotica chapter of the party, as he said, has monitored these unpleasant events for weeks, but has so far not commented, as per the request of the members of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Subotica.

“However, after the bringing in of our fellow citizens, we are fiercely condemning the way in which members of BIA treated the farmers. They were not brought in for interviews – it was an attempt to intimidate (them) and to break the protest. Some of them, who are of Hungarian ethnicity, received ethnically based derogatory remarks from the BIA employees, about their ‘not being fluent in Serbian’ and ‘having an accent’,” Sebek pointed out.

He urged Vladimir Orlic to explain how this protest of farmers undermined the constitutional order of Serbia. “Why has he ordered his subordinates in the agency to insult the farmers who are Hungarian by ethnicity? All our farmers, whatever their name and surname is, suffer the same hardship while feeding all our children, including the children of Orlic and of all those who were apprehending them,” Sebek assessed.