The BIA Fighting an Internal Enemy of the State

At a time when corruption is rising in Serbia, the number of professional killings by organized crime groups is growing, extremism and nationalism are on the rise, and many scandals that occupy the media remain without an epilogue, the Security Information Agency (BIA) is fighting internal enemies and as the biggest threat to Serbia’s security highlights one part of the civil society.

Contrary to the expectations of the general and professional public, there has been no comprehensive reform of the security sector in Serbia, including security services. Since democratic changes in Serbia in year 2000, there has been a partial and inconsistent reform of the security services and the security-intelligence sector, guided by the wishes and ambitions of the strongest political leaders to control the work of the security services, and not by the desire to make the security services one of the bases for protecting the democratic order proclaimed in the first article of the Serbian Constitution.

The never-ending client relationships between security services and politicians in power have only strengthened, and today are an almost more important regulator of the relationship between security services and politics than laws and the Constitution. Therefore, it is not surprising that security services in Serbia today are more of a threat to the democratic order than serving the function of protecting it.

In the analysis, find out more about how seemingly unrelated “affairs” indicate a trend of abuse of security services with an aim of capturing the state.

The analysis is part of a larger body of work dealing with the flows and mechanisms of the capture of security services in Serbia by political authorities, from 2006 to the present, which will be published by the end of 2019. The paper will describe how the (re)arrangement of the security-intelligence sector after the restoration of Serbia’s independence created the preconditions for complete capture of security services. Particular attention will also be paid to legal deficiencies that seemed less important at the time, but later proved to be important in the political instrumentalization of the security-intelligence sector. It will also analyse the way in which the ruling party has collapsed the oversight and control mechanisms of the security services, removing obstacles to their full instrumentalization. It will also show how the ruling party uses the security-intelligence sector for personal and party purposes, including for dealing with critics of the government, through concrete examples.