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From the information that the monument to Stefan Nemanja in the Sava square in Belgrade costs at least nine million euros, it is worse that the payment process is not transparent, that we do not know if the monument was paid by the Government or the City Council, while that the price of the entire project is marked as a state secret.
Photo: Aleksandar RoknićThis is how Danas’ interlocutors evaluate the data obtained by TV H1 journalists, who learned about customs documents, which show that ten trucks arrived from Belgrade to Belgrade with parts of the monument, for which nine million euros were paid.
According to H1 reports, customs documents show that ten trucks from Russia, which were dispatched at different prices, entered Serbia with parts of the monument.
The lowest price is around 600,000 euros.
The prices of parts of the monument amount to more than one million euros.
When the amounts indicated in the documents were collected from Customs, the H1 journalists amounted to the sum of nine million euros, that is, at least one billion dinars.
However, the city and republic authorities continue to conceal the total cost of the construction and erection of the monument.
As Danas previously wrote, the Belgrade City Secretariat of Culture stated that it could not reveal the price of the monument because that information is a state secret.
Thus, the Secretariat responded to the request for information of public relevance, which was sent by a group of professors from the Faculty of Philosophy about the price of the monument to Stefan Nemanja Grad.
The application was submitted by Professors Dubravka Stojanović, Ognjen Radonjić, Sasa Brajović, Nenad Makuljević and Milan Vukomanović.
One of them, Dubravka Stojanović, explains to Danas that at the end of this procedure, when the city authorities refused to submit the requested information, the teachers had the only possibility to lodge an appeal with the Administrative Court.
– That would certainly be interesting, but it is beyond our strength. I don’t know what the real price would be, but I know that the price of the monument should not be a state secret. At least, it’s already a clear sign that something is wrong, Stojanović said.
Art history professor Nenad Makuljevic adds that this figure is certainly not final because it does not include installation costs and that citizens have a right to know how state funds are being spent.
– I think that hiding costs does not make any sense, because obviously they are found and published gradually. Citizens have the right to know who is reshaping Belgrade’s public identity and by what means. Especially in light of the pandemic, it is certainly not a priority to fund monuments, those funds had to be directed towards medical care, Makuljević stated for our paper.
The data, which is kept as a state secret until 2023, could be disclosed to citizens even earlier, according to the Deputy Mayor Goran Vesić, who assures that he is not in charge of it.
– The city of Belgrade did not pay for the construction of the monument, and when everything is finished, the Serbian Government will announce the price, so I am not the address for that, I am dealing with the construction of the monument, Vesić said last month.
Nemanja Nenadić from Transparency Serbia, points out for Danas that from the question of whether nine million euros is the real value of the monument, it is much more important to discover why it is a state secret.
– Much more controversial, than any price, is the fact that there is a certain secret of that price. We can say whether the investment is justified or not, but the basic question that has remained unanswered is for what reasons the secrecy was determined and whether these reasons are based on the law. There is the greatest doubt about this because it is difficult to imagine that the security of the state or international relations could be jeopardized if the price of the monument is revealed, says Nenadić.
He points out that the only thing the city authorities must do to remove suspicion of this process is to publish the information requested by the public.
– The responsibility for publishing the data rests with the person who managed them. To begin with, it is important to clarify whether it is the government or the city of Belgrade, Nenadić said. He also recalls that the situation is reminiscent of the monument issue in Skopje, where one of the most expensive monuments also cost around nine million euros, while the construction of the entire monumental complex proved problematic. Nenadic believes that Stefan Nemanja’s case is starting to look like this.
Veljanovsky: banalized attitude towards tradition
Rade Veljanovski, head of the committee group of the Democratic Civic Forum in the Belgrade Assembly, points out to Danas that the issue of the construction of this monument never passed through the City Assembly, that the process is completely non-transparent and that the authorities the republic and the city transfer responsibility between them. More terrible than that, however, are, according to Veljanovski, the ideological and political consequences left by this monument.
– Apart from the lack of transparency, we see a clearly populist relationship in which the issue of identity is overemphasized. It is as if we could pay more tribute to the size of the monument. It is a violation of patriotism. Instead of working to involve citizens in decisions, hold them accountable for the costs, create a better social community towards which citizens will feel sincere patriotism, we are trivializing the idea of attitude towards history and tradition, Veljanovski emphasized.
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