NEWSLETTER No. 4

KRALJEVO

Active NGO involvement in struggle against corruption

Corruption, as a form of moral depravity in a society, represents a very complex and delicate phenomenon. The concept of corruption is most often related to criminal proceedings and provisions of criminal law. For those reasons it is defined as a phenomenon of bribery – taking bribe. However, the real meaning is much broader. We are dealing with changing from a healthy into an unhealthy state, polluted, rotten and depraved from the usual. 

In tight mutual connection with politics, corruption has extraordinarily destructive power in all societies. It becomes particularly evident in totalitarian and authoritarian systems and environments in which long-lasting poverty has taken strong hold of greed for material goods. Compared to the the civil society, which also has bigger or smaller problems with moral failures, evident particularly through the frightening situation of social deviations and criminal, in time, totalitarian and authoritarian systems lose any kind of defence power against internal disintegration. Corruption takes hold of the whole social organism, from top to bottom. 

In order to counteract it, two assumptions are essential: At the top of the power pyramid, one should strongly renounce the privileges and malpractice that come along with it, so that afterwards – through consistent implementation of new patterns of behaviour and obeying the law – the citizens’ habits would alter as well. Its role is twofold: It has made significant contribution to creating hotbeds of crises and at the same time, parallel to the spreading of the crises, it has become more intense, destroying the remains of the old systems of social values. 

All these facts reflect the current social situation of one of the most corrupted state in Europe, Yugoslavia. In a word, the Serbian economic and social order, in its very long journey into the night of utter social chaos, which culminated before the October events in 2000, has a staunch companion in corruption as part of the system. It is clear that the problem of corruption, within the development of society, industrial recovery and higher standard, police and judiciary independence and transparent and responsible government, represents  the greatest problem. However, although this problem is perceptible in every step of the way, it is not clear why it has not been duly dealt with. 

For that reason, regardless of how implausible it may seem, or even naive, the fact is that only by putting this phenomenon under a sort of control we can hope to be radically safe from the crisis. This is either forgotten or people do not want to turn in that direction for different reasons. 

Will such practice come to an end? This is up to the new government, and the NGOs as well, because it is questionable how much longer the agony can go on. If the limit is the beginning of wide social unrest, there is a real danger it will be too late for everything.

The project "Anticorruption – the project of encouragement", within which the RCGA LINGVA (member of NGO Forum -Kraljevo) has realised the campaign "Be brave! NO to corruption", which we believed could achieve this goal, consisted of five phases in the duration of two months each, and each of the phases was focused on corruption in one of the five most corrupted institutions: education department, health department, judiciary, police and public services under the competence of local self-management. 

Each of the phases developed through the activities that comprised: television and radio jingles, posters, leaflets, public forums and television broadcasts with eminent experts.

Subsequent to these activities, the experience that LINGVA gained through their realisation resulted in issuing a publication in December 2002, in 1,500 copies, which will be distributed to citizens, the media, NGOs, as well as the workers employed in corrupted institutions. 

The target group of the project was primarily the population of Kraljevo, but also the citizens of the neighbouring municipalities covered by the programme of RTV Kraljevo (Krusevac, Trstenik, Vrnjacka Banja). We believe that through this campaign we managed to animate the people employed or engaged in the local self-management agencies, public institutions (judiciary, police, education and health departments) and non-governmental organisations. The project was supported by the local self-management agencies. 

With a view of the fact that in the preceding period no other organisation in Kraljevo Region, whether governmental or not (except for “Otpor”), has addressed the subject of corruption, it was our intention with this project to, in a way, draw a line and point to the essential problem of our society through an intense media campaign. By realising this project we wanted to help our citizens to overcome their fear and become actively involved in the struggle against corruption in our surroundings. 

We believe that our campaign has had a positive impact and that it will continue to influence other NGOs, as well as the system institutions, to join us in the campaign or to start similar projects independently.

This project can initiate something that could greatly benefit our community - a series of programmes related to the corruption problem, in cooperation with the local self-management and other NGOs, which would result in bringing an anticorruption law by the Republic Parliament. This would provide the realisation of programmes like: introducing the ombudsman system as active control of the government, introducing volunteers into public institutions, also as a kind of control and similar.