Nataša Kandić (Serbian Cyrillic: Наташа Кандић) (born 1946, Kragujevac, Serbia, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian human rights activist and the founder and executive director of Humanitarian Law Center,[1] an organisation campaigning for human rights and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia, which she formed in 1992. She has won numerous international awards for her human rights work, but is also a figure of controversy in her home country, including being the subject of a high-profile defamation lawsuit by Tomislav Nikolić.
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After finishing her studies in sociology, Kandić became a dissident under Tito and a human rights activist after his death.[2]
She founded and is executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, a human rights organisation which has been praised for its systematic and impartial investigations of human rights abuses.[3] The work of the Center, established in 1992, is supported by a wide range of international bodies,[4] and Kandić's work has been recognised by numerous international prizes and awards.
She campaigns for the rights of all groups and all minorities, especially in times of conflict. Since the start of the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990s, she has been active in documenting and protesting against the atrocities committed between 1991 and 1999, including torture, rape, and murder. In 1991, she organized the Candles for Peace campaign in 1991 and the "Black Ribbon March" in 1992.[5] Her work has earned her the hatred of fellow Serbs and military leaders throughout the region and the admiration of human-rights defenders worldwide as she "forces governments to stop denying and covering up".[6]
Throughout the war in Kosovo, she traveled back and forth across Serbia, providing information to the outside world about human rights violations being committed by police and paramilitary groups. The evidence she gathered has been vital to the preparation of indictments by the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.[3] Kandić has a view that states, "if you want to establish a certain system of values where the rule of law is paramount, the law must be applied to those who broke it. The truth must come out."
Kandić holds that information such as the "smoking gun" video showing Serb paramilitaries executing six Bosnian Muslim prisoners near Trnovo, used as proof of Serbia's role in the Srebrenica genocide,[7] must be revealed.[8]
Kandić insists that she does not believe herself to be in a minority and cites the professionalism of the many policemen who provide her with most of her information. In 2005, she observed that those responsible for the very things she spoke about had the loudest voice but "one day it will be different".[8]
Kandic's comments in May 2007, purportedly blaming the territorial designs of the Serbian political elite rather than the Croat military's Operation Storm for the exodus of Krajina Serbs from Croatia ordered by their leaders,[9] caused controversy as has her support of Croatian President Stjepan Mesić, whom she described as a "proven anti-fascist in both word and act".
Her presence at Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008[10] also attracted criticism in Serbia.
In 2003, Kandić attended a protest rally held on the International Day of the Disappeared in Republic Square in Belgrade, against the lack of information about Kosovo Serbs missing since the 1999 conflict. She was confronted and repeatedly insulted by other attendees who called her a "traitor". After Nikola Popović, an elderly Serb refugee from Kosovo confronted her directly, she slapped him in the face and yelled back at him. The policemen present took her aside and requested her documents, which she protested saying they should instead request them from other persons. The police later charged her for violent behavior in public and disobeying the police orders.[11][12]
The organisation representing Serb refugees also filed charges. She justified her act by asserting she had to "defend [myself] from Serbian patriotism". In July 2005, the First Municipal Court in Belgrade dismissed the private lawsuit against Kandić. The attendees called the presiding judge a "Serb traitor".[13]
Kandić was found guilty on charges of defamation in February 2009 after her 2006 statements that Tomislav Nikolić killed elderly people in Croatia during the war. She was fined 200,000 Serbian dinars (around 2,000 EUR at the time).[14] International human rights organization Front Line condemned the charges as "part of a campaign aimed at stigmatizing human right defenders and human rights organisations operating in Serbia, portraying them as enemies of the country",[15] and Human Rights Watch named the case as an example of criminal libel laws used as "a tool to silence human rights criticisms."[16] The charges were later overturned on appeal by the Belgrade District Court.[17]
Kandić is a recipient of more than 20 international, regional and national human rights awards. In 2000 she won the The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, awarded jointly by Amnesty International, Diakonia, Human Rights Watch, HURIDOCS, International Alert, the International Commission of Jurists, the International Federation for Human Rights, the International Service for Human Rights and the World Organization Against Torture, granted annually to an individual or an organization who has displayed exceptional courage in combating human rights violations.[3]
She was listed by Time as one of its 36 European Heroes in 2003, and again featured as a Time European Hero in 2006.[18] In 2004 the People in Need Foundation awarded Kandić and the HLC its Homo Homini Award, presented by Václav Havel.[19]
In 2005 she was proclaimed an honorary citizen of Sarajevo, and Slobodna Bosna magazine named her Person of the Year in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In September 2006, Kandić was named to the Order of Danica Hrvatska, awarded by the President of Croatia to individuals who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of moral values.[20]
Kandić's awards have included the following:
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