A Bosnian actor who was deported from Serbia this week has said he believes he was expelled for writing openly about his experience in the war in the 1990s and that “there is no such thing” as freedom of expression under the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić.
Serbian authorities detained Fedja Stukan after he arrived at a Belgrade airport to attend a literary festival and put him on a flight to Sarajevo on Monday.
Stukan – an activist, author and actor known for his role in Angelina Jolie’s 2011 film In the Land of Blood and Honey, about the war in Bosnia – told the Guardian the Serbian authorities had designated him a “national security risk”. But, he said, the real reason for his deportation was his blunt writing.
“I wrote a very dangerous book,” he said in a phone interview on Monday evening. “I quit heroin, alcohol and everything, and I became a pilot and father and movie producer and actor, and I wrote a book about my life. I was a sniper in a war. I was in special combat in a war. So I know things, I know how they were done during the war,” he said.
“I told everything about everyone, and all of those nationalists just, you know, hate me so much because they know that I touched them in the right place,.”
Stukan’s autobiography, Blank, describes his journey from the frontlines of the war in Bosnia to political activism and Hollywood film-making. More than 100,000 people were killed in the 1992-95 war, with Serb forces tried and convicted of committing war crimes. The conflict remains a sensitive issue in the region.
On Monday, Stukan, who has previously participated in anti-government protests in Belgrade, also took aim at Serbia’s leadership, arguing that the country’s president allows some opposition voices to maintain a veneer of democracy.
“There is no such thing,” he said, when asked about freedom of speech and expression in Serbia.
Watchdogs and opposition groups have long raised concerns about the state of democracy in Serbia.
In a recent report, Freedom House thinktank pointed to “unfair electoral conditions and numerous irregularities” in the elections in December and “an increasingly hostile environment for critical journalism”.
Vučić’s office did not respond to a request for comment. He has previously described Stukan as a “criminal”.
Stukan recalled a dinner in Belgrade with people from the arts industry, when the subject of Serbia’s president came up. “They all just lifted the telephones and put them under the leg, on the chair, so they covered the microphone. Everybody did that,” he said. “If you say something against Vučić, you will never get the money for the next project … When they speak about Vučić, they’re whispering.”
The actor said he was previously expelled from Serbia but believed – before the weekend’s incident – that he would be able to return.
Pen International, an association of writers, said it was “concerned” about reports that Stukan was deported from Serbia.
“I think they [the authorities] don’t know really where they should put me in, and what they want to do with me,” Stukan said. “They just don’t want me to be in Serbia.”