City councilor Viktorija Knežević warns that major trials are often just a show for the public, and the real fight begins only when police officers, politicians, and other insiders are held accountable.
City councilor Viktorija Knežević issued a sharp statement on August 3, 2026, questioning the real effectiveness of the fight against organized crime in Croatia. In it, she warns that operations that end with the arrest of only recognizable criminals, without prosecuting the people within the system who enabled their activities, are nothing more than a show for the public.
"When we watch a major organized crime trial and the defendants are only those we immediately recognize as criminals, while among them there is no one from the police, the security system, the judiciary, or politics who allowed them to operate for years, let's not applaud too soon," Knežević said. "Perhaps only pawns have been picked up to show that the state is doing something."
Referring to the words of her criminal law professor, Knežević explained the basic logic: two people can rob a kiosk without anyone knowing, but twenty people cannot launder millions, buy real estate, establish companies, and obtain permits for years without anyone in the system noticing anything.
"Someone tips off. Someone turns a blind eye. Someone doesn't check. Someone files the case away. Someone gets a favor, a job, or money in return," she listed. "Organized crime is not just a group of criminals. Its strength lies precisely in the connections it manages to establish with legal businesses and institutions."
Knežević points out that the absence of real prosecution of organized crime is regularly accompanied by two phenomena. The first is the "almost grotesque severity" of the state apparatus toward ordinary citizens. For a wrong piece of paper, a small debt, or a traffic violation, the state shows all its power through fines, inspections, and arrests.
"Toward people who turn millions, use other people's names, and know who to call, everything suddenly becomes complex, sensitive, and slow," she warned. The ordinary person, as she says, is the easiest target because they have no connections, no money, and no one to call. "The state's severity is trained on the weak without any risk. This is how statistics are produced, the impression that institutions are working, and the fear of citizens toward the state apparatus."
In contrast, a serious criminal often does not fear the law, but only the possibility of losing the right person in the system who protects them.
The second phenomenon Knežević criticizes is the political use of the fight against crime. In clientelistic systems, she claims, politicians who have managed institutions for years often present themselves as the greatest fighters against crime, and in a more extreme version, as its greatest victims.
"This gives them an aura of courage, and the question of their responsibility is replaced by a story of personal endangerment and heroism," she said. Instead of examining how the criminal network was created and why institutions did not stop it, the public is offered a spectacle of a brave politician who single-handedly confronts dangerous forces.
"That is why political victimization should not be automatically accepted as proof of someone's innocence, courage, or successful fight against crime. The real question is: what did you and the institutions you manage do while this crime was growing?"
Knežević emphasizes that organized crime is not broken when a few perpetrators or nominal owners are arrested in front of cameras. "It is broken when its money and assets are seized, its ties to legal businesses are cut, and those who protected it from within the system, warned it, or kept the doors open are prosecuted."
Without that, she concludes, one crew may have fallen, but the system remains and can continue tomorrow with someone else. "A state is not strong when it can punish an ordinary person. Any state can do that. It is strong when the law applies equally to the person who knows no one and the person who knows everyone. Everything else is not a real fight against organized crime. It is a demonstration of force against the weak and a show of impotence before the powerful."
