By: Petra Janša
The Udba textbook, the basic course, is definitely a welcome manual for understanding the functioning of the state. And since it is an archival document, anonymous commentators under published articles can only stumble upon the last name of the author of these lines, as they unfortunately have no serious arguments regarding what has been written. It is difficult to deny the existence of archival documentation. I warmly recommend the mentioned book to all those who fall into some Udba construct and end up in the courts, as it nicely explains what is needed for an effective investigation, which results in a prison sentence.
In the process of investigation or operation itself, as the title of the chapter states, the following is written under the subtitle “Expertise”: “At UDB we distinguish between: official (formal, fn.) expertise in the process of investigation and secret expertise, which are organised with the aim of documenting the facts of accession activity of the enemy, and as a rule such expertise is ordered by the line of the ministry, for example, a commission is formed from a group of specialists with the task of verifying this or that fact in business, and in this way the objective of the expertise is encrypted and we encrypt the object that interests us. The conclusion of such an expertise is not yet a legal document and we have to repeat the same procedure later?” The Udba textbook mentions seven types of expertise, namely “technical, chemical, judicial-psychiatric, forensic-medical, graphic, economic, and accounting”. These were prepared for them by experts who “had no right to characterise the political motive of the proceedings in their conclusion, but they can only indicate that anti-national work was carried out consciously or unconsciously”. It is clear that Udba had its own experts. We still feel this today. Also interesting is the publication of the document, namely the decree for arrest and house search, which was always signed by the chief (major) of Udba and the public prosecutor. “I, the investigator… reviewed the material on the criminal activities of the citizen… found that the citizen… performed counter-revolutionary work… according to art.” More in one of the following issues of Demokracija magazine.
