Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 20 2006 (IPS) – In place of the promised healing touch, they have in cases brought death. And now at least a few people are beginning to demand a check on the recent proliferation of self-proclaimed healers and sorcerers.
The wives of Belgrade technician Marko Radevic and of truck driver Zoran Vojnovic, both suffering from cancer, died within weeks of drinking potions prepared by a local herbalist.
Marica Nedeljkovic had to have her leg amputated after being treated for skin cancer by a man from the southern Serbian town Pirot. A 15-year-old boy from the western town Sabac is in hospital after a popular bone-fixer attempted to heal his knee.
Dozens of people visit the eastern town Smederevo daily. They go there to enter the Najdan circle , a white painted space in a dusty field where they expect to obtain positive energy to push ahead in their lives.
It s not obligatory to leave money, but if you want to, you are free to do it, says a note at the site.
Many such healers collect hundreds of dollars for just a few visits.
When the police raided the lavish premises of some of these helpers of people , they found notebooks with names of thousands of patients who had each paid anything from 50 dollars to thousands. Some entries were more than a decade old.
The law strictly forbids practising of medicine by non-licensed persons, First District Court of Belgrade spokesperson Ana Milosevic told IPS. It s very easy to establish who is a licensed person only the one with a medical degree. It is also easy to put charlatans into jail one has to report them to police, but very few people do it.
Belgrade police say such cases of fraud are often not reported. Very soon after something nasty happens to them, people see how they became victims of blatant fraud, a police source told IPS. Some are afraid their friends will laugh at them, others tend to think, I ll go see another one, maybe he will really help. But the common denominator is that they paid or continue to pay large sums of money to fraudsters.
Serbian reporters who visited several big towns from Novi Sad in the north to Nis in the south found that there is almost no place where local people do not speak of some miraculous herbal doctor, or a popular bone fixer or some woman with a magic potion that treats infertility.
The police say the laws against self-proclaimed healers are too weak. The maximum sentence for unauthorised provision of health services and unauthorised production of alleged treatment substances has been reduced from five to two years in the new law that came into force in January 2006.
Over the past two years, two persons have been sentenced to 16 and 20 months in prison for unlawful practice by way of healing and foretelling the future. Earlier statistics are unavailable in Serbia.
One of those convicted was a man from the southern Serbian town Nis who claimed he could treat bed-wetting, epilepsy and fear through hypnosis. The second was well-known Belgrade sorcerer Zorka Pucar, the clairvoyant Zorka . Besides fortune telling, she treated marital problems by offering recipes such as boiling rusty keys in soups for unfaithful spouses.
People mostly turn to non-traditional methods when regular medicine does not help, Vladimir Kovcina, head of the oncology department at a Belgrade hospital told IPS. They are mostly uninformed, and do not know what illnesses can be cured and how. This leaves space for self-proclaimed doctors to run for fortune based on other people s misfortune.
Neighbourhood sorcerers, fortune-tellers, bean readers and the like are thriving. They advertise in local newspapers and on television, and draw thousands of clients. Many do business over the Internet.
Each human being has a tendency towards unrealistic expectations, psychologist Tijana Mandic wrote in a Belgrade newspaper. This is a way to escape hard reality, pain, poverty. Contacting sorcerers helps people believe that life and health can be better, despite all odds.
Such wisdom seems to have little effect on many people.