SERB SURVIVED HELL IN DUBAI: They accused him of being an Iranian collaborator, tortured him in a dungeon for more than three weeks!

Saša Milivojev, a journalist and writer originally from Aleksandrovo, who has lived and worked in Dubai for many years, disappeared on February 25 exactly at the moment of unrest and conflict in the Middle East. His family tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with him; they turned to embassies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but there was no answer. Saša appeared after 25 days. He says he was isolated, arrested, and tortured in a prison in Dubai.

After 25 days of an international search for a missing person, a Serbian citizen, the Nova.rs portal got in touch with Saša Milivojev, who told of the torture he survived in the city that until recently was his—in Dubai.

At the moment when Iran attacked the Gulf countries and when the first bombs fell on Dubai, concerned family and friends lost contact with Saša, and panic began.

The disappearance was reported to the police, Interpol, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, and the Serbian embassies in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Tehran, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Milivojev was arrested in Dubai after returning from Iran, where he had stayed for a long time in Shiraz and appeared in the Iranian media with his poem in the Persian language, “Genocide in Gaza.” The Tehran Times published his column about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza on its front page.

After returning to Dubai, and due to war tensions in the region, he was arrested on charges of being a collaborator of the Iranian Sepah service (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).

“They handcuffed me, blindfolded me with a black mask so I couldn’t see anything, and drove me from the police station in a luxury jeep in an unknown direction through the desert. I remember the car going uphill; they threatened me with death, I thought they had driven me somewhere to throw me off a cliff. I cried and begged them not to kill me, and they laughed and said ‘we can kill you too,'” Milivojev tells our portal.

As he further explains, they confiscated his mobile phone and all his belongings, and then threw him into solitary confinement.

“They threw me into a terrible solitary cell, a dungeon, and interrogated me for hours over several days, threatening me with beatings and 10 years in prison. They asked me to confess to something I was not guilty of, that I work for Sepah, that they pay me as an agent in the field, to transmit sensitive information about warships in the Gulf. And I had nothing to confess.”

Contact with Sepah

The truth is, he adds, that he had contacts with Sepah.

“They called me when I was extending my Iranian visa. They invited me to a friendly lunch, telling me it was an honor for them that an author like me was in Iran and that they wanted to host me. They asked me what we could do together for Palestine, and I told them that I have no power, only a talent for writing. Therefore, they are behind my publications in the Iranian media, where I appeared as a free, independent author, as a poet, artist, journalist, columnist, thinker. And nothing more than that.”

He emphasizes that he does not write to earn money, but to help others.

“I believed that my poem ‘Genocide in Gaza’ could break some important heart in the world. All those explanations were of no use; the torturers continued to torture me and threatened me that they are the ‘rulers of the world,’ that no embassy, no politician, no human rights organization would be able to help me get out of their prison. But someone helped me, I don’t know who, everyone called Abu Dhabi and Dubai because of me; it is possible there were also diplomatic pressures,” he says.

He thanks his parents, brother, and all the friends who worried and fought for him.

“I also thank the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia and all the embassies in the Middle East region, the Russian, Turkish, and Egyptian security services. God forbid anyone should be imprisoned innocent, there is no greater tragedy and sin; it was unbearable torture, I was afraid they would really keep me there for 10 years, such a life would be meaningless.”

He adds that he also thought about suicide.

“I thought about how to break some glass and slit my veins and how to kill myself so that it would be physically painless. But on the other hand, I believed that it is impossible that there is absolutely no justice in this world. I prayed to God constantly and called all the saints for help, and on the walls with a single screw I carved the text ‘God help me’.”

Dream or reality

After 23 days of torture in solitary confinement, he was told he was traveling to Belgrade.

“Deportation. They unfairly canceled my Golden Visa. No one in the history of the Emirates ever wrote about the Emirates with love like I did; it’s enough just to read my poem ‘The Son of the UAE’. I did not deserve this from the Emirates. Terrible injustice and disappointment. It will take a long time to recover from the shock and stress,” says our interlocutor.

Otherwise, Milivojev is the author of the novels “The Boy from the Yellow House,” “Echo of the Nuclear Bomb,” and “Love and Death in Dubai.”

For years he lived and worked in Dubai, where he received a Golden Visa from the UAE Ministry of Culture as a significant author with an international career.

It has now been revoked.