Barac was an outspoken anti-corruption activist even during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, when she publicly protested the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, who was later indicted for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
She will be remembered for her “tireless commitment to civil resistance against the dictatorial regime of Slobodan Milosevic, and later, in the Council as an independent state institution,” said Vukasin Obradovic, the head of the Independent Association of Serbian Journalists.
“She has made an outstanding contribution to the democratization of society, consistently advocating for the freedom of public discourse and media,” he said in a statement.
Even those with whom she had political quarrels hailed her success fighting corruption.
“Serbia has now lost a brave and uncompromising woman,” Belgrade mayor Dragan Djilas said, adding that Barac will be remembered as one of the country’s greatest fighters against corruption and will serve as an example to future generations.
“Although we did not always agree on all topics, I send a big thank you to Verica Barac, for everything she did for this society,” he said in a news release.
In its most recent report, the anti-corruption council investigated pressure and control over the media. The council raised concern that the Serbian media ownership structure is often occluded, and pointed to a string of offshore companies that own the Serbian newspaper Press, connecting it to Djilas’ powerful marketing companies, Multikom Group and Direct Media.
Barac also spent years investigating the port of Belgrade, indicting 17 officials for abuse of office during the port’s privatization.
In an interview with OCCRP last year, she said that politicians who initiated the privatization process were the ones in the best position to make money, and that they left the Law on Privatization intentionally vague in order to profit.
“Those who originally wrote the legislation purposely left gaps where they were needed,” she said. “So this government … intentionally makes bad laws, because it knows the right things need to be defined. You … shouldn’t make a law in which some things are simply not defined.”
She said that as Milosevic began to lose support, his allies simply shifted their allegiances in order to stay wealthy or get richer. She said tycoon, secret police, university professors and other who wrote the law go their friends appointed to key positions in the privatization process to take advantage of the weaknesses.
Barac was born near Cacak, in Western Serbia on June 14, 1955. She graduated from Belgrade’s law faculty in 1980 and then began work as a public attorney in Cacak’s local government and then joined the Civil Parliament of Serbia in 1999.
Barac was first diagnosed with cancer in 1996, suffered a recurrence in 2000, and her cancer returned once more. According to friends, her last wish was for her death to be announced only after a small family funeral.
