Vjerica Radeta

Vjerica Radeta (Maljković; Вјерица Радета, Маљковић; born 15 October 1955) is a Serbian politician.

She is a prominent figure in the far-right Serbian Radical Party (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRS) and has served several terms in the National Assembly of Serbia.

Radeta was born in Livno, in what was then the People's Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia.

A graduate of the University of Sarajevo's law faculty, she later moved to Serbia and now resides in the Belgrade municipality of Zemun.

She was secretary of the Zemun municipal assembly in the late 1990s, at a time when the Radicals governed the municipality.

After several years in opposition, the Radical Party joined a coalition government led by the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistička partija Srbije, SPS) in February 1998, and Radeta was afterward appointed as a deputy minister of justice in the government of Serbian prime minister Mirko Marjanović.

In February 2000, in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, she was included on a list of Serbian government officials banned from travelling to European Union countries.

Radeta was given the fifth and final position on the Radical Party's electoral list for New Belgrade in the 2000 Yugoslavian parliamentary election.

The Radicals won a single seat in the division, which was automatically assigned to their first-ranked candidate, party leader Vojislav Šešelj.

Radeta also ran for the City Assembly of Belgrade in the concurrent 2000 Serbian local elections and lost to a candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (Demokratska opozicija Srbije, DOS) in Zemun's eleventh division.

Both the parliamentary and the local elections were overshadowed by the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election, in which SPS leader and incumbent president Slobodan Milošević was defeated by DOS candidate Vojislav Koštunica.

This was a watershed event in the political culture of Yugoslavia and Serbia; the Marjanović government fell shortly after Milošević's defeat, and Radeta's tenure as a deputy minister came to an end.

Radeta received the forty-second position on the Radical Party's electoral list in the 2000 Serbian parliamentary election, which was held after Milošević's fall from power.

The SRS won twenty-three seats, and Radeta was not initially included in its assembly delegation.

(From 2000 to 2011, Serbian parliamentary mandates were awarded to sponsoring parties or coalitions rather than to individual candidates, and it was common practice for the mandates to be assigned out of numerical order. Radeta could have been included in the SRS delegation at the start of parliament notwithstanding her position on the list, but she was not.) The DOS won a landslide victory, and the Radical Party served in opposition.

Radeta ultimately received a mandate on 25 March 2003 as the replacement for another SRS member who had resigned.

She was given the thirty-fifth position on the Radical Party's list in the 2003 Serbian parliamentary election and was awarded a mandate for a second term when the list won eighty-two seats.

Although the Radicals won more seats than any other party in this election, they fell well short of a majority and continued to serve in opposition.

During this term, Radeta served as deputy chair of the judiciary and administration committee and was a member of the committee on constitutional affairs.

During a Radical Party press conference, she said that Serbian president Boris Tadić could meet the same fate as Zoran Đinđić, the former Serbian prime minister who was assassinated in 2003 after approving the extradition of Slobodan Milošević.

Radeta was quoted as saying, "We are not threatening (him), but we are warning of the curse which followed all the traitors in Serbian history."

She also said that the Radicals had asked the Serbian Orthodox Church to state its opinion on the extradition, on the grounds that only the church could formally excommunicate members and cast anathemas on them; the party's hope was that the church would take these steps against Tadić.

Radeta's comments were widely reported in the international media, including the New York Times.

Nada Kolundžija, a prominent member of Tadić's Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DS), stated that "Radeta's comments could be interpreted as a call for violence, as justification for [Đinđić]'s murder."

Some of Tadić's supporters called for legal action to be taken against Radeta.

Radeta appeared in the fifth position on the SRS list for the Zemun municipal assembly in the 2004 Serbian local elections and was elected when the list won a plurality victory with twenty-six out of fifty-seven mandates.

In 2005, she attempted to amend Serbia's information law to ban the registration of media outlets that, in her words, "report[ed] notorious lies by pathological liar Nataša Kandić," a Serbian human rights activist and vocal opponent of Serbian nationalism.

She was again included on the Radical Party's list in the 2007 parliamentary election and was given a mandate for a third term when the party won eighty-one seats.

As before, the Radicals won the greatest number of seats but could not form government and remained in opposition.

Radeta again served on the justice and constitutional affairs committees and was deputy chair of the legislative committee; she was also a member of Serbia's republic election commission during this time.

She did not seek re-election at the local level in 2008.

Radeta appeared in the eighth position on the SRS list in the 2008 parliamentary election and was again included in her party's delegation when the list won seventy-eight seats.

The results of this election were inconclusive, and the Radicals afterward held discussions with the Democratic Party of Serbia (Demokratska stranka Srbije, DSS) and the Socialists about forming a coalition government.

This ultimately did not happen; the Socialists instead joined a coalition government led by the For a European Serbia (Za evropsku Srbiju, ZES) alliance, and the Radicals continued in opposition.

In this term, Radeta again served on the legislative, constitutional affairs, and justice committees and was a member of the committee on interethnic relations and the parliamentary friendship group with Japan.

In July 2008, Radeta took part in a Belgrade rally against the Serbian government's decision to extradite former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for crimes committed during the Bosnian War.

The Radical Party experienced a serious split later in 2008, with several prominent members joining the more moderate Serbian Progressive Party (Srpska napredna stranka, SNS) under the leadership of Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić.

Radeta remained with the Radicals and was considered a leading figure in the party's hardline wing.

During an assembly debate in September 2008, after Karadžić's extradition, Radeta shouted, "A curse on every Radical, on his seed and family, who ever meets with Tadić after the shameful extradition."

The Economist noted that this comment was directed at Nikolić, who had met with Tadić to ensure the passage of a key agreement with the European Union.