Upon the principle of the inviolability, diplomatic mail has been a good material for spie novels and movies for a long time. Its content is protected from inspections, but exceptions have shown us that the movie plots can be very realistic. Under the mark of diplomatic mail they carried weapons, drugs, antiques and kidnapped politicians dazed from drugs…
Former American ambassador in Serbia, Cameron Munter, confided in an interview that he once carried ajvar in his luggage to the US, even though it is not allowed. During WWII, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill, allegedly, received shipments of Cuban cigars by the diplomatic mail but for his own needs.
RED WAX: Decades after the end of WWII the diplomats profited from smuggling cigarettes with the help of their status and the diplomatic luggage.
Some ten days ago, a wife of a diplomat from Congo, on service in Serbia, was arrested in Romania after 18.500 packets of cigarettes were found in her car. There is doubt that Esther Paskaline Bombetto and her husband Marc Marius Ithela Elomba, adviser of the embassy of Congo in Serbia, are a part of the smuggling chain that smuggled cigarettes from Montenegro to Romania.
This time not even calling upon the diplomatic immunity helped, because the “scheme” was busted and shadowed for months. For a long time the Romanian intelligence office and the criminal police followed this vehicle, which passed from Serbia to Romania twice a week, sometimes in the company of the diplomat of the embassy of Congo in Belgrade.
Investigation showed that this was the tenth illegal transport of cigarettes from Serbia to Romania which was done with the help of the diplomats.
This was not the first case for a diplomat accredited in Serbia to “fall” for cigarette smuggling, and just last year the Austrian police arrested a diplomat accredited in Serbia and his driver for the smuggling of cigarettes.
A professor of the College of Political Sciences and a former ambassador of Serbia in Paris Predrag Simic says that the diplomatic mail must be specially verified.
“Such a shipment, sealed by red wax, is carried by a specially authorized courier who can also be an ambassador. If there is doubt then it is opened by a special procedure from the Vienna Convention – the shipment is held back, and the staff from the embassy is present at its opening. The same treatment goes for the vehicles with the CD plates”, says Simic.
YUGOSLAVIAN DIPLOMATS SMUGGLED MONEY: A great number of abuses stays undetected, but according to what is known the luggage of the Yugoslavian and Serbian diplomats was full – of money.