Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace

“The past is not past. It’s not even dead.”
William Faulkner

Leaving the past behind and moving on is something that most Serbs would very much like to do. Being a Serb myself, and a witness to myriad ugly things that happened in recent history, this is something I can easily understand.

The trouble is, the past refuses to stick to its designated spot and instead keeps popping up in the here and now.

It did it again two weeks ago, after the arrest of General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander indicted (among other things) for masterminding the execution of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.

He has eluded international justice for many years, although Serbia’s failure to find and deliver him to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague was a major obstacle for the country’s integration into the European Union. Only when it became obvious that Serbia’s attempt to become a member candidate could be frozen indefinitely, did the government make its move and Mladic was discovered living at a relative’s farm near Belgrade.

There are widespread allegations that, despite a warrant for his arrest, the fugitive general was until recently under some sort of government protection.

Serbia’s pro-Western president Boris Tadic triumphantly announced the arrest, declaring: "We have concluded a difficult period of our history and removed a stain from Serbia and the Serbian people.” Few Serbs were listening.

According to a Nielsen poll, at the time of Tadic’s televised speech, the nation’s eyes were glued to a Turkish daytime soap opera running on a commercial channel. Another poll shows that the majority of Serbs are not convinced that Mladic is guilty of any war crimes, but still don’t mind his arrest as long as it leads to the EU, which they see as promised land where money grows on trees.

This is a perfect illustration of Serbia’s struggle to bury its past without actually facing it. Even when faced with irrefutable evidence, people tend to shrug, say ‘bad things happen in wartime” and then change the subject. But the truth is much more complicated than that.

During the past 20 years I’ve spent researching the war crimes of the 90s, I was surprised to learn two things: Firstly, that most war crimes, far from being the result of ‘bad times’ or long-lingering ethnic hatreds, were in reality highly-organised endeavours involving government agencies.

In Serbia’s case, the agency in question was Serbia’s State Security, or secret police, which handpicked and recruited violent criminals, who were subsequently sent to frontlines as ‘volunteer’ paramilitaries. One such unit was the infamous Tigers, led by Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan, who is now known to have been working for the secret police since well before the war.

During the 80s, Arkan provided ‘services’ to the state by helping to assassinate political emigrants in Western countries. In return, his criminal activities were tolerated. When the war began, he and his comrades were armed and organised to become one of the most feared paramilitary units in the Croatian and Bosnian war.

Secondly, the other thing I’ve learned is that there’s not much difference between war crimes and peacetime organised crimes.

In both cases, the perpetrators operate within highly hierarchical structures and act in liaison with people in the position of power. It is no wonder that many former members of paramilitary units from the 90s are now the leaders of organised crime clans today.

My BIRN research is focused on one Veselin Vukotic, aka Vesko, a man whose biography resembles Arkan’s. Like Arkan, Vukotic was a career criminal reportedly recruited by the former Yugoslav State Security in the 80s.

He is a chief suspect in the 1990 assassination of Enver Hadriu, a high-profile ethnic Albanian political from Kosovo, in Brussels. He has since been involved in at least two murders in Serbia and Montenegro and, despite being given a 20-year prison sentence in absentia for the 1997 Montenegro murder, lives as a free man in the Serbian town of Novi Sad as he awaits a retrial.

Unlike Arkan, however, Vukotic was never involved in paramilitary activities.

Instead, during the war he ran a casino frequented by top officials in Milosevic’s government and, according to some reports, by Arkan and friends. He fled the country after the 1997 Montenegro murder and moved to Spain, where he was finally arrested in 2006.

Vukotic was subsequently extradited to Belgium, where he had been named as a chief suspect in the Hadri assassination, and then to Serbia in 2008, in order to serve his 20-year sentence. But instead, Vukotic was released after serving only several months; apparently because of health problems - he has a bad heart – and is now awaiting a retrial.

Montenegro has requested his extradition, also in connection with the 2007 murder on Montenegrin soil – something Serbia has flatly denied.

There are good reasons to believe that Vukotic is at large because he is, yet again, proving to be useful to the state. It is rumoured he has valuable information about the alleged involvement of some of Montenegro’s top officials in organised crime.

Such information could be very useful to Serbia, which is locked in a bitter dispute with Montenegro since Podgorica broke away from the federation with Belgrade several years ago. Since the split, Serbia has repeatedly tried to portray Montenegro as a ‘mafia-run’ state and Vukotic’s knowledge could prop up this claim.

Aiding and protecting murderers for the sake of national interest is one of the bad habits of Serbia’s past regimes. The question is whether the new, democratic authorities are now falling into the same trap? We’ll soon see.

Dejan Anastasijevic is a Belgrade-based journalist who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

He will be writing regular updates on his investigation into organised crime and the state in the Balkans.