By Norbert Mappes Niediek. Newspaper Gazeta Metropol. 23/02/2006.
Arkan, the hero of the original archetype of the Serbian national revolt, was one of the most influential war and peace criminals of the nineties. His rise from a thief and bandit to a figure of the post-socialist society and finally to a politician and “national hero” symbolizes precisely the fall of Yugoslavia from a respectable Federal Republic of Tirana to an elementary catastrophe of the Milosevic regime.
Only his violent death in January 2000 does not yet mark the end of the misery. Arkan was born on April 17, 1952 in Brežice, Slovenia, as the son of a Montenegrin officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army named Velkjo Raznatović, who was stationed there at the time. He spent his youth mainly in Zagreb and Belgrade. The paternal bond did not end properly and this was a typical Yugoslav conflict between the indomitable older generation and was very proactive.
Željko was a mischievous child. At the age of nine he ran away from home for the first time. At the age of 14 he committed his first theft. He snatched a woman’s purse from her hand in the Tašmajdan park in Belgrade and later completed the last grade of the eighth-grade school in the youth prison in Novi Sad.
At the age of 17 he was sentenced to half a year in prison for several other thefts. His international activity began in 1972 in Milan, Italy, where he exchanged heavy blows with the son of the local underworld kingpin Ljuba Zemunac. Later, trials in Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands followed. Sometime during his early years of youth, he nicknamed the betta Arkan, after the tiger in his cartoons.
In the 1970s, Yugoslavia, with its “third way” and as the leader of the states that were not part of any pact, was a respected member of the community of peoples in the UN. For the Yugoslav state, a criminal was a criminal and it was a given that there would be criteria for dealing with this, as there were in Western European countries. At that time, Belgrade was trying in Bonn to extradite an Ustasa extremist who had assassinated a Yugoslav diplomat and who, if he had not had a German passport, would indeed have been extradited.
In the search for criminals like Arkan’s, the Yugoslav police, through Interpol, collaborated with their colleagues in the Western world. Only behind the scenes was there a sense of gratitude for the fugitive kingpin, who in reality managed to escape from various prison guards but who never managed to enjoy freedom for more than a week. The “red notice” that the Interpol office in Stockholm issued against him in 1974, Arkan, in his second life as a folk hero, showed as his trophy.
After that, his criminal career was to seem to the Serbs like a long-standing war against a hostile West – with great length and with a courage of a fool, just as the whole country fought against the injustice of the Western sanctions during the 1990s, Arkan had shown the whole world since his youth. Arkan’s escape from Verviers prison in Belgium was considered a victory.
In 1979, the wanted man, who had an international arrest warrant, would escape from Malmo prison in May 1981, from Over Amstel prison in Amsterdam a month later, and from the prison hospital in Frankfurt in 1983, and from Thoreberg in Switzerland. In the year of his escape from Verviers in Belgium (1979), the Interpol office in Belgrade had also issued an arrest warrant for the dangerous criminal because Arkan had committed an armed robbery in Belgrade in December 1974. The different assessment of Arkan’s crimes can be explained as a natural chain of social development.
During the time before Milosevic but immediately after Tito’s death in May 1980, Arkan’s cooperation with the Yugoslav Police Secretariat (SUP) would begin. His mother would suddenly be given a police apartment in Belgrade for no reason – a sign that her son was on good terms with one of the competing services. In November 1983, the police would intercept his son Zeljko in his mother’s apartment, after he had once again committed an armed robbery. Arkan would exchange fire with the police.
Although he had shot one of the policemen in the leg, it was not even two days before he was released on bail from prison. It seemed that he had strong protection. What Arkan had to do in return for protection from the law is not something that the later politician would be happy to boast about.
This remains a mystery to this day. Since Arkan later denied any collaboration with the Yugoslav secret service, he did not admit to the spectacular triple murder in Germany, which the German intelligence service (BND) still suspects. In Untergruppenbach in Heilbronn on January 17, 1982, three Albanian emigrants and prominent political activists from Kosovo were first executed and then blown up with their entire BME.
All three, Jusuf and Bardhosh Gërvalla and Zeka Kadriu, are now national heroes in Kosovo. During Tito’s last visit to Kosovo in 1979, they organized a demonstration and are said to have led a secret organization from Baden-Württemberg called the “Red Front”.
Arkan was only able to take his first step into legality and, immediately after that, his public appearance, after Milosevic had gradually managed to seize power in Serbia in 1987 and 1988. Initially, the multiple convict opened a firm in Belgrade which, as the only one, obtained the right to print T-shirts for fans with the emblem of the football club “Crvena Zvezda”; In 1989, he also became the president of the “Delije” club, as the club’s fans are called.
Political support was definitely needed for both functions. It was no coincidence that Arkan became a public figure from the football scene. Otherwise, football was an attractive area for tabooed nationalist resentments in the multiethnic state, and national tensions between Serbs and Croats. After many years, they resurfaced after the famous football match between Crvena Zvezda Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb on May 13, 1990.
Through football, all kinds of slogans could be said abroad. Even today, some of the leaders and sports clubs in the former Yugoslavia continue to be a gateway for criminals and politics. Even the deputy prosecutor general, who was arrested in December 2002 on suspicion of trafficking in women, is the president of a football group. It is worth emphasizing that Arkan – the son of a partisan officer and for a time an agent of the communist secret service – took his role in the “right”, “Serbian national” club in Belgrade and not in the “left”, pro-Yugoslav oriented, that is, in the “Partizan” club. In an early interview, Arkan stated that he “wanted to keep politics away from the club”.
Among the club’s fans were supporters of Vuk Drašković, the radical leader Vojislav Šešelj and the popular Chetnik of the time, Mirko Jović, as Arkan would put it – three right-wing opposition politicians. He wanted to unite their party supporters, passionate about football, into a common “core” of fans. As far as it was his duty to bring the young and often violent opposition fans who gathered around the club under control, he did not speak at all.
Zeljko Raznatovic would only become a political figure when, on October 11, 1990, with some friends and well-known Belgrade hooligan leaders, he founded his own “Serbian Volunteer Guard” in the Pokajnica Orthodox monastery, becoming its “commander” himself. The choice of location and the use of Serbian national symbols were another signal of the anti-communist opposition.
The following year, the “Guard” took part in the war in Croatia and established its general headquarters, held by the Serbs, in Eastern Slovenia. Here Arkan would gain his national fame and soon his international fame. He gladly welcomed journalists from all over the world to his general headquarters, dispelling their fears a little and introducing them to the little tiger “Milica”, the mascot of his unit.
Arkan’s men, “Arkanovci”, entered Croatian villages, held the inhabitants hostage and used their places as a base for attacks on Croatian territorial defenses.. in his homeland, that is, in Serbia, the criminal quickly gained international fame. Arkan, like no other, knew how to highlight his patriarchal values of discipline and potency. He did not consume alcohol or tobacco, he woke up every day at six in the morning and forbade his men from consuming any kind of alcohol.
He had nine children with five wives and when he died he had become a grandfather. As early as 1992, Arkan was elected as an independent candidate in the Serbian parliament, in Kosovo where the elections were boycotted by the Albanian majority and therefore each candidate was elected with a small number of votes. The following year, Arkan would establish his own “Serbian Unity Party”.
The founding appeal to the “Serbian brothers”, signed by his semi-illiterate hand, would read like a parade in the nationalist manifestations of that time: “Serbian brothers must extend a fraternal hand to each other because they all have a common goal: Serbian unification!” Arkan’s party during the 2000 elections won more than 5% of the vote and entered the Serbian parliament with 14 deputies.
Figures of the underground in the official police service
Belgrade, once the “Paris of the East” and the only real metropolis in the Balkans, has fallen a lot as a city after a decade of wars and sanctions. But if you go down the Danube towards the apartment blocks with stripped facades somewhere on the left side, if you go past two or three alleys you can discover another world.
eA small bar with soft, 50s-style music, a carpet as soft as plush and as black as a raven, whose square meter is not worth a few euro centers. The “clubs” on the renovated facades display their advertising, while more Porsches and Mercedes S-class cars are parked on the street.
Here in the intermediate empire of politics, police and crime, since 1991, over 150 murders have occurred that are still unsolved today. They found themselves a former president Ivan Stambolic, and a minister still in office Pavle Bulatovic, two police chiefs and a journalist by the name of two old friends of the Milosevic famiely, four paramilitary leaders and several dozen underworld bosses.
“When someone was caught”, explains the Belgrade criminologist Dobrivoje Radovanovic, “then you would find a police book on him”, as the official said in such cases, the perpetrator of the crime was either on leave for the time being, or had just left his job in the police. In fact, Milosevic’s family had deliberately given police books to the Belgrade underworld.
Criminals became our colleagues at that time. Budimir Babovic, the former head of Belgrade Interpol, recounts, “they were hired and thus gained immunity from any criminal prosecution.” Like Arkan and Giska, some of them began a second, but no less criminal, career in Croatia and Bosnia as “defenders of the homeland.”
The practice of systematically employing criminals in the police service also involved a policeman named Radovan Stojicic, nicknamed “Bagja” after a brutal character from the Popeye cartoons. In 1991, at the beginning of the Croatian war, Stojicic became the head of the territorial defense of a socialist-era citizens’ militia for the regions of Slovene, Baranja and Western Syrmia in eastern Croatia, where the fiercest fighting took place.
When the Battle of Vukovar began, Stojicic recruited criminals from international wanted lists to engage in the ethnic cleansing of the region of Croatia. Witnesses later testified that Bagja had controlled the formation in question and had equipped it with modern weapons. As a reward for his role after the bloody battle of Vukovar, he was appointed chief of the entire Serbian uniformed police and deputy minister. Bagja was among the few executed by a masked assassin in the Belgrade restaurant “Mamma Mia”, Slobodan Milosevic and his wife personally attended his funeral.
The scene of the murder of Djindjic
One of Bagja’s best men was Frenki Simatović. “Here comes the Frenki-boys!”. It was enough to mention this phrase in Croatia and Bosnia during the 90s and entire cities would panic. He became even more famous through the mysterious special unit of the Serbian secret police after the assassination of Đinđić. Since Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, as well as during the subsequent conflicts among the Albanian communities of southern Serbia, the troops in green and cream uniforms spread fear and terror.
They are blamed for many massacres since then, especially in Peć, where Đinđić’s killer Jovanović is from. According to a report by a leader known only as Miloš, the unit, which was under Milošević’s orders, was used to carry out covert operations against “terrorists”. Frendi, a secret policeman with extensive experience from the war in Croatia, founded it as a semi-private paramilitary unit until it was accepted as the “Unit for Special Operations” (JSO) in the police organs.
In the war, the special police were distinguished primarily by their cowboy huts. The name of one of the members of the unit stationed in the barracks, who were initially dressed entirely in black, could only be learned by chance. After replacing Frendi, the command was taken by the former foreign legionnaire nicknamed Legija – Milorad Ljuković, who led the operation to assassinate Zoran Đinđić.
