Sound and Fury in Serbia Reverberate in Bosnia

By Peter Lippman

When Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated on March 12, the government of Serbia pulled itself together and responded energetically to the threat to stability. Declaring a state of emergency, it launched a massive crackdown on the infrastructure of gangsters, profiteers, and war criminals who had operated freely since early in the Milosevic era.

The ensuing cleanup promised to straighten out Serbia and to facilitate its smooth entry into the European Union. But the state of affairs in Serbia is not as orderly as has been claimed. Meanwhile, momentous events in Serbia, as a rule, strongly affect neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the present developments are no exception. Will Bosnia benefit, or suffer, from the supposed cleanup of Serbia?

Serbia's Tumultuous Spring

The overthrow and arrest in 2001 of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic opened the door to an era of relative freedom in Serbia. Even after his transfer to The Hague, however, Milosevic's handpicked officials still controlled the country's army, courts and other important institutions, and Vojislav Kostunica, the new president, showed no eagerness to remove them.

As a result, crucial steps in the democratization of Yugoslavia and its successor, the looser federation of "Serbia and Montenegro," were not taken. Indicted war criminals remained free, smuggling and gang violence reigned, and Serbia's cooperation with the war crimes tribunal at The Hague was slow and reluctant. Then Prime Minister Djindjic was assassinated, and the leaders of Serbia realized that they could not take their own safety for granted; it was either tackle organized crime in Serbia, or risk their own hides. The shake-up was launched.

In the ensuing 65-day state of emergency, 10,000 suspects were questioned and over 4,000 detained. Some gangsters were killed during the crackdown, many others arrested, and the notorious Zemun Clan was smashed, its headquarters demolished. Milorad "Legija" Luketic, commander of the shock troop Red Berets, went on the run, but other leading gangsters were handed over to The Hague to answer for their wartime depredations in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia.

By mid-April Serbia's Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic was confident enough to assert that "Serbia will be the only European country with no mafia and no unsolved crimes." With the dramatic arrest and handover in June of Veselin Sljivancanin, wanted for the massacre of Croatians at Vukovar, member of Parliament Bojan Pajtic announced that Serbia-Montenegro had "no further obligations to the Hague Tribunal."

So far, so good. Gangsters were finally off the streets in Belgrade, prostitution was down, and prices for illegal drugs, formerly furnished by those gangsters, were up. It appeared to the world that Serbia was cleaning up its act, finally emerging from the Milosevic era and turning toward Europe. In July, President George W. Bush, noting progress in reforms, approved the lifting of the last sanctions on Serbia. And Serbia's neighbors in Bosnia and Croatia looked on with satisfaction as the war criminals who had ravaged their countries finally were brought down.

Repercussions in Bosnia?

Ever since Serbia's explosion of extreme nationalism in the late 1980s, upheavals and power shifts in that country have affected Bosnia. The present changes are no exception.

Under the 1995 Dayton agreement that ended the war, Bosnia is composed of two entities, one controlled by Serbs and the other a Croat-Muslim federation. The creation of an ethnically cleansed, Serb-controlled entity (RS—the Republika Srpska or Serb Republic) is the result of the policy of Greater Serbian expansionism as promoted by Slobodan Milosevic. The involvement of Serbian political and military forces in the partition of Bosnia is being demonstrated at The Hague these days with ever greater clarity, as one witness after another shares information to this effect. Despite the creation of a Serb entity in Bosnia, however, there still is a hope for that entity's multi-ethnic character, and for its place in a democratic, sovereign state called Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The jury remains out on the question of whether Bosnia will become a real state, and whether the Republika Srpska will ever participate as a democratic component of that state. Events in neighboring Serbia certainly affect this outcome. Along with the Serbian government's fight for survival, as played out in its crackdown on organized crime, came a determination to enhance the country's image in the eyes of the West, and thus improve its chance to enter the European Union.

One of the ways in which Belgrade tried to improve its image was to distance itself from the extreme nationalist political infrastructure that runs the Republika Srpska. This infrastructure is dominated by SDS, the extremist party of Radovan Karadzic, wartime leader of the RS and now a fugitive from justice. Until the end of Milosevic's career, the RS was undergoing a soft annexation to Serbia. The advent of the Kostunica government did very little to change this relationship. It was only during the state of emergency this spring that Serbia finally broke ties with the Bosnian Serb army, which it had helped support financially throughout the post-war years.

In the event, as Belgrade was working to dismantle the criminal infrastructure that had plagued Serbia, Serbian officials expressed strong criticism of the government of the Republika Srpska for its failure to cooperate in the effort to rein in gangsters and war criminals who had at least as much freedom in the RS as in Serbia. After all, the RS is the only entity in the former Yugoslavia that has failed to arrest a single person indicted for war crimes who is residing in its territory.

When Serbia demanded in May that the government of the Republika Srpska help apprehend persons indicted for war crimes, high officials in the SDS reacted with indignation, accusing the Serbian minister of justice of interfering in the RS's internal affairs. Serb member of the Bosnian presidency Borislav Paravac rejected interference from Belgrade, saying that the RS is not a creature of Serbia, but the result of a "civil war" and, as such, the expression of the will of the Serbs of Bosnia.

The use of the phrase "civil war" is standard among people who wish to conceal the fact that the partition of Bosnia, during which approximately one million non-Serbs were expelled from the territory that now makes up the Republika Srpska, was the result of aggression sponsored by neighboring Serbia. President Paravac's statement was a way of asserting the RS's independence from Serbia in order to avoid facing up to questions of legality that could shake the entity to its foundations.

This newfound controversy between Serbia and the Bosnian Serb entity was but a small indication that things still are rotten in the Republika Srpska. The events leading to Paravac's ascension to the presidency, as well as his own past, also provide colorful illustration of what kind of government runs the RS today. Early this year, two scandals broke in that entity: an entity-owned company was revealed to be breaking sanctions against Iraq by supplying it with military equipment and services, and the RS army was found to be spying on the Federation, international officials, and even its own citizens.

In the wake of these scandals, then Serb member of the Bosnian presidency Mirko Sarovic was compelled to resign, with Paravac taking his place in April. However, Paravac's past is at least as shady as that of Sarovic. Paravac was war-time mayor of Doboj during the time when its Muslim and Croat residents were brutalized and ethnically cleansed from that municipality. He was a close confidante to the Republika Srpska minister of defense, now under indictment in Bosnia for war crimes. His membership in the state presidency flies in the face of the movement toward reconciliation and for rule of law in Bosnia.

Overall, the situation in Bosnia can be placed somewhere between war and peace, as justice has not yet been achieved. Karadzic and his wartime general Ratko Mladic are still free; profiteers who entered the war as small-time criminals now run phantom corporations that launder money from smuggling profits and plunder socially created wealth; unemployment hovers around 40 percent and pensioners are owed three months' back payments; crime rings steal cars with impunity and sell them in Montenegro; and returned refugees face regular harassment and violence.

The ills that plague Bosnia are widespread, and polls regularly report that at least 60 percent of Bosnia's youth would leave if they could. (See "Bosnia and Herzegovina: A State Under Threat" in the June 2003 Washington Report, p. 44.)

A cleanup of the war-criminal/gangster/ politician continuum that still reigns in most of Bosnia would open the door to the possibility of Bosnia becoming a healthy state. Meanwhile, well-meaning Bosnians watch events in Serbia and wonder whether Belgrade will succeed in instilling a new spirit of justice and legality in its Bosnian Serb prot…g…s, or whether the sum total of the Serbian contribution to the RS simply will be gangsters on the run.

Fixing Bosnia

While the cleanup in Serbia puts pressure on Bosnia to reform its own political processes, it is not quite clear how sincere and effective the current shake-up in Serbia is. For just as Interior Minister Mihajlovic was claiming success in ridding Serbia of organized crime, other serious ills were coming to the fore. Government harassment of independent journalists in Serbia has been on the increase. Word came out that people detained during the state of emergency on suspicion of having gang connections were being tortured. Then most of them were let go without charges, and a significant number of those most wanted for Djindjic's assassination are still missing. And, as reported by the International Crisis Group, the tinted-window limousines of Belgrade's gangsters are prowling the streets again.

In July the International Crisis Group released an extensive report strongly criticizing the Serbian government for half-measures that seemed to show that the government was much more interested in protecting its own stability than in creating a truly law-abiding country. (See "Serbian Reform Stalls Again," <http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/projects/ showreport.cfm?reportid=1049>.) The process of legalization and stabilization in Serbia appears to be a fitful one, with some half-steps forward, and some backward. It would be incautious simply to accept the idea that the country's status as a generator of extremism in the region has been annulled. However, it is encouraging that in early August the Serbian government announced a purge of a significant portion of Milosevic's old-guard military officers, including some who had participated in atrocities against Kosovo Albanians in 1998 and 1999.

How to fix Bosnia? At present, it appears, the only power capable of making significant changes in Bosnian politics is the international community's High Representative, established by Dayton, in the person of Lord Paddy Ashdown. Lord Ashdown has the power to remove recalcitrant officials and to decree laws, but he has been flirting with the current ruling coalition of Serb, Muslim, and Croat nationalists since that coalition's establishment earlier this year.

In denial of the reality of a ubiquitous corrupt, separatist regime in Bosnia, Ashdown calls the nationalist parties "reformed," and gives favor to them over a potential force of non-nationalist politicians and activists. Ashdown has recently been criticized for ruling Bosnia like a "Maharaja," but in fact his real sin has been allowing the gangsters free reign.

Given this failure of initiative on the part of the High Representative, Bosnia's only remaining hope is the voice of its pensioners and other ordinary people, as represented by the grassroots non-governmental organizations. Local activists will have to push for reforms and legality where both the Serbian government and the international community have failed to measure up.

Peter Lippman, a native of Seattle, Washington, is a field project coordinator for the Advocacy Project (www.advocacynet.org), a human rights organization that supports grass-roots advocates in countries in crisis or transition.