CROSSING CONTINENTS - Serbia

NARRATOR:
The grave is marked by a very simple wooden cross.  It just says
Zoran Djindjic, 1952-2003, and below there's a mountain of
flowers, bluebells and daffodils and lilies, bright red and white
lilies.  And even now several weeks after the murder there's a
constant trickle of people who make their way to this spot in
Belgrade Central Cemetery to kneel and to light a candle.  I'm
just going to ask one of them, one of the people who have just
finished paying their respects, why they are here.  Can I ask
you?

MOURNER: [translated]
She said Djindjic meant everything for Serbia.  He was somebody
who actually presented us Serbia as it should be, the part of
Europe.  He was the first politician that when I saw on
television, he was talking, I somehow felt that he was talking
from, for me for myself, that this was actually my voice on
television and I think you see even with his death, he even gave
his life for us so we can live better.

NARRATOR:
But when you very first heard about the murder, that he was dead,
what was the first thing you felt?  How did you feel?

MOURNER: [translated]
I don't know how to say, this was such a feeling that I heard
myself screaming and I was desperate.  I, at this moment I just
hated this country.

NARRATOR:
What was it in this country that you hated?

MOURNER: [translated]
In the history of this country, we had a lot of leaders who were
modern and who wanted to do something good for this country, and
they were just violently killed by some people who actually
wanted to keep this country in the Middle Ages.  So when I heard
this about Djindjic, I had the same feeling that - well these
forces of darkness, as I would say, were trying to push us down
on the ground again.

NARRATOR:
Who specifically, who or what are the forces of darkness?  Who
killed him?

MOURNER: [translated]
Forces of darkness are criminals, nationalists, the people who
actually stayed from the past, stayed from Milosevic's regime. 
They were doing whatever they want, they were having a lot of
money, they were practically controlling the whole state and they
wanted to continue with the life that they had before.  That's
what I, what I mean when I say the forces of darkness.

NARRATOR:
Well, in this week's Crossing Continents, I'll be asking whether
Serbia can now rid itself of those forces of darkness that killed
Zoran Djindjic.  We know, or at least we think we know, who
pulled the trigger on the prime minister. It was the deputy
commander of an elite military unit, the Red Berets, roughly the
equivalent of the SAS. That's shocking enough in itself, but the
conspiracy went far wider.  Every day now brings fresh arrests
and fresh revelations.  It's as though the murder of Djindjic has
finally forced Serbia to lift the stone on the vast underworld
that's continued to poison life in this country since the fall
of Slobodan Milosevic, and now it's determined to expose and
crush everything that's scurrying and crawling underneath. 

To understand how rotten the state of Serbia had become, you only
have to see how easily the assassination of Djindjic was carried
out.  I've come now to the site of the murder.  I am in the
grounds of a little outdoor café at the back of the Serbian
government building.  There's an ornamental fountain playing, and
people are sipping espressos.  If I'd been here on the 12th of
March, the bullet that killed the prime minister would have
whizzed straight over my head.

I am here today with Dejan Anastasjevic, of Vremya news magazine,
and we're looking up at the window that the shot came from.  Now
Dejan just tell me exactly what happened.

ANASTASJEVIC:
On the 12th of March approximately about noon, three men in
overalls walked into this building.  One of them was carrying a
tool box, where we later found out probably the gun was.  They
walked, climbed to the second floor and waited for the prime
minister.  So it's 12:25, the prime minister stepped out of his
car, so as he was coming out of the car, the sniper from one of
these windows here shot him in the chest.  We're talking about
something less than two hundred metres actually as the crow
flies, or as the bullet flies.

NARRATOR:
But isn't it extraordinary then that all these buildings can
overlook the government car park where the prime minister gets
in and out of his car, and they're not checked in any way or
guarded?

ANASTASJEVIC:
Yes it is, and obviously there were serious security lapses all
around the prime ministers which is not so strange when you know
that many of the people who were, whose job was to protect the
prime minister previously served in the same special unit, the
Red Berets, from which the assassins came as well.  So Mr
Djindjic's security was already heavily infiltrated.  After they
shot the prime minister, the assassin and his two companions just
walked out from the building, gun carried openly, and I can bet
that under these blue overalls they probably had police uniforms.

NARRATOR:
So basically they could just do a quick change and then get away
and no one could possibly question them because they would simply
appear to be the police?

ANASTASJEVIC:
Exactly, and they were the police.  They were active members of
the security forces.

NARRATOR:
Just tell me exactly what the Red Berets were.

ANASTASJEVIC:
Red Berets was a highly trained and the very well equipped anti-
terrorist unit which also during Milosevic's regime effectively
served as a death squad.

NARRATOR:
As a death squad?

ANASTASJEVIC:
Exactly.  During the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, the government
essentially gave licence to kill to some violent criminals,
recruited them from jails, promised them amnesty if they proved
themselves on the front line, a sort of a Dirty Dozen scenario,
and in return these people were allowed to become bona fide
members of security forces.  But after they did that, they
discovered that the police protection they'd acquired was
extremely useful for covering the drug deals, kidnapping,
extortions and various kinds of purely criminal activities.  You
see once you give someone a licence to kill, it's very difficult
to revoke that licence.

NARRATOR:
Ironically, Zoran Djindjic was on the point of revoking that
licence the very day he was shot. The government now says that
one day before the murder, it had assembled a complete picture
of the links between the Red Berets and Serbia's criminal
underworld. It was about to launch a wave of arrests, and
possibly to send more war crimes suspects to the Hague Tribunal.
But the "dark forces" struck first, and no wonder.  They knew
what was going on from their agents in the security services. 
Marko Nicovic is a former head of the Belgrade police who got out
just before that corrupt system took hold.

NICOVIC:
Nowhere in the world, it was some kind of symbios between
establishment, crimes and secret police.  I think is the only
example in the world, in the history, what is happened in Serbia. 
Now we have the monster.

NARRATOR:
What is that monster?

NICOVIC:
Monster, because very strange combination between secret police
and criminal group, and secret police used this criminal group
for many dirty things, for instance like political assassination
or racketeering.  They used those groups for that kind of things.

NARRATOR:
Criminals used the police and the police used the criminals?

NICOVIC:
Yeah, and finally state fell down.
NARRATOR:
In fact there were two states in Serbia, an official state and
a shadow state, and it was hard to know where one ended and the
other began, just as here on Belgrade's main shopping street it's
quite hard to know which businesses are built on clean money and
which on dirty.  The Red Berets, those rogue killers-in-uniform, 
moved effortlessly in and out of the shadows. And so, in
varying degrees, did almost everyone who mattered in Serbia, even
the late prime minister himself. 

Zoran Djindjic came to power through a deal with the shadow
state, a deal with the very man, now on the run, who's suspected
of ordering his death. That man was the former commander of the
Red Berets, a heavily-muscled brute with a black rose tattoo.
He'd served in the French Foreign Legion and that's where he got
his nickname, the Serbian for legion:  Legija. 

On October 4th 2000, as protests against Milosevic were reaching
a climax, Legija summoned Djindjic to a secret meeting in a
parked car, here behind government headquarters. The young thug
made a bargain with the opposition leader. His boys, the Red
Berets, would betray Milosevic; the next day, October the 5th,
they would refuse to fire on the protestors. In return, they
expected to be protected by Milosevic's successors. It was a pact
with the devil that led ultimately to his death.

DRASKOVIC:
On the 5th of October, Milosevic lost power and his system stayed
untouchable, and they promoted Legija, the international hero. 
They believed they must be very grateful to that killer because
that killer didn't shot on the people on the 5th of October.  I
can't understand that.  It was the main political mistake.

NARRATOR:
I'm with Vuk Draskovic, the fiery bearded politician who was also
part of the democratic opposition in October 2000. But unlike
Djindjic, he had no illusions about Legija. He believed the Red
Beret commander had already been behind two attempts to kill him.
Tell me about the first of those.

DRASKOVIC:
It was Sunday, very beautiful day.  I was in the car and in the
next car were three leading people of my party.  Unexpectedly one
truck, big one like a tank, full of sand collided with the car. 
All of them were killed.  They were under the truck, the truck
was full of explosive.  I can't understand how I escaped, how I
get out of the car.  I was injured but not seriously.

NARRATOR:
What proof do you have that Legija was behind the assassination
attempt on you?

DRASKOVIC:
We organised our party investigation and very soon we discovered
two policemen, traffic policemen, remembered very well two guys
get out, showed their card of secret police of Serbia.  One of them
had tattoo on the right side of neck - and tattoo on right side
of neck has Legija.

NARRATOR:
Something he acquired in the French Foreign Legion?

DRASKOVIC:
Of course.  We presented to the court more than three hundred
documents.  They had evidence but they didn't react.  Legija was
protected and prime minister Djindjic, he said Legija is my
friend.  I couldn't understand that.

NARRATOR:
So Zoran Djindjic described the man who is now the principal
suspect in his murder, described him as a friend, as my friend?

DRASKOVIC:
Yeah.  And the other assassination attempt against my life in
June 2000, I was wounded.  You can see the trace of bullet.

NARRATOR:
A long scar on your temple?

DRASKOVIC:
Yeah.  Who did it?  Legija organised, and Spasojevic, Dusan
Spasojevic, I mean people there now blamed as leaders of the
biggest gang in Balkans did it.  But all of them, in period of
Milosevic, were members of secret police of Serbia and they kept
their position after the 5th of October.

NARRATOR:
Well, just as I thought the pace of events was slowing down, I've
just bought today's newspaper.  I'm sitting in a café and staring
out from the front page are two of the country's best-known
organised crime leaders killed yesterday in a shoot-out, and this
is the very man here who the politician Vuk Draskovic told us was
thought to have fired the shot or one of the people who fired the
shot that only just missed Draskovic by a millimetre.  And I
can't really understand the details, I'm just going to ask our
assistant Susana.  This is the head actually of the most, the
biggest gang in the country, the Zemun gang, Dusan Spasojevic.

SUSANNA:
Yes.  They were killed yesterday during the police raid and they
were suspected to be one of the people who was planning the
assassination of the prime minister, Zoran Djindjic.

NARRATOR:
And it's also thought one of the best friends of the man who's
still in hiding but is thought to have been the ringleader of the
whole plot, Legija?

SUSANNA:
Yes that's what they say, yes.

NARRATOR:
Two best friends, Legija and Spasojevic. One was in ‘security’, the
other in ‘business’, but both were able to try their hands at the
other's trade, and both were doing pretty well for themselves.
The government says that overall Belgrade's gangland was moving
a hundred kilograms of heroin a month. I want to get an idea of
the style that that enabled them to live in, and the journalist
Dejan Anastasjevic has offered to take me on a tour of their now
crumbling empire.

Where are we at the moment?

ANASTASJEVIC:
We are now in the suburb called Zemun.  You can see in the
architecture there is a little bit of Austro-Hungarian charm
still here because this part of Belgrade used to belong to
Austro-Hungarian empire all the way up to the World War I.

NARRATOR:
And the most famous gang, the most notorious gang which has now
been cracked down on hardest, is called the Zemun gang, after
this region?

ANASTASJEVIC:
Yes they had their headquarters here, they had practically a
fortress.

NARRATOR:
Can we see it?

ANASTASJEVIC: 
Yes, yes I certainly hope so.  It's not entirely there so to
speak because the government just demolished it, broke it down
immediately after the prime minister was assassinated.  It was
all covered with CCTV, even the entrance roads into Zemun and out
of Zemun.

NARRATOR:
So if that building hadn't been demolished, they would be
tracking us now?

ANASTASJEVIC:
Yes.  After about thirty seconds some very serious young man
would come out and show us out.

NARRATOR:
Well we've pulled up, we've pulled up now at exactly the building
you're talking about, although we can hardly see it because in
the fact the road is blocked off at this point and there is a
screen blocking the road, but behind it we can see, can just see
a demolished roof.  Shall we get out for a minute?

Let's see because there's actually a tear in this great plastic
screen across the road, so we can have a little look through it. 
Gosh, that's extraordinary.  There's, well there's the remains
of a house, completely tottering on one side.  Now it's, that
used to be three storeys?

ANASTASJEVIC:
This used to be three storeys high, yeah.  It took them ten days
to, to demolish it this place.

NARRATOR:
It was that well built?

ANASTASJEVIC:
It was well built and it had, it was built according to
specifications for military bunkers because it was all built on
heroin really.

NARRATOR:
The Serbian government wants us to believe that the murder of
Djindjic has persuaded it finally to declare war once and for all
on the vast illegal shadow state that Milosevic created, and at
first sight the results of its offensive look pretty impressive. 
More than four thousand people have been detained for
questioning, more than a thousand are behind bars and they
include such big fish as the former head of the secret police,
and the country's best known pop singer Ceca, the widow of the
war criminal Arkan.  And as the raids continue, I have been
invited tonight to join a night-time patrol with the newly
established Serbian Gendarmerie, supposedly a new clean security
force for a new Serbia.

We've come out by jeep to a large roundabout.  It's a force of
about eight gendarmes here, all in camouflage uniforms, with
camouflage netting masks over their faces which makes them look
quite intimidating.  And every time they stop a car, one of them
goes forward, asks the driver for his papers and three of his
colleagues cover him, pointing their rifles at the car - a lot
more frightening than the average police stop and search
operation.

Well disappointingly, the gendarmes didn't run Legija to ground
that night. He's still in hiding. But there are enough other
sensations to keep Belgrade's café society talking furiously over
their Turkish coffee. More than 7,500 suspects have now been
detailed, and the latest news is that Mira Markovic, Milosevic's
wife, has suddenly fled to Moscow.  With every day that passes
the shock-waves from the bullet that killed Djindjic are
spreading wider and wider. 

One of the country's most popular politicians, ex-president
Vojislav Kostunica, a bitter rival of Djindjic, is now being
forced to deny that he was behind the assassination.  The
extraordinary allegation is that Kostunica, who'd defended the
Red Berets before, was involved in a conspiracy with them to
create chaos on the streets after Djindjic's assassination and
then overthrow the whole pro-reform government.  So far, no
evidence to confirm that has been made public, but Zarko Korac,
the deputy prime minister, has been saying in public that the
murder did have a wider political dimension, and I'm going to
talk to him about that now.

KORAC:
This was a conspiracy against the state, to have chaos, to have
new elections, to have so-called patriotic forces once again in
power, to have these old good days before Milosevic was sent to
Hague.  When you see the width of all this, then you would
understand that Djindjic was in effect almost powerless to do
anything and that's a very very sad statement.  Even if you
arrest them, they would very often be released and the party
would be against you, and these criminals were all around.  And
some of them were seen by not a small proportion of our society
as heroes.  We had magazines, we had media that publicised these
lavish styles of these criminals that had money and they were
almost role models for some youngsters, people like Arkan and
people like this Legija, the man that organised the murder of Mr
Djindjic, have, have short brutal and fascinating lives.

NARRATOR:
What you're now attempting is what looks like the final crack-
down, the complete clear-out of all the kind of elements from the
Milosevic era that remained and are dangerous to the state.  Is
it really going to be a complete clear-out?  How confident are
you of that?

KORAC:
What we hope to get are two things, to clean up as much as
possible the institutions of state, of utterly corrupt people
that worked for gang leaders and the criminal gangs.  The
second thing is that this is a historical turning point.  These
so-called ‘patriots’ from previous wars won't seem so patriotic
after all.  We want to show that they turn out to be what they
have always been - plain criminals that went to war to rob, to
rape, to kill and to get rich if possible.  The death of Djindjic
symbolically means literally the end of the period where you
could do whatever you wanted and claim that you were a patriot. 
Now patriots turn out to be murderers and this is the death of
this idea of Milosevic's patriotism.

NARRATOR:
Well, Professor Korac has just rushed off mysteriously for an
urgent hair cut.  I wanted to press him quite a bit further
because I'm not convinced that Milosevic patriotism can be killed
off that easily.  Anyway tonight I'm going to enjoy a night on
the town because I'm going to use the opportunity to test a wider
range of opinion on the subject.

VOX POP:
Turbo-folk!  We love it!

NARRATOR:
I can't really disguise that I'm too old for clubbing, but I
decided to brave this Belgrade nightspot because it's a bunker -
a sweaty bunker - of patriotic taste.  The noise you may just
about be able to hear behind me is turbo-folk, the sound track
for what patriots here call the "national project".  That's what
we call the murderous ten-year struggle to unite all Serbs that's
now being deconstructed by the Hague Tribunal. Turbo-folk's
greatest star is, or was, the turbo-bosomed Ceca, Serbia's
Madonna, Tina Turner and Dolly Parton all rolled gloriously into
one.  Ceca rolled with the ethnic cleanser Arkan, and after he
was gunned down, she rolled with Legija. Now, she's been banged
up. A huge cache of arms and explosives was found under her
swimming pool. 

So, do all her fans - the close-cropped lads and leather-clad
girls in here - see it as the end for "Milosevic patriotism"?
Well I think I'm going to have another drink before I dare to ask
them.

Well it was almost impossible to hear anything in there, even
myself, so I've just come out onto the street to ask some of the
boys and girls who are leaving what they think of turbo-folk and
why they like it.  

VOX POPS:
it's our national music., it's a kind of Turkish, Iraqian and
Serbian.  It is in our blood to listen to that music. 

NARRATOR:
Tell me about Ceca, why do people like Ceca so much?

VOX POPS:
Ceca!  Well did you see her breasts?

NARRATOR:
Her breasts?  I did, yes.  Can I just ask you one more question? 
I know that because of everything that's happening now, Ceca is
actually arrested, yes?  What do you think about that?

VOX POPS:
Well I knew that she was kind of criminal you know.  I expected
it.  
NARRATOR:
Have a good night, thank you.  Can we ask you?  BBC?  Tell me,
who do young people in Serbia now, who do they admire?

VOX POPS: [translated]
They admire criminals.  

NARRATOR:
They admire criminals?  Why is that?

VOX POPS: [translated]
They live good, they have money and all other things that are
going together with money.

NARRATOR:
You admire criminals as well?

VOX POPS: [translated]
Yes!  I like this behind you.

NARRATOR:
What we can see behind me is a girl, I can see in fishnet tights. 
She's tottering on a very very high pair of heels.  Also wearing
a very very tight blouse.  

VOX POPS: [translated}
Well before we used to call these guys criminals.  Now we call
them controverse businessmen, controversial businessmen, which
is the same.

NARRATOR:
Do you think it's possible already to forget about the war, the
war in Yugoslavia?

VOX POPS:
For us the war is very very past.

And we must forget of that.

NARRATOR:
You don't think there's still a lot of people who are involved
in bad things in the war?

VOX POPS:
No no no, that is propaganda, nothing more.

NARRATOR:
I am on the terrace of the British Embassy in Belgrade with the
ambassador Charles Crawford.  How far was Djindjic pressurised
into finally planning to move against these people by western
pressure, to bring war criminals to The Hague?

CRAWFORD: 
That's a good question.  I think the, I think he was put under
pressure but it was pressure to do something he wanted to do. He
saw the links between organised crime and war crimes very
clearly, and he was, he knew he had to do it.  He knew it was
part of European standards. I think it wasn't popular because I
think you know the great mass of Serbs feel that more Serbs have
been taken to The Hague than other you know Croats or Albanians
and so on.  It wasn't easy for him to do it but he was
sufficiently bold and determined and principled, if you like, a
leader to take unpopular steps.  He was someone who really was
brave in that way.  He told me lots of times he was determined
to lurch Serbia towards Europe you know at the price of his own
popularity and ultimately I'm afraid you know he went through to
the price of his own life.

NARRATOR:
If the system was so unhealthy, if it was actually quite hard to
tell within the system who really was a good-y and who was a bad-
y, if everybody was so intertwined, the underworld and the
official state structures, how can you really be sure that this
is a tipping point?

CRAWFORD:
Well the answer is I'm not sure, but one has to look at the sheer
scale of what they've done.  Every institution you can think of
here was rotten in varying degrees.  The judges, the police,
politics, business, customs, you name it.  I mean it's hard to
imagine quite how big this was, and he was getting better.  I
don't think it was, it wasn't all bad.  Following the 5th of
October, things were improving but it was a bit like trying to
take an animal, you know a horse or something down the road with
poisoned arrows sticking out the side of it.  They'd managed to
throw off the rider of Milosevic but they were - because of
what's happened now and the assassination of Zoran Djindjic -
they made a tremendous effort to pull out some of the poisoned
arrows so the poison is still in the system, part of it, the
wounds are still painful but I think the horse can now move a lot
more freely.

NARRATOR:
In the week I've been making this programme the destruction of
Serbia's shadow state has continued apace, but I've seen how
difficult it is to distinguish between the forces of darkness and
the forces of light.  Many Serbian institutions such as the army
which were deeply implicated in Milosevic's rule still remain
largely untouched by the current purges. Serbia's experience
shows the same thing that the west may now find in Iraq - you can
lop the head off a dictatorship but it's much harder to pull it
up by the roots.