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Serbia's mafia warlords showed they will stop at nothing to protect their criminal empire when they assassinated Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic - burying the country's best chance of escaping from the dark age of Milosevic. Report by Ian Traynor in Zagreb and Dejan Anastasijevic in Belgrade
Sunday March 16,
2003
The Observer
The three men in blue
overalls strolled casually into the city centre building at lunchtime on
Wednesday, just as office workers, government bureaucrats and shop assistants
were pouring on to the streets of Belgrade to savour a first flush of spring.
The trio carried a toolbox and a coil of telephone cable.
Flanked by the ruins of Defence Ministry buildings bombed by Nato in 1999, the
office looks directly on to a small park that abuts a car park at the rear
entrance of the Serbian Prime Minister's office.
But no one paid any attention to the workmen. A janitor nodded
to them as they went up the stairs to the second floor and entered an empty
office.
From the toolbox, one of the men took a blanket and a
high-velocity sniper rifle. He laid the blanket across the windowsill. On this
he set up and loaded the gun. The weapon was pointed across the park at the
Prime Ministerial parking space, 200 yards away.
Twenty minutes later, an armoured, metallic grey BMW cruised
sleekly into the yard, taking Zoran Djindjic to a meeting with a government
advisory body on combatting corruption.
The well-groomed Serbian Prime Minister was a very fit
50-year-old. But he hobbled on crutches out of the BMW because he had recently
torn an Achilles tendon while playing football for the government team against a
Serbian police XI.
As he clambered out of the car and sought to get his
balance on the crutches, a single 7.9-millimetre bullet - not two bullets, as
widely reported - struck Djindjic in the back, shattered his heart and shredded
his intestines before exiting from his abdomen and hitting a bodyguard.
Djindjic, a controversial and flawed character who represented
the best chance Serbia has of recovering from the 13 years of disaster wreaked
by Slobodan Milosevic, was hurled back into the car and rushed to a nearby
clinic. He was dead on arrival. The bodyguard is recovering in hospital.
Springtime in Belgrade has seldom seemed so chilly.
The assassination was breathtakingly bold, executed with
clinical perfection by a professional killer.
Despite contradictory police claims that two or three of the
alleged perpetrators had been caught immediately, the three men in blue overalls
walked out of the building.
The janitor, say Serbian police sources, watched a bespectacled,
dark-haired man aged around 30 leave the building carrying the rifle. His two
accomplices brandished pistols. They disappeared up the street into the
lunchtime melee.
As Serbia mourned yesterday at Djindjic's funeral in Belgrade -
and the West pondered the impact of the loss of its key Serbian ally - Slobodan
Milosevic sat in a Dutch prison cell 1,000 miles away and may have afforded
himself a sly chuckle.
It was Djindjic who literally gambled his life on putting the
former Serbian strongman in the dock for genocide in The Hague. On Wednesday, he
lost that bet.
'He was our best hope for a better future,' said Danilo
Vasiljevic, a factory worker who joined 100,000 mourners on the streets of
Belgrade yesterday for the state funeral. 'I'm not sure we can pull through
without him.'
Not since Tito died in 1980 had Belgrade witnessed such
an outpouring of grief. The streets were bedecked with flowers for the funeral
cortege.
The huge security operation that accompanied the funeral aroused
the wrath of mourners. 'Look at them now showing off,' Milica Spiridonovic, a
Belgrade housewife, said contemptuously of the special police and army troops in
flak jackets lining the streets. 'Why didn't they protect him when he was
alive?'
Djindjic was a principled if pragmatic opponent of Milosevic for
a decade, before spearheading the revolt against the dictator 30 months ago. But
he owed his rise to power to a Faustian pact with the thugs and secret policemen
who served as Milosevic's henchmen through four lost wars in the 1990s.
'A man must have friends in both heaven and hell,' he quipped
memorably last summer. But the shady characters with whom he consorted have
extracted their price. The future looks bleak.
'This is unfinished business from October 2000,' said Mirko
Klarin, an expert on war crimes in former Yugoslavia, referring to the street
revolt that Djindjic led to depose Milosevic, 'a result of the compromises and
Mephistophelean deals that Djindjic had to make'. Milosevisc is directly
implicated in the assassination. But the murder is the Milosevic system's
revenge for handing over the ex-leader and some of his cronies to the war crimes
tribunal in The Hague, and for Djindjic's moves to combat the mobsters licensed
by Milosevic and who now form a powerful para-state.
The murder is also a wake-up call to the West, a terrifying
reminder of the ease, confidence and impunity with which the Belgrade mafias
operate.
The Milosevic legacy of gangsterism is no local quarrel among
thieves, but a burgeoning industry that is bleeding the Balkans dry, entrenching
political corruption, paralysing government and spreading criminality to the
West.
Illegal immigration, people-trafficking, hard drugs, sex
slavery, money laundering and gun-running are booming in the Balkans, right on
the borders of an expanding European Union.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that up to
70,000 kilos of heroin are smuggled through the Balkans into western Europe
every year, generating $7 billion (�4.5bn) of business.
A European task force set up to combat people-trafficking
concluded that mafia-run illegal immigration and the kidnapping of women and
children into the sex industry brings half a million people into western Europe
via the Balkans every year.
There is a direct link with the murder of Djindjic, who was
gathering his energies and resources to crack down on the organised criminals
who helped him to power and, under strong US pressure, to transfer more war
crimes suspects to The Hague.
Lashing out in fury at the murder and putting on a show of
force, the Serbian authorities have pulled in 181 people from the underworld and
Milosevic security appa ratus, demolished gangsters' villas and rampaged through
mafia headquarters.
But if the three men in overalls walked away from the scene of
the crime, the two key suspects have also vanished - the mysterious mafia boss
Milorad Lukovic alias Legija, and his sidekick at the top of the 'Zemun gang',
Dusan Spasojevic.
From the torching of the Croatian village of Dreznik in 1991 to
the massacre of Albanian civilians in Drenica in 1998, Legija is reputed to have
been involved in the worst atrocities of Milosevic's failed Greater Serbia
project.
He headed the secret Red Berets special operations unit of the
Serbian Interior Ministry, which operated as Milosevic's death squads in
Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Secret footage shown recently at the Milosevic trial showed
Legija displaying his unit to Milosevic and bragging that his men constituted 'a
small, mobile, discreet, and murderous unit'.
Djindjic met Legija two days before Milosevic's overthrow in
October 2000 and secured guarantees that the paramilitaries would keep out of
the fight.
But in January, Legija directed an extraordinary broadside at
Djindjic, accusing the Prime Minister of breaking his promises of immunity for
the thugs, of being a Western lackey, and warning him against extraditing
Serbian 'patriots' to The Hague.
Djindjic shrugged off the thinly veiled threat, just as he
shrugged off an earlier assassination attempt three weeks ago, when a lorry
tried to ram his motorcade. That appears to have been a warning shot, but it was
ignored.
Serbia is to get a new Prime Minister today - in all likelihood,
the Djindjic aide and Interior Minister, Zoran Zivkovic. He lacks the leadership
qualities, the ruthlessness and the education that made Djindjic the most
capable democrat in Belgrade. For the mobsters, the good times are back.
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