Looking into the eyes of the Serbian ‘tiger’
Reflections on a warlord’s reign of terror in the former Yugoslavia
The last time I was in Belgrade in March, 1999, it was still the capital of Yugoslavia and its most notorious warlord wanted me dead.
Zeljko Raznatovic, far better known by his nom de guerre, Arkan, confronted me and about 20 other journalists in the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel a few hours after U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and F-117 Nighthawk stealth ground-attack aircraft had destroyed much of Belgrade’s electrical grid and attacked other key targets, including the Yugoslav Army headquarters and television transmitters.
If we were not gone from Yugoslavia by sundown, Arkan said, fighters from his Serb Volunteer Guard would be ordered to kill us.
Surrounded by gunmen swaddled in bandoliers and carrying assault rifles, Arkan had picked me out of the crowd because he recognized me from an interview I had done with him eight years earlier, in the Croatian-occupied town of Erdut. At that time he was fondling a Siberian tiger cub that had become his talisman and claiming that he had recently lost part of a finger to a Croatian bullet. To welcome me, the 39-year-old “pastry and ice cream salesman” arranged for an honour guard of several hundred “Tigers” toting grenade launchers and machine guns.
Arkan was regarded by many Serbs as a dashing super-patriot and folk hero confronting what he called Croatian and German fascism and those he believed instigated all the trouble, the Roman Catholic Church. His boyishly handsome image adorned Serbian magazine covers. Newspapers regaled readers with his latest battlefield exploits. Fans clamoured for his autograph. Married and a father of four, his girlfriend was one of Serbia’s most popular rock singers.
But to many other Serbs, Arkan was a lout and a career criminal who commanded a private army that would lead them deeper into a war that many of them did not want. They reviled his ultranationalism and were deeply suspicious of his underworld connections and his constant scrapes with the law.
Most of all, as I wrote at the time, they feared Arkan was helping to lead the Balkans into a Lebanon-like sectarian apocalypse. Such fears were prophetic.
When we spoke in Erdut, ethnic cleansing had already begun in Croatian cities in eastern Slavonia, later spreading to Serbian, Muslim and Croatian towns and villages in Bosnia, where hunting down those who prayed in different confessionals became a blood sport.
Before the decade of rage and vengeance was over, all of Vukovar and much of Sarajevo had been reduced to rubble, other Bosnian cities such as Mostar had been badly damaged and Kosovar Albanians had fled en masse to Albania and Macedonia.
It was Kosovo that finally provoked a U.S.-led NATO coalition, which included Canadian warplanes, to launch an air assault on prime targets in Serbia including the bridges in and near Belgrade which spanned the Danube.
The night before Arkan had issued his ultimatum, I watched the lethal dance of the cruise missiles from the roof of my hotel. The attack was dazzling and terrifying to behold.
Launched from long-range bombers and from submarines and cruisers in the Mediterranean, the rockets swept into Belgrade at an altitude of perhaps 20 or 30 metres. They miraculously veered around street corners as they navigated their way to pre-programmed targets. Each time one of them smashed into a power transformer there were spectacular fireworks accompanied by a snap, crackle and pop as the structure crumbled.
As cruel as those attacks on Belgrade were, they hastened the end of the war in Kosovo, which was the last blood-soaked chapter in the deadly conflict.
Belgrade looks as pretty and as placid today as it did before the wars began in Slovenia in early 1991.
But it’s impossible to forget the hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Croats and Muslims who died in Europe’s biggest conflagration since the Second World War. It’s also impossible to forget Arkan’s bluster and braggadocio.
“The Serbian people need warriors and they’ve made me their symbol,” Arkan boasted to me in 1991. “It’s a war and I’m a warrior — I’m no commander who keeps his ass at the rear. I lead from the front. I’ve personally killed many Croats. I am a tiger. Not a sheep.”
Already wanted in half a dozen European countries for murder, extortion and racketeering, Arkan was indicted in 1999 on 24 charges by the UN War Crimes Tribunal for crimes against humanity. But he never stood trial.
Nine months after threatening to kill me and other journalists at the Hyatt, Arkan was gunned down a couple of hundred metres away in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel.