I: Introduction

March 12, 2003, about 9 AM. Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Dindic is on the phone with a close adviser and confidant, Zoran Janjusevic. (C)

Dindic: Janjusevic, it’s me.

Janjusevic: Good morning, sir.

Dindic: The same to you. How are things moving along with these gangs?

Janjusevic: We're making quite good progress, actually.

Dindic: Good. I worry maybe I didn't make the right call firing Savic and Bracanovic last month.

Janjusevic: No, it was the right move. No more leaks, as far as we can tell. Spasojevic and the Zemun gang won't know what hit them.

Dindic: Well, good. That’s good. Thank you. Anyways, I’ll be in this afternoon after some meetings. We’ll talk more then.

Later that day, around 12:35pm, Dindic’s motorcade turns into the parking lot at Nemanjina 11. Dindic’s driver needs no reminder that his boss prefers to avoid the government headquarters' secure tunnel passage, and he pulls the car up to an exterior entrance instead. The security team exits the other vehicles and forms a perimeter, while Dindic's top bodyguard gets out, opens his boss's door, and turns to grab some crutches. Dindic’s lower left leg is in a cast, thanks to an achilles injury from a soccer match the week prior. Handing off the crutches, the bodyguard then goes for the Prime Minister’s briefcase, as Dindic starts toward the entrance. Then,

[two shots]

Zoran Dindic is shot. Immediately, building security drags him inside to safety, shouting that someone should call an ambulance. Alerted by the commotion, Dindic’s confidant Janjusevic appears on the scene, stunned. He kneels down by the Prime Minister and finds he’s still alive but bleeding heavily. Janjusevic tells security to forget the ambulance and to help him carry the Prime Minister to the car.

Within moments, they are speeding to the hospital. Across the rear seats, his head in Janjusevic’s lap, lies the man who ousted a genocidal dictator, who brought war criminals to justice, who sought to build a brighter future for a nation burdened by a terribly dark past, and whose greatest crime, it now seemed, was taking on gangs who profited off brutality, addiction, and war. And now, after everything, Zoran Dindic is dead.

The mystery of his murder lies not so much in the question of “Who did this?”, although there are theories that question the official explanation; Zvezdan Jovanovic pulled the trigger at the behest of his boss, notorious gangster Dusan “Duke” Spasojevic, and his former commander, Special Operative Milorad “Legion” Ulemek. Rather, it lies in the question, “How did this happen?”: a mystery which requires unraveling the interwoven stories of these men—Legion, Duke, Dindic, and others—who, some for better, others for worse, had a hand in shaping the fate of this young nation.

II: Born in Bloodshed

Those stories begin in the 1990s, when Serbia's mother-country, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was coming apart, thanks largely to ethnic tensions stoked by Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic (A, 32-33). The wars of disintegration that followed saw brutality on all sides, but are widely remembered for Serbian attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing of Croats, Bosnians, and others.

Although Serbia's government remained officially aloof from the conflicts, Milosevic’s state security services funded, trained, and encouraged the formation of Serbian militias: among them, the notorious Red Berets who perpetrated such atrocities as the ethnic cleansing of Doboj in Bosnia, resulting in over 300 civilian deaths and thousands displaced (A, 38-47, 136). And wherever they went, after the killing came the looting. According to the later testimony of one Serbian State Security official, the Red Berets

“introduced a reign of terror…They started carrying away property and prevented people from taking anything with them if they wanted to leave (B)”

In turn, they built strong relations with and fueled the rise of powerful gangs trafficking in stolen wartime plunder, including people.For their brutality and avarice, Milosevic rewarded the Red Berets, incorporating them as the Special Operations Unit or JSO within the Ministry of State Security in 1996 after the wars drew to a close (A, 107). With official status came a particularly import ant new recruit: Milorad Ulemek, also known as Legion (A, 105). Almost immediately,

Legion started climbing the ranks of the unit, and transformed it into one of Milosevic’s chief instruments of repression, carrying out the disappearance and assassination of political opponents (A, 112-113). By 1999, he was the Red Berets’ leader. But as Legion and his unit were growing in power, Serbia was struggling. Internationally isolated by sanctions imposed in response to the violence, Serbia's official economy began to sink.

In its place rose the shadow economy born from the trade of wartime plunder.

Emblematic of this trend was the Zemun Clan, a mafia group led by Dusan Spasojevic, known as the "Duke." He’d started out dealing in stolen cars but quickly graduated to heroin trafficking and kidnappings for ransom (A, 112-113). In each other, Duke and Legion each found a perfect ally—Ulemek helped plan the abductions, and reinvested part of his own cut from the ransoms into the Red Berets. Even in peace, the symbiosis between paramilitary and organized crime had only deepened (A, 112-113).

But peace was not to last. By 1999, in Kosovo—an autonomous province within Serbia—long-simmering ethnic tensions between the Serbs and majority Albanians exploded into open conflict (L, 203). Milosevic responded by deploying troops, including the Red Berets, to the region, sparking international fears of a repeat of the atrocities of the early 90s (A, 110).

When those fears were confirmed, and reports of ethnic cleansing began to leak out of Kosovo, Europe and the United States, under the banner of NATO, intervened with a massive air campaign against Serbia. For 78 days in early 1999, bombs fell across the country, until, threatened by a land invasion, Milosevic agreed to withdraw. Serbia’s infrastructure had been wrecked, along with Milosevic’s prestige, and he was now the subject of an indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (L, 204-205).

An international fugitive, the authoritarian ruler’s power was now threatened, but domestically he was still entrenched. It would take a massive push to overthrow him.

III: Fateful Choices

The man who would ultimately contribute, gain, and then tragically lose the most from that massive push was Zoran Djindjic. A former philosophy professor, Djindjic had spent the 1980s criticizing Yugoslavia’s bubbling nationalism (H). In 1989, he and a group of intellectuals established one of the first major opposition parties in the country: the Democratic Party. Though a strident liberal ideologue, Dindic was not an idealist. Summarizing his pragmatism, he reportedly remarked to a disgruntled ally:

"If you want honesty, go to church.” (H)

Over the course of the 90s, Djindjic employed his political acumen to call tens, sometimes even hundreds, of thousands of Serbians out onto the streets almost at a moment’s notice, protesting to demand an end to authoritarian rule (F, G). And when Milosevic found himself on the wrong side of NATO bombers in 1999, Djindjic and his allies saw an opening. With training and funding from Western pro-democracy organizations, Dindic and other opposition leaders began discussing the formation of a broad popular front against the current government. By the end of the year, it was official: eighteen political parties combined to form the Democratic Opposition of Serbia and rallied against Milosevic (K, 310-311).

And the time was ripe. Years of international sanctions and months of bombing had destroyed the Serbian economy. Milosevic’s support for the wars of the decade had become incredibly unpopular, and even his precious Red Berets weren't able to disappear and murder enough of his enemies to save him now. There were just too many (K, 310).

Yet perhaps not comprehending just how dire his situation was, in July of 2000 Milosevic decided to call early elections for the presidency of Yugoslavia, which by now was limited to Serbia and neighboring Montenegro, reduced by the losses of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Slovenia (N).

Djindjic faced a difficult choice. To many, he was the face of opposition, but while many Serbs were tired of Milosevic's bloodshed, they weren't necessarily inclined to support a liberal philosophy professor who’d once railed against Serbian nationalism. Moreover, Djindjic was publicly linked to the very European countries that had bombed Serbia only a year and a half earlier, and he knew it, stating in his own words,

"My political position is currently too pro-European for most people in Serbia. Their feelings about Europe are still too linked to the NATO intervention and sanctions, and they are suspicious about the good intentions of those countries." (D, 3)

And so, Djindjic stepped aside in favor of Vojislav Kostunica, a longtime opponent of Milosevic but a far more traditional candidate who more readily embraced Serbian nationalism (D, 1). Djindjic was entrusted with the crucial, but far less glorious, task of managing Kostunica’s campaign (K, 312).

The election was held on September 24th, 2000. Kostunica won an outright majority, embarassing Milosevic who won a mere 37% of the vote (K, 311). After over a decade in power, Slobodan Milosevic had been rejected by his own people.

Claiming that Kostunica hadn’t actually won a majority, Milosevic demanded a second round of voting (O). In response to this obvious power-grab, protests erupted across the country, and crowds descended on Belgrade. Except…Milosevic and his lackeys still had the guns. While the opposition movement planned a massive protest for October 5th, Djindjic and the other leaders were concerned that the police—and Legion's notoriously brutal Red Berets in particular—would unleash deadly force against the demonstrators (K, 312).

And so, on the night of October 4th, Zoran Dindic, the man who said that those who wanted honesty in politics should instead go to church, once again making a fateful choice, got into the back of a Jeep in downtown Belgrade and sat across from Milorad Ulemek, the man who would, in 2003, have him killed. But that was years away. On this night in 2000, they struck a deal. If the Red Berets refused to follow Milosevic’s inevitable order to put down the protests, the protestors would steer clear of Legion's men. More importantly, the deal effectively secured the unit's continued existence in the post-Milosevic regime (A,115-116).

The next day, over 500,000 Serbians flooded the streets of Belgrade. Milosevic ordered the his loyal Red Berets to defend the regime, but Legion told his men to stand down (L, 312). For Milosevic, the jig was up. On October 7th, just two days later, Kostunica was inaugurated as the President of Yugoslavia (K, 314). Two months later, the opposition parties won a smashing victory in Serbia’s parliamentary elections. Zoran Dindic, for his work, leadership, and willingness to compromise with Kostunica and Legion, was chosen as Prime Minister (P).

Dindic now faced two inseperable challenges: how to revive the collapsed economy and what to do about Slobodan Milosevic. The International Criminal Tribunal had indicted Milosevic in 1999 and put out a warrant for his arrest. Europe and America wanted that warrant executed, with Milosevic extradited to the Hague to be put on trial. Until that happened, the sanctions strangling Serbia, particularly from America, weren't going anywhere (R).

Now, Milosevic had been arrested not long after his ousting, but that was for domestic crimes of corruption and abuse of power (Q, 663). That didn't help with the issue of extradition, and Kostunica, with whom Djindjic almost immediately experienced a falling out, refused to green-light a constitutional amendment or exception (R) . On June 28th, 2001, the Yugoslav federal court concurred with Kostunica, ruling that Milosevic could not be extradited.

This put Djindjic between the rock of international justice and the hard place of national constitutionalism. Because Yugoslavia’s old constitution, written under Milosevic, was still in force, and it said in plain terms that

A Yugoslav citizen may not be deprived of his citizenship, deported from the country, or extradited to another state. (S)

Djindjic had no authority to disobey.

Now, Milosevic had been arrested not long after his ousting, but that was for domestic crimes of corruption and abuse of power. That didn't help with the issue of extradition, and Kostunica, with whom Djindjic almost immediately experienced a falling out, refused to green-light a constitutional amendment or exception. On June 28th, 2001, the Yugoslav federal court concurred with Kostunica, ruling that Milosevic could not be extradited (Q).

Djindjic was, yet again, faced with a difficult choice, his options constrained by a constitution written by the government he had just helped overthrow and international actors who had a life-or-death say over his country’s economy. And so he convened a meeting of his cabinet. They held a vote. Fifteen ministers, including Djindjic, voted to extradite Milosevic. Just one voted against, while six abstained. Within hours, Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of a decade of brutal civil violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, was put onto a plane and flown to the Hague (Q).

It was a blatantly unconstitutional act by Djindjic and his government, yet one done out of both a desire to achieve a higher justice that transcended the law and a practical need to provide for his people. In Djindjic’s own words,

We should fulfill certain conditions to be accepted as a partner. The conditions are to accept the rules of this democratic world, to cooperate with international organizations. That means cooperation with The Hague tribunal, fighting against corruption and organized crime in our country, conducting financial discipline and (promoting) free markets and democratic institutions. (T)

Serbian sanctions were lifted, but Dindic was hardly out of the woods yet.

IV: Mutiny

Because of course Milosevic didn’t act alone in his crimes against humanity, nor was he the only one wanted by the Hague. Among the many others on the list were, importantly, two brothers, Predrag and Nenad Banovic, wanted for their work as concentration camp guards where they beat, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered non-Serb prisoners. (4B) /CAM/

To apprehend these criminals, Dindic’s Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic dispatched the Red Berets on November 8, 2001. To this day it’s not known exactly what they were told about their targets, whether they knew exactly who they were or why they were wanted, but when, within hours of their arrest, the Banovic brothers were on a plane destined for the Hague, the Red Berets were not very happy.

On November 9, they mutinied. The Red Berets, many of whom served as security for government officials, simply didn’t show up to work, instead blockading themselves in their headquarters at Kula and issuing a statement demanding Mihajlovic’s resignation, saying,

“The unit was deceived and led to perform an illegal and unconstitutional act against its will. Given that the law on cooperation with the Hague Tribunal has not yet been passed…we reject any order issued in that direction. Members of this unit will not be hunters of Serbs persecuted like beasts without any basis in law.” (4B)

At that moment, Dindic was away in Washington, meeting and currying favor with American officials. News of the mutiny did not help things.

The next day the Red Berets made a show of force by barricading a critical highway north of Belgrade for several hours. Dindic, still scrambling to return to the capital, did nothing. (4C)

On the 11th he arrived in Belgrade, made a statement threatening to fire the special operatives if they didn’t quit the mutiny,

and convened a meeting with his cabinet and closest advisers.

Records revealed ten years later3 give us an astonishing insider look at the debate that followed. (4C)

Interior Minister Mihajlovic, at the center of this conflict, began the meeting by casting doubt on the purported legal concerns of this paramilitary death squad, theorizing that instead they were simply paranoid they would be next on the Hague's list. The rest of the military, he added, remained loyal.

Then, after another minister exclaimed,

“It is an armed rebellion against the government!”

Dindic made his first comment. Instead of responding to this or to Mihajlovic’s subtle suggestion to quash the mutiny, he laid out a complex three-pronged argument refuting the mutineers' legal arguments.

When another minister remarked that Djindjic hadn't answered what should actually be done,

Dindic replied,

“Let's see that the competent ministry finds a solution that will not add fuel to the fire. We have enough time tomorrow, if things escalate, to react more sharply.”

With that, the meeting adjourned. In other words, despite the urging of his subordinates, Dindic chose to delegate the decision and delay decisive action.

The next day, on the 12th, the Red Berets took the mutiny a step further, blockading the same critical highway, but this time for nearly ten hours.

On the 13th, Mihajlovic went to meet with the mutineers. They reiterated their demand that he resign. Determining the best course of action was to sacrifice himself, Mihajlovic penned his resignation there and then. But when he held it out for the mutineers to see, a fellow minister accompanying him snatched it from his hands and tore it to shreds. One of the Red Berets drew a knife and threatened to kill the man. But this was not the day Zvezdan Jovanovic would kill a government official. That would come just over a year later, when he set his sights on Zoran Dindic and pulled the trigger.

In the meantime, the ministers returned to Belgrade with nothing to show other than shredded paper and plans to attend yet another cabinet meeting.

This time, Dindic began by excoriating those who led the effort to arrest the Banovic brothers, validating the complaints of the mutineers. Though he refused Mihajlovic’s resignation, he suggested offering the Red Berets a deal: he would fire the Minister and Deputy Minister of State Security, who had immediate responsibility for the Banovic arrests. If they refused this, he added, then the cabinet would decide how to respond later.

At that, Mihajlovic became heated, retorting,

“The only thing that is not good is this talk of “tomorrow.” We have to know what our answer is to all situations…This is about an armed rebellion…It is a political battle for whether we will cooperate with The Hague and whether we will be a legal state in which organized mafia will not rule this country, in which there will be no [military] units…stronger than the state. Therefore, are we going to disarm those brothers in arms and blood and bring them to justice or not?”

Dindic dismissed the notion,

“This story about disarming them is a story for small children.”

Mihajlovic:

“That is not true. If the Government orders to disarm that unit and disband it, I will implement that decision.”

Another minister butted in:

“Zoran, I invite you to hit the table with your fist!…This is, with a political background, an armed rebellion against the Government.”

Another sounded his agreement, before one man cut through the din with the fateful question,

“Do we have the strength to disarm them?”

The room went quiet. Dindic responded, gravely,

“Don't ask for an honest answer.”

When some ministers pressed him to explain, he added,

“When I individually called [the military commanders] who should intervene and asked, “Why you don't want to intervene?” they would answer, “Why would I, when I go to The Hague tomorrow?” That's when I realized the scale of this spreading paranoia.”

Nobody wanted to do anything, because everyone feared they were next on the Hague lists. So once more, Dindic balked and delayed. For the moment, the Red Berets were satisfied, laying down their arms on the 17th, after Dindic brought in new leadership at State Security: Minister Andreja Savic and Deputy Minister Milorad Bracanovic, the latter being himself a former member of the Berets.(J)

V: The Aftermath

However, this concession would prove fatal. In the aftermath of the mutiny, Dindic knew he had to step up the fight against criminal gangs and paramilitaries, or else everything he'd worked for would be destroyed. So, in 2002, his government began secretly establishing new courts and prosecutors to go after the mafia and building robust legal protections for witnesses. In January of 2003, though, word got out. Somehow the Zemun Clan had become aware of these plans. There had to be a mole. Who else but the two men at the top of State Security connected to Ulemek and, by extension, Spasojevic? So Dindic fired Savic and Bracanovic. (J) /CAM/

But it wasn’t enough; their dismissals were in reality a trip wire, a step that told Legion and Duke that it was time to get rid of Djindjic entirely. They recruited Zvezdan Jovanovic to pull the trigger. As he later testified, Jovanovic believed that by assassinating Djindjic he could restore a pro-Milosevic government, one final testament to the deep ties between the authoritarian, genocidal regime that had preceded Djindjic and the rapacious criminals who had profited from it. (U)

In a poetic turn of fortune for Serbia, however, Dindic’s killers achieved anything but that. With this kind of violence against the state, there was no longer room for debate and delay about what had to be done. Within hours of Dindic's death, his cabinet convened and, motivated in part by Mihajlovic's insistence, declared a state of emergency and launched a massive police crackdown known as Operation Sabre. After more than 11,000 arrests, the results were stark. Although it took over a year to round up Ulemek and Spasojevic, the Red Berets were formally disbanded and the Zemun Clan, although it still exists today, has been nothing more than a shadow of its former self since 2003. (V)

But this leaves one question unanswered. If the Berets and gangs were dealt with so effectively, shouldn’t Djindjic have simply acted more aggressively, earlier? There’s no doubt that he needed Ulemek’s men on October 5th, 2000; if he hadn’t convinced them to step aside Milosevic might have stayed in power. But by the time of the mutiny in late 2001, it wasn’t so obvious anymore. The deliberations show that there was a real belief among some officials that this was the moment to put the Red Berets out of business, a move that, if successful, would have freed up the government to take action against the nation's gangs as well. Yet Djindjic hesitated.

Because he inherited a brutal dilemma. He was attempting to build a new, just society with the bricks and stones of a repressive, genocidal dictatorship. In his quest, the tools at his disposal — the Red Berets, the army, the constitution — were all tainted by the old regime. On the one hand, he had to extradite Milosevic and men like the Banovic brothers. He had to clean house. But to do so meant leveraging the laws crafted to prop up dictatorship and calling on the assistance of the very men who feared—not without reason—that “cleaning house” meant that they were about to be swept away too: next on the Hague lists.

Relying on, occasionally conceding to, the institutions and personnel of the old political order does not necessarily render the efforts of transition disingenuous. Men like Zoran Dindic, Janjusevic, Mihajlovic, and so many more gave everything in their earnest mission to build democracy. Yet, today, despite their efforts, Serbian democracy lags and is even backsliding. Organized crime resurged in the 2010s and continues to plague the country. Because transitioning to a functioning democracy is not easy work. Nor is it guaranteed. Even when successful, it’s a slow process full of fits and starts. In the case of Serbia, the forces of the old order were deeply entrenched in the state security system, and the ravages of war had empowered criminal elements at the expense of the public. It was never going to be easy, because there can be no clean break with the past. We play with the hand we’re dealt.

And yet, there are better and worse ways to play that hand in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Choices and leadership matter at critical moments, even when the shadow of the past looms large over the options available to decision makers. Zoran Djindjic made choices at crucial junctures, choices that led, successfully, to the ousting of a brutal regime and the establishment of a young democracy, but also, unsuccessfully, to the sustained influence of that regime’s fragments over the new order.

There’s no program here, no set of steps every leader can take. There is only good judgement and a willingness to take risks. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Maybe he could have broken with the past, at least more cleanly, at the moment of the mutiny. Or maybe he did everything right, and Serbia's history was just too dark, too recent. We can't know for sure. But we do know that he tried, and that in killing him, his assassins only empowered the allies of Serbian democracy and enshrined his memory as a man who sought, amidst the pain and tragedy, a glimmer of hope.

Sources

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B. IRMCT Stanisic, hearing, witness RFJ-151 (19 September 2017), https://ucr. irmct.org/scasedocs/case/MICT-15-96#transcripts

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4B. Danas, 11/21

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4C. Pescanik, 2011

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N. “Laws Altered, Milosevic Calls Election For September,” Associated Press, 28 July 2000.

O. Steven Erlanger, “Milosevic Seeking a Runoff Election After His Setback,” in The New York Times, 27 September 2000.

P. Steven Erlanger, “New Serbian Leader Vows Fast Improvements,” in The New York Times, 25 December 2000.

Q. Konstantinos D. Magliveras, “The Interplay Between the Transfer of Slobodan Milosevic to the ICTY and Yugoslav Constitutional Law,” in the European Journal of International Law, 13 no. 6 (2002), 661-677.

R. BBC, “Milosevic Extradited,” 28 June 2001.

S. Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Article 17.

T. “Serbian Leader on Life After Milosevic,” 24 October 2003, NBC.

U. Vesna Peric Zimonjic, “Assassin says Djindjic murder was to be first of many,” in The Independent, 9 April 2003.

V. “Serbia Disbands Police Unit of Suspect in Prime Minister’s Death,” Reuters, 27 March 2003.

W. “Rights Group Urges Inquiry on Torture in Serbia,” Associated Press, 4 September 2003.

X. Milos Ciric, “Mutiny, Assassination and a Serbian Political Conspiracy,” in Balkan Insight, 13 July 2018.