A genocide trial for Karadzic, and gangzter memories of Belgrade

Ex-Bosnian Serb Leader, Facing War-Crimes Charges, Appears to Steal a Page From Milosevic’s Courtroom Playbook.

By MARC CHAMPION

BRUSSELS — The trial of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on war-crimes charges begins Monday, and lawyers say his courtroom strategy is already emerging. Like the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, Mr. Karadzic looks set to try to string the proceedings out and turn them into an inquest into the role of the West in the war, these lawyers say. In addition, Mr. Karadzic has made it clear he plans to challenge the size of the death toll in the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, which is at the core of the genocide charge against him. Mr. Karadzic has been in detention in The Hague since he was discovered in Belgrade last year, in disguise and practicing alternative psychiatric medicine.

via Genocide Trial Set to Begin for Karadzic – WSJ.com.

Oh dear… With Serbia in the news again – as usual for all the wrong reasons – I couldn’t help but think back to the time I spent in Belgrade, hanging with gangsters for Australian Studio for Men magazine. Here’s what I wrote then. I intend revisiting Belgrade next year, it will be interesting to see how much, or how little has changed…

It’s a Wednesday evening in Belgrade, and I’m sitting in a ditsy-ritzy bar called ‘Blay Watch’ when I realise that my lifelong search for the world’s worst music may finally be at an end. Imagine Techno mixed up with Arabic and Gypsy sounds, and you have Serbia’s gift to musical tack: Turbo Folk.

But it is a few hours later, that the excitement really begins. That’s when I meet with a ’semi-retired’ thirty-two year old drug dealer (and father of two) named Bojan, (pronounced Boyan). Bojan operates out of a bar called No Names, which is on a barge moored on the river Danube. When we pull up at the river’s edge in a rackety Volvo, it is shrouded in darkness, apart from a dim red light from a cabin window. That, and the pulse of Goa trance music assures us that someone is within. My fixer and I wait for a few minutes behind a gate on a drawbridge for our man to emerge from his shadowy vessel.

Your correspondent

Bojan is a spare, wiry man with a night-time pallor, pock marked skin, shoulder length hair and a gravely, captivating voice. It is the voice of both seducer and killer, and I could imagine this man telling someone exactly what he was going to do to them, before he did it, in either scenario: the soft tone and delivery virtually the same. “Nowadays I want to finish something with somebody, I must make to seem like it is accident” he says ominously as he sparks up a joint, oblivious to a police boat purring by on the Danube.

Continues after the jump, if you can take it…

…A cigarette pack stuffed tight with marijuana costs ten Deutsch Mark in Belgrade if you know where to get it, which is everywhere. It’s quite strong stuff (apparently), not hydroponically grown but still with a buzzy blur packed inside. The dope from Albania is meant to be even more de-habilitating. Cocaine in Belgrade costs between 80DEM and 120DEM for ‘pure cocaine’, and is widely used by the kind of people you can imagine snorting cocaine in Eastern Europe. These aren’t your new-fashion-line/album-launch/PR-media-event/party-in-Mayfair cocaine users we’re talking about here. These are enormous guys with shaven heads wearing gold chains and Italian suits, metaphorical Kalashnikov in one hand probably, poodle-haired über-bimbo girlfriend in the other. Smack is also popular in Belgrade, but presumably with a more dressed-down sort of crowd. There are said to be junkies living like golems in the underground passages and caves around the Kalemegdan castle.

As a boy in his late teens appears on deck of No Names bar to spin records, Bojan says, “I saw him smoke cocaine with marijuana first time when he was thirteen”, and they both smile like it was some happy event to be remembered fondly: first communion with the white monkey.

Bojan is the second really shady character I had been introduced to that evening. The first was a guy named ‘Raki’. Not, thinks Sherlock, his real name. Bojan was all flamboyance and eye contact and telling stories and showing me his knife and bullet wounds while Raki had been quieter, more guarded. Bojan claims that, these days, he is “out of the game – mostly”. With Raki we had all indulged in the convention that he is someone who ‘knows guys – who know guys who know guys’. But I don’t think Raki paid for his Mercedes Compressor by delivering pizzas. Dressed in a non-descript leather jacket and jeans, Raki was well over six foot, no older than thirty and surgically good-looking. He also turned out to be quite a serious guy. He told me about the various neighbourhoods, how they all have their specialist gangs “but a lot of them just start out stealing cars. Some are ex-cops. Many. It’s always the second-tier guys who are flashy. Some guys in Belgrade even dress up and act like they’re gangsters just to impress girls”. When I asked him about the future, he seemed quite concerned. “This organised crime will continue as long as you can bribe police and especially judges. Everyone knows the market price for a verdict. The judges need better salaries – and bodyguards”. Quite.

Bojan is less ostensibly concerned with the intricacies of legal reform and performs instead a little Macho dance-of-death with me when we go for a drive that would have made Mad Max a trifle windy. As we speed pass the crumbling blancmange of the bomb-struck Chinese embassy he points out a drink bar in the shopping complex opposite. “We were in my bar with some girls doing big lines of coke when the bomb hit the embassy… We ran in to help people out. All came screaming. We help but then ambulance, TV crew turn up so we turn around and go back to the bar – back to party. Ruined an Armani suit”.

You could ruin more than your Armani suit by hitting on the wrong girl at the wonderfully named Stupica discotheque, where we go for (more) drinks. The music playing as we arrive is the authentic sound of Serbian pop: ‘Turbofolk’. Two of the stars of the genre sound like characters straight out of film noir, as they’re both musically inclined gangsters’ molls. Troubled young blonde bombshell Jelena Karleusa lost her boyfriend Zoran Davidovic Canda in a hail of machine gun bullets. Raven-haired temptress Ceca was the wife of notorious mobster and paramilitary anti-hero, Arkan. Roll over Jennifer and Puff. The girls in Stupica certainly look as if they raided J Lo’s wardrobe lately, all the way to hoop earrings and French cut denims and the guys are all decked out in the most plausible Prada knock-offs I have seen anywhere in Europe, Italy included.

It is 1am when we leave the club and still many people are hanging out on street corners, drinking a little, kicking cans, smoking cigarettes or, in the instance of the girls prowling by the roadside in Novi Beograd, looking for business. For 50DEM or less a guy can do all the standard range of things he does when he pays to have sex with a woman, in his car, or even behind the trees at the side of the road. These girls are young, and it breaks your heart, (unless you’re a total creep), to see them out there, strutting and viperish and confident and doomed.

My night out with the irrepressible Bojan finishes in another wooden hut (this one on dry ground) where off-duty military police are entertained by a band of Roma, extracting perhaps a surprising amount of harmonic Eastern woe from a piano accordion. There’s even a gypsy band for hire that waits day and night outside Belgrade railway station. They will play your favourite songs of wandering and loss down a cellular phone to a loved one, for a price. I am vividly aware as I sit in this bar with my new mobster pal that I am not, so to speak, in Kansas anymore. Bojan is deeply into the story-telling now, talking to me in Italian and telling me how for instance several years before he had gone to Sicily to meet the ‘cappo di tutti cappi’. The police stop us on our drive back to No Names at around 5am and ask everyone for identification papers. I get out of the car and demand to know, in an authoritarian tone of voice, exactly what the problem is. All of us are a zillion times over the legal alcohol limit anywhere, but my bluster seems to intimidate the cops, as they abruptly change tune and let us go on our way. I get back in the car and Bojan tells me in Italian: “tu ha palle!” (you have balls). In truth, that’s probably the most dangerous moment of my night: when a bourgeois journalist from the west starts fancying himself (even if only fleetingly) to be anywhere in the same league as these guys, it’s time for a snap inspection reality check.

Oh, and a little bit about that Serbian gangster lean. The Serbian media maverick B92 produced a documentary Vidimo Se U Citulji or ‘The Crime That Changed Serbia’, which is highly instructive. It’s an artful, hand-held camera look at the Yugoslavian gang scene, and even if you don’t understand Serbian, you’ll know what’s going on – not least because you have seen a variation of it in movies like Goodfellas. These people always seem to have lots of photographs and snapshots of themselves, (there’s Igor at the family barbecue, there he is in his tuxedo at Goran’s wedding, there he is wearing a face mask and carrying a machine gun). Back in 1992, when the story of Vidimo Se U Citulji begins, a nineteen-year old Belgrade drug kingpin named Aleksandar Knezevic had been shot to death in his long-term-stay suite in Belgrade’s Hyatt Regency, room no. 813. He was wearing Gucci and a cluster of gold chains around his neck at the time, as was the fashion for Belgrade hoods back then. Nowadays Belgrade’s gangsta biznesmen apparel is somewhat subtler – so watch out for anyone who looks like an Italian hairdresser. They could be really dangerous. Given the present conflict which the world has thrown itself into, it would be wise to help provide the youth of Yugoslavia with a vision of a future brighter than, at best, days and nights spent chain smoking smelly, high tar cigarettes with men wearing clunky gold chains and brightly coloured leisure suits in dodgy downstairs discotheques… And at worst? One shudders to think.

To be continued…