By 1989 Milosevic had realized that communism was dead in the water; the horse to mount was that of extreme Serb nationalism. In fact, he brought not one but four horsemen to his country, those of the Apocalypse. Zilic served him almost to the end.
Yugoslavia was breaking up. Milosevic posed as the man to save the union, but made no mention that he intended to do this through genocide, known as ethnic cleansing. Inside Serbia, the province around Belgrade, his popularity stemmed from the belief that he would save Serbs everywhere from non-Serb persecution.
To do this, they had first to be persecuted. If the Croatians or Bosnians were slow on the uptake, this had to be arranged. A small local massacre would normally provoke the resident majority to turn on the Serbs among them. Then Milosevic could send in the army to save the Serbs. It was the gangsters, turned paramilitary ‘patriots’, who acted as his agents provocateurs.
Where up until 1989 the Yugoslav state had kept its gangster underworld at arm’s length and abroad, Milosevic took them into full partnership at home.
Like so many second-raters elevated to state power, Milosevic became fascinated by money. The sheer size of the sums involved acted on him like a snake-charmer’s pipe to a cobra. It was not, for him, the luxury that money could buy. He remained personally frugal to the end. It was money as another form of power that hypnotized him. By the time he fell, it was estimated by the successor Yugoslavian government that he and his cronies had embezzled and diverted to their own foreign accounts about twenty billion dollars.
Others were not so frugal. These included his deeply ghastly wife and equally appalling son and daughter. The Milosevic household made The Munsters look like Little House on the Prairie.
Among those ‘full partners’ was Zoran Zilic, who became the dictator’s personal enforcer, a killer for hire. Reward under Milosevic was never in cash. It came in the award of franchises for especially lucrative rackets, coupled with the assurance of absolute immunity. The tyrant’s cronies could rob, torture, rape, kill, and there was absolutely nothing the regular police could do about it. He established a criminal-cum-embezzler regime, posed as a patriot and the Serbs and West European politicians fell for it for years.
In all this brutality and bloodshed, he still did not save the Yugoslav federation or even his dream of a Greater Serbia. Slovenia left, then Macedonia and Croatia. By the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, Bosnia was gone, and by July 1999, he had not only effectively lost Kosovo, but also provoked the partial destruction by NATO bombs of Serbia itself.
Like Arkan, Zilic also formed a small squad of paramilitaries. There were others, like the sinister, shadowy and brutal Frankie’s Boys, the group of Frankie Stamatovic – amazingly not even a Serb, but a renegade Croat from Istria. Unlike the florid and ostentatious Arkan, gunned down in the lobby of the Belgrade Holiday Inn, Zilic kept himself and his group so low-profile as to be invisible. But on three occasions during the Bosnia war he took his group north and raped, tortured and murdered his way across that miserable province until American intervention put a stop to it.
The third occasion was in April 1995. Where Arkan called his group his Tigers and had a couple of hundred of them, Zilic was content with Zoran’s Wolves and he kept the numbers small. On the third sortie he had no more than a dozen. They were all thugs who had operated before, save one. He lacked a radio operator and one of his colleagues whose junior brother was in law school said his brother had a friend who had been an Army R/T operator.
Contacted via the fellow student, the newcomer agreed to forgo his Easter vacation and join the Wolves.
Zilic asked what he was like. Had he seen combat? No, he had done his military service in the Signals corps which was why he was ready for some ‘action’.
‘If he has never been shot at, then he surely has never killed anyone,’ said Zilic. ‘So this expedition should be quite a learning curve.’
The group set off for the north in the first week of May, delayed by technical problems to their Russian-made jeeps. They went through Pale, the tiny former ski resort now established as the capital of the self-styled Republika Serpska, the third of Bosnia now so ‘cleansed’ that it was uniquely Serb. They skirted Sarajevo, once the proud host of the winter Olympics, now a wreck, and went on into Bosnia proper, making their base at the stronghold of Banja Luka.
From there Zilic ranged outwards, avoiding the dangerous Mujahedin, looking for softer targets among any Bosnian Muslim communities who might lack armed protection.
On 14 May, they found a small hamlet in the Vlasic range, took it by surprise and wiped out the inhabitants, spent the night in the woods and were back at Banja Luka by the evening of the 15th.
The new recruit left them the next day, screaming that he wanted to get back to his studies after all. Zilic let him go, after warning him that if he ever opened his mouth he, Zilic, would personally cut off his dick with a broken wineglass and stuff both down his throat in that order. He did not like the boy anyway; he was stupid and squeamish.
The Dayton Agreement put an end to sport in Bosnia, but Kosovo was coming into season, and in 1998 he was operating there also, claiming to be suppressing the Kosovo Liberation Army, in fact concentrating on rural communities and some seriously interesting loot.
But he never neglected his real reason for allying with Slobodan Milosevic. His service to the despot had paid rich dividends. His ‘business’ dealings were a gangster’s charter, the right to do what every Mafioso has to dodge the Law to achieve and yet to do it with presidential immunity.
Chief among the franchises that paid dividends of several hundred per cent were cigarettes and perfumes, fine brandies and whiskies and all forms of luxury goods. These franchises he shared with Raznatovic, the only other gangster of comparable importance, and a few others. Even with sweeteners to all the necessary police and political ‘protection’, he was a millionaire by the mid-Nineties.
Then he moved into prostitution, narcotics and arms dealing. With his fluent German and English he was better placed to deal with the international crime world than the others who were monolingual.
Narcotics and arms were especially lucrative. His dollar fortune entered eight figures. He also entered the files of the American Drug Enforcement Agency, the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (arms dealing) and the FBI.
Those around Milosevic, fat on embezzled money, power, corruption, ostentation, luxury and the endless sycophancy to which they were subjected, became lazy and complacent. They presumed the party would go on for ever. Zilic did not.
He avoided the obvious banks used by most of the cronies to store or export their fortunes. Almost every penny he made he stashed abroad, but via banks no one in the Serbian State knew anything about. And he watched for the first cracks in the plaster. Sooner or later, he reasoned acutely, even the awesomely weak politicians and diplomats of Britain and the European Union would see through Milosevic and call ‘time out’. It happened over Kosovo.
A largely agricultural province, Kosovo ranked with Montenegro as all that was left of Serbia’s fiefdoms within the Federation of Yugoslavia. It contained about 1,800,000 Kosovars, who are Muslims and hardly distinguishable from the neighbouring Albanians, and 200,000 Serbs.
Milosevic had been deliberately persecuting the Kosovars for a decade until the once moribund Kosovo Liberation Army was back in being. The strategy was to be the same as usual. Persecute beyond toleration; wait for the local outrage; denounce the ‘terrorists’; enter in force to save the Serbs and ‘restore order’. Then NATO said it would not stand by any more. Milosevic did not believe them. Mistake. This time they meant it.
In the spring of 1999 the ethnic cleansing began, mainly accomplished by the occupying Third Army, assisted by the Security Police and the para-militaries: Arkan’s Tigers, Frankie’s Boys and Zoran’s Wolves. As foreseen, over a million Kosovars fled in terror over the borders into Albania and Macedonia. They were supposed to. The West was supposed to take them all in as refugees. But they did not. They started to bomb Serbia.
Belgrade stuck it out for seventy-eight days. Up front, the local reaction was anti-NATO. Behind their hands, the Serbs began to mutter that it was the mad Milosevic who had brought this ruin upon them. It is always educational to note how the war fever fades when the roof falls in. Zilic heard the muttering behind the hands.
On 3 June 1999 Milosevic agreed to terms. That was the way it was put. To Zilic it was unconditional surrender. He decided the moment had come to depart.
The fighting ended. The Third Army, having hardly taken a casualty to NATO’s high-altitude bombing inside Kosovo, withdrew with all their equipment intact. The NATO allies occupied the province. The remaining Serbs began to flee into Serbia, bringing their rage with them. The direction of that rage began to move from NATO to Milosevic as the Serbs contemplated their shattered country.