He Can’t Seek Office, but Notorious Serb Warlord Still Stumps in Bosnia

Like a Hollywood celebrity, Arkan, the notorious militia commander, strode onto the stage, waved at his crowd of admirers and shouted a pledge to defend the Bosnian Serb Republic to the death.

Patriotic songs filled the air while young men waved red-and-blue banners. Arkan kissed children bearing flowers.

A surreal campaign requires surreal characters, and Bosnia’s election has its share. In northwest Bosnia, a Muslim warlord is on trial for armed rebellion and treason at the same time he is running for president. In the west, some of the same Bosnian Croats who rounded up Muslims into concentration camps now direct political parties.

But undoubtedly one of the characters of most unsavory repute is Arkan, whose smiling baby face looks down from hundreds of campaign posters covering many of the very villages his paramilitary forces, known as the Tigers, emptied of Muslims and other non-Serbs early in the war and as recently as last fall.

“A war criminal? Me?” Arkan said, complaining to reporters that he is always misrepresented in the Western press. Speaking in English, he held forth in an interview following a Monday night political rally in Bijeljina, near Bosnia’s northeast border with Serbia.

Arkan, whose real name is Zeljko Raznatovic, said he believes in peace and the U.S.-brokered agreement that brought it to Bosnia. But if Muslim “extremists” threaten Bosnian Serb land anew, he asserted: “I will be the first one here. They are my people.”

His Serbian Party of Unity is fielding a candidate for the presidency of the Bosnian Serb Republic--a 30-year-old woman nicknamed Tina--as well as vice presidential and legislative hopefuls. Arkan himself is not a candidate; he is not a Bosnian but a Serb of Serbia proper.

In one of the more Orwellian twists of this campaign, the international organization in charge of monitoring the election gives money to Arkan and other politicians to publish brochures and posters--even though the message they promote goes directly against the peace treaty that the international community pretends to uphold.

Arkan’s party, like other Bosnian Serb nationalists, calls for the Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb Republic) to secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina and unite with Serbia. Such rhetoric has dominated most Bosnian Serb political rallies for two months.

Finally, on Tuesday, Western election officials for the first time took action against the abuse. In two judgments, the officials punished the ruling Bosnian Serb party for use of language that “challenges or denies the territorial integrity” of Bosnia.

“The occasional lapse into ethnic hatred and the denial of the sovereignty of Bosnia-Herzegovina has escalated in the last 10 days to become almost routine,” said Stephen Bowen, special advisor to the Election Appeals Sub-commission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

As punishment, the OSCE withheld $50,000 of the money it was to give the Serbian Democratic Party of Radovan Karadzic--who has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague and consequently has been barred from public politics. The OSCE stopped short of dismissing the party’s leading candidates--apparently out of fear of disrupting the elections--and Karadzic posters, a fixture throughout the Serb-held half of Bosnia, were ordered taken down.

But coming just four days before the election, the sanctions seemed too late to change the influence exerted by misleading campaign rhetoric, monitors said.

As for Arkan, despite the widely held belief that he pioneered the practice known as “ethnic cleansing” and reports that he is also wanted elsewhere in Europe for bank robbery, he is not on The Hague’s list and therefore has no limits on his campaign profile.

More than 1,000 people flocked to Bijeljina’s main square Monday night to see the man many Serbs consider a hero. Arkan and his Tigers seized Bijeljina on April 1, 1992, wiped out token resistance, executed Muslim leaders and terrorized the population.

More than two dozen Muslim civilians were killed in two days; the war began in Bijeljina. The first city to fall to Bosnian Serb forces in what would become a chain of devastation, Bijeljina then saw the exodus of its majority Muslim population. Today, it is overwhelmingly Serb.

But Arkan, dressed in a black three-piece suit, vest buttoned up to his neck, described those events differently.

Flanked by party officials and bodyguards, he grabbed the mike with both hands and told the crowd, “We came at night, and we prevented a new genocide [of Serbs].”

Arkan’s presidential candidate, Ljilja “Tina” Peric, also addressed the crowd. Peric is president of a humanitarian agency called Third Child--which, among other things, pays Bosnian Serb families to have three or more children.

“Brothers and sisters, go out and give birth to as many Serbian children as you can!” she urged. “We must never become a minority in our own state.”

Peric, who owns a cafe and is married to the party’s Bijeljina president, praised Arkan as a “true Serbian hero” and condemned U.S.-led NATO peacekeeping forces.

“Many of our Serbian heroes can’t wander our sacred land because of these tourists,” she said, alluding to the troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “On Sept. 14, we will decide who walks our land.”

Arkan’s cohorts made it clear where they stood on forming part of Bosnia.

“The Serbs should not drown in life under a Bosnian government,” said Arkan’s deputy Tiger commander, Borislav Pelevic, adding that all Serbs should be allowed to live together in a single state.

“Germans had that right to live together, although they committed genocide in the first and second world wars,” Pelevic said.

As spotty as Bosnia’s candidate lineup may be, Arkan’s appearance outraged even a few Serbs. One called him an international gangster.

“It would be the same as if Al Capone formed a party and ran for office!” said Vojislav Seselj, whose Serbian Radical Party is also competing in the election. “He put socks on his face [as masks to commit robberies] more than I put socks on my feet!”

Seselj should know: He too is a nationalist extremist whose own paramilitary irregulars rampaged through Bosnia during the war, accused of atrocities that could match those blamed on Arkan.

Arkan, in his Monday chat with reporters, was attempting to put on his best face. He said he wants Republika Srpska to join NATO, advocated a free-market economy with U.S. dollars replacing the local currency, blasted “Communist generals” who ruined the Bosnian Serb fighting effort and denied knowing who blew up Bijeljina’s mosques and expelled its Muslims.

But, he said, even though most Muslims are “not guilty,” it would be illogical for them to return to Serb-held Bosnia.

“What is not natural cannot” last, said Arkan, who a couple of years ago married a leading Serbian pop singer in an elaborate ceremony in which he dressed up as a World War I royal Serbian general. He and his wife are expecting their first child, his eighth.

Many among Bijeljina’s Serbian population admire Arkan for dispensing with the war in their city quickly.

“I don’t think he’s a war criminal,” said Dalibor Peric, 20, who watched his hero at the rally. “He saved our people.”

But a 21-year-old woman who fled the city of Tuzla for Bosnian Serb territory three years ago was less of a fan.

“If anyone thinks anything bad about him, they won’t say it,” she said. “They are afraid of what might happen. He is too important.”