Ruined Nation Found a Violent Hero in ‘Arkan’

Long before Zeljko Raznatovic became the feared “Arkan,” before he was an assassin for the state, a filthy rich gangster or an indicted war crimes suspect, he was the son of a Serbian war hero growing up in the projects of New Belgrade.

The high-rise apartment complex is still known as “the Six Corporals” because many of the first people to move in were families of soldiers like Arkan’s father, a guerrilla who fought the Nazis.

Zeljko was only 9 when he ran away from New Belgrade. He ended up in London, a teenager tutored by crooks, a young man who grew up to become a violent hero to a ruined nation.

But it all came full circle Saturday night, when the 47-year-old Arkan was shot three times in the head just a few blocks from his childhood home, in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel.

For days after his killing, newspapers sold out across the city, and they’re still pulling in readers with every detail of his life, and death, and the sensation, intrigue and brutality that surrounded both. On Wednesday, a memorial service drew more than 1,000 people.

In a virtual gangster state, brought almost to its knees by 10 years of lost wars, corrupt politicians, economic mistakes and foreign sanctions, many Serbs have found hope in the Cult of Arkan.

“Over the last 10 years, Serbia has been transformed with new values, which are really how to get rich quickly,” Sonja Biserko, head of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, said in an interview Wednesday. “Arkan is the very symbol of that.

“He looked rich. He had all these young people around him wearing Armani suits and Versace dresses. It is the moral collapse of this society, and I would say that Arkan is really the best illustration of it.”

In Arkan’s old neighborhood, things have changed a bit over the decades since he left. Graffiti artists have spray-painted nearby walls in homage to other idols, rock bands such as Nirvana and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who, like Arkan, has been indicted on war crimes charges.

The basketball court outside the elementary school looks as old, and weary, as the neighborhood itself. The rims have no nets and the painted backboards are peeling, but the kids who shoot hoops there dream of making it to America and playing in the NBA.

One of them is an 18-year-old nicknamed Velja, whose pantheon includes Shaquille O’Neal, the Lakers--and Arkan.

Velja tried to explain the Arkan phenomenon with an example from a painful time in U.S. history: Just as many Americans were entranced by murderous gangster Al Capone, Serbs are now celebrating Arkan.

“He’s not a model, really, for many of the young kids,” said Velja, who, like most Serbs, didn’t want to be identified when speaking the name Arkan. “But people respected him. And they feared him.”

Like many Serbs, Velja sees both the good and bad in the life of a man whose jobs included hit man, armed robber, paramilitary fighter and war profiteer, but he insisted that Arkan was a war hero, not a war criminal.

“He was a volunteer,” the teenager said. “Everything he did for Serbs should be respected.”

Arkan was killed along with a business partner and a plainclothes federal police agent when at least one gunman opened fire as he sat in the hotel’s lobby Saturday.

According to local reports, which the Yugoslav Information Ministry confirmed Wednesday, Arkan knew his killer and shook hands with the man. The killer left, then returned with an accomplice.

Police identified one of the attackers as Dusan Gavric, a member of Arkan’s paramilitary Tigers since 1993. One of Arkan’s bodyguards wounded Gavric, and he is reportedly conscious in a hospital, with liver and spine injuries.

Arkan is to be buried today beneath a black marble tombstone, which he had already prepared to mark his family’s burial site.

A large crowd packed a downtown movie theater in Belgrade--the capital of Yugoslavia and of Serbia, its dominant republic--to pay respects Wednesday. Arkan’s third wife, Svetlana, Serbia’s most popular folk singer, who is known as Ceca to her fans, wept in the front row.

Among the other mourners were Dragan Kijac, a top ally of Karadzic; players from Arkan’s Obilic soccer team; various underworld figures; and the director of the Belgrade Zoo, home to the tiger mascot of Arkan’s paramilitary fighters.

Borislav Pelevic, a general in the Tigers, which is formally known as the Serbian Voluntary Guard, eulogized Arkan as a loving father, a great humanitarian and a war hero, despite evidence that he and his men committed some of the worst atrocities against civilians in a decade of Balkan wars.

Arkan was secretly indicted by the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague in 1997, and the charges were made public last spring amid reports of Serbian atrocities in Serbia’s separatist Kosovo province during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing campaign.

Serbian newspapers are filled each day with new theories about who might have killed Arkan, and while many here suspect that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ordered the hit, no one has offered any evidence. Arkan had many enemies with possible motives.

Whether run by Milosevic’s regime or allied with the opposition, the papers have lionized Arkan with headlines like the one that appeared Tuesday in the state-run Vecernje Novosti--a popular tabloid that features bare-breasted women on its front page--declaring him “The True Leader.”

Biserko, the human rights activist, said she sees Arkan’s killing as another sign of worse things to come as Milosevic tries to hold on to power, the West squeezes Serbs with sanctions in the hope they will force Milosevic out, the opposition languishes and the country goes on falling apart.

“If this agony continues, I’m afraid this gap between us and the West will grow,” she warned. “And it will become even more difficult to repair such an ailing society. It will come to the point of being irreparable.”