Dot-Camaraderie Helped in Milosevic’s Ouster

Serbia’s revenge of the nerds began with a call from a former paramilitary commander with a love of the Internet and an urgent need for recruits.

Dragan Vasiljkovic had one crucial assignment left on Oct. 6, as the uprising against Slobodan Milosevic entered its last, critical phase: Seize the customs department from one of Milosevic’s most powerful cronies, Mihalj Kertes.

The silver-haired Vasiljkovic, 45, hadn’t seen battle in years and hadn’t slept for two days. Most of his trained men were busy elsewhere consolidating the revolution.

The man known to Serbs as Captain Dragan, or to his followers simply as Cap, had just an hour to get control of customs--and leave Milosevic no doubt that the game was up. So Vasiljkovic grabbed a couple of rocket-propelled grenade launchers and ordered his secretary to start phoning his Internet cafes to round up some Web surfers as shock troops.

Vasiljkovic said he managed to gather about 15 people, including half a dozen trained soldiers, and 10 weapons--mostly Skorpion machine pistols and other small, army-issue automatic weapons.

“I told them: ‘This is probably the most important action in this revolution. If you trust me, I’m going to be in front of you.’ ”

They drove off to storm the customs office commanded by a man many considered second only to Milosevic.

“He ran the only [state] institution that had any money. If we managed to capture Kertes, it would definitely destabilize Milosevic’s regime.”

Like much of the revolt against Milosevic, the storming of customs benefited more from good luck and the wholesale capitulation of a corrupt regime than from great planning.

Pavle Jovanovic, a Web page designer, was awakened after the all-night street party celebrating the storming of parliament and other strongholds of Milosevic’s power--actions that were assisted by denizens of Vasiljkovic’s Internet cafes. Jovanovic was given just 30 minutes to reach a meeting place near the customs building, a huge complex with its own hotel, a well-armed security force and a labyrinth of hiding places.

“I frankly thought we were going to some restaurant to celebrate. I was only told to come, and to bring my friends,” said Jovanovic, 25.

All Yugoslav males 18 or older are supposed to serve at least one year in the military, so Jovanovic knew how to handle a weapon. But he admits to being afraid.

“We had a lot of students, people who had never seen weapons,” he said. “Many of these people were the quiet kind who just do their work. Everybody was surprised. We were going to conquer an institution that, a few days before, we weren’t even allowed to walk by.”

The Takeover Succeeds Without a Fight

But like so many of the people who had kept Milosevic in power, Kertes, his bodyguards and a few hundred customs officers gave up without a fight.

Once Vasiljkovic persuaded Kertes to resign, he also asked Kertes to sign a receipt for the stash in his office safe: cash in the amount of 2.3 million German marks (about $1 million), 21 million Yugoslav dinars (about $323,000), and 7 kilos (about 15 1/2 pounds) of heroin or cocaine--Vasiljkovic said he can’t remember which.

Vasiljkovic took the 60 or so pistols, sniper rifles and other firearms he found and handed them out to reinforcements who set up a perimeter defense, expecting the army to roll in at any minute.

“About three hours later, we got the message that Milosevic had admitted defeat,” Vasiljkovic said.

The revolution won, Captain Dragan ordered his recruits to hand in their weapons, and he gave back the government-issued identity cards he had taken as their deposit.

The events in Belgrade--the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the country’s main republic--brought Vasiljkovic, a Serbian legend who once lived in Australia and in Fort Hood, Texas, back into the limelight.

As the former Yugoslav federation began its long, bloody disintegration in 1991, he became one of the first leaders of the Serbian paramilitary units. Most of them were civilians with guns and uniforms, and many paramilitaries became infamous for mass killings, looting and expelling civilians across Croatia and then Bosnia-Herzegovina.

When Croatia declared independence, its Serb-dominated regions declared their own independence. Vasiljkovic became commander of a 16,000-man “special police task force.” Since his paramilitaries were fighting around the Serbian stronghold of Knin, they were called the “The Kninjas.”

Vasiljkovic is something of a rarity among paramilitary commanders because he has not been indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Vasiljkovic claims that he was relieved of command because Milosevic found him to be too popular among Serbs.

He decided to use his fame to raise money to support war veterans, many of them disabled and ignored by the state because Milosevic maintained that Serbia wasn’t at war.

His Captain Dragan Fund took donations from 300,000 people and gave aid to 67,000 veterans and victims of war. As the Internet caught on, it seemed to be the perfect way to liberate people who couldn’t walk or see or even move their hands.

Vasiljkovic, who now wears a gray suit and tie and speaks with the evangelism of a dot-com guru, has four computer centers in Belgrade that operate under the name NetCentar. Besides providing the shock troops for the storming of the customs office, they proved to be essential communications links for the protesters who brought down Milosevic.

On Oct. 4, the night before hundreds of thousands of protesters converged on Belgrade, Vasiljkovic was approached by his best friend, who said he had a request from Zoran Djindjic, the man still pulling many of the strings behind opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica.

Vasiljkovic said he didn’t have close contacts with Djindjic and actually regarded him as part of the political problem.

But he disliked Milosevic a lot more, so when Vasiljkovic was asked to draft a plan to take control of Studio B television during the protests, Captain Dragan the commander was back in business.

Studio B is in Belgrade’s tallest office building, eight floors above Vasiljkovic’s main 24-hour computer center. Since people come to surf the Web at all hours, he had ideal cover to hide some of his best-trained fighters among the computer nerds.

Some of them spent the night in sleeping bags on the office floor, getting up to surf the Web as cover.

When protesters stormed the federal parliament buildings in a cloud of tear gas at about 3:30 p.m. Oct. 5, 18-year-old Nenad Milanovic was online at the main NetCentar.

He was linked with Vasiljkovic via personal chat software that worked when the phones wouldn’t.

Milanovic, who wears a ponytail, jeans and a Euro 2000 soccer T-shirt, has worked at Vasiljkovic’s Internet cafe since he was 15, and now spends 12 hours a day there, six days a week.

‘Cap, They Are Burning Everything’

From his 13th-floor office window, Milanovic had a clear view of the burning parliament buildings and the advance of protesters who were determined to seize control of Studio B just above him. It was after they left, and then regrouped to confront the police again, that Milanovic got worried.

“I’m the one who sent the message to Captain Dragan that they were downstairs,” Milanovic said. “I simply typed: ‘Cap, they are burning everything around town. They are now in front of our building. I’m afraid they will set it on fire.”

To fool any secret police who might be tapped into the Internet, Vasiljkovic had a friend’s wife keep the conversation going while he drove to the building. He persuaded the police to stand down and let the protesters broadcast from Studio B, a major turning point in the revolution.

Vasiljkovic also has a smaller Internet cafe behind the parliament buildings on Kosovska Street. It took a direct hit from a tear gas canister during the afternoon uprising and filled with choking gray smoke.

“Crying and typing,” Danilo Lisinac messaged across the Internet, according to a transcript saved for posterity. “Kosovska burning!”

About 20 police officers burst into the building, and the surfers-turned-revolutionaries thought it was a raid. But most of the police scattered through the courtyard, or hid in an upstairs office.

One of the officers, who, like Lisinac, was 24 years old, pleaded with him to save his life.

“He was begging: ‘I won’t do anything. Please let me stay, please let me stay,’ ” Lisinac recalled. “We gave him shelter so people wouldn’t kill him. Then we gave him civilian clothes, some food and a drink, and sent him home.”

Three hours after the tear gas attack, a NetCentar employee signed on from the embattled Kosovska Street Internet cafe to issue this terse declaration of victory: “We are alive,” he typed. “We are back online.”