FACE TO FACE WITH EVIL

By JOHANNA MCGEARY/KRAGUJEVAC

"As if nothing happened." --WALL GRAFFITO IN BELGRADE

Even war has its rules. Slobodan Miljkovic, called "Lugar"--the Gamekeeper--would not have been thinking about that when, as eyewitnesses allege, he had 50 Croat and Muslim Bosnian civilians lined up against a wall and took part in shooting 16 of them, when he sliced an old man's throat with a broken chair, when he clubbed and shot another Bosnian man to death, or when he savagely beat a Croat priest and five others with a police baton, a metal wrench and a car jack. From April 17 until Nov. 20, 1992, the witnesses say, Lugar terrorized thousands of non-Serb residents of Bosanski Samac in northern Bosnia until they either fled or died. He stopped only when Bosnian Serb authorities jailed him--unjustly, he huffs--for torturing 11 Serb allies and killing one in a quarrel over loot. Lugar, 34, claims he did not do anything wrong. "I was just a military policeman," he tells TIME, "carrying out normal duties."

For such "normal duties" Lugar has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity. Dozens of witnesses say he committed terrible acts as platoon leader of a Serbian paramilitary unit known as the Gray Wolves. Yet today Lugar is free, if not living particularly well, back home in Kragujevac, a grimy industrial city 60 miles southeast of Belgrade.

Six months after the U.S.-brokered Dayton accord said war criminals would be arrested and tried at the Hague, hundreds of Balkan triggermen who carried out atrocities and scores of high-ranking apparatchiks and politicians who ordered the genocide go about their lives as if nothing has happened. National leaders who presided over the savagery remain in power, including the indicted ringleaders of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Only three of the 57 accused war criminals formally charged--46 Serbs, eight Croats, three Muslims--are in custody in the Hague, though the Bosnian government just arrested two of the Muslims and plans to hand them over this week. It could take years to prosecute even a handful of the suspects.

As it has taken months for the first trial to begin. Dusan Tadic, a Serb accused of abusing and murdering some of the 3,000 civilians at Omarska camp, finally goes before the court this week after delays caused, his lawyers say, by the Serb government repeatedly hindering efforts to collect evidence and interview witnesses.

Bosnia's victims, Muslim, Croat and Serb alike, plead that there can never be lasting peace in the Balkans if individuals who raped and pillaged and slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians are not brought to judgment. But the obstacles are formidable. Despite a recent show of cooperation from Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the two Presidents have largely stonewalled the tribunal. Both have deeply vested interests in preventing investigations and trials that could incriminate their political apparatus or themselves. Western powers sit down and do business with them because both men are needed to make the fragile Dayton agreement work.

The three-year-old Hague tribunal is hampered by a shortage of funds and staff. Watertight legal cases are difficult to construct, and no one has uncovered the kind of paperwork that helped convict Nazi offenders at Nuremberg. Most of the suspects remain safe from arrest at home, and NATO's Implementation Force in Bosnia is resolute against mission creep that might ask its soldiers to hunt them down. "Oh, we hope for justice," says Alija Dedajic, a survivor of Sarajevo, "but we do not believe in it."

So almost all the men suspected of perpetrating the most barbaric acts in Europe since World War II remain at large. To learn more about who they are, how they live and how they answer the charges against them, TIME tracked some of them down. Of course each one denies he is guilty, but long conversations with them provide a glimpse into the minds of men who may have been responsible for Bosnia's atrocities. By some of their accounts, the trail of culpability leads directly to Milosevic, the man the U.S. is relying on most to make the peace hold.

Lugar looks ready to bolt as he steps into a dingy workingman's cafe in Kragujevac. The man who helped arrange the meeting, a shark-faced lawyer in a purple suit, nods in reassurance, but Lugar stares truculently at two TIME journalists, unsure if we are who we say we are. His jacket stretches tightly across his burly chest, barely hiding a bulletproof vest; he keeps a hand on a briefcase that contains a pistol. He has good reason to take precautions. Since he returned from Bosnia, he has been shot at twice, bashed with an iron bar and slammed with a shovel; he has been repeatedly arrested for petty crimes and is fighting a long prison sentence for extortion. He suspects everyone: Bosnians out for vengeance, NATO forces who he fears will deliver him to the Hague, Serb secret police determined to hush him up. "There are so many refugees, agents, spies," he says. "I'm just an easy target."

While Lugar stares at his hands, the lawyer pitches a tale of innocent patriotism at odds with the cold, brawler's face of his client: how a good-hearted truck driver trying to make ends meet for a wife, two daughters, a sick mother, six cats and two parrots, gave up everything to defend his brother Serbs in Bosnia; how he never did anything but "stand guard" and "carry out ordinary military orders"; how in return for risking his life, he is broke and jobless, his children are shunned and his own government is trying to make him a scapegoat. "I didn't go there to kill other people's kids," says Lugar, "but to defend kids just like my own from our enemies."

As items on his indictment are ticked off, Lugar chain-smokes and dismisses them one by one. That killing didn't happen, he says: "If anyone did such things, they would have been court-martialed immediately." The Gray Wolves didn't exist, and anyway I wasn't a paramilitary, he says: "No, no, I was in the regular army, Second Posavina Brigade." I wasn't in charge, he says: One of the other men indicted was the local police chief, and "there's no way I could have commanded him." It wasn't me, he says: "Anyone could use my name, some Serb envious of me." I wasn't there, he says: on May 6 when he allegedly pulled the trigger on the detainees, "I think I was attending a funeral in Montenegro for one of my poor dead 18-year-old soldiers." The enemy committed war crimes, not us, he says, slamming down fuzzy, undated photos that he claims show Serb men decapitated by Muslims and Serb bodies mutilated. "No one is being accused at the Hague for that!"

Lugar is worried that his government will sell him out. He claims that the Belgrade secret police (who originally recruited him, the lawyer later suggests) variously want to arrest him and hand him over to the Hague or kill him to prevent him from surrendering to the tribunal or discredit him so he cannot testify against his superiors. He is bitter about his treatment. "In Croatia people like me have been rewarded," he complains.

The Lugars of the war were tools--often enthusiastic ones, to be sure--in a deliberately orchestrated campaign of extermination devised by political leaders and executed by hired gangs and local authorities. Instead of soldiers killing soldiers, civilians murdering civilians was the main act of the war. Pero Skopljak was one of that sort too, a Bosnian Croat who apparently succumbed to authority--or peer pressure or the hysteria of the moment--to enforce Croatian dominance over his neighbors.

He is one of six Croats indicted for complicity in the vicious ethnic cleansing that took place in 1993 around Vitez in central Bosnia. The tribunal says that local civilians, including Skopljak, together with Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic, were in charge when Croats sacked the village of Ahmici, tossing grenades into cellars where villagers sought to hide. To dislodge holdouts in downtown Vitez, Croats filled a tanker truck with explosives, tied a Muslim to the steering wheel and propelled the vehicle into a block of houses, killing and maiming dozens.

Skopljak was the police chief back then, and he acknowledged to TIME last November after being indicted that bad things happened. "I am not denying there were crimes on our side," he said, "but I am honestly innocent, as stupid as it sounds." While the Croats of Vitez rallied round, denouncing the Hague, Skopljak charged that "the tribunal believes stories invented by the Muslims. This is a staged process, a dirty political game." The former Franciscan monk insists that he "protected Muslims by hiding them, and I tried to find out who did Ahmici, but I didn't succeed." Confident Croatia's leaders would protect him, he declared, "I am staying here."

But that was just before Tudjman handed Blaskic over to the tribunal in April. Now the public outrage has evaporated, and Skopljak has fled Vitez. He no longer knows whom to trust, and ifor troops patrol his hometown. Speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, he bemoans his sad state. "I am ostracized, I can't travel, I can't work," he says. "I'm already punished."

The United Nations Commission of Experts, Human Rights Watch/ Helsinki and other investigators have documented how the Serbs and Croats carried out ethnic cleansing. According to these reports, the mainly Muslim Bosnian government did not engage in systematic cleansing (some experts argue that the government did not lack the will to carry out such a program, it simply did not control enough territory to do so), but its people too committed atrocities in the course of the war.

In the Serb case, the process worked like this. Regular Bosnian Serb forces and Yugoslav army troops from Belgrade would surround an area designated for ethnic cleansing, shelling the target from afar. As the town fell, the time came for men like Lugar to do their work. Paramilitary units, secretly enlisted by the Serb leadership in Belgrade and the Bosnian Serb leaders in Pale, would seize the territory and "dispose" of all non-Serbs. The paramilitaries razed homes, churches and mosques, terrorizing residents with random killings, rapes, looting; local Serb "crisis committees" took charge to detain, beat and imprison anyone who did not flee, collecting them into camps where abuse and mass killing were routine. Finally the units would massacre any remaining ethnic rivals until no one was left but the Serbs.

More even than the brutal militia members, the Hague wants to nail the men at the top who gave them orders. "The tribunal's primary goal," says deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt, is "to find where command responsibility is located." Vojislav Seselj is high among the suspects, but he has not been indicted--and he plans to run in Serbia's next election as leader of the far-right Serbian Radical Party. He is a true believer who willingly employed instruments of death on behalf of his country, but denies he committed any war crime. "Ethnic cleansing," he says, "was not a crime but a case of herd mentality"; historic enemies and foreign powers are just "satanizing" Serbs.

A law professor, member of the Serb parliament and virulent nationalist jailed in 1984 for rebellion, the fortyish Seselj served as Milosevic's chief hatemonger, whipping up hysteria at World War II-era grievances and prescribing the direst revenge, all dressed up in myths of Serb superiority. "We will kill Croats with rusty spoons," he would roar, "because it will hurt more." It all suited Milosevic in 1992 when Seselj's propaganda dominated the airwaves, inflaming war fever.

But there is evidence for much more serious charges against Seselj. When fighting broke out in 1992, he became one of the three key Serb paramilitary leaders who provided the shock troops of ethnic cleansing. He recruited and commanded a rabid band of "volunteers" dubbed the Chetniks in honor of Serbia's World War II royalist antifascist squads. Dressed in natty black jackets, the Chetniks left a well-documented trail of blood as they rampaged across Croatia and Bosnia, all the while bragging they were acting under Seselj's command. They exaggerate, he says. "I just happen to have had the traditional Chetnik title of Duke assigned to me."

The blond giant wears blue business suits these days at his political headquarters in downtown Belgrade, but his pale eyes are hard as polished stones. Seselj shows no remorse as he shunts aside direct accusations. "I am personally very sure I was not involved in any war crime," he says. "I provided volunteers. I made excursions to the front to boost morale. Those are not crimes." He waves away suggestions that he is responsible for fomenting the conflict. "Rhetoric is hardly enough to start a war." If there were Serb war crimes, he says, "scavengers" and "looters" among "criminal paramilitaries" did the deeds.

But if, he says, he is guilty of war crimes, then so is Milosevic himself. The two fell out in mid-1993, says Seselj, when Milosevic realized that Seselj was turning into a serious political rival. The opportunistic Milosevic was transforming himself into a peacemaker and needed to jettison an obdurate backer of the war.

Seselj is still angry at the betrayal. He swears he can incriminate Milosevic; he has even called the tribunal and offered to appear. "They said for now they had nothing on me and wouldn't rely on statements from politicians," he sniffs. But he is certain Belgrade would kill him rather than allow him to testify. "Milosevic is afraid of me," he says. "He knows that I have certain documents that heavily compromise him, kept in safe places abroad. I will publish them if anything happens to me." He mutters that he cannot say what the documents contain: "They are the only thing that is keeping me alive."

Seselj claims he and his "volunteers" were always in service to the government. "Milosevic ordered that a barracks be given to us near Belgrade; he provided our uniforms, our weapons, our equipment. When we needed buses to go to the front, he provided them; and when our volunteers died, they were buried with official military ceremony." He says he had the "closest possible relationship with Milosevic."

Paramilitary units, says Seselj, knew they were doing the bidding of Milosevic, but his leadership was always cagey. He did not issue direct war commands; he merely made his "intentions" plain and "requested" that his subordinates devise ways to carry them out. "I never heard Milosevic order ethnic cleansing," says Seselj, "but I can give examples of indirect invitations to do such things." The President passed those invitations through the secret police, says Seselj. They in turn invited the paramilitaries to "liberate" areas Serbia coveted or "defend" Serb-minority towns. Seselj admits his unit fought under such directives, but says that as soon as the legitimate "liberation" of a town was complete, his boys would depart. "We never took part in the looting," he insists.

Milosevic's elliptical style of command is confirmed by Borisav Jovic, the last head of the joint federal presidency that ruled unified Yugoslavia from Tito's death until its breakup. He was an intimate who shared in Milosevic's decision making until mid-1992. He tells TIME that the merciless siege of Vukovar, in which Croats claim some 2,000 of their kin perished, illustrates Milosevic's method. The President made a "general decision" to "free" Yugoslav army troops in barracks "blockaded" inside predominantly Croat cities. "No siege order was issued," says Jovic; Serb troops merely went to the aid of their confreres, only to be repulsed by "Croats who managed to maintain control over our barracks for a long time."

War-crimes investigators agree Milosevic was always careful to establish plausible deniability. He was not officially commander in chief of the Yugoslav army: while some top officers personally owed him loyalty, they formally reported to a civilian panel. The real villainy, investigators say, was conducted through the Interior Ministry, home of the Serb secret police and Milosevic's inner circle of advisers. These were men who actually drew the plans for ethnic cleansing and transmitted orders to carry it out. They were spotted now and then in the war zone, under assumed names, disguised, talking to Bosnian Serb political and military officials.

These behind-the-scenes apparatchiks may be the most guilty and have the best evidence of Milosevic's personal culpability. Yet the tribunal is unlikely ever to get them to court unless one sells the others out. "The witnesses who could really convict Milosevic still work for him," says a human-rights analyst. "They owe him everything." Even then to convict the men at the top, says U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck, "you need direct evidence of their complicity in specific crimes." Leading the war is not enough.

Nothing is more galling about the post-Dayton behavior of suspected war criminals than the way some flaunt their freedom and stolen riches. Zeljko Raznatovic, who fought under the nom de guerre Arkan, is the most notorious of Serbia's paramilitary chiefs. He personally led his 200-odd Tigers through Bosnia to rape, torture and murder. Yet he has not even been indicted, and today he shows up all over Belgrade. He lives in a luxe marble mansion that he clearly did not buy out of earnings from his cafe. He is affiliated with Belgrade's biggest soccer club and appears at film premieres, in expensive restaurants, on TV talk shows. In an elaborate 1995 ceremony, where he dressed up as a royalist Serb officer, he took as his third bride the country's most popular folk singer.

No one profited more from the killing frenzy than Arkan. Since the paramilitaries from Serbia were paid mainly in what they could steal, theft provoked many atrocities. Arkan reportedly had a price list for "liberating" a town: say, 2 million to 3 million German marks ($1 million to $2 million), plus all the loot from the police station and bank, plus right of passage for 30 cars, plus everything his men could carry. The Tigers' plunder attracted "weekend warriors" from Belgrade's underworld who would pillage for profit. Arkan brags he does not consider himself a war criminal. An indictment at the Hague, he has reportedly said, would be a "compliment."

Arkan was in it for the money. Another unindicted militia leader, Dragoslav Bokan, sought to satisfy his dreams of political power. Bokan is the organizer and commander of the White Eagles, a third important paramilitary group. The pudgy, 35-year-old film critic comes across as a rather unusual war-crimes suspect. He can be found preening amid the expensive '20s-style bric-a-brac in his brand-new Belgrade cafe, which he has named the Lexington, he chuckles, in honor of the Chicago hotel favored by Al Capone.

In hours of nonstop talk, Bokan plays emotional riffs on the injustices Serbs have suffered, even as he mocks himself as "the rock-'n'-roll war criminal." He says the conduct of the war was a question of "political strategy not passion," but keeps recalling that "my family was butchered by the Croats 50 years ago." Serb nationalism harmlessly "exhausts itself in talk," he says, but he went to the front "because we are what we do."

Bokan was, by his own account, one of the seminal propagandists of the war, a voice who made it respectable for young Serbs to act on their worst beliefs, and a highly effective recruiter of "volunteers.'' Human-rights investigators say Bokan was more. He allegedly oversaw the decimation of Vocin and of Lovas, near Vukovar, where Croats were made to march through minefields and gunned down if they refused.

By turns self-deprecating and self-promoting, Bokan gets tangled up boasting of his starring role in the field while denying command responsibility for indictable crimes. He is full of nationalist justification, like Seselj, but gives prominence to his own brilliance. "People accuse me because of my high profile," he says, "because I am such a gifted speaker." Eager young Serbs flocked to his words, he says, and virtually forced him into forming the White Eagles, "a legally registered organization, nothing like those other paramilitary animals," so they could serve together. Bokan felt it was his moral duty to accompany them to the front lines. "The media loved my unusual personality so they focused on me as commander," he says, "but I went not to fight but as a brother, priest, teacher. I was their moral commissar." He pauses to admire this locution. "I exerted real influence," he says, "not military leadership but bigger than that."

Bokan is hurt that he is not enjoying the same adulation--and wealth--as Arkan. "The government never paid me," he complains, "never cut me in on the loot. I got no medals, not even a TV talk-show appearance. I'm surrounded by people who think I'm a homicidal maniac and want to see me delivered to the Hague. If you knew the extent of my solitude, you'd be shocked." Underneath the bombast and bathos, though, Bokan is afraid he will be sacrificed to the Hague by Milosevic because, unlike Seselj, he does not claim to have evidence that could fix the blame higher up. "I'd be an ideal scapegoat," he says, "because they'd get rid of a powerful troublemaker." Then he reverses course again. "All I care is how much can I use my influence with the young to inspire future Serb generations. I'm not afraid. The only court I respect is the court of Last Judgment."

Although the Dayton accord has brought a bare minimum of peace to the Balkans, even that will not last if implementation of the civilian provisions fails, and none is more crucial than the one promising that the men who held the club and the gun will be arrested and tried. "How can I ever go home," says Hamdija, a Muslim refugee in Sarajevo, "if the man who killed my father goes free?"

Many of those responsible for the worst atrocities not only remain free, but they also retain power in the towns and cities where they wreaked such devastation, in a position to begin all over again. "The only way Bosnians will ever feel safe," says Ivan Lupas, a human-rights investigator, "is if those responsible for the killings are punished." Deputy prosecutor Blewitt says at the Hague, "People explain this war as revenge for atrocities done in the past that were never punished. We have got to stop that cycle." The countrymen of the perpetrators also need the balm of justice. "The only way we Serbs can escape collective guilt," says Human Rights Watch's Sonja Bisierka, "is to determine who individually is guilty, who personally was responsible, so not all Serbs are condemned alike."

According to Richard Goldstone, the chief prosecutor, the biggest problem for the tribunal right now is that it has no means to arrest the suspects it has indicted. ifor won't help, and Serbia refuses to hand over any of the indicted men who are on its territory, as it is legally required to do. The U.N. Security Council could try to force Serbia to comply by imposing economic sanctions, but it has not done so. "On what basis is it going to proceed into the next century," Goldstone asks, "if it sits back and allows U.N. members to ignore their obligations?"

Without effective due process at the Hague, victims and victors alike may all too soon turn to the old Balkan tradition of blood justice. More justice, less blood--that is what the Balkans need.

--With reporting by Alexandra Stiglmayer/Zagreb

With reporting by ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER/ZAGREB