The Bloody Red Berets

By Andrew Purvis and Dejan Anastasijevic/Belgrade

When Franko Simatovic was first dispatched from his native Belgrade to Croatia in 1991, there was little to distinguish him from other young Yugoslav intelligence officers drafted into the early days of Serbia's war effort. Slobodan Milosevic was whipping up Serbian nationalism, and the rest of the world was only dimly aware of the simmering ethnic mix that was about to explode in Yugoslavia. Tall, with fair hair, fluent in English and several other languages, "Frenki" was noted for his calm, professorial manner--and a fondness for Raybans. His main accomplishment was having successfully spied on U.S. diplomats at their Belgrade embassy during the cold war.

But Simatovic was in Croatia on a special mission. Politicians in Belgrade needed a way to make secret war on one of their own republics without involving the military. Simatovic's solution was to set up a small unit of ex-policemen, ex-convicts and other self-proclaimed volunteers who would answer only to Serbian secret police.

The Red Berets, or "Frenki's boys," as they came to be known, were remarkably successful: they helped invent the 1990s version of "ethnic cleansing" and went on to become the most feared paramilitary unit of the Balkan wars. Without such units, politicians like Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic would never have had the means to carry out their radical ethnic policies. When the war expanded to Bosnia in 1992, Frenki moved with it and later went on to Kosovo. Word that Frenki's boys were in the neighborhood was enough to drive tens of thousands of Kosovars from their homes and across the borders into neighboring countries. Even other Serbian paramilitaries, lower in the battlefield hierarchy, had to watch their backs. "Everybody was afraid of us," a former Red Beret boasted to TIME. "Karadzic trembled before Frenki." Says a U.S. official: "Frenki's boys were at the forefront of several ethnic-cleansing campaigns in Kosovo and Bosnia."

But for all his notoriety outside Serbia, at home Frenki has remained oddly invisible. Rumors circulate of his death, resurrection and/or transmogrification into someone else. Few know his precise whereabouts, and significantly, no photograph has ever been published. That is deliberate; when a reporter tried to take his picture on the battlefield, the reporter says, Frenki put a pistol to the man's temple and told him that if he tried that again, Frenki would pull the trigger.

A TIME investigation into Frenki and his boys reveals how he continues to escape scrutiny in Serbia despite his alarming reputation elsewhere. Friends and former colleagues are edgily protective. Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan, an associate who trained the first contingent of Red Berets and who now runs a Belgrade Internet cafe, calls the ex-chief a "real gentlemen." "I can't see him committing anything that would not agree with my own moral standards," says Vasiljkovic. He adds, dragging on a cigarette, "If anyone will call me as a witness, he can expect me to defend him." Simatovic and the Red Berets still have contacts in high places. Zoran Djindjic, now Serbia's Prime Minister, met with a top Red Beret commander on the eve of Milosevic's ouster in October and obtained a guarantee that the unit would not intervene. Said a senior Western official: "Djindjic feels that he owes Frenki a debt."

No court has indicted Simatovic, and as recently as last month, he was still somewhere within Serbia's labyrinthine Ministry of Interior. But that doesn't make war-crimes-tribunal investigators any less eager to investigate him and his unit. Noted an investigator from the Hague: "Frenki's boys are a direct link between Slobodan Milosevic and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo."

Simatovic is one of dozens of principal coordinators of the bloody wars of the 1990s who remain comfortably at large in Serbia. Their continued freedom underscores the challenges and risks facing those who would bring key Serbian perpetrators of the Balkan wars to justice. While the world awaits the arrest of Milosevic--expected almost any day now--his detention will not be the watershed that international prosecutors hoped for. Despite his indictment by the international war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, he will be tried in Belgrade, most probably for abuse of office and other misdeeds rather than for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and elsewhere. This is not a minor distinction. Local trials do not address responsibility for the worst crimes committed in Europe since World War II, and hence they undermine the landmark U.N.-led effort to hold war criminals accountable under international law regardless of nationality.

And the problem runs deeper than Milosevic. Beneath him and his immediate cronies lies a complex web of officials and erstwhile thugs who are escaping scrutiny for war crimes simply by hewing to the law at home. Some are still pulling the levers of power. The real job of bringing Serbian war criminals to justice has not even begun.

TIME recently spoke to a former Red Beret, now in hiding, who described joining the unit just before it overran his hometown of Mostar in southeastern Bosnia on a cool fall day in 1991: "They took about a hundred Muslim and Croat civilians--men and women--from a shelter and lined them up on the banks of the Neretva River," recalled the heavily scarred Bosnian Serb, now 28. "Standing on the other side, I watched as five of the Red Berets executed them all. Some were shot; others they knifed or bludgeoned with rifle butts as they screamed for mercy. It lasted for about half an hour. Eventually, an excavator came to bury the bodies." Later, he described a visit by Frenki to their camp. "He was wearing sharp civilian clothes and had longish hair and expensive-looking sunglasses. He said that he came as a representative of the state of Serbia and that we were 'Serbian knights,' shock troops in a war against Serbia's enemies, and that the fate of all Serbs depended on us."

Some 200,000 people were killed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, most of them in Bosnia. No one knows how many died as a result of atrocities. Nor is it known how many of the tens of thousands of Serbs who fought knowingly participated in war crimes, though hundreds certainly did. So far, the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague has indicted 49 Serbs from throughout the former Yugoslavia, 15 of whom are now thought to be at large in Serbia.

Since her first visit to Belgrade in January, chief U.N. war-crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte has complained bitterly that her efforts to hunt down suspects and have them arrested are being thwarted at the highest levels. Resistance is coming, predictably, from the dwindling number of Milosevic loyalists and organized-crime groups allied to the old regime. But it is also coming from members of the new reformist government, many of whom sat by and cheered as Serbia exported war to neighboring republics in the former Yugoslavia. President Vojislav Kostunica, a former academic and self-proclaimed patriot, infuriated the Swiss prosecutor during their January meeting by lecturing her for 30 minutes on the purported bias of her tribunal. Meanwhile, a fresh U.S. ultimatum to Belgrade to show tangible signs of cooperation with the Hague by March 31 or forfeit $100 million in aid may not require Milosevic's extradition--as had at first been suggested--but instead a series of less politically perilous signs of goodwill.

Unlike in Germany after World War II, the postwar transition in Serbia has taken place gradually. There was no purge of officials associated with the war effort, only of those linked directly to Milosevic. In fact, the new government has shown few pangs of conscience about Serbia's wartime past. Prime Minister Djindjic recently appointed to the critical post of chief of public security Sreten Lukic, the man who presided over Serbian police during massacres in Kosovo prior to the NATO bombing. Now Lukic, among his new responsibilities, is obliged to arrest and extradite two relatives, Milan and Sredoje Lukic, wanted by the Hague for "willfully killing a significant number of Bosnian Muslim civilians" in the eastern town of Visegrad between May 1992 and October 1994. The men are accused of herding 135 women and children into two houses in June 1992 and burning them alive.

Djindjic has publicly declared that he will not send anyone to be tried for war crimes in the Hague simply because they commanded units that did the dirty work in the Balkan wars, an apparent reference to Simatovic. That reflects a deeper ambivalence among ordinary Serbs about wartime officials. While the vast majority of Serbs (80% in a recent poll) agree that Milosevic should be jailed, most still want him tried at home for crimes against the Serbian people. Less prominent figures, meanwhile, especially those whose alleged crimes were committed elsewhere, are attracting little attention.

Simatovic is not a hero in Belgrade, nor is he the villain that he is in the eyes of many Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians. The appointments of Lukic and others were greeted with a yawn. Even figures who have become synonymous with evil in the West have yet to fall from grace in long-isolated Serbia. Not long ago, 500 Belgraders turned out on a midwinter morning to honor the memory of Zeljko (Arkan) Raznjatovic, the notorious paramilitary gangster who was gunned down in a hotel lobby a year ago. Dressed in rich furs and long black overcoats, the mourners snaked past Raznjatovic's gaudy monument, kissing the cold marble and sharing plastic cups of soda. Serbia's neighbors view such demonstrations of misplaced loyalty with disgust.

There are occasional hints of moderation. A poll released last week found that just over 50% of Serbs would agree to send Milosevic to the Hague if the alternative were losing Western aid. At the same time, the perils of even local prosecution are becoming clear. Not long ago, gunmen fired (unsuccessfully) at the vehicle carrying the new Interior Minister; earlier, the driver of the new head of state security was shot as he waited for his boss outside Djindjic's office.

And the Red Berets? They were in action again last week, this time against Albanian guerrillas along the Kosovo border, though these days they are under a different command. The new government defends its reluctance to send even indicted war criminals to the Hague, citing the risk of political instability if it acts too fast. But the reverse is also true. "If we want to build a normal society, we need to face the truth about these crimes and punish the perpetrators," says Natasa Kandic, head of a local human-rights group, the Humanitarian Law Fund. Anything less would be getting away with murder. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington