Organized Crime in Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

Until well into the 1990s, Yugoslavia’s general crime pattern seemed to follow the smooth path of modernization, with violent crime on the decrease and property crime on the rise, as outlined in the theory propounded by criminologists such as Louise Shelley (1981). Even in 1992, with the wars starting, the Belgrade-based Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research published a report for UNICRI (the UNESCO organization dealing with crime) entitled Development and Crime, which showed that traditional crimes such as honour killings and blood feuds, as well as “stealing wood from the forest” had declined, although urbaniza- tion and industrialization had generated a sharp rise in theft. The dark ages of Bal- kan history with its proverbial cruelty were over and, judging from its criminologi- cal profile, Yugoslavia seemed to have become a “normal” country. Then on March 12, 2003 Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was killed by a sniper sent by the Belgrade mafia, probably the group from the Zemun suburb. Djindjic was the leader of the Democratic Party that had begun to carry out reforms that would have brought Serbia back to a welcoming Western Europe. Some political commentators in for- mer Yugoslavia expressed the belief that Djindjic himself was compromised when he accepted the assistance of organized crime in 1990 to come to power and especially when he handed over former president Milosevic to the Yugoslavia Tribunal in the Hague. Djindjic was assassinated presumably to prevent him from purging politics of the criminal element. What has happened in former Yugoslavia between 1980 and 2003 that has now brought the country back to its darkest ages? In this article I will try to make the case that the rise of the mafia is closely connected to the Wars of Partition in the 1990s and the corruptive Milosevic regime between 1988 and 2000.