The Bloody Red Berets

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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.