Serbia's Red Berets come out as warriors and plain criminals

The scenes of scared residents fleeing from the sight of red beret-wearing warriors have definitely passed in Serbia after the government decided last Tuesday to disband the controversial unit over its role in the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12.

The Serbian Special Operation Unit (JSO), or Red Berets, was disbanded after police revealed the latest in a series of evidence linking the unit with the most powerful criminal gang in the Balkans, which has been blamed for Djindjic's assassination.

"The All-Star fighting team" or "Milosevic's Praetorian Guard" was Serbia's most elite and ruthless combat unit under former President Slobodan Milosevic and during the decade of the bloody Balkan wars, when it was believed to be involved in series of war crimes, including the killing of dozens of ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo village of Cuska in May 1999. The 1,000-strong force was founded in 1991, by Milosevic's spymaster, Jovica Stanisic, as Belgrade's strongmen decided to use the network of secret agents to wage wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

The unit originally consisted mostly of former convicts who were promised reduced sentences and special privileges, or soccer fans and people who wanted to protect Serbs from the Croatian regime. An elite, highly disciplined commando formation was established to command a wide range of paramilitary groups active on the battlefields at the time and oversee special operations, a former member of the unit told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

Unlike other fighting units in Serbia - the Red Berets, which originally had about 100 men - were equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and communications gear, including US-made armoured Humvees, Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships and a "Grizzly" personnel carrier captured from Canadian peacekeepers in Bosnia. To lead the unit, Stanisic chose his most trusted aide, Franko Simatovic Frenki, a career intelligence officer formerly in charge of hunting Western and KGB spies in Belgrade.

Soon they were known as Frenki's Boys and were identified only by their Red Berets. The force kept close contact with notorious warlords like Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan and his paramilitary unit, the "Tigers."

The "Tigers" were incorporated into JSO in 1994. After the Bosnian war, the Red Berets stepped out of the shadow and received an official name, the Special Operations Unit, but stayed out of the official chain of command as Stanisic defined their role as a "iron fist" of Milosevic's regime. The Belgraders were among the first to witness their rage as the unit's members, dressed in plainclothes and armed with baseball bats, stormed the streets of the capital, severely beating demonstrators during numerous opposition rallies in the late 1990s. But in 1998, ethnic Albanian rebels begun the war for independence in Kosovo, and the Red Berets were deployed to the province to crush the rebellion as the top combat unit ordered to attack guerrilla strongholds.

The unit is also believed to be involved in the unusual operation of destroying war crimes evidence by escorting deliveries of Albanian corpses to gravesites in other parts of Serbia. The Red Berets' operations in Kosovo were commanded by Milorad Ulemek, or Lukovic, nicknamed "The Legionnaire," reflecting his previous career in the French Foreign Legion. "The Legionnaire" appeared in headlines in October 2000 when he refused to use his unit to suppress a public uprising that led to Milosevic's fall from power.

This event led to numerous media reports about Ulemek's friendly relations with the country's new leadership as the unit managed to avoid the first tide in the new government's dismantling of Milosevic's regime virtually intact. The rumours of their involvement in organised crime, the drug trade, money laundering, unsolved murders and kidnappings were finally confirmed only after a skilled sharpshooter killed reformist premier Zoran Djindjic in the centre of Belgrade. The massive manhunt and overwhelming investigation that followed the assassination led to the end of the Red Berets. The Serbian government immediately blamed Ulemek for masterminding the killing to try to protect his business interests and avoid eventual extradition to The Hague War Crimes Tribunal.

Several top brass in the Red Berets - including its commander Dusan Maricic, deputy commander Zvezdan Jovanovic and another JSO member, Sasa Pejakovic - were arrested under suspicion of direct involvement in the killing. So were founders of the unit - Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic. "The Legionnaire," and his "partner in crime" - Serbia's most influential mafia boss, Dusan Spasojevic, are, however, still on the run.