Book Vixere Srdjan Cvijic it is the result of unprecedented archivally supported research - incisive and documented to the smallest detail - presented as tense and vivid to read as a documentary thriller.
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"WEATHER" Why is UDBA killed?
SRĐAN CVIJIĆ: In principle, it was about an authoritarian regime surrounded, as we used to say in Yugoslavia at the time - "Brigama". These are the initial letters of all the then neighbors of Yugoslavia, from Bulgaria onwards. The regime felt very threatened, so the killings were a response to that feeling. But let's not mention the liquidations immediately after the Second World War, when OZNA still existed, it was mostly about establishing power, control or direct revenge. Significant changes began in 1972, when the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood invaded Yugoslavia.
The name of the first unit is "Murders of Serbian Don Quixotes". Why this comparison??
These were lost and defeated people, completely politically irrelevant and did not pose any threat except perhaps Bora Blagojević. When you read the book, you can see that there are doubts for some of the victims that they were in a certain relationship of cooperation with the Yugoslav service. With the exception of Blagojević, it is difficult to fathom why they were killed. The first victim - Bora Blagojević - was still a member of Sopo, an organization that really planned actions against Yugoslavia.
Some liquidated actions were only plans. Some of them organized a gathering of Serbian emigration in 1974 in Brussels, but there were 20 people there. However, today it is unimaginable for us that the government kills people because of political action. I think that we have not completely eliminated any danger from that.
Did you manage to access the UDBA documents?-e?
When Yugoslavia fell apart, many documents had duplicates, and many got lost in the archives of other institutions. That's how historians and researchers came to them. By Government Decree in 2001, all documents were opened. However, at that moment, Radomir Marković and others were in custody for burning official documents. That regulation practically decriminalized their act. That is why the government of that time withdrew that decree. By the way, in the book I quote experts in the work of the State Security who state that the most scandalous data on operations and liquidations were not even written. Documents describing a murder are hard to find.
In the book, you mentioned some codes that were used for murders?
Passivization, offensive action, sometimes even more explicit names. However, what is interesting to some victims from the diaspora are the volumes of documentation about the tracking, tracking of them and their friends. Usually, a few days before their liquidation, that reporting would stop. In other words, immediately before a person's death, the service's interest in him ceases.
What was the reason for the liquidations? What is that red line that UDBA did not forgive?
For example, Petar Valić and Miodrag Bošković printed the newspaper Vaskrs Srbije, which was distributed during Tito's visit to Frankfurt. Tito was probably extremely annoyed by this, and there was already a decision after the Ustasha group's incursion into Yugoslavia to intensify offensive actions abroad. By the way, Bošković contacted the Informbirovci, it was rumored that he wanted to form a coalition with them, a government in exile... At the time, this was probably interpreted as a threat. There is also something else. At that time, the decentralization of the state was in progress, practically the confederation of the SFRY, in which the republican services received greater powers when it comes to these actions. It worked according to the territorial key - for example, Croats were in charge of people from Croatia. Therefore, it can be suspected that those liquidations also served to flatter Tito and the state leadership.
Who was responsible for the liquidations? Who proposed them?, and who approved??
Without any doubt, it could not have been done without Tito. Later, there was a Council for the Protection of the Constitutional Order composed of people from the services and the bureaucratic apparatus.
It is clear that UDBA-and she could not easily locate the escaped Ustashas, but here we are talking about emigrants who did not hide.
Probably the year 1972 was a turning point. It was not only that Ustasha incursion, but also actions that were thwarted. In the book, I describe a conversation where it is clear that there are people like Mirko Tepavac who are against liquidations abroad. He says that no one kills our emigration like us, and they reply that no one attacks like our emigration. This happened at the time of the kidnapping at the Munich Olympics, when the Mossad was killing Palestinians in Europe, and the Palestinians were attacking Israelis and others. In those "lead years" of Europe, Yugoslavia was not the most threatened, but there was obviously that sentiment within the leadership of the KPJ in SFRY. It seems that there was also "leveling" by national key. If one is killed, others must be killed as well.
Many of those victims were involved in some criminal activities. It is difficult to know whether some were connected to State Security, which may have been collecting some of its debts. The explanation, however, is found in politics, not in the vulnerability of the state.
You managed to avoid romanticizing and building a myth around the secret services. It could also be said that you were quite careful while writing the book. Why??
Don't be wrong. Much has been written on this topic without access to documentation, based solely on gossip from the diaspora of former Udbas. What I couldn't prove, I didn't even write. All that seemed probable to me, but I could not prove, I left to the readers to draw their own conclusions.
photo: ivan božinovski, courtesy of studio photography...
What were the Udba agents like?? Are there any differences between the earlier murders you cover in the book and the later ones??
In the book, I used the comparison of "lone wolves" for earlier murders and "packs of rabid dogs" for later liquidations. For example, they sent two teams to Belgium to kill the Albanian activist Enver Hadri (the last murder). One team was compromised due to a penalty for a traffic violation. Jusuf Bulić and Kristijan Golubović were in it. So, extremely unprofessional action.
When the recruitment of criminals starts? In the book, you say that before the appearance of Ranko Rubežić, there were no real gangsters in Belgrade.
I suspect that Udba might have wanted to start this practice even earlier. She started in the late 60s, early 70s. At the same time, the economic reform in Yugoslavia was heating up, a completely different system was emerging from the one in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Bloc countries. In Yugoslavia, money began to replace ideology, criminal activities increased. Criminals became a social phenomenon, and the secret service began to hire them abroad, giving them immunity in the country. This increasingly produced corrosion within the state. As a symbol of that time, I talk about Arcanum in the book.
After the removal of Ranković and from the beginning of the seventies, we can no longer speak of the Service in the singular. Simply, a completely different dynamic enters the scene, and people change as well. Many at the top of the communist system feel uneasy about these actions abroad. On the other hand, the criminals who are recruited have some socio-politically acceptable pedigree. They are children of generals and officers. Arkan is the son of a colonel, a partisan, Darko Ashanin (linked to the murder of Enver Hadri) is also an officer's child.
It is known how the then regime recruited criminals for operations in the West. Namely, the Federal Service was in contact with the Belgrade SUP and the department for juvenile delinquency. It worked like NBA scouting through cops keeping them on the phone and recruiting as needed.
Affair "Markovic" is one of the best examples of constructing conspiracy theories about Yugoslavs, world scandals and the role of various services in them.
The real story is, in fact, much more interesting than all our speculations and some hunting stories related to the affair with Stevic Marković. The opposition and orthodox degolists in France tried to politically delegitimize Prime Minister Georges Pompidou with that affair, so they readily welcomed all those conspiracy theories. If you are talking about romanticization, media worker Milomir Marić invited a certain Toma Avramski to his show - under the signs of allegations - as one of the witnesses of those events and wrote an entire book about the "Marković" affair.
In Marić's show, he literally jumps into his own mouth. Basically, I had the opportunity to mention the affair in the book, because that group of people around the murdered Miodrag Bošković was connected to Marković before he came to Paris to work as Alain Delon's bodyguard. Before that, he was with Bošković, in his circle in Brussels, and then he left for Paris due to problems with the law.
Recently, the news appeared that Božidar Spasić, Andrija Drašković and Veselin Vukotić were sentenced in Belgium to life imprisonment for the murder of Enver Hadri. It is about the confirmation of the verdict, since they were convicted back in 2016. Isn't it??
In Belgium, the procedural actions for the murder of Enver Hadri intensified in 1996, when former DB agent Božidar Spasić bragged about that murder in an interview for the magazine "Svet" at the time. On the other hand, the ball begins to unravel after the murder of Andrija Lakonić in the club "Nana" in Senjak in 1990, a month after the murder of Hadrije, who is also linked to this liquidation. However, the trial in Belgium took place only in 2016. Why so late? The reason is that there is a jury trial for serious crimes, murder and terrorism. As in American movies, citizens are randomly selected from the register and called for trial. Preparations for such trials take years. Besides, all the perpetrators were on the run. Some were later killed (Andrija Lakonić and Darko Ašanin). Therefore, it is considered that Ašanin, Lakonić, Veselin Vukotić and Andrija Drašković participated in the assassination of Enver Hadri.
How Andrija Drašković found himself in the verdict for murder when the witnesses mostly mention Vukotić, Ašanin and Lakonić?
Not all witnesses mention him, that's true. Other evidence was presented, and Spasić's writing also played a role. Teuta, Enver Hadri's daughter, said that her father's killers were convicted on the basis of a document from Serbia, which is true. At the beginning of the year, the life sentences were confirmed.
You mention General Franjo Herljević, next to Dolanc, Ćulafić and Gračanin in context "difficulty to get out of the forest". Herljević lost three brothers in the war, goose, mother and sister, everything from Ustashas and Chetniks. Isn't their determination against those who planned subversive actions against Yugoslavia understandable??
Almost 30 years later? You know, it's a little worrying. There was an internal struggle in that system, but dogmatic thinking and the zeitgeist of World War II prevailed. Herljević was heavily involved in the invasion of HRB in 1972. It was a great embarrassment. A group of some 12-14 Ustasha was chased for a month by 30 thousand members of the JNA and the Territorial Defense. Perhaps this shame was also a motive for the subsequent proliferation of murders. I can only imagine what Tito told them behind closed doors, and we have some documents that show us the outlines of those conversations. There is a great anger, a sense of responsibility, and they had to prove to Marshall that they were doing their job.
Should a distinction be made between the liquidations of emigrant circles that were preparing actions against Yugoslavia (I don't just mean the faces in your book, but also the others liquidated around the world) and some activists who really didn't give an excessive reason for being put on the kill list?
I believe in the rule of law - society simply cannot function normally without it. It is not possible to justify murders. In SFRY, we did not have the rule of law, but the rule of the hermetically sealed Communist Party. There were a lot of good things, but also very problematic things, because of which even to this day we don't have the kind of democracy we should have. I think my book illustrates all of this pretty well. There were attacks on Yugoslav embassies and other institutions abroad, but for most murders I would say that the conditions for the state to act offensively were not met. Rather, I could say that it is state terrorism.
I asked this question trying to go back to the Cold War context when these murders took place.
That's a good point and maybe it's interesting to mention the Belgian context. We have the Red Brigades in Italy, the Faction of the Red Army in Germany, we have serious terrorist attacks, so-called. The Brabant murders in supermarkets in the 80s in Belgium... The circumstances are different than today and what happened did not produce as much shock as it would produce today.
There is one more thing. I devoted an entire chapter to the role of the Belgian service and Cold War politics in general in these murders. This could allow UDBA to operate smoothly in Belgium. The Belgian service was trying to distance itself from the auspices of the American CIA. This is all part of the policy of détente in Europe - the thawing of relations with the East and the reduction of tensions affected the Belgian service. As part of that building of independence in relation to the Americans, contacts were established with eastern services, and Yugoslavia was the least problematic in that context. I don't think there was open cooperation between the Belgian and Yugoslav services, especially not in those murders, but the UDBA took advantage of the newly created situation and carried out its duties. All those people who were liquidated were not important to the Belgian state, and some had problems with the law.
