The 12 March assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran
Djindjic was blamed by the International Crisis Group on an
\"interlocking nexus\" of organized crime, war criminals, and police
and army officers hiding behind \"nationalist-patriotic\" slogans and
organizations.\" Similar accusations were made by 14 Serbian civic
groups and other Serbian commentators.
But the link between organized crime, the executive, and
domestic-security forces that still exists in Serbia is not unique to
that country — it is also characteristic of Bosnia and to a lesser
degree of Croatia, and in the 1990s became the norm in Ukraine and
Russia.
Although military budgets were starved throughout the 1990s,
the domestic security forces in Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Russia grew
in size. In Yugoslavia, former President Slobodan Milosevic
distrusted the armed forces and relied upon the Interior Ministry and
the security service as his personal Praetorian Guard.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) is the successor to the
republican KGB but, unlike in Russia, it was never divided into
separate internal and external branches. The Directorate for State
Defense — successor to the republican KGB\'s 9th Directorate, which
guards top officials and is analogous to the U.S. Secret Service —
was separated from the SBU, but was reabsorbed in 1996.
Mykola Melnychenko, who illicitly bugged President Leonid
Kuchma\'s office in 1999-2000, worked in this directorate as a
counterintelligence officer.
In Yugoslavia under Milosevic, and also in Ukraine and
Russia, the main bodies to have gained from the transfer of financial
resources from the military are their interior ministries. The
interior ministries in Russia and Ukraine inherited the internal
troops and OMON troops that were created in the Gorbachev era. The
OMON retain their name in Russia, and have the worst human rights
record of any Russian security-force unit in Chechnya. In Ukraine,
the Soviet-era OMON became the Berkut (Golden Eagles) and have been
used to attack opposition demonstrators.
Political surveillance and state-orchestrated violence in
these countries is usually the work of specialist units of the
interior ministry. The assassination of Djindjic is widely believed
to be the work of Milorad Ulemek-Lukovic \"Legija,\" a former commander
of the Serbian Interior Ministry\'s elite police Special Operations
Unit (JSO), or Red Berets, which covertly supported paramilitary
operations and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia in the1990s.
Lukovic switched allegiances to the opposition in the fall of 2000
and helped arrest Milosevic for the international war crimes
tribunal. In gratitude, the authorities under Djindjic reportedly
turned a blind eye to Lukovic\'s connections to organized crime.
In Ukraine, the murder of opposition journalist Heorhiy
Gongadze in the fall of 2000 has thrown the spotlight on the
activities of special police units in Ukraine\'s Interior Ministry.
Prosecutor-General Svyatoslav Piskun and other senior officials in
the Prosecutor-General\'s Office have recently claimed that one of the
best leads they are pursuing in Gongadze\'s murder is the involvement
of the Interior Ministry\'s Falcons (Orly), special-forces troops
attached to the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (UBOZ)
within the ministry. Information about the Falcons first appeared on
the Melnychenko tape released in November 2000 that sparked the
Kuchmagate crisis. This evidence has since been backed up by leaked
letters from anonymous Interior Ministry officers.
As with the JSO and paramilitary groups in Yugoslavia under
Milosevic, and similar units in Croatia and Bosnia, the special
purpose Falcons units were involved in organized crime. Since the
fall of 2002, some senior and lower-ranking members of the UBOZ\'s
Falcons have been arrested and charged with jointly organizing \"death
squads\" together with organized-crime figures.
In addition to shedding light on Gongadze\'s death, the leaked
Interior Ministry letters have provided information that corroborates
and complements a 1999 video interview with ministry officers leaked
to then-presidential candidate Yevhen Marchuk, who admitted that they
organized the \"car accident\" that led to the death of Rukh leader
Vyacheslav Chornovil in March 1999. A KamAZ truck hit the car in
which Chornovil was traveling, killing him and the driver.
Chornovil\'s son Taras, and Hennadiy Udovenko, who is Chornovil\'s
successor as head of Rukh, both accuse the authorities of being
behind the \"accident.\" Although Rukh was already dividing into two
feuding groups just prior to Chornovil\'s death, his demise rendered
the split irreversible and thus removed a potential threat to Kuchma
in the presidential elections later that year.
A similar episode took place in Yugoslavia in October 1999. A
car in which Vuk Draskovic — the head of Serbia\'s largest opposition
party, the Serbian Renewal Movement — was traveling was also hit by
a large truck. Draskovic survived, but his three bodyguards died, one
of whom was Draskovic\'s brother-in-law. After cooperating with
Milosevic in government, Draskovic had begun making overtures to join
the opposition Alliance for Change.
The truck drivers in both Chornovil\'s and Draskovic\'s \"car
accidents\" were never prosecuted. Djindjic had, however, allowed a
sensitive trial to begin of policemen involved in the Draskovic
crash. Djindjic himself was the target of a similar \"accident\" last
month when a large truck, driven by a man allegedly working for
Legija attempted to hit his car in what was widely believed to be an
assassination attempt.
The nexus between organized crime and internal security
forces might be cleaned up in Serbia following Djindjic\'s
assassination. A former assistant chief of a JSO unit was arrested on
25 March on suspicion of participating in Djindjic\'s assassination.
But, in CIS states, such as Ukraine, this prospect still seems far
off. The latest leaked Interior Ministry letter in Ukraine claims
that the front-runner in next year\'s presidential elections, Viktor
Yushchenko, is being trailed by the very same Falcons that
Prosecutor-General Piskun is investigating for their possible role in
Gongadze\'s murder.

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