By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 26 2004 (IPS)

Privatisation has brought in “private armies” to protect Serbian businesses facing growing threats.

“Other countries in the area, Bulgaria or Croatia, have already finished the phase when communist economies collapse in favour of market economy,” Marko Nicovic, vice-president of the International Bodyguard and Security Services Association in Serbia told IPS. “Serbia is at that stage now and it’s no wonder that the need for improved security is growing.”

Some 38,000 men work in Serbia as security guards for banks, insurance companies, newly established production firms and the new rich. About 5,000 of them are bodyguards. As many as 3,241 firms are registered in this line of work.

The new rich have come to fear abductions. In recent cases a millionaire Milorad Miskovic and the son of the popular folk music star Fahreta Zivojinovic were abducted. Both were released after their families paid several millions of dollars in ransom. The abductors were never caught.

Exchange offices and banks are being robbed almost daily. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash have been looted in recent raids, with the police usually too late to catch anyone.

“Paying for protection is normal in a country where police work has still to return to normal,” Nicovic added.

In the turbulent 1990s Serbian police grew to a 100,000 strong force in a country of 7.5 million. The police participated in state-sponsored smuggling operations of oil and other goods while Serbia was under international sanctions.

The police was used also as a tool of repression by the regime of former leader Slobodan Milosevic. Savage beatings of protestors at anti-Milosevic rallies were common.

Special police units participated in wars in former Yugoslavia that took the lives of more than 200,000 people. Police reforms began only after the fall of Milosevic four years ago. The force has now been reduced to about 50,000.

But much policing work has gone private. “We like to describe ourselves as white collar crime fighters,” says Ranko Vukomanovic, head of the Association of Private Security Companies of Serbia. “Private detectives are involved in checking the data on domestic companies that foreign firms want to buy or tracing missing persons where the police have been inefficient.”

The Serbian public only recently learned of the death of a popular gypsy music star after she had disappeared mysteriously a year ago. The case was investigated by a private company. The police were unable to solve the crime.

Private armies, as the security guards are often called, have plenty to do in protecting newly privatised companies. In a recent case in Zrenjanin town 70 km north of Belgrade, angry workers at the pharmaceuticals company Jugoremedija challenged the decision of the new management to lay off dozens of workers. For more than two months they prevented other workers from entering the factory.

The blockage of production led to a 12 million dollar loss for Jugoremedija, and to shortage of some drugs. The police did not intervene because they said the protest was peaceful.

“We had to call in a private security company to clear the compound in order to re- start production,” manager Aleksandar Radovanovic told IPS. “Otherwise we would have had to close down.”

Many firms have had to close down as a result of the move to the market economy. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off. Unemployment stands at 30 percent.

Firms that had survived the 1990s, comprising mostly cement, sugar, steel, copper, pharmaceuticals and food factories, were privatised. The Privatisation Agency of Serbia says 1,053 state-owned firms had been sold to local and foreign investors by January 2003.

The tensions caused by this process mean that many newly privatised firms have needed private security.

In neighbouring Bulgaria Konstantin Trenchev, leader of the second largest trade union Podkrepa has called for creation of a private security army to counter what he called gypsy crime.

“Gypsy crime has taken on epidemic dimensions,” he said last week. The police had proved incapable of dealing with the problem, he told local media. “We need to form a new power structure to counter the crime wave.”

But the men in these private armies are beginning to find more tempting offers outside the Balkans. Thousands of men, most of them former soldiers from wars in former Yugoslavia are joining security forces engaged by foreign companies in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“Soldiers of fortune are leaving the Balkans for Iraq,” analyst Slobodan Kljakic told IPS. “The number who left from Serbia can be put at 1,000, the same goes for Croatia and Bosnia. Bosnians are specialised in de-mining jobs in Afghanistan, others are going for tougher security jobs.”

The ex-soldiers are attracted by payments of between 100,000 and 200,000 dollars a year, says Croatian journalist Marina Seric who has researched Croatian mercenaries abroad. But they are attracted also by the excitement of war, she says. Peace has prevailed in former Yugoslavia for nine years now.

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