Bobby Anderson From Thieves to Nation-builders; the Nexus of Banditry, Insurgency and State-Building in the Balkans, 1804-2007
Introduction
“A bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory.”
– Horowitz 1985:140
Vračar, a grey, drab, working class neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, was showing its age in the summer of 1993. As elsewhere in Serbia, the formal economy no longer existed. In its place stood a regional combat economy, though no one in Vračar would have articulated it as such. The neighborhood’s unemployed young men—boys, really—spent that summer posturing, strutting, tattooing one another, and occasionally firing Kalashnikovs from rooftops. Their younger brothers carried tear gas pistols and flare guns; such children developed apocalyptic visions of the future which their parents did not try to refute, because there existed, in Vračar, no contrary evidence. Accompanying this was a moral degradation; it might have existed before in Vračar, but I had no frame of reference for any normal time there. All I knew was what I saw. Anything was to be had, and done; gunshots seemed as common as car horns, and murders occurred over nothing, glances at the wrong girl, misinterpreted
words, arguments over the bill in a café. Hand grenades, available for 20 Marks, were thrown onto nightclub dancefloors. Radio-Television Serbia announced that it was legal to murder someone if you caught them attempting to steal your car; meanwhile, the city police sold registrations for any car, without proof of ownership, for 50 Deutschmarks. The young and hungry profited while the old and hungry waited on breadlines. Sanctions made boys richer than their incredulous parents could comprehend. Heroin was cheap and plentiful, but for those not in the sanctions racket, boiling the heads of locally-grown poppies and drinking the foul liquid sufficed.
Oglasnik advertised weekend trips to the then-static Croat front line, where Beograders could take potshots at Papists. It was a long, hot summer, the year I graduated from high school, and I lived in Vračar. My friends there believed that they, personally, were at war, but their articulation was stale. And it was there, through them, that I realised that the wars which were happening nearby—Srebrenica was roughly 70 miles away from where I slept that summer, near-oblivious to that overcrowded, desperate enclave—were hardly contained there. The conflagration was
close enough that local men who’d gone to Bosnia to fight could return home for the weekends. They brought goods with them, loot which they would sell from the backs of pickup trucks. They leaked. And the depredations and profits inherent in those ‘reasonless’ places nearby which were coming apart leaked also. Such a leak spread far beyond Bosnia- even beyond Yugoslavia. It did not seem like the ripples in the
water from the splash of a stone; rather, to my uninitiated and overwhelmed eye, it seemed like a violent industrial accident which began somewhere in the rural interior of that imploded state and carried out in all directions, belching black smoke, spraying refugees, guns, metal, blood, drugs and graves from Tirana to Munich and further afield, all manner of pain and profit. And for a number of people in Vračar, the men with the BMWs and the duty free stores and the drugs and the weapons and
stolen goods for sale, the men who were watched in awe as they sipped Turkish coffee in cafes with sponsor girls and thinly disguised pistols in the waistbands of their garish tracksuits—war was a good thing. Normalcy would have left them as purse snatchers, petty thieves, back-alley pimps. To children, they were gods. What they wanted, they simply took. It was their time.
The varied chapters of the 1991-1999 Balkan wars were less about ethnicity than they were about economic redistribution and coercive accumulation—thinly veiled organised criminal activities with the sheltering veneer of primitivism, further concealed by the intentional encouragement of war’s view through a myopic prism of race, religion, and blood. This prism allowed western elites to distance themselves from the war by acknowledging what Serb and Croat leaders had, from the earliest stages, repeated like commercial jingles which became lodged in the heads of
diplomats and journalists- that ancient ethnic hatreds were, indeed, the sole factor at play.
Introduction
“A bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory.”
– Horowitz 1985:140
Vračar, a grey, drab, working class neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, was showing its age in the summer of 1993. As elsewhere in Serbia, the formal economy no longer existed. In its place stood a regional combat economy, though no one in Vračar would have articulated it as such. The neighborhood’s unemployed young men—boys, really—spent that summer posturing, strutting, tattooing one another, and occasionally firing Kalashnikovs from rooftops. Their younger brothers carried tear gas pistols and flare guns; such children developed apocalyptic visions of the future which their parents did not try to refute, because there existed, in Vračar, no contrary evidence. Accompanying this was a moral degradation; it might have existed before in Vračar, but I had no frame of reference for any normal time there. All I knew was what I saw. Anything was to be had, and done; gunshots seemed as common as car horns, and murders occurred over nothing, glances at the wrong girl, misinterpreted
words, arguments over the bill in a café. Hand grenades, available for 20 Marks, were thrown onto nightclub dancefloors. Radio-Television Serbia announced that it was legal to murder someone if you caught them attempting to steal your car; meanwhile, the city police sold registrations for any car, without proof of ownership, for 50 Deutschmarks. The young and hungry profited while the old and hungry waited on breadlines. Sanctions made boys richer than their incredulous parents could comprehend. Heroin was cheap and plentiful, but for those not in the sanctions racket, boiling the heads of locally-grown poppies and drinking the foul liquid sufficed.
Oglasnik advertised weekend trips to the then-static Croat front line, where Beograders could take potshots at Papists. It was a long, hot summer, the year I graduated from high school, and I lived in Vračar. My friends there believed that they, personally, were at war, but their articulation was stale. And it was there, through them, that I realised that the wars which were happening nearby—Srebrenica was roughly 70 miles away from where I slept that summer, near-oblivious to that overcrowded, desperate enclave—were hardly contained there. The conflagration was
close enough that local men who’d gone to Bosnia to fight could return home for the weekends. They brought goods with them, loot which they would sell from the backs of pickup trucks. They leaked. And the depredations and profits inherent in those ‘reasonless’ places nearby which were coming apart leaked also. Such a leak spread far beyond Bosnia- even beyond Yugoslavia. It did not seem like the ripples in the
water from the splash of a stone; rather, to my uninitiated and overwhelmed eye, it seemed like a violent industrial accident which began somewhere in the rural interior of that imploded state and carried out in all directions, belching black smoke, spraying refugees, guns, metal, blood, drugs and graves from Tirana to Munich and further afield, all manner of pain and profit. And for a number of people in Vračar, the men with the BMWs and the duty free stores and the drugs and the weapons and
stolen goods for sale, the men who were watched in awe as they sipped Turkish coffee in cafes with sponsor girls and thinly disguised pistols in the waistbands of their garish tracksuits—war was a good thing. Normalcy would have left them as purse snatchers, petty thieves, back-alley pimps. To children, they were gods. What they wanted, they simply took. It was their time.
The varied chapters of the 1991-1999 Balkan wars were less about ethnicity than they were about economic redistribution and coercive accumulation—thinly veiled organised criminal activities with the sheltering veneer of primitivism, further concealed by the intentional encouragement of war’s view through a myopic prism of race, religion, and blood. This prism allowed western elites to distance themselves from the war by acknowledging what Serb and Croat leaders had, from the earliest stages, repeated like commercial jingles which became lodged in the heads of
diplomats and journalists- that ancient ethnic hatreds were, indeed, the sole factor at play.
Introduction
“A bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory.”
– Horowitz 1985:140
Vračar, a grey, drab, working class neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, was showing its age in the summer of 1993. As elsewhere in Serbia, the formal economy no longer existed. In its place stood a regional combat economy, though no one in Vračar would have articulated it as such. The neighborhood’s unemployed young men—boys, really—spent that summer posturing, strutting, tattooing one another, and occasionally firing Kalashnikovs from rooftops. Their younger brothers carried tear gas pistols and flare guns; such children developed apocalyptic visions of the future which their parents did not try to refute, because there existed, in Vračar, no contrary evidence. Accompanying this was a moral degradation; it might have existed before in Vračar, but I had no frame of reference for any normal time there. All I knew was what I saw. Anything was to be had, and done; gunshots seemed as common as car horns, and murders occurred over nothing, glances at the wrong girl, misinterpreted
words, arguments over the bill in a café. Hand grenades, available for 20 Marks, were thrown onto nightclub dancefloors. Radio-Television Serbia announced that it was legal to murder someone if you caught them attempting to steal your car; meanwhile, the city police sold registrations for any car, without proof of ownership, for 50 Deutschmarks. The young and hungry profited while the old and hungry waited on breadlines. Sanctions made boys richer than their incredulous parents could comprehend. Heroin was cheap and plentiful, but for those not in the sanctions racket, boiling the heads of locally-grown poppies and drinking the foul liquid sufficed.
Oglasnik advertised weekend trips to the then-static Croat front line, where Beograders could take potshots at Papists. It was a long, hot summer, the year I graduated from high school, and I lived in Vračar. My friends there believed that they, personally, were at war, but their articulation was stale. And it was there, through them, that I realised that the wars which were happening nearby—Srebrenica was roughly 70 miles away from where I slept that summer, near-oblivious to that overcrowded, desperate enclave—were hardly contained there. The conflagration was
close enough that local men who’d gone to Bosnia to fight could return home for the weekends. They brought goods with them, loot which they would sell from the backs of pickup trucks. They leaked. And the depredations and profits inherent in those ‘reasonless’ places nearby which were coming apart leaked also. Such a leak spread far beyond Bosnia- even beyond Yugoslavia. It did not seem like the ripples in the
water from the splash of a stone; rather, to my uninitiated and overwhelmed eye, it seemed like a violent industrial accident which began somewhere in the rural interior of that imploded state and carried out in all directions, belching black smoke, spraying refugees, guns, metal, blood, drugs and graves from Tirana to Munich and further afield, all manner of pain and profit. And for a number of people in Vračar, the men with the BMWs and the duty free stores and the drugs and the weapons and
stolen goods for sale, the men who were watched in awe as they sipped Turkish coffee in cafes with sponsor girls and thinly disguised pistols in the waistbands of their garish tracksuits—war was a good thing. Normalcy would have left them as purse snatchers, petty thieves, back-alley pimps. To children, they were gods. What they wanted, they simply took. It was their time.
The varied chapters of the 1991-1999 Balkan wars were less about ethnicity than they were about economic redistribution and coercive accumulation—thinly veiled organised criminal activities with the sheltering veneer of primitivism, further concealed by the intentional encouragement of war’s view through a myopic prism of race, religion, and blood. This prism allowed western elites to distance themselves from the war by acknowledging what Serb and Croat leaders had, from the earliest stages, repeated like commercial jingles which became lodged in the heads of
diplomats and journalists- that ancient ethnic hatreds were, indeed, the sole factor at play.
Introduction
“A bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory.”
– Horowitz 1985:140
Vračar, a grey, drab, working class neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, was showing its age in the summer of 1993. As elsewhere in Serbia, the formal economy no longer existed. In its place stood a regional combat economy, though no one in Vračar would have articulated it as such. The neighborhood’s unemployed young men—boys, really—spent that summer posturing, strutting, tattooing one another, and occasionally firing Kalashnikovs from rooftops. Their younger brothers carried tear gas pistols and flare guns; such children developed apocalyptic visions of the future which their parents did not try to refute, because there existed, in Vračar, no contrary evidence. Accompanying this was a moral degradation; it might have existed before in Vračar, but I had no frame of reference for any normal time there. All I knew was what I saw. Anything was to be had, and done; gunshots seemed as common as car horns, and murders occurred over nothing, glances at the wrong girl, misinterpreted
words, arguments over the bill in a café. Hand grenades, available for 20 Marks, were thrown onto nightclub dancefloors. Radio-Television Serbia announced that it was legal to murder someone if you caught them attempting to steal your car; meanwhile, the city police sold registrations for any car, without proof of ownership, for 50 Deutschmarks. The young and hungry profited while the old and hungry waited on breadlines. Sanctions made boys richer than their incredulous parents could comprehend. Heroin was cheap and plentiful, but for those not in the sanctions racket, boiling the heads of locally-grown poppies and drinking the foul liquid sufficed.
Oglasnik advertised weekend trips to the then-static Croat front line, where Beograders could take potshots at Papists. It was a long, hot summer, the year I graduated from high school, and I lived in Vračar. My friends there believed that they, personally, were at war, but their articulation was stale. And it was there, through them, that I realised that the wars which were happening nearby—Srebrenica was roughly 70 miles away from where I slept that summer, near-oblivious to that overcrowded, desperate enclave—were hardly contained there. The conflagration was
close enough that local men who’d gone to Bosnia to fight could return home for the weekends. They brought goods with them, loot which they would sell from the backs of pickup trucks. They leaked. And the depredations and profits inherent in those ‘reasonless’ places nearby which were coming apart leaked also. Such a leak spread far beyond Bosnia- even beyond Yugoslavia. It did not seem like the ripples in the
water from the splash of a stone; rather, to my uninitiated and overwhelmed eye, it seemed like a violent industrial accident which began somewhere in the rural interior of that imploded state and carried out in all directions, belching black smoke, spraying refugees, guns, metal, blood, drugs and graves from Tirana to Munich and further afield, all manner of pain and profit. And for a number of people in Vračar, the men with the BMWs and the duty free stores and the drugs and the weapons and
stolen goods for sale, the men who were watched in awe as they sipped Turkish coffee in cafes with sponsor girls and thinly disguised pistols in the waistbands of their garish tracksuits—war was a good thing. Normalcy would have left them as purse snatchers, petty thieves, back-alley pimps. To children, they were gods. What they wanted, they simply took. It was their time.
The varied chapters of the 1991-1999 Balkan wars were less about ethnicity than they were about economic redistribution and coercive accumulation—thinly veiled organised criminal activities with the sheltering veneer of primitivism, further concealed by the intentional encouragement of war’s view through a myopic prism of race, religion, and blood. This prism allowed western elites to distance themselves from the war by acknowledging what Serb and Croat leaders had, from the earliest stages, repeated like commercial jingles which became lodged in the heads of
diplomats and journalists- that ancient ethnic hatreds were, indeed, the sole factor at play.