Sunday, March 27, 2000

All President's (Dead) Men

Radovan Stojicic Badza
(1951-1997)

Assassinated on April 11, 1997. At the time, he was the chief of the Department of Public Safety of the Ministry of the Interior and the acting Minister of the Interior.

The Profile

After graduating from the police high school, Radovan Stojicic joined the police force and became patrolman in Tasmajdan Park. Because of his violent behavior he was nicknamed Badza (i.e. Brutus) after the character from the Popeye cartoon. Some police officers claimed that his official record depicted him as a controversial personality. As a martial arts fan, he was appointed administrator for physical education of the Belgrade Police Department and later transferred to the Special Forces of the Serbian Ministry of the Interior (MUP).

His first favor to Slobodan Milosevic was in 1989 when he put forward a plan to drive the Albanian miners out of the Stari Trg mine. As a commander in chief of the MUP Special Forces, he recommended himself as the commanding officer of the operation. The action was, as Madeleine Albright would say - "clean and swift".

Together with Jovica Stanisic (former head of the Serbian Secret Service - SDB), Mihalj Kertes (head administrator of the Yugoslav Customs) and Frenki Stamatovic, he was one of the most important persons in the military faction of the MUP at the beginning of the war in Ex-Yugoslavia. During 1991 Radovan Stojicic Badza was the commander of the Territorial Defense of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem (regions in eastern Croatia). These units were comprised of volunteers, reservists and selected parts of the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army - the army of Ex-Yugoslavia).

A tight connection between the police and organized crime began to form as the operations in the Vukovar theater started. That connection exists even today. Badza hired many criminals wanted by the Interpol to carry out the ethnical cleansing in the Croatian part of Pannonia (the valley of the Danube and Sava rivers). Among others, he hired Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan who was later on indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Hague. This friendship survived until Stojicic's funeral when Arkan almost burst into tears.

Many paramilitary organizations acted as centers for assembling military volunteers. Vojislav Seselj, Dragoslav Bokan and Arkan stood out among the leaders of these organizations but all of them were subject to the authority of Radovan Stojicic. In interviews Seselj often pointed out Badza as someone who requested volunteer fighters from him. Bokan talked about Badza as the commander of the "Red Berets", the military unit often mentioned by witnesses of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. The London Guardian, in February 3, 1997 issue, published an interview with Branislav Vakic, the commanding officer of Seselj's paramilitary unit and an ICTY indictee. He claimed that Badza had supplied his paramilitary unit with the latest weapons. In the same issue, Marko Nicovic, a police officer dismissed from the force and once very close to the JUL (Yugoslav Left, the communist party of Mrs. Markovic, Milosevic's wife), stated that "former bank robber" Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan became untouchable after he had become friendly with Badza in Eastern Slavonia.

As a reward for his deeds, Radovan Stojicic Badza was appointed chief of the Department of Public Safety (head of the all uniformed police force) and the Deputy Minister of the Interior.

In 1994, in the Belgrade weekly paper "Telegraf" (Slavko Curuvija, who was assasinated during the NATO intervention, was one of the owners of the newspaper), former police inspector in the 2nd Division of the Belgrade Police Department Dragan Mladenovic accused Badza of selling weapons to Croats and Muslims in Bosnia and of dealing drugs in Belgrade, car thefts, etc.

During the student and citizen protest in the winter of 1996/1997 (against the annulment of the victory of the democratic coalition "Zajedno" in the municipal elections), thousands of policemen armed to the teeth invaded Belgrade. It goes without saying that they were expected to use force on peaceful demonstrators. Hundreds of protesters were beaten and arrested during those three months. The most drastic examples are: the arrest and beating of Dejan Bulatovic (the protester who carried the puppet representing Milosevic as a convict); battering of citizens on December 29, 1996 on Terazije Street by plainclothes policemen, members of the MUP Special Forces; breaking into the School of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade by the police on the same night; beating up of the demonstrators on the Branko's Bridge and the use of water cannons on the temprature well bellow zero in the night of February 2-3, 1997. Of course, Radovan Stojicic was the commanding officer of all these actions.

The Assassination

Radovan Stojicic was assassinated in his favorite restaurant "Mamma Mia" at the address General Zdanova Street 70, just a few hundred meters of the MUP Headquarters and in the vicinity of the Great Britain and Libya embassies. The restaurant was known as the gathering place for many famous performers and influential politicians probably because they felt safe in the neighborhood of the main police headquarters.

The murder took place in the night between Thursday and Friday (April 10-11, 1997) at about half past midnight. Radovan Stojicic was sitting at the table in the smaller room of the restaurant with Milos Kurdulija, Badza's friend and customs official. Badza's son Vojislav Stojicic was sitting at the next table. At one point in time, a man (175-185 cm tall) walked into the restaurant almost full of people. He was wearing woolen ski mask over his face. The man ordered everyone to lie down and walked over the three steps that lead toward the smaller room of the restaurant. Then he stepped behind an empty ice cream stand and the full 25-liter bottle of Italian white wine that provided him a cover. There, from the close range, he fired seven shots one of which missed the victim. After that, the assassin passing by the prostrated guests retreated from the restaurant. On the way out he fired again - three shots through the restaurant window - to make sure that no one would prevent him from escaping.

When the assassin had left, Vojislav Stojicic and Milos Kurdulija went into the kitchen and called the police, which arrived at the scene just a few minutes afterwards. Soon the police force was given the alert, the whole town was put under the blockade. The police asked every passerby on the street for ID, stooped and searched every car moving on the streets, ran into the vehicles of public transportation, questioned the residents of neighboring buildings. But to no avail.

Everything but the murder itself is in the domain of pure speculation - from the murder weapon to the motive for the assassination of Badza. The media stated that the murder weapon was Heckler und Koch automatic handgun as well as the American Ingram M-11. During the nineties the former became very popular among the Belgrade criminals and the latter is the weapon of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and some of the European terrorist organizations.

In a sea of misinformation and half-truths one emerged in the Belgrade daily paper "Vecernje Novosti". A day after the assassination, the newspaper published that the leather briefcase containing 700,000 DEM ($350,000) was found by the body. The official denial has never been issued, but on the other hand the information have never reappeared either.

The Motive

Even three years after the assassination, the public is not acquainted with the progress of the investigation. Nikola Sainovic (Vice President of the FRY government, indicted for war crimes in Kosovo together with the President of the FRY Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia Milan Milutinovic and the Serbian Minister of the Interior Vlajko Stojiljkovic) was appointed head of the investigation by Slobodan Milosevic himself.

In order to reveal who the murderer is, the police usually starts with determining the motive. Because of his position and his eventful life, Badza certainly made enough enemies that had a motive to eliminate him.

High on the list of suspects are his "business partners". In the seventies the police began to hire members of the Belgrade underworld to carry out the activities the police did not want to be openly tied to. However, until Milosevic rose to power in Serbia and until the war in Ex-Yugoslavia the cooperation was limited to assassinating certain persons who weren't to the liking of the state administration. But as the war started, there was a need for much stronger cooperation and the members of the criminal society were the best choice for preparing the territories that would have made the Greater Serbia. The most descriptive impression about the ties between the police and the mafia were given by the former police inspector Mladenovic who said: "Unfortunately, he [Stojicic] identified himself with the very persons he ought to be prosecuting", as well as the respected Belgrade lawyer Toma Fila who, when asked by journalist if he knew who assassinated Badza, said: "The same person who assassinated Vlada Tref. He was smuggling sweets, and Badza was smuggling cigarettes."

The second on the list of suspects is the man Badza owed his career to. As a witness and a first-hand participant in "the awakening of the Serbs", Stojicic could have certainly been a very reliable source of information about the role of Slobodan Milosevic in planning, organizing and carrying out the defense of the "defenseless Serbian nation" from the "arisen ustasha and mujaheddin movement [WWII pro-fascist collaborators]". "The defense" meant leveling of Vukovar to the ground, burning Bijeljina down, killing thousands in Srebrenica and besieging Sarajevo for years forcing citizens of Sarajevo to live without water, electricity, food, shelter, heating, etc.

Radovan Stojicic stepped on Mrs. Markovic's foot by not being so keen on using force against the demonstrators in the 1996/97 protest that had ended just a few months before he was assassinated. It is well known that Mrs. Markovic and the JUL were the most vigorous supporters of the violent breaking up of the protest. After the protest ended, Milosevic moved to the federal level and took Zoran Sokolovic with him, and that resulted in a genuine war over the new chief of the Serbian police. At the time of his death Badza was the acting Minister of the Interior and the candidate of the SPS (Socialist Party of Serbia) for the new Minister. His death made favorable conditions for the appointment of Mrs. Markovic's front-runner Vlajko Stojiljkovic. And so, the person which earlier career guaranteed that he would not considerably interfere with his own job became the new Minister of the Interior.

The Funeral

The funeral was appropriate for a high government official. On April 13, 1997 in the presence of the members of the Special Antiterrorist Unit (SAJ), thousands of people attended the ceremony at the New Belgrade Graveyard. The adjacent Ruzveltova Street was completely blocked. Slobodan Milosevic, nearly crying, stood in the first row next to his son Marko and his daughter Marija. The absence of his wife Mrs. Mirjana Markovic, Ph.D., was very noticeable. Behind Milosevic one could see the gloomy faces of Jovica Stanisic and Nikola Sainovic, and Dragan Tomic (the Chairman of the Serbian Parliament) who looked a bit frightened. Just behind Slobodan Milosevic, a camera for a moment caught the face of Badza's wartime buddy Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan who will join his friend three years afterwards. Mihalj Kertes, Zoran Lilic (the former President of FRY), Zoran Sokolovic, Radmilo Bogdanovic, Milorad Vucelic, Milomir Minic (all of them were at the time or still are close allies of Milosevic), etc. were also attending the funeral. It is worth mentioning that this list of attendants significantly coincides with the list of people who are forbidden to enter countries of the European Union.

Trivia

Almost unaltered, the attendance of the funeral later afternoon ended up celebrating an anniversary of "Jugopetrol" (government petrol company) in the congressional hall of the "Sava Centar". The highlight of the entertainment were jokes about priests and girls told by the actor Lane Gutovic, and the song by the rock singer Momcilo Bajagic (the words of the song: "My friends are tough guys with steel hearts, when they drink, kiss girls or shoot")

Quotes

"Why should I be afraid? I'm making an honest living and I do not see a reason… No, I didn't say that he [Stojicic] was not making an honest living too. He did. But if someone wants to kill you, he will kill you regardless of the number of police officers assigned to protect you."
Mirko Marjanovic, the Serbian Prime Minister, when asked if he felt safe after the assassination of Badza

"Organized crime throughout the world necessitates the connection of criminals with particular political persons i.e. persons from the administration. That's way I wouldn't agree with the statement that there is any organized crime in our country."
Radovan Stojicic Badza for the Novi Sad daily paper "Dnevnik" when asked if there was any organized crime in Serbia

"Stojicic is […] the victim of the crime he fought against in the battle that was announced by the President of the Republic."
Dragan Tomic, the President of the Serbian Parliament

"I would like to believe that there is no mafia in our country."
Radmilo Bogdanovic

"The MUP has become just the way Radovan Stojicic fought it to be."
Taken from the farewell speech to Badza by Zoran Sokolovic

"I have nothing to be afraid of because everything I do, I do honestly."
Radovan Stojicic Badza

"I loved him like a child."
Milorad Vucelic about Badza

We'll review every response, and publish the best ones.