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October 7, 1996 Gangs Descend, to Pick Bosnia's Carcass Clean By CHRIS HEDGES SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Even during the three and a half years of war, Vraca Park was the meeting place for heroin addicts in Sarajevo who shared needles and collective stupors that, at times, must have seemed attractive to even this city's most sober citizens. But in recent weeks, police officers noticed that the number of addicts had begun to swell. And then it became apparent why. "Dealers," said Ismet Dahic, Sarajevo's laconic and burly police chief, "have been walking around handing out free packets of heroin." The political chaos and poverty that continue to grip Bosnia 10 months after the peace accord was signed have spawned a thriving criminal underworld. Well-organized gangs with plenty of money and with roots in Italy and Germany are building empires that are taking advantage of Bosnia's division into Serbian, Croatian and Muslim entities. The size and reach of these gangs -- the only genuinely multi-ethnic organizations now functioning in Bosnia, with their intermingling of ethnic Serbs, Croats and Muslims -- threaten to overwhelm Bosnia's weak and divided law enforcement system. Western diplomats say the swift rise of organized crime presents one of the gravest perils to post-war Bosnia. Bosnian Muslim police officers, who lack crime laboratories and earn about $30 a month, are increasingly open to the hefty bribes handed out by criminal gangs. Local officials, who control towns in central Bosnia as if they were fiefs, have switched from the black marketeering that made them rich during the war, to more traditional criminal activities like loan sharking, extortion and smuggling goods past customs. Protection rackets, which plagued Sarajevo at the start of the conflict, have returned, with shop and restaurant owners now doling out $200 or $300 a month to mobsters. As for the police forces in Croatian- and Serbian-held Bosnia, Western diplomats say that they refuse to cooperate in law enforcement with the police from other ethnic groups, and in many cases have become intertwined with the criminal networks. After a hit-and-run accident recently involving an ethnic Croat, the Sarajevo police appealed to Bosnian Croat police for assistance. "The Croats said the man we wanted was a police official," said Asim Fazlic, a senior Interior Ministry official. "And not only would they refuse to turn him over, but they would refuse to release any information about him. How can we fight crime with a situation like this?" Cars stolen from Muslim-held Sarajevo are driven across the zone of separation patrolled by the NATO-led peacekeeping force at the edge of the city and delivered into the hands of Serbian gangsters often with close ties to Bosnian Serb police, Bosnian Muslim police officials said. "With Bosnia's three ethnic enclaves divided into little para-states it has become good business to steal from one enclave and sell the goods in another," said a senior Western law enforcement official, who asked not to be identified. "The lawlessness in the Baltic states, parts of Eastern Europe and even Moscow, is probably a good picture of what we expect to happen here." The lack of an effective police force, sloppy and corrupt customs officials, porous borders, widespread poverty and easy violence, born and bred in war, have combined to see criminal rings flourish. And police officials in Sarajevo say they believe the newest heroin addicts here were hooked not so much for the business they could give to local dealers, but for the services they could provide as drug couriers within and outside Europe. Bosnia, these officials say, is rapidly becoming a preferred route for smuggling drugs from Iran, through Turkey and into the rest of Europe. And in the past few weeks law enforcement officials say even Colombian drug lords have caught on, shipping cocaine through Bosnia to Croatia, Italy and Austria. The FBI and officials from other U.S. Justice Department agencies have sent in assessment teams over the past few weeks to organize new criminal investigative units. Meanwhile, the deterioration in law enforcement in Bosnia is palpable. Car theft in Sarajevo, and along many of the roads in Bosnia, is endemic. Most Western diplomats and humanitarian aid workers, for example, no longer drive the roads from Sarajevo to Mostar, or Tuzla to Brcko, at night because of the rash of carjackings by small groups of heavily armed men. Young men, unable to find work, have turned to burglary, slipping stockings over their faces and sliding in through second-story windows to steal television sets and stereos, often in the middle of the day. Police officials say that extraditions of Bosnian criminals from German and Italian jails, now that the war is over, have compounded the problem. "We have no record on these guys," said Dahic, the Sarajevo police chief. "And they have gained both the experience and the ties to carry out criminal activity in Bosnia. We get new extraditions here almost every day." Many criminal gangs are positioning themselves to take huge government contracts and buy up the state-owned businesses being sold off by the Bosnian government, Western diplomats said. Rival gangs are now vying for the government concession to run the cellular phone industry, these officials said. "Bribes are flowing in here like water," said a Bosnian who works closely with officials handling the telecommunications contracts. And the size and scope of local prostitution rings have stunned even the police. One of the biggest criminal gangs in Bosnia, police officials said, now runs a vast prostitution ring out of Sarajevo. Young women are lured into the ring, given false identity papers and sent to a village called Vrgorac, about 60 miles south of the Croatian city of Split. The gang, these officials said, provides scores of prostitutes to the tourist hotels up and down the Croatian coast that cater to the soldiers from the 53,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force. Other women are sent on to brothels and nightclubs in Germany, Austria and Italy, these officials said. "It is a huge operation, in the millions of dollars," said Fazlic, the senior Interior Ministry official. "And, given the lack of cooperation with the Croats, we have been unable to investigate its operations or shut it down."   News Topics | Home | Research | History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People| Life in a Gang | Gallery | Iraqi Cards |