Halfway down the Danube

The Legionnaire Speaks!

But oh, boy, is it hard to make sense of it.

The Legionnaire is, of course, Milorad "Legija" Ulemek -- former paramilitary, chief of Slobodan Milosevic's special police, gang leader, and accused assassin of the late Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

Legija has been in police captivity since his surprising surrender last month, after more than a year on the run. He's appeared in court a couple of times, but without saying anything. Yesterday, though, he finally started talking.

High points:

-- He says he's innocent of Djindjic's assassination. "Neither I nor any member of the Special Operations Unit were in any way involved in organising or executing the assassination of the prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic."

-- A few days before the killing, he was contacted by Momcilo Perisic, former Army Chief of Staff. Perisic suggested that Legija should "take refuge". So he moved to a friend's apartment.

-- On the day of the assassination, March 12, he claimed to have been taking care of his children. Then he went to a friend's apartment, where he hid for a day and a half. Then he walked home; he was wearing white clothes and it was snowing heavily, so nobody noticed him.

-- He acknowledged having been close to the late Dusan Spasojevic, but says that they had drifted apart in the months before the assassination. Spasojevic -- also known as "Siptar -- was the leader of the Zemun Gang, a criminal group based in Belgrade's suburb of Zemun.

(Siptar was heavily implicated in the Djindjic killing. He and another gang leader were killed by police a few days after the assassination. Originally, they were supposed to have been killed in a gun battle, but just recently a Belgrade news magazine claimed to have obtained an autopsy showing that they'd been shot from close range in the back of the head.)

-- The bit that everyone is talking about: Legija claims that members of the Djindjic government asked him to sell 700 kilograms (about 3/4 of a ton) of heroin in the West.

The heroin had been seized by police from drug dealers some time earlier, and placed in a safe deposit vault in Belgrade’s Commercial Bank. Legija says that in April 2001 he was contacted by Djindjic's former deputy prime minister, Cedomir Jovanovic. Jovanovic pointed out that the heroin was still there and was worth millions, and that "it would be silly to throw away something worth hundreds of millions of dollars," when it could instead be sold for the profit of the impoverished Serbian state.

"The West gave us bombs and depleted uranium, so why not pay them back in hard drugs," Jovanovic supposedly said.

"To tell you the truth, I rather liked it," Legija testified. "It could be a little bit of revenge of us ordinary people, who were bombed for 78 days, And if that is the will of the state, then I accept."

Since Legija was still the commander of the Special Operations Unit of the Serbian police, it was agreed that they should distribute the heroin in the West. Legija says that they brought the heroin over Serbia's borders and sold it to transshippers in Romania, Croatia, and the Serbian Republic in Bosnia.

Former deputy prime minister Jovanovic vehemently denied the allegations:

"The drugs he was talking about are those we found in the vault of the Commercial Bank. We destroyed them, in line with the law and informed the public. These were drugs hidden there by him and members of the Milosevic regime. It is because of these drugs that he is in the position of having to do what he is doing today, trying to conceal his own responsibility for everything that’s happened in our society."

Some other parts of Legija's story are also under attack. For instance, his description of walking home in heavy snow isn't consistent with the weather records from that day, which show a dusting of snow that quickly melted. (Though there was about an inch of snow on the following day.)

Things Legija hasn't yet talked about: where he's been for the last 14 months; why he chose to surrender when he did; who really killed Djindjic; whether he was involved in the 2000 murder of Ivan Stambolic, the former president of Serbia; the 1999 assassination of four officials of the then opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement; and a failed assassination attempt in 2000 on SPO's leader, Vuk Draskovic, who is now the Foreign Minister for the joint state of Serbia-and-Montenegro.

So there should be more to come. Whether it will make any sense, of course, is something else again.

Legija's second day of testimony was cut short, though; he claimed he was feeling sick and feverish, and stopped talking. For now.

Posted by douglas at June 17, 2004 11:05 AM