BELGRADE – Shortly after arresting a man suspected of leading a criminal gang last month in connection with a series of murders involving beheadings and torture, Serbian police raided what they believe to be the band’s secret lair: a bunker-like room in the bowels of a stadium used by Partizan Belgrade, a renowned football team in the Serbian capital.
The room, located in an extinct restaurant under the stands, was isolated as a crime scene after investigators looking for evidence of links between football hooligans and organized crime found weapons there.
The outer wall is painted in black and white with the name that Partizan fans use for themselves: “os Coveiros”.
The name is well deserved. Serbian football fans, at least those who in pre-pandemic days used to huddle in the turbulent bleachers south of Partizan stadium and on the equally anarchic north side of the arena used by their Belgrade archrivals, Red Star, have long had a reputation for extraordinary violence.
A French fan who traveled to Belgrade in 2009 to support his team, Toulouse, in a game against Partizan, died after being beaten with iron bars and bicycle chains. In that case, 14 Partizan fans were convicted of murder.
The violent tendencies have also made Serbian football fans, especially the two rival teams from Belgrade, a powerful force on the streets and in the country’s tumultuous politics.
The issue that is now consuming Serbia is what led to the arrest last month of Veljko Belivuk, who is suspected of being a gangster and leader of a group of violent Partizan fans. He has been operating with impunity for a long time and reportedly maintains close ties with the government and security forces.
According to the government, Belivuk is a brutal mobster whose arrest signals his determination to contain the criminal gangs that helped fuel the terrible violence in the Balkan wars in the 1990s, murdered a reformist prime minister in 2003 and damaged the Serbian government. efforts to become a normal European country.
“Our message is that we ended this gang,” said President Aleksandar Vucic, who is a dedicated Red Star fan and admitted to fighting in games in the past, on March 6, after state television broadcast terrifying images of a corpse beheaded and mutilated body of a young man with a Red Star tattoo on his leg – alleged victims of the Belivuk gang.
Investigators also linked Belivuk to a decade-long drug war between two rival criminal clans to control a lucrative trafficking route across the Adriatic Sea, from Serbia’s neighbor, Montenegro, to Western Europe.
The government’s version of why Belivuk and 16 of his Confederates were arrested, however, discouraged those who monitor the functioning of Serbian football clubs and their fans, the most violent of whom are known as “ultras”.
“Our hooligans are controlled by the state – they do what the state tells them to do,” said Mirko Poledica, president of the Union of Professional Football Players “Independence”, Serbia’s main player association.
Violent fans like Belivuk, he said, are such a formidable force that controlling them has always been a priority for any government that wants to avoid problems and stay in power.
Mr. Belivuk was a tool of the government, he said, used to help break opposition rallies and provide security on the streets for Vucic’s tenure in 2017.
Ana Brnabic, Serbia’s prime minister, said in an interview that Vucic, far from being Belivuk’s partner, was his target. “I have reliable information that his life is in danger,” she said. “It was time to take action because of all the threats from organized crime.”
But she admitted that criminal gangs had developed “strong ties” to the state and security structures and that they were now being investigated and uprooted. “Obviously, the mafia would not be as strong if it did not have government support,” she said.
In addition to a widespread view that Vucic is hiding something, however, there was a cruel smear campaign in the pro-government media aimed at those who challenged the president’s story of a direct crackdown on organized crime.
Vladimir Vuletic, a Belgrade law professor and former Partizan vice president who went public with accusations of government collusion with the arrested gang leader, has been attacked daily in tabloids that support Vucic.
Ms. Brnabic denied that the campaign was orchestrated by the government.
Also vilified by the tabloids is Krik, a highly respected group of investigative journalists who have been reporting on links between government officials and the Belivuk gang for years.
Stevan Dojcinovic, Krik’s editor-in-chief, said that organized crime in Serbia – and government officials – has long been linked to the “brutal force of nature” provided by football hooligans.
“Politicians have always been afraid of our hooligans. No matter who is in power, they always partner with them, ”he said.
The difficulties of partnering with hooligans, however, were evident with the death of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Under his rule in the 1990s, hooligans flooded the ranks of state-sponsored paramilitary groups that wreaked havoc in Bosnia and Kosovo after the division of Yugoslavia.
That Mr. Milosevic, for whom Mr. Vucic served as Minister of Information and whose security services worked closely with hooligans and criminals, was in serious trouble when the Red Star ultras started shouting “Slobodan Kill yourself! ” in games. (His parents died in suicides.)
Milosevic lost power in 2000 after the ultras led students and other protesters to break into the parliament building in Belgrade.
When Yugoslavia, of which Serbia was a part, began to disintegrate in the late 1980s, one of the first signs of impending war came in May 1990, when the Red Star traveled to a game in Zagreb, capital of the neighboring Republic Croatia’s Yugoslavian. The game was suspended after rival fans staged a violent hand-to-hand fight and set the stadium on fire.
Among the Red Star fans who traveled to Zagreb for the match was Vucic, who later boasted that he “used to fight” at games.
Poledica, the head of the footballers’ association, said: “Our politicians always fear the stadium and its terrible power. They know that any dissatisfaction in the stadium can quickly spread to the street. They want to control this. “
He added that he did not know why the authorities had turned against Belivuk, but speculated that Belivuk and his followers had gone too far. “Everyone knew that they were violent, that they hit people and made threats. But chop off heads? “
Belivuk’s lawyer, Dejan Lazarevic, said his client had not yet been formally charged and that there was no evidence to support charges of murder, kidnapping and other serious crimes against him by officials.
Vuletic, the professor, said that Belivuk and a bandit known as “Sale the Mute”, who has already been killed, took control of the southern part of the Partizan stadium shortly after Vucic became prime minister in 2014, and began to beat up any one screaming insults at him.
Suspicions that Mr. Belivuk had powerful friends in government, or at least law enforcement, have been growing since 2016, when he was arrested on charges of murder, but later released after DNA and other evidence against him disappeared or had to be discarded because of adulteration.
Krik, the investigative reporting group, later published photos showing a member of Serbia’s gendarmerie, a police force, watching football games with Belivuk. At the time, the officer maintained a relationship with a senior official responsible for the Ministry of the Interior.
This partnership with the government, said Dojcinovic, the editor of Krik, broke down last year for unknown reasons, possibly because of an internal split in the Serbian Progressive Party, which governs Vucic, some of whose members were caught in the investigation of Mr Belivuk .
Among those detained for questioning by the police in connection with the case is Slavisa Kozeka, president of the Serbian Football Federation. Kozeka, a senior official in the ruling party, was formerly an activist for a far-right nationalist organization that was led for years by a convicted war criminal.
All the negative publicity infuriated peaceful Partizan fans like Vladimir Trikic. Walking through the Dorcol district in central Belgrade, he displayed murals by artists, theater directors and poets who rooted for the club. Partizan, although closely linked to the former Yugoslav Army, he said, “has always been a team of intellectuals”.
For ordinary Partizan fans, Belivuk was never really a fan, but an imposter sent by Vucic to control and discredit his own team’s greatest rivals.
In a Partizan game in Belgrade last week, held in front of almost empty stands due to the pandemic, Zoran Krivokapic was one of the few fans who managed to enter the stadium. He said he attended every home game for 47 years and blamed Belivuk’s rise and fall in what he said was a personal vendetta by Vucic, the president, against Partizan.
“He wants to destroy the Partizan and allow the Red Star to rise,” he said.