See You in the Obituaries

"The situation gets tenser every day. How can I put it: a small pond, a lot of crocodiles," said Bata Trlajic, one of the main characters in the movie. That explanation has its sociological side: "Shake them out of their pants and you won't find 10 German marks. They're all social cases and the saddest part is they don't know how to make money. They should go work in factories."

The pond is small, the crocodile numbers are huge and the booty is getting increasingly rare. Everyone is fighting for the little extra cash there is: the state, banks, merchants, smugglers and gangsters. The sanctions always have one certain result: a change in the division of wealth. Here criminals have played a role from the start, first in robberies, then as operators on street markets for the authorities they waged war for, and finally as independent players in the all out grab game.

As on any free market, the fight to survive has speeded up: big crocs eat small crocs and the biggest of them all (the police) is keeping quiet and swallows someone sometimes. The number of murders is recorded in weekly levels, not annual as it once was. The police are not unhappy and have failed to solve at least 70 murders in the past three years. The war and the increasingly reliance of the authorities on the police caused an increase in their numbers, a drop in professional quality and growing corruption.

"They tried to build a society with certain moral norms," said Milan Milenkovic, commander of the river police. "But the people who advocated those norms did not back them."

The meddling of politics in police-crime relations brought new rules. It's not clear who's winning but it's clear who's losing: the public interest. The police used the services of criminals in its work and that was necessary. The limits of that cooperation were clearly defined: as long as the profit is greater than the losses informers were excused. Criminals also worked for the secret services abroad. Naturally, they didn't spend years doing what former special foreign action group chief Bozidar Spasic calls "certain acts" in the film just out of patriotism. Spasic is described as the man who personally helped 120 criminals across the border. "They did nothing here, but abroad they had fake passports provided by us. We knew, for example, that the Swiss police were after someone so we give him a passport to go to Switzerland and he comes back to Belgrade full of money and when he spends it all here he goes abroad again. Everyone's happy and no one's the wiser."

Spasic lost his job because of his outspokenness.

In one murder case the killer turned out to be connected with the police and a scandal broke when a police official was found to have several passports under different names with the killer's picture. The dead man also had police links. The whole thing caused Serbia's republican police to take control of the Belgrade police and later hand it over to the federal police. Belgrade policemen said the highest-ranking city police officers were sacked then as well as the best professionals. That's when protection of the population finally gave way to state interests, a retired police inspector said.

Kristijan Golubovic, one of the men in the film, explained what happened to society: "You can't survive working honestly: the sanctions, a minimal budget, you can't live on 100 marks a month. We are an honest nation and young people went for all or nothing. 90% of the population feels the tragedy of this war, all the weight of the sanctions, while crime is flourishing. The people who support it are flourishing. There are loopholes in the laws, lawyers are completely corrupt. A law abiding state can't function that way."

It's interesting that all the criminals in the film had something bad to say about killing. Trlajic said: "You know exactly when the Colombians, for example, are going to kill; when someone rips them off for 10 million dollars. 99% of the people here don't know why they're killing."

Golubovic: "That's your answer to the crime levels in Belgrade. Show me any criminal in the West, even the Mafia, who has killed innocent people? I know judge Falcone was killed with a ton of dynamite; he got killed and his guards. Here it's madness made up of countless madness in one place. Crime at home can't reach higher levels than the drug levels."

The police say drugs, besides foreign currency, are one of the main chips in the game: many killings are drug related. There is heroin and cocaine on the streets; the big suppliers clash, the small ones lose their heads and try to make more money.

Predrag Vladusic said in the film: "As for drugs, you know, there's a couple of kids who have bosses who make them kill. They put guns in their belts, give them drugs to sniff and send them out against an enemy. These kids are expendable, and they charge head on."

Role models are not found only in the West. Zeljko Rutovic (31, never sentenced in the FRY) says everyone lives well in the former Soviet Union: "One part of Sochi (a Black Sea resort where he has a gambling house) is held by Armenians, another by Georgians and everyone lives like brothers. Everything they promise they deliver, even more. All the most important people in Sochi, the mayor, police chief, know and get paid and everyone works together."

Bojan Petrovic (35, one of the killers of top criminal Ranko Rubezic, wanted in Sweden for armed robbery): "There were nine of us in Goeteborg and I had a different concept but my boys insisted on primitive robberies. I thought we could have taken the city in the long term since there was no competition, everyone was afraid of us."

Police inspector Ljuba Milanovic spoke about the mentality of criminals: "Our Mafia can't do big deals. Instead of planning a deal worth five million marks over a year, they'll take 10,000 and trick someone the same day. That's the mentality. Whoever got past that has risen."

So who has risen up?

Bane Grebenarevic (20) said in the film: "I like Arkan most and he's a sort of role model. He's got an enviable level of organization like no one has achieved here."

Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan only appeared once in the film to comment warrants for his arrest on criminal and war crime charges: "I don't give a damn!"

Arkan is described as one of the richest people in Yugoslavia and he's not a role model by chance. The ideal of Belgrade's criminals is getting rich, becoming a respectable businessman and becoming an honest citizen. The problem is that the difference between honest and dishonest, legal and illegal has become fluid. The fact that someone drives a Porsche or Mercedes and has a half kilo of gold around his neck doesn't mean a thing here. The financial police will stick an honest baker or cafe owner in jail but they're not interested in the property owned by criminals. The police definitely have reasonable cause for a lot of things but nothing is happening

All the people in the film spoke of the relativity of everything in life, as if they knew they're dead men on leave. Their deaths, or lives, are in the hands of the faceless authorities which will appear one day in the form of a police SWAT team that shoots first, asks questions later, in the form of an assassin who will never be caught, in the form of a partner who will testify in court.

The only ones who can count on growing old are the ones who paid their debts to their brethren and the services who kept out of the war and away from the public. There are very few of them.

So where does the story of Belgrade's criminals end? In the graveyard where most of them have been buried.

Logically, the war moved from Croatia and Bosnia to Belgrade. In the last few years the district court has charged many men who have been to war with murder or armed robbery. The Zigic family ( a mother and child) were killed by Bosnia veterans. Their statements shocked even experienced police officers. Inspector Ljuba Milanovic said: "When we asked him why he killed the child he said: fuck him, he should have been in school."

Two of Arkan's former men killed a policeman they wanted to rob. The veterans see no difference between the front and the streets.

So the big crocs will eat the little crocs and then they'll turn on each other and finally the biggest crocs will demand laws to protect private property.

The biggest croc (the state) doesn't care either way. It has transferred its money out of the country waiting for the moment when the final privatization laws are adopted. Then we'll get new capitalists and industrialists and the criminal graveyard will be filled. Dead men don't talk.