The Deer Hunter

Many weeks before Drago Milicic, an army reservist from Bijeljina (Bosnia), committed a terrible crime which resulted in six deaths, certain Krsmanovic, another Bijeljina resident, escaped from a mental hospital in Vrsac and thus, unwittingly, started a bloody sequence of events. Straight from the hospital he joined a volunteers' unit, got well armed overnight, to later return to Bijeljina and threaten with a gun the local social workers, blaming them for putting him in an asylum.

Nobody was hurt then, so the whole story was hushed up - until six people were murdered. The tragic incident motivated a doctor from the Bijeljina hospital to tell us the trouble she had to go through to convince the officer in charge that Krsmanovic's place was in the mental hospital and not in a volunteers' unit. At that time she was probably the only one who at least suspected a horrible outcome. The already frequent skirmishes and various accidents with fire arms which resulted in a lot of wounded and two people killed did not arouse suspicion.

Today, Bijeljina is full of obituaries, and its confused citizens still refuse to believe that eight of their fellow townsmen lost their lives in the past month.

The ordinary people you meet in the street call this "just an accident", saying that the political parties are to be blamed for their misfortune and longing for the good old days of the communist rule; in a local cafe you can learn that a hand grenade can be bought for 500 dinars and that Milicic was a bad tempered young fellow fond of his glass; people from SDS (The Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia) put the blame on SK- PJ (Communist Party - Movement for Yugoslavia).

Milicic, one of the few mass murderers to be caught in this war, saw a psychiatrist only once, at his conscription military check-up. Like in many other cases, the doctor found that he was "emotionally immature" and that he had "an anxiety-depression reaction", which is not reason enough to excuse anyone from the military service. Zorica Naskovic, a psychiatrist at the Bijeljina hospital, says that even the reservists with legitimate complaints have difficulties to be excused and that a garrison doctor came to ask her how to recognize the fakers.

Although it cannot be stated with certainty that Milicic was mentally unfit for the army, one of his victim definitely wasn't. A reserve lieutenant Dragoslav Radovanovic (the only Milicic's commanding officer at the time of the crime) was at the beginning of October last year issued a medical certificate to officially prove to his superiors that he should be discharged on psychological grounds. Nobody, however, paid attention.

"People here are under terrible stress, the reservists are not replaced for months, they are losing their temper, not to mention that in this town it is practically impossible to find a sober soldier", says dr. Zorica Naskovic.

Her words clearly explain the events that took place on that night when a twenty year old Drago Milicic, after four and a half months of military service, did the following:

First, he got quite drunk in the "Dallas" cafe in the village of Modran, where he broke a few ashtrays with his knife. Then, God knows how, he managed to get to the army barrack (formerly a nursery), take an assault rifle and kill three of his friends (two privates and a commanding officer Radovanovic) while they were asleep, drop a few hand grenades on the sentries, hijack a car and return to Modran. What he did there resulted in deaths of three other people - two man and a young girl. He later hid in their house and after a few hours of arguing with the police he suddenly decided to surrender.

A series of funerals ensued. The Milicic case acquired a political dimension. SDS representatives from Bijeljina decided to address the issue of the reservists and to withdraw them from the army, claiming that all the commanding officers are SK-PJ members and that their sole concern is to arm their sympathizers.

Although the SDS representatives told VREME that they will "swear off the army" as early as next week, in all likelihood the things will remain as they were before. As far as the Milicic case is concerned, it will probably be forgotten in time. It will become an issue again when some reservist attempts something similar.